Read our newsletter at:

https://mailchi.mp/emfsa/enforcement-monitoring-compliance-configuration-data-transparency

The post EMFSA August 2023 Newsletter appeared first on EMFSA.

An MIT Technology Review series, supported by the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program and the Pulitzer Center, investigating how AI is enriching a powerful few by dispossessing communities that have been dispossessed before.

INTRODUCTION

Artificial intelligence is creating a new world order

Over the last few years, an increasing number of scholars have argued that the impact of AI is repeating the patterns of colonial history. European colonialism, they say, was characterized by the violent capture of land, extraction of resources, and exploitation of people—for example, through slavery—for the economic enrichment of the conquering country. While it would diminish the depth of past traumas to say the AI industry is repeating this violence today, it is now using other, more insidious means to enrich the wealthy and powerful at the great expense of the poor.

Read more at:

https://www.technologyreview.com/supertopic/ai-colonialism-supertopic/

The post An MIT Technology Review series: AI Colonialism appeared first on EMFSA.

The app is a major source of raw location data for a multibillion-dollar industry that buys, packages, and sells people’s movements

By: Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng

December 6, 2021

Life360, a popular family safety app used by 33 million people worldwide, has been marketed as a great way for parents to track their children’s movements using their cellphones. The Markup has learned, however, that the app is selling data on kids’ and families’ whereabouts to approximately a dozen data brokers who have sold data to virtually anyone who wants to buy it. 

Through interviews with two former employees of the company, along with two individuals who formerly worked at location data brokers Cuebiq and X-Mode, The Markup discovered that the app acts as a firehose of data for a controversial industry that has operated in the shadows with few safeguards to prevent the misuse of this sensitive information. The former employees spoke with The Markup on the condition that we not use their names, as they are all still employed in the data industry. They said they agreed to talk because of concerns with the location data industry’s security and privacy and a desire to shed more light on the opaque location data economy. All of them described Life360 as one of the largest sources of data for the industry. 

“We have no means to confirm or deny the accuracy” of whether Life360 is among the largest sources of data for the industry, Life360 founder and CEO Chris Hulls said in an emailed response to questions from The Markup. “We see data as an important part of our business model that allows us to keep the core Life360 services free for the majority of our users, including features that have improved driver safety and saved numerous lives.”

A former X-Mode engineer said the raw location data the company received from Life360 was among X-Mode’s most valuable offerings due to the sheer volume and precision of the data. A former Cuebiq employee joked that the company wouldn’t be able to run its marketing campaigns without Life360’s constant flow of location data. 

Read more at: https://themarkup.org/privacy/2021/12/06/the-popular-family-safety-app-life360-is-selling-precise-location-data-on-its-tens-of-millions-of-user

The post The Popular Family Safety App Life360 Is Selling Precise Location Data on Its Tens of Millions of Users appeared first on EMFSA.

Carissa Véliz

11.10.2021

Apple has taken a public stand on privacy, curtailing data abuses by apps and declaring it doesn’t exploit its users’ information. But it has also created comprehensive new ways to track us.

Among tech giants, Apple stands out for its insistence on offering privacy features instead of joining its competitors in the exploitation of users’ personal data. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently clashed with Facebook on exactly those grounds – making a point, during a podcast interview, of defending privacy over the social network’s data-hungry ad-based model. When it comes to privacy, the maker of the iPhone is presenting itself as a good actor. But is that actually the case?

Apple recently rolled out a smorgasbord of new security features: Apple devices now block tracking pixels embedded in emails, tell users how many times an app has accessed sensitive data, utilise a relay to mask web traffic, and allow for the creation of unique email aliases. All of these are praiseworthy tools – long overdue – to protect our privacy.

What’s more, judging by its success as the world’s biggest company by market capitalisation, Apple is demonstrating that privacy can sell. About 94 per cent of American users opted out of data collection when Apple gave them the choice. Given its reach and clout, Apple has been able to do more for privacy in one software update than what most governments around the world have done in years (although it seems that some apps are still tracking non-consenting users). With a single decision, Apple can improve privacy standards globally. But, before we give it too much credit, we should take a critical look at the company’s general direction of travel.

Many of Apple’s latest features are about enhancing surveillance – even if Apple would never call them that. The new iPhone operating system, iOS 15, can digitise text in photos, enabling users to copy and paste text from an image, or call a phone number that appears in a picture. Scanning nearby buildings with an iPhone will make Maps recognise them and generate walking directions. Algorithms will identify objects in real-time video, and it will be possible to turn photos into 3D models for augmented reality. And users will now be able to carry their IDs in their phone. All of these features increase the amount of data collected.

Apple is also active in the lucrative business of healthcare. Using their iPhones and Apple Watches, people can track their steps, heart rate, and gait, among other things. A new sharing tab on the Health app even lets users share their health data with family and caregivers. Granted, all that data is supposed to be kept secure – but whenever sensitive information is collected and shared that easily, data disasters are just lurking around the corner.

Read more at: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-surveillance-technology

The post We need to talk about how Apple is normalising surveillance appeared first on EMFSA.

SCOTT IKEDA, AUGUST 3, 2021

Amazon’s new sleep tracking technology proposes to cast an “electromagnetic bubble” over customers, monitoring their movements throughout the night in an attempt to improve quality of rest. Critics have already raised multiple concerns, from exactly what Amazon intends to do with the data it collects about sleep habits to the amount of radiation it would need to emit to function.

Sleep tracking technology puts corporations in the bedroom

The apparent market demand for Amazon’s new sleep tracking tech stems from reports of common sleep disturbance during the Covid-19 pandemic; studies find that as many as half of all respondents are saying that they have been having trouble getting a full night of rest since early last year.

About two weeks ago, Amazon received Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval to bring sleep tracking devices to the market. The unit has yet to be built, but the proposed plan is to use 60GHZ radar to track body motion across a bed throughout the night. Excessive or unusual movements might then help to pinpoint specific issues causing difficulty in maintaining proper sleep. Google is developing similar sensor technology to be incorporated in its Nest Hub smart device networking system.

Read more at https://tinyurl.com/7u97kkm4

The post Does Amazon’s Sleep Tracking Technology Invade Bedroom Privacy? Concerns Raised About Data Sharing, Opacity of Intentions for Collected Information appeared first on EMFSA.

Deleting data from Echo Dots—and other IoT devices from Amazon and elsewhere—is hard.

DAN GOODIN – 7/2/2021

Like most Internet-of-things (IoT) devices these days, Amazon’s Echo Dot gives users a way to perform a factory reset so, as the corporate behemoth says, users can “remove any… personal content from the applicable device(s)” before selling or discarding them. But researchers have recently found that the digital bits that remain on these reset devices can be reassembled to retrieve a wealth of sensitive data, including passwords, locations, authentication tokens, and other sensitive data.

Most IoT devices, the Echo Dot included, use NAND-based flash memory to store data. Like traditional hard drives, NAND—which is short for the boolean operator “NOT AND“—stores bits of data so they can be recalled later, but whereas hard drives write data to magnetic platters, NAND uses silicon chips. NAND is also less stable than hard drives because reading and writing to it produces bit errors that must be corrected using error-correcting code.

Reset but not wiped

NAND is usually organized in planes, blocks, and pages. This design allows for a limited number of erase cycles, usually in the neighborhood of between 10,000 to 100,000 times per block. To extend the life of the chip, blocks storing deleted data are often invalidated rather than wiped. True deletions usually happen only when most of the pages in a block are invalidated. This process is known as wear-leveling.

Researchers from Northeastern University bought 86 used devices on eBay and at flea markets over a span of 16 months. They first examined the purchased devices to see which ones had been factory reset and which hadn’t. Their first surprise: 61 percent of them had not been reset. Without a reset, recovering the previous owners’ Wi-Fi passwords, router MAC addresses, Amazon account credentials, and information about connected devices was a relatively easy process.

The next surprise came when the researchers disassembled the devices and forensically examined the contents stored in their memory.

Read more at https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/passwords-in-amazon-echo-dots-live-on-even-after-you-factory-reset-them/

The post Thinking about selling your Echo Dot—or any IoT device? Read this first appeared first on EMFSA.

JUL 20, 2021 – BY DAVID HOSANSKY

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The United States must protect radio frequencies that are essential for weather forecasts and understanding the climate system, NCAR Associate Director William Mahoney told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology today.

Mahoney, a meteorologist and expert in forecasting systems needed to protect life and property, testified at a committee hearing, “Spectrum Needs for Observations in Earth and Space Sciences.” His remarks came as meteorologists and other atmospheric scientists have raised increasing concerns that transmissions of 5G networks will interfere with satellite observations, significantly degrading weather forecasts, impairing our ability to advance our knowledge of the Earth system and prepare for climate change.

“At a time of increasing weather hazard vulnerability, it is imperative that critical Earth observations be protected from interference,” Mahoney said in his prepared remarks. “The impact of lost Earth observing data could be catastrophic for the nation.”

Read more at: https://news.ucar.edu/132801/5g-wireless-networks-threaten-weather-forecasts-ncar-expert-tells-congress

The post 5G WIRELESS NETWORKS THREATEN WEATHER FORECASTS, NCAR EXPERT TELLS CONGRESS appeared first on EMFSA.

Synthetic voice technologies are increasingly passing as human. But today’s voice assistants are still a far cry from the hyper-intelligent thinking machines we’ve been musing about for decades. In this episode, we explore how machines learn to communicate—and what it means for the humans on the other end of the conversation.

We meet:

Susan C. Bennett, voice of Siri

Cade Metz, The New York Times

Charlotte Jee, MIT Technology Review

Credits

This episode was produced by Jennifer Strong, Emma Cillekens, Anthony Green, Karen Hao and Charlotte Jee. Edited by Michael Reilly and Niall Firth.

The post Podcast: In Machines We Trust – What’s in a voice appeared first on EMFSA.

The first episode premieres Monday, May 17, 2021.

https://datasociety.simplecast.com/episodes/becoming-data-trailer

In the podcast series, Natalie Kerby of Data & Society asks her guests: How long has human life been quantified as data, and in what contexts? What are some major implications of humanity being measured as data? How are people pushing back against the datafication of human life, work, health, and citizenship?

She speaks with academics, artists, activists, and journalists to explore these questions and more.

The post TRAILER: BECOMING DATA appeared first on EMFSA.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p09cy8dg

The post How smartphones share data when we’re not using them appeared first on EMFSA.