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data collection
Your Data or Your Life: DOGE’s Highway Robbery
The greatest public theft in human history is happening right now.
Feb 28, 2025
Our social imaginations have failed to keep pace with our technological imaginations. That has left us unguarded against today’s fast-moving, multi-pronged assault on our individual and collective autonomy.
DOGE isn’t just a power play for the levers of government power. It’s also the greatest theft of a public resource in human history. That resource is data: our aggregated data, in the form of research studies, along with some very personal individual information.
In a very real sense, the fight for this data is a fight for the future.
Our Data Belongs to Us
Last year, I wrote a piece for Current Affairs magazine entitled, “The Only Ethical Model for AI is Socialism.” My main argument was, and is, that the “large language models” (LLMs) behind today’s “chatbot” AI are both a public product and a public good. As I wrote then, “LLM AI was created by humans, billions of them, as they used the internet... a chatbot is a collectivity. Because it’s produced by everyone, it can’t ethically be owned by anyone.”
In the 20th century, military juntas seized radio stations whenever their coups began. Today’s data hijackings represent something similar, but with even more draconian implications.
I’m willing to defend that argument with anyone—socialist, Keynesian, or libertarian. In retrospect, however, I probably failed to fully convey the ruthlessness and brutality of Big Tech’s executives. Maybe I didn’t fully believe it myself. Now, everyone can see it.
Which gets us to the news of the day. The dozens of executive orders, the mass firings, the bizarre flurry of unauthorized memos to workers, the name-calling and intimidation: They’re all important. But the data dimension of this assault has been underemphasized. That must change
Elon Musk et al. are thinking big—bigger than most of their opponents can imagine.
The Great Theft
In the 20th century, military juntas seized radio stations whenever their coups began. Today’s data hijackings represent something similar, but with even more draconian implications.
People became rightfully alarmed when “DOGE” apparatchiks, some barely out of their teens, demanded access to federal payment systems. But there’s an even bigger target: information. The federal government’s massive databases have incalculable value. Their data can be used to manipulate public opinion, reshape policy, and accelerate the privatization of public resources. In a real sense, it can be used to reshape reality.
The leaders of DOGE’s tech jugend understand this. They proved that when they shut down more than 8,000 pages from more than a dozen government websites, going well beyond President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI directive. They took down over 3,000 pages from the U.S. Census Bureau, for example—mostly datasets and surveys used in debates about government policy. They also deleted nearly 1,000 pages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on innocent topics like preventing chronic disease, early detection of Alzheimer’s, and guidelines for treating sexually transmitted diseases. Some of these deletions may be the work of overzealous youngsters, but there are too many to dismiss as happenstance.
These databases contain collective or amalgamated data—on income, labor status, health, environment, and more. They represent millions of person-hours of research intended to benefit the public, not private entrepreneurs or totalitarian leaders.
Digital Big Brother
The assault on our individual data is equally frightening, if not more so. This data can be used to change our behavior, to target vulnerable groups for exploitation—even for blackmail, if it should come to that.
Take just one resource: health information. The federal government’s health data could be used to profile virtually anyone’s overall health, their past care, their mental state (if treated), and in some cases their sexual or recreational drug preferences. Equally sensitive information can be found at the IRS, the Treasury Department, and throughout government.
This information is also invaluable to Musk and his business associates, providing a competitive advantage that could help them build new monopolies. The highly competitive AI economy runs on data, and the U.S. government is the largest untapped data source in the Western world.
Data is power. If the right-wing coup officiants succeed in seizing it, that power could be theirs forever.
Again, let’s use health as an example. The federal government manages one-third of the U.S. health economy. With that data, a corporation could predict doctor and patient behavior. They could map prescription habits by doctor, doctor specialty, medical facility, and patient. They could project the likelihood of any individual experiencing a costly medical emergency in the next year, which could lead to the return of discriminatory “medical underwriting.”
And that’s just the beginning. With that data, a corporation could name its price with pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, and many other companies. Multiply that by every government database in existence, and you can build an information mega-monopoly. Don’t think Musk and his friends haven’t thought about that.
The data currently being hijacked can also be used to automate federal jobs, potentially on a mass scale. AI isn’t likely to do these jobs well, but making government more efficient isn’t the real goal. The goal is to dismantle government and replace it with private contractors wherever possible.
And who will be best positioned to bid on those automated jobs? The corporation that holds this data—our data.
A Fight for Survival
Without access some of these scientific reports, some people will die. Without the government’s medical, economic, and demographic information, many policy debates will be stifled. And this hijacked data can be used to divide us even more: sick vs. healthy, young vs. old, urban vs. rural, white vs. Black...
The bottom line? Data is power. If the right-wing coup officiants succeed in seizing it, that power could be theirs forever. If we don’t stop them now, we may be unable to stop them later.
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Amazon Fined in France for Illegally Spying on Workers
The retail giant was also ordered to pay more than $30 million last year after allegedly surveilling customers with its tech products.
Jan 23, 2024
Months after Amazon was fined more than $30 million for allegedly spying on customers in their homes, a French data watchdog on Monday announced it had ordered the retail giant to pay another $35 million for what it called "excessive" tracking of warehouse employees' activity.
France's National Commission on Informatics and Liberty (CNIL) informed Amazon France Logistique, which runs the U.S. company's warehouses in the country, of the fine late last month after investigating scanning devices used by employees.
Several features of the tools violate the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), according to the group.
The technology-focused news outlet The Register reported that all employees at Amazon's French warehouses are given scanners that document their tasks, including when they pick up an item or place it in a delivery box.
CNIL found that the "inactivity indicators" on the scanners were "too precise" and could lead "to the employee potentially having to justify each break or interruption."
Another feature used to measure the speed at which the scanner is used and one that stored data history for 31 days were also deemed "excessive" by the watchdog.
CNIL's investigation found that before April 2020, temporary employees at the warehouses weren't informed that their data would be collected by the scanning devices and that no workers were sufficiently told that the facilities were equipped with video surveillance systems.
In violation of Article 32 of the GDPR, said the watchdog, "access to the video surveillance software was not sufficiently secure, since the password was not sufficiently robust and the access account was shared between several users."
The group said it determined the amount of Amazon's penalty by taking into account "the fact that the processing of employees' data by means of scanners differed from the methods of monitoring of traditional activity because of the scale at which they were implemented, both in terms of their completeness and permanence, and led to a very tight and detailed monitoring of the work of employees."
The EUobserver, which reports on democracy within the bloc, noted that the fine was announced on the same day that Amazon refused to participate in a European Parliament hearing on working conditions in its warehouses.
The fine comes less than a year after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) determined that an Amazon employee had used its Ring security cameras to spy on female customers for several months, prompting the company to agree to a settlement worth $5.8 million.
Amazon also agreed to a $25 million settlement after being accused to failing to delete audio when parents requested they be erased from Alexa speakers.
The company said Tuesday that it "might appeal" the CNIL's decision and that the watchdog's conclusions about its surveillance practices were "factually incorrect."
In the U.S., progressive law professor Zephyr Teachout called the fine "excellent" and expressed hope that policymakers will soon pass "clear American laws that recognize just how harmful extreme monitoring is."
"Contract law is not the key," said Teachout. "Basic dignity is."
Amazon's focus on closely monitoring employees' activities has led to numerous injuries among workers, according to a survey by the University of Illinois Chicago's Center for Urban Economic Development last October. The center found that out of 1,484 employees, 70% had been forced to take unpaid time off due to sprains, strains, and other injuries sustained while rushing to keep up with Amazon's demanding quotas.
"We see clear evidence in our data," said researchers, "that work intensity and monitoring contribute to negative health outcomes."
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'Chilling': Rights Advocates Blast FBI for Abusing Surveillance Tool 278,000+ Times
"The FBI's systematic misuse of these resources proves that it (and the rest of the federal government) simply can't be trusted to wield this sort of power," said one campaigner. "Let 702 die."
May 20, 2023
Friday's "alarming" revelations about U.S. law enforcement's abuse of a powerful surveillance tool "confirmed the worst fears of advocates" and likely further complicated a brewing battle in Congress over reauthorizing a constitutionally dubious spying law.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—which is set to expire at the end of this year unless reauthorized by federal lawmakers—empowers the U.S. government to engage in warrantless surveillance of electronic communications. Although the law only authorizes targeting foreigners located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information, a massive amount of Americans' data is also collected.
On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), in consultation with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), released a pair of redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinions—one which revealed that in 2020 and early 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) misused the Section 702 database over 278,000 times.
"These unlawful searches undermine our core constitutional rights and threaten the bedrock of our democracy. It's clear the FBI can't be left to police itself."
The "persistent and widespread" violations by the FBI—which is part of the DOJ—include searches for information related to crime victims, protesters arrested after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, donors to a congressional candidate, and people suspected of breaching the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The New York Times reported that "a senior FBI official said that in those cases, the analysts misunderstood the standard and were required to undergo additional training," and a representative for the DOJ disclosed that the unidentified political candidate lost to an incumbent lawmaker.
The ODNI's statement about the court documents insists that "all of these compliance incidents occurred prior to FBI deploying a series of remedial measures beginning in the summer of 2021 and through 2022. As a result, these compliance incidents do not reflect FBI's querying practices subsequent to the full deployment of the remedial measures."
However, exposure of the FBI's conduct prompted fresh demands from civil liberties advocates in Congress and beyond for seriously reforming or even ending Section 702, with several critics casting doubt on claims that the bureau—and other agencies with access to the collected data—will behave absent outside intervention.
"These abuses have been going on for years and despite recent changes in FBI practices, these systematic violations of Americans' privacy require congressional action," U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) declared Friday. "If Section 702 is to be reauthorized, there must be statutory reforms to ensure that the checks and balances are in place to put an end to these abuses."
"I am disappointed at the extent of the redactions in the opinions released today," he added, pledging to pressure ODNI to inform the public about the interpretation of the law behind closed doors. "There is important, secret information about how the government has interpreted Section 702 that Congress and the American people need to see before the law is renewed."
House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) also weighed in, though he noted his hesitation to do so given that Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has created the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government—which has been called the "Insurrection Protection Committee" and a "fascist power grab to evade accountability" by progressive lawmakers:
In the middle of Chairman Jordan's overzealous attack on federal law enforcement and the absurd claims advanced by the MAGA crowd on the weaponization subcommittee, I am hesitant to comment at all—but the abuse of FISA authority detailed in this opinion demands a response from all members of Congress. Section 702 exists only to protect the country from external threats to our national security. The government may only use it to target non-U.S. persons located outside of the United States. If the FBI insists on using it for routine domestic criminal investigations, without a warrant or probable cause, then perhaps they should not have access to this information at all. The problem is not that the FBI unlawfully targeted thousands of Americans of any particular political view. They appear to have conducted backdoor searches on Black Lives Matter protestors, January 6th rioters, and everyone in between. The problem is that they unlawfully targeted thousands of Americans. Period.
The FBI says that they have instituted new procedures to make this kind of abuse impossible. They have made that promise before. Without significant changes to the law to prevent this abuse, I will oppose the reauthorization of this authority.
Civil society groups that have for years sounded the alarm about Section 702 responded similarly to the latest revelations.
"Today's disclosures underscore the need for Congress to rein in the FBI's egregious abuses of this law, including warrantless searches using the names of people who donated to a congressional candidate," Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the ACLU's National Security Project, told The Associated Press Friday. "These unlawful searches undermine our core constitutional rights and threaten the bedrock of our democracy. It's clear the FBI can't be left to police itself."
The Washington Post noted that "this is not the only time the FBI has been in trouble for the database. Another recent audit found multiple problems, including that the FBI used the database to search for the name of a member of Congress."
"For the FBI to misuse Section 702 to spy on people protesting the killing of George Floyd, political donors, and victims of crimes is an unspeakable abuse of trust," said Demand Progress senior policy counsel Sean Vitka. "Congress must enact comprehensive privacy protections for people in the United States, against all forms of warrantless surveillance, or Section 702 must fall. If the administration wants to see this law survive in any form, it should publicly embrace this reality."
The Biden administration in recent months has urged Congress to reauthorize Section 702, including in a February letter to top Democratic and Republican lawmakers from Attorney General Merrick Garland and Avril Haines, director of national intelligence.
Vitka asserted that the "shocking" abuse is "unmatched since the days of J. Edgar Hoover," a former longtime FBI director also referenced by Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's Security & Surveillance Project.
"Even with the long history of FBI misuse of FISA 702, these latest revelations should set off alarm bells across Congress," said Laperruque. "The systemic misuse of this warrantless surveillance tool has made FISA 702 as toxic as COINTELPRO and the FBI abuses of the Hoover years. Absent a full overhaul of Section 702 and related surveillance powers, Congress should not allow the law to be extended past this year."
"For decades, we've seen surveillance abuse target political dissidents and marginalized communities, and worried a defensive search exception for FISA 702 could be misused the same way," he added, referring to queries seeking data on someone who may be a victim or target of a foreign influence operation. "This shocking example of 'defensive searches' being an excuse to pull up the communications of a batch of 19,000 political donors without a warrant should end the discussion of whether any type of 'defensive search' exception is safe or acceptable.”
Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program, said in a series of tweets Friday that "it's time to end this charade once and for all. The Fourth Amendment requires the government to show probable cause to a court if it wants to access Americans' communications."
"Backdoor searches provide an end-run around this requirement under the best of circumstances and they are indefensible when the [government] is violating its own minimal standards in ways that directly impact Americans' rights to engage in political protest, donate to political campaigns, or just live their lives free from [government] scrutiny based on race or ethnicity," she added. "Congress should not authorize Section 702 without sweeping reforms, starting with a warrant requirement to conduct U.S. person queries of any data the government obtained without a warrant based on the claim that it was not targeting Americans."
In a Friday opinion piece for Fast Company, Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, argued that the data collected under Section 702 "is nothing short of a loaded gun aimed at the heart of a democracy, a lawless digital dragnet systematically abused by those who swore to uphold the law."
The campaigner continued:
As civil rights groups warned would happen, FBI agents just couldn't help themselves. Rather than follow the limits that were supposed to protect Americans from this international dragnet, agents used this terrifying tool to target protesters and domestic suspects. And the abuses should be chilling to all of us, no matter where we sit on the political spectrum...
It would have been disturbing if these sorts of egregious examples happened just a few times, but to see the FBI's systematic misuse of these resources proves that it (and the rest of the federal government) simply can't be trusted to wield this sort of power.
"If the FBI is willing to break the law this brazenly, Congress and the administration must acknowledge that there's no set of guardrails, no Band-Aid, that can fix 702 and keep the public safe," he concluded. "The only way to safeguard our data and our rights is to do what we should have done a long time ago: Let 702 die."
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As Quietly as Possible, the Government is Renewing Its Assault on Your Privacy
Having failed to secure an anti-encryption bill, the FBI and justice department are now engaged in a multi-pronged attack on all sorts of other privacy rights
Jun 22, 2016
With their dangerous crusade for an anti-encryption bill in Congress all but dead (for now), the FBI and US Justice Department are now engaged in a multi-pronged attack on all sorts of other privacy rights - this time, with much less public scrutiny.
A report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office harshly criticized the FBI last week for its little-discussed but frequently used facial recognition database and called on the bureau to implement myriad privacy and safety protections. It turns out the database has far more photos than anyone thought - 411.9m to be exact - and the vast majority are not mugshots of criminals, but driver's license photos from over a dozen states and passport photos of millions of completely innocent people. The feds searched it over 36,000 times from 2011 to 2015 (no court order needed) while also apparently having no idea how accurate it is.
Worse, the FBI wants its hundreds of millions of facial recognition photos and its entire biometric database, including fingerprints and DNA profiles, to be exempt from important Privacy Act protections. As the Intercept reported two weeks ago: "Specifically, the FBI's proposal would exempt the database from the provisions in the Privacy Act that require federal agencies to share with individuals the information they collect about them and that give people the legal right to determine the accuracy and fairness of how their personal information is collected and used."
In Congress, Senate Republicans are pushing for a vote this week on controversial new warrantless surveillance measures that would let the FBI use unconstitutional National Security Letters to get email records and internet browsing history from countless US citizens - without going to a judge or court at all. The Senate leadership is bringing the measure up to vote by invoking the Orlando attack, despite the fact that we know the FBI had no problem surveilling the Orlando killer when he was previously investigated. It is a blatant attempt to exploit the tragedy in order to gain powers the FBI has long asked for (powers, by the way, the FBI is already reportedly using, despite the justice department telling them it's basically illegal).
The justice department, meanwhile, is busy attempting to implement a new rule for the court system that would make it much easier for the FBI to hack into computers worldwide - including those of hacking victims. Using the obscure process for amending the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the department has convinced the courts that they should be able to get one warrant to potentially hack thousands of computers, and shouldn't have to comply with the normal rules involving getting the court order in the jurisdiction where the crime occurred.
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has noted, "this is a recipe for disaster," and it is being done by circumventing the normal democratic process. Several organizations (including Freedom of the Press Foundation, the organization I work for) have called on Congress to put a stop to it.
Also, in the courts, the Justice Department has continued to argue that the US government doesn't need a warrant to gather Americans' cell phone location information—even though that type of information can give authorities their precise whereabouts 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The Justice Department convinced the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals last month to overturn its previous ruling that police need a probable cause warrant to get such information. The court agreed with the justice department that cellphone users don't have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" around their location, even though it is some of the most intimate information that exists, giving law enforcement officials a detailed picture of your life that even your close friends and family may not know.
Last year, the FBI director disingenuously tried to claim that the pendulum "has swung too far" in the way of privacy despite the fact that the agency has virtually unprecedented access to all sorts of information on Americans. If it wasn't clear before, it should be now: they plan on using any means necessary to further erode the rights of hundreds of millions of citizens in their crusade against privacy.
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New Report: FBI Can Access Hundreds of Millions of Face Recognition Photos
Jun 16, 2016
Today the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) finally published its exhaustive report on the FBI's face recognition capabilities. The takeaway: FBI has access to hundreds of millions more photos than we ever thought. And the Bureau has been hiding this fact from the public--in flagrant violation of federal law and agency policy--for years.
According to the GAO Report, FBI's Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation (FACE) Services unit not only has access to FBI's Next Generation Identification (NGI) face recognition database of nearly 30 million civil and criminal mug shot photos, it also has access to the State Department's Visa and Passport databases, the Defense Department's biometric database, and the driver's license databases of at least 16 states. Totaling 411.9 million images, this is an unprecedented number of photographs, most of which are of Americans and foreigners who have committed no crimes.
The FBI has done little to make sure that its search results (which the Bureau calls "investigative leads") do not include photos of innocent people, according to the report. The FBI has conducted only very limited testing to ensure the accuracy of NGI's face recognition capabilities. And it has not taken any steps to determine whether the face recognition systems of its external partners--states and other federal agencies--are sufficiently accurate to prevent innocent people from being identified as criminal suspects. As we know from previous research, face recognition is notoriously inaccurate across the board and may also misidentify African Americans and ethnic minorities, young people, and women at higher rates than whites, older people, and men, respectively.
As the Report points out, many of the 411.9 face images to which FBI has access--like driver's license and passport and visa photos--were never collected for criminal or national security purposes. And yet, under agreements we've never seen between the FBI and its state and federal partners, the FBI may search these civil photos whenever it's trying to find a suspect in a crime. As the map above shows, 18 more states are in negotiations with the FBI to provide similar access to their driver's license databases.
The states have been very involved in the development of the FBI's own NGI database, which includes nearly 30 million of the 411.9 million face images accessible to the Bureau (we've written extensively about NGI in the past). NGI includes more than 20 million civil and criminal images received directly from at least six states, including California, Louisiana, Michigan, New York, Texas, and Virginia. And it appears five additional states--Florida, Maryland, Maine, New Mexico, and Arkansas--can send search requests directly to the NGI database. As of December 2015, FBI is working with eight more states to grant them access to NGI, and an additional 24 states are also interested.
The GAO Report spends a significant number of pages criticizing FBI for rolling out these massive face recognition capabilities without ever explaining the privacy implications of its actions to the public. Federal law and Department of Justice policies require the FBI to complete a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) of all programs that collect data on Americans, both at the beginning of development and any time there's significant change to the program. While the FBI produced a PIA in 2008, when it first started planning out the face recognition component of NGI, it didn't update that PIA until late 2015--seven years later and well after it began making significant changes to the program. It also failed to produce a PIA for the FACE Services unit until May 2015--three years after FACE began supporting FBI with face recognition searches. As GAO notes, the whole point of PIAs is to give the public notice of the privacy implications of data collection programs and to ensure that privacy protections are built into the system from the start. The FBI failed at this.
The single bright spot in the report reiterates that FBI decided not to allow searches of civil photos enrolled in NGI to "better protect individuals' privacy." This is a hollow victory, however, because if you've ever been arrested for any crime at all--including blocking a street as part of a public protest--your civil photos will be linked to your booking photo and subject to face recognition searches along with all the other 29.7 million images in NGI.
The GAO's findings are especially shocking, given the timing. Just over a month ago the FBI demanded its face recognition capabilities be exempt from several key provisions of the federal Privacy Act--and provided the public with only 30 days to respond. Over and over, the FBI's secret data collection practices confirm why we need more transparency, not less. In the coming weeks, we'll be asking you to sign on to our comments to the FBI's proposal. Help us send a message to the FBI that its practices are unacceptable and must change.
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'Incredibly Creepy' Billboards to Track Behavior of Passers-By
'People have no idea that they’re being tracked and targeted'
Feb 29, 2016
Billboards nationwide will soon begin spying on passers-by's behavior and selling that data to advertisers.
Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, which owns tens of thousands of billboards nationwide, is announcing plans to use people's cell phones to allow its billboards to track the behavior of everyone who walks or drives past the ads.
"People have no idea that they're being tracked and targeted," Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, told the New York Times, which broke the news on Sunday. "It is incredibly creepy, and it's the most recent intrusion into our privacy."
The marketing behemoth is partnering with AT&T and other companies that track human behavior to collect data on viewers' activity, which advertisers could then use to create hyper-targeted ads--similar to how websites track visitors through their browsers and sell that data to online marketers.
Privacy advocates say the problem is that most people when out in public, have no idea that their every move is being recorded, analyzed, and sold for marketing purposes. When similar ads that used smartphones to track behavior were installed in phone booths in New York City in 2008, there was a loud public outcry, and the billboards were quickly removed after a Buzzfeed investigation.
Indeed, even Clear Channel Outdoor Americas' spokesman conceded to the New York Times that the company's new service "sounds a bit creepy."
Critics also note that using smartphone data to track the behavior of unsuspecting passers-by poses specific risks to children. Children are more susceptible to advertisements and use mobile phones at increasingly younger ages. A 2012 study found that 56 percent of children ages eight to 12 have cell phones.
Advertisers also increasingly use facial recognition technology to track behavior in public spaces, and many people remain unaware of it. The February 2016 issue of Consumer Reports drew attention to the growing phenomenon and listed a few examples of how the technology is being put to use:
In Germany, the Astra beer brand recently created an automated billboard that noted when women walked past. The billboard approximated the women's age, then played one of several prerecorded ads to match.
Retailers can use facial recognition systems to see how long people of a particular race or gender remain in the shop and adjust displays and the store layout to enhance sales.
Using related technology, some high-end retailers in the U.S. have experimented with "memory mirrors" that perform tricks such as storing images of what shoppers tried on so that they can be revisited or emailed directly to friends for feedback.
Public tracking techniques such as facial recognition are "largely unregulated," the magazine observed.
"People would be outraged if they knew how facial recognition" is being developed and promoted, Alvaro Bedoya, the executive director of Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy & Technology, told Consumer Reports. "Not only because they weren't told about it, but because there's nothing they can do about it."
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Manipulating Reality: Facebook Is Listening to You
Oct 10, 2015
One thing we have become all too used to is that our reality can be manipulated to create the appearance of something else entirely. Invading another country is defensive, rigged elections are passed off as democracy in action, more guns (or more nuclear weapons) ensure the peace, trade and foreign investment, increase jobs at home. Orwellian logic has become commonplace.
What I am reporting on here is another kind of manipulation: How Facebook and other social media use the information we, for the most part, unknowingly provide it--including even words we speak in the privacy of our own homes--to advertise products that we didn't request and almost certainly don't want, and pass data on to the government.
I am hardly the first to discover this extraordinary capability. A number of other people have expressed their astonishment and anger when they became aware that keywords they used in Facebook and Twitter communication, such as messaging, location, and status, as well as in private conversations anywhere in their homes, were being picked up and almost instantly converted into ads. You mention a particular sport and a ticketing agency's ad appears. You say you would love to drive a Lexus and up pops a Lexus ad. You talk about a vacation, and a Facebook ad refers you to a Hawaiian beach or a small Paris hotel that--lo and behold--you had actually mentioned just yesterday!
Is this paranoia? Is Facebook (or Instagram, Google, or Yahoo) capable of listening in on our conversations? Facebook readily admits that its business model relies on the data we enter or transmit online, that once we join the data essentially becomes Facebook's property, and that (as Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has argued) most people don't care all that much about their privacy anyway. Of course, Facebook et al. defend their model by telling you they are merely responding to your wants and that if you wish, they can reduce (but not eliminate) advertising if you'll simply check a list provided in their program settings. However, as to actually listening in, Facebook contends that you only control the microphone, and (according to the head of Facebook security) you must give permission to Facebook to activate it. Does anyone recall being asked for permission?
You apparently can disable the microphone function in Windows or the Facebook mobile app on your smart phone or tablet. But does "off" actually mean completely off? Apparently not. My wife Jodi's and my own experiences, after we turned off the microphone on her computer, say otherwise. Note that the ads appeared within seconds of our speaking.
- Jodi made a remark about Robin Wright Penn, the actress. Ads for Sean Penn movies instantly appeared.
- We discussed T-shirts for grandchildren. Ads for just such T-shirts appeared.
- Jodi mentioned our unfinished Scrabble game. Immediately, an ad for the game Yahtzee came up.
- Jodi was describing her appearance relevant to her age, such as laugh lines and gray hair, and an ad for Maybelline "Age Rewind" popped up.
So now you say, OK, but isn't this snooping illegal, an invasion of privacy? There have been large-scale protests of Facebook's smartphone snooping, but no policy change by Facebook as far as I'm aware. At a legal level, a Belgian study points out--and by the way, the Europeans are far more upset with and focused on Facebook's shenanigans than are Americans--"opting out" of advertising is not the same as informed and direct consent. Moreover, Facebook does not ask for our consent to its acquiring data from other sources, for collecting location data provided in smart phones, for using photos or other data (such as "like") entered by the user.
I think a fair reading of the Belgian report and Facebook's most recent (2015) clarifications of policy is that Facebook may collect any and all information stemming from your use of Facebook and from the device you use to access Facebook. "Any information" means absolutely any data you enter, whether about yourself or third parties, and whether provided in writing, by voice, or in pictures. Even if you elect to terminate your Facebook account, it retains all the information you've provided.
There is an additional and even more pernicious issue: the gathering and use of social media data by U.S. government agencies, notably the National Security Agency (NSA). Edward Snowden exposed this practice, which includes Facebook, Apple, and several other technology companies participating in the NSA's Prism program, which collects data directly from the companies rather than simply via the Internet.
This intrusion on privacy is now being contested by the European Union. In 2000, the EU accepted the U.S. proposal to establish a "Safe Harbor" program for transferring personal data collected in Europe by Facebook, Google, and Amazon to the U.S. That agreement was reevaluated by the European Court of Justice Advocate-General, who maintained that it violates Europeans' basic rights. The A-G finds that the data can be "accessed by the NSA and by other United States security agencies in the course of a mass and indiscriminate surveillance."
The ECJ has just upheld that opinion, declaring Safe Harbor invalid. The court's ruling is that Safe Harbor "must be regarded as compromising the essence of the fundamental right to respect for private life." It's a big blow, though not necessarily a fatal one, to Facebook and others engaged in data transferring in Europe. The Europeans have been pressing these companies, especially Google and Amazon, on other issues as well, such as with anti-trust legislation. Ideally, the ECJ ruling and other European actions will embolden Americans to stage their own fight for greater privacy and more transparency in the way the technology giants conduct their business.
Does social media's invasion of privacy bother you, or do you consider the loss of your privacy the price of socializing? How have you handled your privacy with your computer, phone, or tablet? Have you had the kinds of listening-in experiences I mentioned?
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1984 Arrives Thirty Years Late: Say Goodbye to Privacy Forever if This Bill Passes
Legislation called "The Student Right to Know Before You Go Act" has been introduced in both houses of Congress. Nice name, no? Don't you think you should have "the right to know before you go" to a college or university?
What it really means is that the federal government will:
Jun 22, 2015
Legislation called "The Student Right to Know Before You Go Act" has been introduced in both houses of Congress. Nice name, no? Don't you think you should have "the right to know before you go" to a college or university?
What it really means is that the federal government will:
authorize the creation of a federal database of all college students, complete with their personally identifiable information, tracking them through college and into the workforce, including their earnings, Social Security numbers, and more. The ostensible purpose of the bill? To provide better consumer information to parents and students so they can make "smart higher education investments."
Big Data, the answer to all problems. All you need do is surrender your privacy and become someone's data point, perhaps the point of sales.
Barmak Nassirian, writing on the blog of Studentprivacymatters, warns about the dangers this legislation poses. He wrote originally in response to an article endorsing the legislation by researchers at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who viewed the invasion of personal privacy as less significant than the need for consumer information about one's choice of a college or university:
First, let's be clear that the data in question would be personally identifiable information of every student (regardless of whether they seek or obtain any benefits from the government), that these data would be collected without the individual's consent or knowledge, that each individual's educational data would be linked to income data collected for unrelated purposes, and that the highly personal information residing for the first time in the same data-system would be tracked and updated over time.
Second, the open-ended justification for the collection and maintenance of the data ("better consumer information") strongly suggests that the data systems in question would have very long, if not permanent, record-retention policies. They, in other words, would effectively become life-long dossiers on individuals.
Third, the amorphous rationale for matching collegiate and employment data would predictably spread and justify the concatenation of other "related" data into individuals' longitudinal records. The giant sucking sound we would hear could be the sound of personally identifiable data from individuals' K12, juvenile justice, military service, incarceration, and health records being pulled into their national dossiers.
Fourth, the lack of explicit intentionality as to the compelling governmental interest that would justify such a surveillance system is an open invitation for mission creep. The availability of a dataset as rich as even the most basic version of the system in question would quickly turn it into the go-to data mart for other federal and state agencies, and result in currently unthinkable uses that would never have been authorized if proposed as allowable disclosures in the first place.
This is a bill that conservatives and liberals should be fighting against. Imagine if such a data set existed; how long would it be before the data were hacked for fun and profit, exposing personally identifiable information about students who had never given their consent? Didn't the government recently become aware of a massive hack of its personnel records?
According to the New York Times:
For more than five years, American intelligence agencies followed several groups of Chinese hackers who were systematically draining information from defense contractors, energy firms and electronics makers, their targets shifting to fit Beijing's latest economic priorities.
But last summer, officials lost the trail as some of the hackers changed focus again, burrowing deep into United States government computer systems that contain vast troves of personnel data, according to American officials briefed on a federal investigation into the attack and private security experts.
Undetected for nearly a year, the Chinese intruders executed a sophisticated attack that gave them "administrator privileges" into the computer networks at the Office of Personnel Management, mimicking the credentials of people who run the agency's systems, two senior administration officials said. The hackers began siphoning out a rush of data after constructing what amounted to an electronic pipeline that led back to China, investigators told Congress last week in classified briefings.
How long will a treasure trove of personally identifiable student data remain confidential?
If this bill passes, farewell to privacy.
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The US Government Could Count Those Killed by Police, But It's Chosen Not To
We’ve had the authority to collect and publish data on law enforcement’s use of force for 20 years. We can’t wait another 20 for transparency or accountability
Jun 04, 2015
For centuries, black communities in America have faced physical abuse and unjustified deadly force at the hands of law enforcement. Modern policing even originated in slave patrols and night watches that captured people who tried to escape slavery. According to the most recent FBI data, local police kill black people at nearly the same rate as people lynched in the Jim Crow-era - at least two times a week. The Guardian's latest count for the first five months of 2015 puts that number at around once per day.
But the verifiable impact on black lives of racially discriminatory policing remains largely unknown. Despite federal law authorizing the US attorney general to collect nationwide data on police use of force, there remains no federal database on how often police kill civilians, let alone abuse their authority.
According to Guardian's The Counted, police killed 464 people in the first 5 months of 2015, including 135 black people. Their data shows that, in 2015 so far, the black people killed by the police are twice as likely to be unarmed as the white people. According to a recent Washington Post analysis, at this rate, police will fatally shoot nearly 1,000 people by the end of year. The federal government has no way to confirm or disprove this data, though they've long had the authority to compile it themselves.
In 1994, the US Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which authorized the attorney general to collect and publish nationwide data on police use of force. In 2000, Congress passed the Death in Custody Reporting Act, which required states to report any individual who dies in police custody, but lacked proper enforcement and expired in 2006. In December 2014, a new version of the latter act passed again, requiring the attorney general to eliminate federal funding for police departments that fail to comply.
And just last week, as part of President Obama's executive order to limit the types of militarized weapons the federal government can transfer to local police, he expanded police data collection of police uses of force, pedestrian and vehicle stops, officer involved shootings and more. But the executive action fails to address the scale of today's policing crisis or make the data collection mandatory: of 18,000 police departments in the US, only 21 are participating in the new initiative.
We cannot afford to wait another 20 years for comprehensive, public data on how often local, state and federal police use force.
Read the full article at The Guardian.
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