Category Archives: data collection

Surveillance by the New Microsoft Outlook App

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The ProtonMail people are accusing Microsoft’s new Outlook for Windows app of conducting extensive surveillance on its users. It shares data with advertisers, a lot of data:

The window informs users that Microsoft and those 801 third parties use their data for a number of purposes, including to:

  • Store and/or access information on the user’s device
  • Develop and improve products
  • Personalize ads and content
  • Measure ads and content
  • Derive audience insights
  • Obtain precise geolocation data
  • Identify users through device scanning

Commentary.

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Class-Action Lawsuit against Google’s Incognito Mode

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The lawsuit has been settled:

Google has agreed to delete “billions of data records” the company collected while users browsed the web using Incognito mode, according to documents filed in federal court in San Francisco on Monday. The agreement, part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit filed in 2020, caps off years of disclosures about Google’s practices that shed light on how much data the tech giant siphons from its users­—even when they’re in private-browsing mode.

Under the terms of the settlement, Google must further update the Incognito mode “splash page” that appears anytime you open an Incognito mode Chrome window after …

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NSA Buying Bulk Surveillance Data on Americans without a Warrant

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It finally admitted to buying bulk data on Americans from data brokers, in response to a query by Senator Weyden.
This is almost certainly illegal, although the NSA maintains that it is legal until it’s told otherwise.
Some news articles.
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IT teams unable to deliver data fast enough to match the speed of business

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Increasing data requests overwhelm IT teams, but security concerns hinder their ability to provide employees with access to timely data, according to CData Software. The majority of Ops professionals feel that they are prohibited from accessing the dat… Continue reading IT teams unable to deliver data fast enough to match the speed of business→

OpenAI Is Not Training on Your Dropbox Documents—Today

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There’s a rumor flying around the Internet that OpenAI is training foundation models on your Dropbox documents.

Here’s CNBC. Here’s Boing Boing. Some articles are more nuanced, but there’s still a lot of confusion.

It seems not to be true. Dropbox isn’t sharing all of your documents with OpenAI. But here’s the problem: we don’t trust OpenAI. We don’t trust tech corporations. And—to be fair—corporations in general. We have no reason to.

Simon Willison nails it in a tweet:

“OpenAI are training on every piece of data they see, even when they say they aren’t” is the new “Facebook are showing you ads based on overhearing everything you say through your phone’s microphone.”…

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Ask Hackaday: Could Rating Airlines Stop Flights From Spreading Diseases?

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  A few weeks ago, I found myself the victim of flights from hell. My first flight was cancelled, leaving me driving home late at night, only to wake again …read more Continue reading Ask Hackaday: Could Rating Airlines Stop Flights From Spreading Diseases?→

How global enterprises navigate the complex world of data privacy

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In this Help Net Security interview, Evelyn de Souza, Head of Privacy Compliance, Oracle SaaS Cloud, talks about the constant efforts required to keep up with privacy laws in each country, and ensuring compliance across the entire organization. She als… Continue reading How global enterprises navigate the complex world of data privacy→

The Hacker Tool to Get Personal Data from Credit Bureaus

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The new site 404 Media has a good article on how hackers are cheaply getting personal information from credit bureaus:

This is the result of a secret weapon criminals are selling access to online that appears to tap into an especially powerful set of data: the target’s credit header. This is personal information that the credit bureaus Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion have on most adults in America via their credit cards. Through a complex web of agreements and purchases, that data trickles down from the credit bureaus to other companies who offer it to debt collectors, insurance companies, and law enforcement…

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Google Is Using Its Vast Data Stores to Train AI

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No surprise, but Google just changed its privacy policy to reflect broader uses of all the surveillance data it has captured over the years:

Research and development: Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public. For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.

(I quote the privacy policy as of today. The Mastodon link quotes the privacy policy from ten days ago. So things are changing fast.)…

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Privacy of Printing Services

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The Washington Post has an article about popular printing services, and whether or not they read your documents and mine the data when you use them for printing:

Ideally, printing services should avoid storing the content of your files, or at least delete daily. Print services should also communicate clearly upfront what information they’re collecting and why. Some services, like the New York Public Library and PrintWithMe, do both.

Others dodged our questions about what data they collect, how long they store it and whom they share it with. Some—including Canon, FedEx and Staples—declined to answer basic questions about their privacy practices…

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