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Maryland Becomes First State to Tax Big Tech’s Ad Revenue - 15 février 2021
Maryland decided to take a chunk of Big Tech’s advertising dollars on Friday, successfully passing legislation that would place a maximum tax of 10% on revenue from digital ads. Analysts estimate that the tax will generate about $250 million in its first year, money that the Maryland says will go to schools.
State (...)
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Facebook’s Privacy Policies Are An Unreadable Mess - 3 février 2021
Folks, I’m gonna be honest with you. Over my (short) tenure covering digital privacy, I’ve seen my fair share of deeply shitty tech companies pulling deeply shitty stunts in attempts to profit off our personal data. Facebook is one of the names that comes up most frequently here, and that’s partially because their (...)
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Developing Algorithms That Might One Day Be Used Against You - 25 janvier 2021
Machine learning algorithms serve us the news we read, the ads we see, and in some cases even drive our cars. But there’s an insidious layer to these algorithms : They rely on data collected by and about humans, and they spit our worst biases right back out at us. For example, job candidate screening algorithms may (...)
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Russian Government Claims TikTok Deleted Young People’s Protest Prep Videos at Its Behest - 24 janvier 2021
The same week recently poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was taken into police custody in Moscow, Russia’s youth and adults began preparing for unsanctioned protests that will take place across the country on Saturday, January 23. Some of this preparation has been aided by the video-sharing platform (...)
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Parler Users Video GPS Data Shows Involvement in Capitol Attack - 13 janvier 2021
At least several users of the far-right social network Parler appear to be among the horde of rioters that managed to penetrate deep inside the U.S. Capitol building and into areas normally restricted to the public, according to GPS metadata linked to videos posted to the platform the day of the insurrection in (...)
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Every Deleted Parler Post, Many With Users’ Location Data, Has Been Archived - 12 janvier 2021
In the wake of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately (...)
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The Instagram Insurrection - 11 janvier 2021
The first inkling I had that something was very wrong on Wednesday was when my wife said, “Oh shit, is this real ?” as we were en route to Trader Joe’s after spending a few hours on the cold, sun-drenched beaches of Long Island for a winter walk on our last day of a vacation. A friend had texted about the Capitol. (...)
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Should We Use Search History for Credit Scores ? IMF Says Yes - 19 décembre 2020
With more services than ever collecting your data, it’s easy to start asking why anyone should care about most of it. This is why. Because people start having ideas like this.
In a new blog post for the International Monetary Fund, four researchers presented their findings from a working paper that examines the (...)
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U.S. Schools Are Buying Cellebrite Phone-Hacking Tech - 12 décembre 2020
In May 2016, a student enrolled in a high-school in Shelbyville, Texas, consented to having his phone searched by one of the district’s school resource officers. Looking for evidence of a romantic relationship between the student and a teacher, the officer plugged the phone into a Cellebrite UFED to recover deleted (...)
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Amazon Isn’t Even Hiding Its Intentions Anymore - 25 octobre 2020
After spending years promising Congress that the data it collected from third-party sellers wasn’t used to beef up its private-label products, today Amazon decided to roll out a product achieve a similar end from a different angle. The Amazon Shopper Panel, as it’s called, promises to pay Amazon customers that offer (...)
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Cops Don’t Need GPS Data to Track Your Phone at Protests - 27 août 2020
For the thousands of people protesting and reporting on George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department—or even for bystanders caught up in the demonstrations—arrests, injuries, and even death are becoming commonplace in this moment. And just like protests we’ve experienced within the past (...)
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It Doesn’t Matter Who Owns TikTok - 8 août 2020
When Microsoft officially emerged as the frontrunner for a potential acquisition of the teen-fave-turned-national-security-concern TikTok earlier this week, tech critics ‘round the globe found themselves with an endless set of questions that seemingly nobody could answer. Why would a company as corporate as (...)
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Telmate’s Guardian App Is Hell, Parolees Say - 2 mai 2020
On the day Layla got out of prison and back to her home in Georgia, she was told she would need to purchase a smartphone—not an insignificant task for someone who’d just completed a sentence, but Layla was lucky to have a friend who could buy one for her. She says she was at home in bed a few days later when the app (...)
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The House That Spied on Me - 8 janvier 2020
Kashmir
In December, I converted my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco into a “smart home.” I connected as many of my appliances and belongings as I could to the internet : an Amazon Echo, my lights, my coffee maker, my baby monitor, my kid’s toys, my vacuum, my TV, my toothbrush, a photo frame, a sex toy, and (...)
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Ring’s Hidden Data Let Us Map Amazon’s Sprawling Home Surveillance Network - 10 décembre 2019
As reporters raced this summer to bring new details of Ring’s law enforcement contracts to light, the home security company, acquired last year by Amazon for a whopping $1 billion, strove to underscore the privacy it had pledged to provide users.
Even as its creeping objective of ensuring an ever-expanding network (...)
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Billionaire Buys ’Climate Change’ on Google - 30 novembre 2019
When you have Mike Bloomberg money, there is no shortage of ways to spend it. And running for president opens up a whole new world of blowing through cash.
Bloomberg announced he was seeking the Democratic nomination for president earlier this week along with plans to spend up to $1 billion of his own fortune on (...)
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Google Employees Call on Company to Kick Heritage Foundation Ghoul Off AI Ethics Board - 2 avril 2019
Google announced the formation of a global council on technology ethics last week to some deserved trepidation. Sure, the company had amassed some highly qualified individuals to fill seats on this board"”but Google’s track record of following its own internal ethics codes is less than spotless.
What provoked the (...)
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Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information - 5 mars 2019
Last week, I ran an ad on Facebook that was targeted at a computer science professor named Alan Mislove. Mislove studies how privacy works on social networks and had a theory that Facebook is letting advertisers reach users with contact information collected in surprising ways. I was helping him test the theory by (...)
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These Academics Spent The Last Year Testing Whether Your Phone Is Secretly Listening To You | Gizmodo Australia - 3 juillet 2018
It’s the smartphone conspiracy theory that just won’t go away : Many, many people are convinced that their phones are listening to their conversations to target them with ads. Vice recently fuelled the paranoia with an article that declared "Your phone is listening and it’s not paranoia", a conclusion the author (...)
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GitHub Coders to Microsoft : Cut Ties With ICE or We’ll ’Take Our Projects Elsewhere’ - 22 juin 2018
More than five dozen Github contributors on Thursday signed a letter threatening to abandon the website unless Microsoft canceled its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contract.
Microsoft, which acquired GitHub, the internet’s largest source code repository, for $7.5 billion earlier this month, is one of (...)
