Privacy…who really needs it?
Tag: data collection
No Warrant, No Problem
In 1928, the late Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis characterized the values underlying the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as embracing the uniquely American right, and the right most valued by civilized persons, which he called the right to be let alone. Today we call it the right to privacy. He also warned that the greatest dangers to privacy lurk in the slow and insidious encroachments upon it by zealots in the government.
Last week, the Biden administration’s director of National Intelligence caused me to recall Justice Brandeis’ warnings when she revealed that the 16 federal spying agencies that she nominally supervises have begun to do indirectly what the Constitution prohibits them from doing directly.
Since they cannot obtain search warrants from a judge to surveil targets without first demonstrating under oath probable cause of crime by the persons whose surveillance they seek, these zealots in the government are purchasing private data about every American adult from the corporations and entities to which we all have unwittingly surrendered it.
This constitutes computer hacking – and it is as criminal as if federal agents had directly broken into the computers of those about whom and from whom they desire personal data.
Can the government do indirectly what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly? In a word: NO.
Here is the backstory.
White House to partner with social media monitoring tool
The Biden administration is about to sign a contract with Dataminr – a licensing deal for the company’s product that is used in the monitoring of social media.
This is revealed in documents published by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) which will buy 30 licenses to deploy Dataminr’s First Alert V2, designed for the public sector and the scouring of 200,000 online sources and data mining, then compiling real-time news alerts for the White House, and other clients.
Dataminr is a popular tool used by news desks and others that want to monitor the internet and it’s easy to see why it would be useful to the government. Portions of the press show an unfavorable attitude towards Dataminr because it was used by police in many cities, including New York and Los Angeles, to monitor the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and riots.
US Defense Department’s non-civilian employees already use Dataminr’s services thanks to a 2021 contract signed with the Air Force.
DISA said in June it had no plans to directly or in another way “involve” Twitter as a subcontractor. In August, this agency that handles the White House communications said it needed a contract (with Dataminr) of its own because civilians it employs cannot utilize mass surveillance of social media through that Air Force deal.
New York-based Dataminr, which is also known for its work as one of Twitter’s official partners and bills itself as an AI company, has been awarded the contract but the details, such as its duration and the overall cost of licensing have not been announced.
Meanwhile, it is speculated that Dataminr was chosen by the US administration precisely for its association with Twitter, as DISA spelled it out in the document explaining the choice of the vendor by saying it must be a certified Twitter partner.
Google Is Like ‘a Stranger Watching Your Child Through Their Bedroom Window’
By default, Google Chrome allows any and all tracker cookies to follow your every move online.
Google is without a doubt the largest and clearest monopoly on the planet. It dominates online searches and advertising, which in and of itself leads to automatic bias.
As noted by Google’s founders Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page in their 1998 paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,”
“… [W]e expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”
Google has also infiltrated many other areas of our day-to-day lives, having acquired dozens of other companies you might not realize belong to Google or its parent company, Alphabet.
Among the most well-known are YouTube, the largest video platform on the web, and Android, one of the most popular operating systems worldwide.
Google also has significant influence over urban development, health care and childhood education.
Why Facebook May Have Your Medical Records
By now, most people are aware that if they “like” a certain page on Facebook, it gives the social media giant information about them.
“Like” a page about a particular disease, for instance, and marketers may begin to target you with related products and services.
Facebook may be collecting sensitive health data in far more insidious ways as well, however, including tracking you when you’re on hospital websites and even when you’re in a personal, password-protected health information portal like MyChart.
It does this via pixels, which may be installed without your knowledge on websites you visit. They can collect information about you as you browse the web, even if you don’t have a Facebook account.
How the Federal Government Buys Our Cell Phone Location Data
Over the past few years, data brokers and federal military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies have formed a vast, secretive partnership to surveil the movements of millions of people. Many of the mobile apps on our cell phones track our movements with great precision and frequency. Data brokers harvest our location data from the app developers, and then sell it to these agencies. Once in government hands, the data is used by the military to spy on people overseas, by ICE to monitor people in and around the U.S., and by criminal investigators like the FBI and Secret Service. This post will draw on recent research and reporting to explain how this surveillance partnership works, why is it alarming, and what can we do about it.
Where does the data come from?
Weather apps, navigation apps, coupon apps, and “family safety” apps often request location access in order to enable key features. But once an app has location access, it typically has free rein to share that access with just about anyone.
That’s where the location data broker industry comes in. Data brokers entice app developers with cash-for-data deals, often paying per user for direct access to their device. Developers can add bits of code called “software development kits,” or SDKs, from location brokers into their apps. Once installed, a broker’s SDK is able to gather data whenever the app itself has access to it: sometimes, that means access to location data whenever the app is open. In other cases, it means “background” access to data whenever the phone is on, even if the app is closed.
Mental health and worship apps are found to be some of the most privacy invasive
Apps that deal with some of the most sensitive and personal data, such as that concerning a user’s mental health or religious activities, are said to rank among the worst privacy offenders.
This is the conclusion of a study conducted by the Mozilla Foundation, which singled out mental health and prayer apps as being prone to track and collect data revealing a person’s state of mind, feelings, and thoughts, and then “share” that for-profit via targeted advertising.
Mozilla’s team looked into 32 apps from this category, putting a “privacy not included” label on 29, and publishing the findings in a guide of the same name. 25 of these apps didn’t pass the foundations’ minimum security standards around password quality and handling of security updates.
PTSD Coach, developed by the US The Department of Veterans Affairs, has “strong privacy policies and security practices,” while chatbot Wysa “seems to value users’ privacy.” And the Catholic prayer app Hallow was the only one to “respond in a timely manner” to Mozilla’s emails.
Besides these technical issues, the apps singled out in the report are also said to target “vulnerable users with personalized advertisements” and track and share biometric data.
Scooping private data doesn’t violate Fourth Amendment if the owner can still access it, court rules
The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals appears to have given the government permission to order anyone’s internet account data copied and held without any cause, whenever they want, without providing any justification, according to University of California, Berkeley School of Law professor Orin Kerr’s analysis of a recent Ninth Circuit briefing that affirmed Carsten Igor Rosenow’s conviction and sentencing for sexually exploiting children in the Philippines.
In his appeal to the Ninth Circuit, Rosenow argued that he had a right to privacy in his digital data and that law enforcement requests to preserve his Yahoo! account data, which were submitted without a warrant after a tip from Yahoo!, violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
But the Ninth Circuit rejected his argument and affirmed his conviction, saying that Yahoo!’s preservation of Rosenow’s records didn’t amount to an unreasonable seizure because the preservation requests didn’t prevent him from accessing his account and Yahoo! didn’t provide the government with access to his data without further legal process:
“A ‘seizure’ of property requires ‘some meaningful interference [by the government,] with an individual’s possessory interests in [his] property.’ Jacobsen, 466 U.S. at 113. Here, the preservation requests themselves, which applied only retrospectively, did not meaningfully interfere with Rosenow’s possessory interests in his digital data because they did not prevent Rosenow from accessing his account. Nor did they provide the government with access to any of Rosenow’s digital information without further legal process.”
The court also claimed that Rosenow had already consented to these preservation requests when he accepted Yahoo!’s terms of service:
“It also is worth noting that Rosenow consented to the ESPs [electronic service providers] honoring preservation requests from law enforcement under the ESPs’ terms of use.”
We obtained a copy of the Ninth Circuit’s briefing for you here.
AI Used to Tap Massive Amounts of Smart Meter Data
The global market for Smart Electricity Meters estimated at US$10.5 Billion in the year 2020, is projected to reach a revised size of US$15.2 Billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 6.7% over the analysis period.
For utilities aiming to modernize their grid operations with advanced solutions, smart electricity meters have emerged as an effective tool that can flawlessly address their various energy T&D needs in a simple and flexible manner.
Single-Phase, one of the segments analyzed in the report, is projected to record 6.2% CAGR and reach US$11.9 Billion by the end of the analysis period. After a thorough analysis of the business implications of the pandemic and its induced economic crisis, growth in the Three-Phase segment is readjusted to a revised 7.9% CAGR for the next 7-year period.
In the coming years, the growth of smart electricity meters market will be driven by the increasing need for products and services that enable energy conservation; government initiatives to install smart electric meters in order to address issues of energy requirement; the ability of smart electric meters to prevent energy losses due to theft and fraud, and to reduce the costs involved in manual data collection; increasing investments in smart grid establishments; the growing trend of integration of renewable sources to existing power generation grids; rising T&D upgrade initiatives especially in developed economies; increasing investments into construction of commercial establishments such as educational institutions and banking institutions in both developing and developed economies; and emerging growth opportunities in Europe with the ongoing rollouts of smart electricity meter rollouts in countries such as Germany, the UK, France, and Spain.
Adults and Children Continuously Targeted for Data Extraction, Surveillance and Censorship
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that not a single day goes by without a new data exploit, hack, breach, leak, or scandal involving censorship by private companies and government agencies. Of course, this is all compounded even further by the fact that more devices contain more sensors that connect to the internet than ever before, offering many new methods for targeting groups and individuals. It has been estimated that by 2030 there could be 125 billion devices — potentially 15 per user — that in some way will comprise the ever-expanding Internet of Things ecosystem.
Amid this sea of two-way data traffic, we have a massive amount of targeted advertising and personally identifiable information extraction that has shown very often to all be done without users’ consent. If there is consent at all, it very likely is through lenthy and confusing Terms and Conditions that almost no one reads in their entirety. Worse still is the proven targeting of children’s data. Lawmakers continue to attempt to rein in these consumer-unfriendly practices, but their current proposals will likely do more harm than good. At this point it should be obvious that even if legislative measures are effectively created, such a waiting game only leaves all of us, including our kids, increasingly vulnerable at any given moment. People want – and deserve – to become personally responsible for their own security and privacy.
Fortunately, there are residential proxy providers on the opposing side that understand the rising awareness by the public of these data violations and creepy intrusions. These companies are doing everything they can to offer the tools necessary for individuals to protect their family’s data and privacy, while also offering increasing freedom to reach the websites that we do want to visit.
Hellbound and Down 
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