Collaborate Disseminate
News here and here. Other companies have been quick to deny that they did the same thing, but I generally don’t believe those carefully worded statements about what they have and haven’t done. We do know that the NSA uses bribery, coercion, threat, legal compulsion, and outright theft to get what they want. We just don’t know which one they… Continue reading Yahoo Scanned Everyone’s E-mails for the NSA
Both are worth reading…. Continue reading Two Good Essays on the NSA’s "Upstream" Data Collection under Section 702
There’s an app that allows people to submit photographs of hotel rooms around the world into a centralized database. The idea is that photographs of victims of human trafficking are often taken in hotel rooms, and the database will help law enforcement find the traffickers. I can’t speak to the efficacy of the database — in particular, the false positives… Continue reading Crowdsourcing a Database of Hotel Rooms
At the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this week, Apple talked about something called "differential privacy." We know very little about the details, but it seems to be an anonymization technique designed to collect user data without revealing personal information. What we know about anonymization is that it’s much harder than people think, and it’s likely that this technique will… Continue reading Apple’s Differential Privacy
There’s a new trend in Silicon Valley startups; companies are not collecting and saving data on their customers: In Silicon Valley, there’s a new emphasis on putting up barriers to government requests for data. The Apple-FBI case and its aftermath have tech firms racing to employ a variety of tools that would place customer information beyond the reach of a… Continue reading Companies Not Saving Your Data
The White House has released a report on big-data discrimination. From the blog post: Using case studies on credit lending, employment, higher education, and criminal justice, the report we are releasing today illustrates how big data techniques can be used to detect bias and prevent discrimination. It also demonstrates the risks involved, particularly how technologies can deliberately or inadvertently perpetuate,… Continue reading White House Report on Big Data Discrimination
NYU Helen Nissenbaum gave an excellent lecture at Brown University last month, where she rebutted those who think that we should not regulate data collection, only data use: something she calls "big data exceptionalism." Basically, this is the idea that collecting the "haystack" isn’t the problem; it what is done with it that is. (I discuss this same topic in… Continue reading Helen Nissenbaum on Regulating Data Collection and Use