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Daily Archives: May 6, 2018

You Can’t Opt Out Of Sharing Your Data, Even If You Didn’t Opt In

FiveThirtyEight: “…Yonatan Zunger, a former Google privacy engineer, noted we’ve known for a long time that one person’s personal information is never just their own to share. It’s the idea behind the old proverb, “Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.” And as far back as the 1960s, said Jennifer Lynch, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, phone companies could help law enforcement collect a list of all the numbers one phone line called and how long the calls lasted. The phone records may help convict a guilty party, but they also likely call police attention to the phone numbers, identities and habits of people who may not have anything to do with the crime being investigated. But the digital economy has changed things, making the privacy of the commons easier to exploit and creating stronger incentives to do so…Even if you do your searches from a specialized browser, tape over all your webcams and monitor your privacy settings without fail, your personal data has probably still been collected, stored and used in ways you didn’t intend — and don’t even know about. Companies can even build a profile of a person from birth based entirely on data-sharing choices made by others, said Salome Viljoen, a lawyer and fellow with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. Imagine new parents signing up for a loyalty card at their local pharmacy and then filling all of their child’s prescriptions there. The information collected every time they scan that loyalty card adds up to something like a medical history, which could later be sold to data brokers or combined with data bought from brokers to paint a fuller picture of a person who never consented to any of this…In fact, the privacy of the commons means that, in some cases, your data is collected in ways you cannot reasonably prevent, no matter how carefully you or anyone you know behaves.

Julie Cohen, a technology and law professor at Georgetown University. “There’s a lot of burden being put on individuals to have an understanding and mastery of something that’s so complex that it would be impossible for them to do what they need to do,” she said.

Activists request that government disable Gmail’s new ‘Self Destruct’ feature

Gmail’s ‘Self Destruct’ Feature Will Probably Be Used to Illegally Destroy –  Government Records Activists have asked Google to disable the feature on government accounts. “A new update rolling out for Gmail offers a “self destruct” feature that allows users to send messages that expire after a set amount of time. While this may sound… Continue Reading

SEC Launches Additional Investor Protection Search Tool

News release: “The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced the launch of an additional online search feature that enables investors to research whether the person trying to sell them investments has a judgment or order entered against them in an enforcement action. The new tool is intended to assist the public in making informed investment… Continue Reading

Cambridge Analytica closed for business under this name and is now called Emerdata

Follow-up to previous posting – Cambridge Analytica closes operations after Facebook scandal – this update and additional information via The Register – “…though Cambridge Analytica said it is pulling the plug in the US and UK, there is already some indication that the outfit – which has a non-trivial organizational structure – is more or… Continue Reading

Women Leaders Launch “Time’s Up” Campaign to Eradicate Abuse of Power, Shift Leadership Imbalances, and Promote Equality

“The National Women’s Law Center is excited to announce the launch of the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund. The TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, which is housed at and administered by the National Women’s Law Center, connects those who experience sexual misconduct including assault, harassment, abuse and related retaliation in the workplace or in trying… Continue Reading

Remember when we always put two spaces between sentences – there was a good reason

Washington Post: One space between each sentence, they said. Science just proved them wrong.: “A paper published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics aims to settle the hotly debated typographical question citing new research that made use of eye-tracking equipment.” Please read this article directly as it is written using fonts and spaces than… Continue Reading

FBI – Active Shooter Incidents in US in 2016 and 2017

Department of Justice – Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2016 and 2017 – The FBI has designated 50 shootings in 2016 and 2017 as active shooter incidents (20 incidents occurred in 2016, while 30 incidents occurred in 2017). “As with past FBI active shooter-related publications, this report does not encompass all gun-related… Continue Reading