Archives June 2018

A study from the Norwegian Consumer Council dug into the underhanded tactics used by Microsoft, Facebook, and Google to collect user data. “The findings include privacy intrusive default settings, misleading wording, giving users an illusion of control, hiding away privacy-friendly choices, take-it-or-leave-it choices, and choice architectures where choosing the privacy friendly option requires more effort for the users,” states the report, which includes images and examples of confusing design choices and strangely worded statements involving the collection and use of personal data.

Google makes opting out of personalized ads more of a chore than it needs to be and uses multiple pages of text, unclear design language, and, as described by the report, “hidden defaults” to push users toward the company’s desired action. “If the user tried to turn the setting off, a popup window appeared explaining what happens if Ads Personalization is turned off, and asked users to reaffirm their choice,” the report explained. “There was no explanation about the possible benefits of turning off Ads Personalization, or negative sides of leaving it turned on.” Those who wish to completely avoid personalized ads must traverse multiple menus, making that “I agree” option seem like the lesser of two evils.

In Windows 10, if a user wants to opt out of “tailored experiences with diagnostic data,” they have to click a dimmed lightbulb, while the symbol for opting in is a brightly shining bulb, says the report.

Another example has to do with Facebook. The social media site makes the “Agree and continue” option much more appealing and less intimidating than the grey “Manage Data Settings” option. The report says the company-suggested option is the easiest to use. “This ‘easy road’ consisted of four clicks to get through the process, which entailed accepting personalized ads from third parties and the use of face recognition. In contrast, users who wanted to limit data collection and use had to go through 13 clicks.”

Researchers at Norway’s Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research now have scientific proof of something we’ve long suspsected—we’re all getting dumber.

In their paper, “Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused,” which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bernt Bratsberg and Ole Rogeberg report that IQ scores have been steadily dropping since the 1970s.

The study consisted of analyzing 730,000 IQ test results gleaned from young men entering Norway’s compulsory military service from 1970 to 2009. They found that scores declined by an average of seven points per generation, a reversal of the so-called “Flynn effect” where IQ was seen to be rising during the first part of the 20th century.

The decline may be due to environmental factors, but because the researchers couldn’t find consistent trends among families, Bratsberg and Rogeberg discounted factors like parental education, family size, increased immigration, and genetics as significant causes. The more likely culprit is our Cheeto-eating, binge-watching, video game-playing, never-reading lifestyles.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a new piece of software that uses wifi signals to monitor the movements, breathing, and heartbeats of humans on the other side of walls. While the researchers say this new tech could be used in areas like remote healthcare, it could in theory be used in more dystopian applications.

“We actually are tracking 14 different joints on the body […] the head, the neck, the shoulders, the elbows, the wrists, the hips, the knees, and the feet,” Dina Katabi, an electrical engineering and computer science teacher at MIT, said. “So you can get the full stick-figure that is dynamically moving with the individuals that are obstructed from you — and that’s something new that was not possible before.” The technology works a little bit like radar, but to teach their neural network how to interpret these granular bits of human activity, the team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) had to create two separate A.I.s: a student and a teacher.

The team developed one A.I. program that monitored human movements with a camera, on one side of a wall, and fed that information to their wifi X-ray A.I., called RF-Pose, as it struggled to make sense of the radio waves passing through that wall on the other side. The research builds off of a longstanding project at CSAIL lead by Katabi, which hopes to use this wifi tracking to help passively monitor the elderly and automate any emergency alerts to EMTs and medical professionals if they were to fall or suffer some other injury.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology behind the innovation has previously received funding from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Another also presented work at a security research symposium curated by a c-suite member of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s high-tech venture capital firm.

A city in northern China has introduced a special pedestrian lane on one of its roads, exclusively for slow-walking smartphone users, it’s reported.

According to the Shaanxi Online News, the pavement along the Yanta Road in Xi’an has now got itself a special lane for “phubbers” – people who stare at their phones and ignore everything else around them.

The lane is painted red, green and blue, and is 80cm wide and 100m long. Pictures of smartphones along the route distinguish it from an ordinary pedestrian lane.

The top U.S. counterintelligence official said journalists have released only about 1 percent taken by the 34-year-old American, … “This past year, we had more international, Snowden-related documents and breaches than ever,” Bill Evanina, who directs the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said at a recent conference. “Since 2013, when Snowden left, there have been thousands of articles around the world with really sensitive stuff that’s been leaked.”

18 November 2016. DoD claims 1,700,000 files, ~.04% of that released. ACLU lists 525 pages released by the press. However, if as The Washington Post reported, a minimum of 250,000 pages are in the Snowden files, then less than 1% have been released.

Facebook reportedly formed data-sharing partnerships with dozens of device makers, including Apple and Samsung, giving them access to information on users, as well as on users’ friends.

The New York Times revealed the extent of the partnerships on Sunday, shedding new light on the social media giant’s behavior related to customer data following a scandal involving the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

The Times found that the company made at least 60 such deals over the past decade, many of which are still in effect, allowing the other companies access to personal data of Facebook users and their friends.

The partnerships may have also violated a 2011 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) consent decree, according to the Times, which Facebook officials denied.

The report comes as Facebook is under scrutiny for its handling of private data after it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica accessed millions of users’ private information.

The partnerships allowed companies like Apple, Blackberry and Amazon to offer users Facebook features, like the ability to post photos, directly from a device without using the Facebook app.

The Times found that the partnerships allowed outside companies to access personal user data like relationship status, religious and political affiliations, work history and birthdays, as well as the information of users’ Facebook friends, even if the friends had blocked Facebook from sharing their information with third parties.

Facebook officials told the Times in interviews that the data-sharing partnerships were different from app developers’ access to Facebook users, and that the device makers are considered “extensions” of the social network.

But security experts and former Facebook engineers expressed concerns that the partnerships offered companies practically unfettered access to hundreds of thousands of Facebook users without their knowledge.

“It’s like having door locks installed, only to find out that the locksmith also gave keys to all of his friends so they can come in and rifle through your stuff without having to ask you for permission,” said Ashkan Soltani, a former FTC chief technologist, according to the Times.

Facebook began ending the partnerships in recent months, but the Times reported that many are still in effect.

Three weeks ago, Bobby Burns, a YouTuber with just under one million subscribers, sat down on a rock in Central Park to talk about a recent mental health episode. One week ago, Elle Mills, a creator with more than 1.2 million subscribers, uploaded a video that included vulnerable footage during a breakdown. Six days ago, Rubén “El Rubius” Gundersen, the third most popular YouTuber in the world with just under 30 million subscribers, turned on his camera to talk to his viewers about the fear of an impending breakdown and his decision to take a break from YouTube.

Burns, Mills and Gundersen aren’t alone. Erik “M3RKMUS1C” Phillips (four million subscribers), Benjamin “Crainer” Vestergaard (2.7 million subscribers) and other top YouTubers have either announced brief hiatuses from the platform, or discussed their own struggles with burnout, in the past month. Everyone from PewDiePie (62 million subscribers) to Jake Paul (15.2 million subscribers) have dealt with burnout. Lately, however, it seems like more of YouTube’s top creators are coming forward with their mental health problems.

Constant changes to the platform’s algorithm, unhealthy obsessions with remaining relevant in a rapidly growing field and social media pressures are making it almost impossible for top creators to continue creating at the pace both the platform and audience want — and that can have a detrimental effect on the very ecosystem they belong to.