All-seeing, all-knowing identity supremacy.
Data collected from acquaintances and even strangers can predict your location
Apr 2022, phys.org
It's like with a pandemic, no matter how safe you are, you're only as safe as the people around you are safe:
Your Colocation Network
"Almost as much latent information can be extracted from perfect strangers that the individual tends to co-locate with."
Obvious network: people who are socially tied to an individual, such as family members, friends, or co-workers
Not-So-Obvious Network: people who are not socially tied to an individual, but who are at a location at a similar time as the individual. They might include people working in the same building but with different companies, parents whose children attend the same schools but who are unknown to each other, or people who shop at the same grocery store.
Ahh, always excited to read the word "surprisingly" in the results.
Movement patterns of people who are socially tied to an individual contain up to 95% of the information needed to predict that individual's mobility patterns. However, even more surprisingly, they found that strangers not tied socially to an individual could also provide significant information, predicting up to 85% of an individual's movement.
"This research has a lot of implications for surveillance and privacy issues, especially with the rise of authoritarian impulses. We can't just tell people to switch off their phones or go off the grid. We need to have dialogs to put in place laws and guidelines that regulate how people collecting your data use it." -Gourab Ghoshal, Data Science at the University of Rochester
via University of Rochester, University of Exeter, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Northeastern University, and University of Vermont: Zexun Chen et al, Contrasting social and non-social sources of predictability in human mobility, Nature Communications (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29592-y
Europeans' data shared 376 times daily in advertising sales, report says
May 2022, BBC News
- Europeans' data shared 376 times daily in advertising sales.
- The figure rises to 747 times daily for US-based users.
- The revenue from digital adverts is what keeps most internet services free to use.
- (Not for long, says Tim Hwang, Subprime Attention Crisis, 2020)
This is Your Metadata
(On Electronic Drugs)
- Device the page is loading on
- Location details
- Previous websites visited and their subject matter
- This data is used to secure the most relevant bidder for the advert space on the page
- This all happens automatically, in a fraction of a second, and is a multi-million dollar industry
- Personally-identifying information is not included, but campaigners argue that the volume of the data is still a violation of privacy
- Figures do NOT include numbers from Facebook and Amazon, only Google
- US web users' habits are shared in advert sales processes 107 trillion times per year
- European users' data is shared 71 billion times per year
via the Irish Council for Civil Liberties: The Biggest Data Breach: ICCL report on the scale of Real-Time Bidding data broadcasts in the U.S. and Europe, May 2022.
Researcher creates free comment moderation software for YouTube
May 2022, phys.org
"We used standard development tools to create FilterBuddy, but the features are so appreciated by the community and so desperately needed," he said. "The fact that we built this service on a shoestring budget demonstrates that at the moment, the platforms aren't paying enough attention to creators' needs."
No, the fact that you built it on a shoestring budget is proof that these companies know how to fix their problems already, but they're not profitable when they do, so they don't.
PMA, PFAS, leaded gasoline, you name it; they know it's bad, they know how to fix it, and they have the money to fix it. They don't because we don't make them do it.
via Rutgers: Shagun Jhaver et al, Designing Word Filter Tools for Creator-led Comment Moderation, CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2022). DOI: 10.1145/3491102.3517505
In Other News:
Ukraine war: Don’t underestimate Russia cyber-threat, warns US
May 2022, BBC News
One piece of perhaps surprising news though is that ransomware attacks - when computer data is encrypted and hackers demand money for it to be released - are actually down.
Mr Joyce said he believed this was partly because many of the gangs, which operate out of Russia, were finding it hard to use Western credit cards and infrastructure to launch their attacks because of sanctions.
And now for something to lighten the mood:
Highway death toll messages cause more crashes
Apr 2022, phys.org
Someone thought a great way to stop traffic deaths was to tally them on a huge digital billboard, to show to drivers, while they're driving:
The bigger the number in the fatality message, the more harmful the effects. The number of additional crashes each month increased as the death toll rose throughout the year, with the most additional crashes occurring in January when the message stated the annual total.
They also found that crashes increased in areas where drivers experienced higher cognitive loads, such as heavy traffic or driving past multiple message boards.
The researchers suggest this "in-your-face" messaging approach weighs down drivers' "cognitive loads," temporarily impacting their ability to respond to changes in traffic conditions.
via University of Minnesota: Jonathan D. Hall et al, Can Behavioral Interventions Be Too Salient? Evidence from Traffic Safety Messages, Science (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abm3427
Post Script:
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