Category Archives: datacollection

Cory Doctorow on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

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Cory Doctorow has writtten an extended rebuttal of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. He summarized the argument on Twitter. Shorter summary: it’s not the surveillance part, it’s the fact that these companies are monopolies. I think it’s both. Surveillance capitalism has some unique properties that make it particularly unethical and incompatible with a free society, and Zuboff… Continue reading Cory Doctorow on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism→

Robocall Results from a Telephony Honeypot

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A group of researchers set up a telephony honeypot and tracked robocall behavior: NCSU researchers said they ran 66,606 telephone lines between March 2019 and January 2020, during which time they said to have received 1,481,201 unsolicited calls — even if they never made their phone numbers public via any source. The research team said they usually received an unsolicited… Continue reading Robocall Results from a Telephony Honeypot→

Security and Privacy Implications of Zoom

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Over the past few weeks, Zoom’s use has exploded since it became the video conferencing platform of choice in today’s COVID-19 world. (My own university, Harvard, uses it for all of its classes.) Over that same period, the company has been exposed for … Continue reading Security and Privacy Implications of Zoom→

Security and Privacy Implications of Zoom

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Over the past few weeks, Zoom’s use has exploded since it became the video conferencing platform of choice in today’s COVID-19 world. (My own university, Harvard, uses it for all of its classes. Boris Johnson had a cabinet meeting over Zoom.) Over that same period, the company has been exposed for having both lousy privacy and lousy security. My goal… Continue reading Security and Privacy Implications of Zoom→

Emergency Surveillance During COVID-19 Crisis

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Israel is using emergency surveillance powers to track people who may have COVID-19, joining China and Iran in using mass surveillance in this way. I believe pressure will increase to leverage existing corporate surveillance infrastructure for these purposes in the US and other countries. With that in mind, the EFF has some good thinking on how to balance public safety… Continue reading Emergency Surveillance During COVID-19 Crisis→

The Whisper Secret-Sharing App Exposed Locations

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This is a big deal: Whisper, the secret-sharing app that called itself the "safest place on the Internet," left years of users’ most intimate confessions exposed on the Web tied to their age, location and other details, raising alarm among cybersecurity researchers that users could have been unmasked or blackmailed. […] The records were viewable on a non-password-protected database open… Continue reading The Whisper Secret-Sharing App Exposed Locations→

Collating Hacked Data Sets

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Two Harvard undergraduates completed a project where they went out on the dark web and found a bunch of stolen datasets. Then they correlated all the information, and combined it with additional, publicly available, information. No surprise: the result was much more detailed and personal. "What we were able to do is alarming because we can now find vulnerabilities in… Continue reading Collating Hacked Data Sets→

Customer Tracking at Ralphs Grocery Store

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To comply with California’s new data privacy law, companies that collect information on consumers and users are forced to be more transparent about it. Sometimes the results are creepy. Here’s an article about Ralphs, a California supermarket chain owned by Kroger: …the form proceeds to state that, as part of signing up for a rewards card, Ralphs "may collect" information… Continue reading Customer Tracking at Ralphs Grocery Store→

Palantir’s Surveillance Service for Law Enforcement

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Motherboard got its hands on Palantir’s Gotham user’s manual, which is used by the police to get information on people: The Palantir user guide shows that police can start with almost no information about a person of interest and instantly know extremely intimate details about their lives. The capabilities are staggering, according to the guide: If police have a name… Continue reading Palantir’s Surveillance Service for Law Enforcement→

Cell Networks Hacked by (Probable) Nation-State Attackers

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A sophisticated attacker has successfuly infiltrated cell providers to collect information on specific users: The hackers have systematically broken in to more than 10 cell networks around the world to date over the past seven years to obtain massive amounts of call records — including times and dates of calls, and their cell-based locations — on at least 20 individuals…. Continue reading Cell Networks Hacked by (Probable) Nation-State Attackers→