Tag: data-mining

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Scary New Ways the Internet Giants Profile You

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Facebook, Google, and the other Internet titans have ever more sophisticated and intrusive methods of mining your data, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The success of the consumer Internet can be attributed to a simple grand bargain. We’ve been encouraged to search the web, share our lives with friends, and take advantage of all sorts of other free services. In exchange, the Internet titans that provide these services, as well as hundreds of other lesser-known firms, have meticulously tracked our every move in order to bombard us with targeted advertising. Now, this grand bargain is being tested by new attitudes and technologies.

Consumers who were not long ago blithely dismissive of privacy issues are increasingly feeling that they’ve lost control over their personal information. Meanwhile, Internet companies, adtech firms, and data brokers continue to roll out new technologies to build ever more granular profiles of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of consumers. And with next generation of artificial intelligence poised to exploit our data in ways we can’t even imagine, the simple terms of the old agreement seem woefully inadequate.

In the early days of the Internet, we were led to believe that all this data would deliver us to a state of information nirvana. We were going to get new tools and better communications, access to all the information we could possibly need, and ads we actually wanted to receive. Who could possibly argue with that?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/08/scary-new-ways-the-internet-profiles-you.html

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Obama Spying On Consumers Without Security Protections

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“A just-released inspector general report found that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is conducting a massive consumer data-mining operation without the security safeguards to protect the sensitive data from cyberattacks.” Rep. Mia Love, R-Utah

10/13/2015 05:25 PM

Privacy: The most powerful unaccountable agency in Washington is mining and amassing all your personal financial data. While that’s bad enough, it also isn’t adequately protecting them from hackers and identity thieves.A just-released inspector general report found that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is conducting a massive consumer data-mining operation without the security safeguards to protect the sensitive data from cyberattacks.

The CFPB is collecting and stockpiling more than 600 million credit card accounts, along with personal data from millions of mortgage loans, but “has not yet fully implemented a number of privacy control steps and information security practices,” warned CFPB Inspector General Mark Bialek in a 10-page memo to CFPB Director Richard Cordray.

More alarming, the agency is sharing the massive databases with outside contractors and storing sensitive private information on unsecured clouds, making the data extra vulnerable to cyberattacks “from outside governments and organized groups.”

American consumers have no idea that the government is doing this. They’re not being alerted about the sharing of data from their private financial accounts, and they’re not being given the right to opt out of the government programs to gather and retain their most sensitive personal information.

The Big Brother operation is being done surreptitiously, with the reluctant cooperation of banks. It’s an unprecedented invasion of privacy, even for the feds — and the Obama administration has no good answers for why it’s amassing this information on private citizens.

In a recent House banking committee hearing, Rep. Mia Love, R-Utah, tried to get answers from Cordray, who explained, unconvincingly, “I’m just looking at overall patterns in the market.”

Read More At Investor’s Business Daily: https://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/101315-775415-ig-warns-cfpb-not-protecting-millions-credit-card-accounts-from-hackers.htm#ixzz3p7Gh92F8

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Yes, Facebook is stalking you

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By Megan McArdle

October 10, 2015 | 5:15am

Facebook is following you around the Web. You knew that, right?

How else would Facebook know to serve that panda video straight into your news feed, and leave your college friend’s ill-informed rant about Pacific trade deals in the dark bowels of its servers? How else would it know to serve you with 7,000 ads for wedding dress vendors the very day you announce your engagement?

Facebook knows what you like. It knows what you don’t like. It probably knows whether you have been naughty or nice, and will be selling that data to Santa this Christmas season.

This bothers many people, especially since Facebook keeps expanding the list of things it knows about you, and the ways it is willing to use that data to make money.

The recent announcement that Facebook would soon target ads using your “likes” and “shares” has triggered some Olympic-level teeth- gnashing from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, because Facebook will get information from you not just when you actually like, “like” something, but when you load a page that has a “like” button on it.

The EFF wants Facebook to agree to use a “Do Not Track” standard that will keep all that potentially profitable data from the greedy eyes of advertisers.

Of course people should be able to hide data about what sites they use. But there’s a perfectly good way to do this: Stay signed out of Facebook and tell your browser not to accept cookies or otherwise let advertisers follow you around.

The problem is, this level of security is incredibly inconvenient, because you have to spend a lot of time painfully re-entering data. The other problem is that naive users, who probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about privacy, won’t bother.

https://nypost.com/2015/10/10/yes-facebook-is-stalking-you-thats-the-price-of-free-social-media/

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Patriot Act on life support

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By Julian Hattem – 05/17/15 02:30 PM EDT

A stalemate in the Senate would leave the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) without powers they have used to track terrorists for years, say supporters of the Patriot Act.

Without action by the end of the month, key provisions of the Patriot Act will expire, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argues would put the United States at a pre September 11, 2001-footing.

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Yet McConnell has no definite path to extend those provisions.

He and other hawkish senators are pressing for an extension of the key Patriot Act measures, but they are opposed by other senators, the White House and a majority of House lawmakers in both parties.

The House voted last week to approve reforms to the NSA provisions in an overwhelming 338-88 vote.

McConnell filed a short-term extension of existing law just 24 hours later, signaling his determination to move in a different direction.

Observers say it’s increasingly looking like the standoff could result in no action by Congress, which would mean the Patriot Act provisions would lapse.

That would be a worst-case scenario for the NSA, but a pipe dream for ardent civil libertarians who have been rooting for such a result.

“Right now that we’re down to the wire… it’s just not clear to me how you get authorization through the Senate and the House,” said Neema Singh Guliani, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union and critic of the law.

Defenders of the NSA say that would be disastrous for national security.

“Congress must act to reauthorize” the provisions, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) — two hawkish members of their respective Intelligence Committees — warned in an op-ed for Fox News on Friday. “The alternative is too dangerous.”

At issue is Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the federal government to collect “any tangible things” that are “relevant” to an investigation into terrorist or foreign intelligence activity.

The NSA has used that to collect millions of people’s phone call “metadata” — which include information about the numbers involved in a call and when the call occurred, but not people’s actual conversations — without a warrant. Supporters say that’s a crucial tool that has allowed the government to connect the dots between possible terrorist suspects.

If Congress doesn’t act, the program would end, the White House has said. The NSA would simply stop collecting the records.

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/242271-patriot-act-on-life-support