the OS that takes a screenshot of what you’re doing every five seconds?
My guess: worth it. They probably made 20x that on advertising. It will have little to no impact on future sales. What are their customers going to do, switch to Data brokers are selling the ability to track phones that visit abortion clinics and follow them back across state lines, all the way to their owners’ homes. All it takes for this kind of 24-hour surveillance is a credit card. Given the creepy enthusiasm with which MAGA government officials are inserting themselves into women’s health choices, these tracking tools present a pressing danger for women across the country.Thanks again to my senator Ron Wyden for fighting the good fight against our constant tech surveillance culture.
The deck does not say where CMG allegedly sources this voice data, be that a particular brand of smart TV, a smart speaker, or smartphone loaded with a particular app. It says that once it has used the voice data to identify an audience that is “ready-to-buy,” CMG builds a list of those audience members and uploads it to ad platforms to then target advertisements.It sure sounds like CMG is selling advertising based on the idea that our smart devices are picking up our conversations and reporting them back to their company.
Hagenah says that in cases of employers with “bring your own devices” policies, there’s a risk of someone leaving with huge volumes of company data saved on their laptops. That’s a particular risk if they’re disgruntled or leave on bad terms, he says.Or how about when a company is sued and must turn over all related employee Recall data? Seems like much more information than texts and emails contain. Companies might want to run this feature by their general counsel before deploying.
Wyden suggested that the intelligence community might be helping data brokers violate an FTC order requiring that Americans are provided "clear and conspicuous" disclosures and give informed consent before their data can be sold to third parties. In the seven years that Wyden has been investigating data brokers, he said that he has not been made "aware of any company that provides such a warning to users before collecting their data."If you’re curious about why we need much stronger privacy laws in the US, this article is a good start. Thanks Senator Wyden for fighting the good fight.
In a press release, the FTC said that "Ring deceived its customers by failing to restrict employees' and contractors' access to its customers' videos, using customer videos to train algorithms, among other purposes, without consent, and failing to implement security safeguards." In one case, an employee "viewed thousands of video recordings belonging to female users of Ring cameras that surveilled intimate spaces in their homes such as their bathrooms or bedrooms," the FTC said.This is awful and why I try not to buy surveillance devices. It’s difficult not to send data out of your house but I hope not being connected to the Internet becomes a selling point for electronics eventually.
A controversial facial recognition database, used by police departments across the nation, was built in part with 30 billion photos the company scraped from Facebook and other social media users without their permission, the company's CEO recently admitted, creating what critics called a "perpetual police line-up," even for people who haven't done anything wrong.Posting to social media was supposed to be harmless.
"During testing, with every response — such as clicking a button to indicate feeling depressed “more than half the days” over the last two weeks — a pixel sent Facebook the text of the answer button, the specific URL the user was visiting when clicking the button, and the user's hashed name, email address, phone number."The targeted advertising industry has set up some ridiculous incentives for people to behave horribly toward other people.
iOS users must now give explicit permission for apps to track their behavior and sell their personal data, such as age, location, spending habits and health information, to advertisers. While many apps have allowed people to manage or opt-out of this for years, it's typically buried deep in user settings and wordy privacy policies.Nice.
"So today I set out to actually see what it is one agrees to when they accept all."Peeling back the layers on those cookie agreement dialogs helps us learn about how web advertising works (and how massive the industry is).