VR is coming, but it’s not right for every kind of experience. Here are three rules to create by.
Source: Wired
Facebook’s late Friday disclosure that a data analytics company with ties to the Trump campaign improperly obtained — and then failed to destroy — the private data of 50 million users is generating more unwanted attention from politicians, some of whom were already beating the drums of regulation in the company’s direction.
On Saturday morning, Facebook dove into the semantics of its disclosure, arguing against wording in the New York Times story the company was attempting to get out in front of that referred to the incident as a breach. Most of this happened on the Twitter account of Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos before Stamos took down his tweets and the gist of the conversation made its way into an update to Facebook’s official post.
“People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked,” the added language argued.
While the language is up for debate, lawmakers don’t appear to be looking kindly on Facebook’s arguably legitimate effort to sidestep data breach notification laws that, were this a proper hack, could have required the company to disclose that it lost track of the data of 50 million users, only 270,000 of which consented to data sharing to the third party app involved. (In April of 2015, Facebook changed its policy, shutting down the API that shared friends data with third-party Facebook apps that they did not consent to sharing in the first place.)
While most lawmakers and politicians haven’t crafted formal statements yet (expect a landslide of those on Monday), a few are weighing in. Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar calling for Facebook’s chief executive — and not just its counsel — to appear before the Senate Judiciary committee.
Senator Mark Warner, a prominent figure in tech’s role in enabling Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, used the incident to call attention to a piece of bipartisan legislation called the Honest Ads Act, designed to “prevent foreign interference in future elections and improve the transparency of online political advertisements.”
“This is more evidence that the online political advertising market is essentially the Wild West,” Warner said in a statement. “Whether it’s allowing Russians to purchase political ads, or extensive micro-targeting based on ill-gotten user data, it’s clear that, left unregulated, this market will continue to be prone to deception and lacking in transparency.”
That call for transparency was echoed Saturday by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey who announced that her office would be launching an investigation into the situation. “Massachusetts residents deserve answers immediately from Facebook and Cambridge Analytica,” Healey tweeted. TechCrunch has reached out to Healey’s office for additional information.
On Cambridge Analytica’s side, it looks possible that the company may have violated Federal Election Commission laws forbidding foreign participation in domestic U.S. elections. The FEC enforces a “broad prohibition on foreign national activity in connection with elections in the United States.”
“Now is a time of reckoning for all tech and internet companies to truly consider their impact on democracies worldwide,” said Nuala O’Connor, President of the Center for Democracy & Technology. “Internet users in the U.S. are left incredibly vulnerable to this sort of abuse because of the lack of comprehensive data protection and privacy laws, which leaves this data unprotected.”
Just what lawmakers intend to do about big tech’s latest privacy debacle will be more clear come Monday, but the chorus calling for regulation is likely to grow louder from here on out.
Source: TechCrunch
Cambridge Analytica is the firm best know for its work alongside Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but the company is in trouble with Facebook over misusing personal data.
The post Facebook suspends Cambridge Analytica for misuse of personal data appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Facebook has launched a new service called Wi-Fi Express which aims to provide affordable internet access to those living in developing countries.
The post Facebook’s Express Wi-Fi offers internet service to developing countries appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
The world’s largest social network is at the center of an international scandal around voter data, the 2016 US presidential election, and Brexit.
Source: CNET
In a recent appearance by YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki at the South by Southwest Festival, she suggested that YouTube is countering the conspiracy-related videos that have been spreading like wildfire on the platform — including videos telling viewers that high school senior and Parkland, Fl. survivor David Hogg is an actor.
Specifically, Wojcicki outlined YouTube’s plans to add “information cues,” including links to Wikipedia pages that debunk garbage content for viewers if they choose to learn more. (Somewhat strangely, no one had told Wikipedia about this plan.)
Either way, the platform is going to have do much better than that, suggests a new Business Insider report that says YouTube Kids has a huge problem with conspiracy videos, too. To wit, the three-year-old, ostensibly kid-friendly version of YouTube is showing its young viewers videos that preach the nonsensical, including “that the world is flat, that the moon landing was faked, and that the planet is ruled by reptile-human hybrids,” according to BI’s own first-hand findings.
In fact, when BI searched for “UFO” on YouTube Kids, one of the top videos to appear was a nearly five-hour-long lecture by professional conspiracy theorist David Icke, who covers everything in the clip from “reptile human bloodlines,” to the Freemasons, who he credits with building the Statue of Liberty, Las Vegas, Christianity, and Islam, among other things. (The Freemasons also killed President John Kennedy, he tells viewers.).
Business Insider says YouTube removed the videos from YouTube Kids after its editorial team contacted the company. YouTube also issued the following statement: “The YouTube Kids app is home to a wide variety of content that includes enriching and entertaining videos for families. This content is screened using human trained systems. That being said, no system is perfect and sometimes we miss the mark. When we do, we take immediate action to block the videos or, as necessary, channels from appearing in the app. We will continue to work to improve the YouTube Kids app experience.”
That’s not going to be good enough for parents who are paying attention. Hunter Walk, a venture capitalist who previously led product at YouTube and has a young daughter, may have summed it up best in a tweet that he published earlier this afternoon, writing that “when you create and market an app to kids, the level of care and custodial responsibility you need to take is 100x usual. Clean it up or shut it down pls.”
YouTube has been reluctant to tinker with is recommendation algorithm because its “main objective is to keep you consuming YouTube videos for as long as possible” Wired noted this past week. (Crazy theories are apparently quite sticky). Wired also reported that despite a recent uproar about all the conspiracy theory content, YouTube still doesn’t have clear rules around when whether these videos violate its community guidelines, which cover bullying, hate speech, graphic violence, and sexually explicit content.
Wojcicki said during her festival appearance that “People can still watch the videos, but then they have access to additional information.”
Hopefully, YouTube will come up with a more sophisticated solution to the spread of misinformation, especially when it comes to its younger viewers. We don’t yet know the scale of this particular issue (we’ve reached out to YouTube to see if the company is able and willing to discuss it in further detail). But as it is, this editor doesn’t allow her kids to watch YouTube Kids without strict supervision for fear of what they might see. At this point, we’d be surprised if parents at YouTube did otherwise.
Source: TechCrunch
A misspelling buried in the programming for Civilization VI may be why your A.I. opponents are emphasizing faith rather than gold or production. An intrepid modder discovered the error. and Firaxis has responded.
The post A typo in ‘Civilization VI’ game code can ‘yeild’ some strange A.I. behavior appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
On March 16, we learned that Facebook will be suspending Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) and its offshoot Cambridge Analytica. According to Facebook, a University of Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan was using Facebook Login in his “research app,” collecting data about its users, and passing it on to Cambridge Analytica, a third party. Cambridge Analytica, in turn, obtained personal information belonging to as many as 50 million Facebook users, through Kogan’s app, and without any express authorization from Facebook. This personal information was subsequently used to target voters and sway public opinion, in ways that benefited the then presidential candidate Trump.
In response to accusations that this constituted a data breach, Paul Grewal, Deputy General Counsel for Facebook claimed that –
“The claim that this is a data breach is completely false. Aleksandr Kogan requested and gained access to information from users who chose to sign up to his app, and everyone involved gave their consent. People knowingly provided their information, no systems were infiltrated, and no passwords or sensitive pieces of information were stolen or hacked.”
Technically speaking, this assessment is probably correct. There was no unauthorized external hacking involved, meaning that Facebook databases were not breached by an outside malicious actor. At the same time, this approach misses the point entirely in terms of user privacy and security. It should not matter for a company like Facebook whether their users’ personal information was forcefully obtained through brute-force, or whether Facebook’s personnel were manipulated to hand in that information to malicious and untrustworthy party.
Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
The cliché goes that humans are the weakest link in cybersecurity, and potentially even the leading cause for the majority of cybersecurity incidents in recent years. This debacle demonstrates that cliché to its full extent. But there is a deeper question here – why are our current data breach notification laws creating this dichotomy between active breaches, where hackers penetrate a database and obtain valuable data, and passive breaches, where humans are being tricked into passing that data into unauthorized hands? After all, the result is the same – users’ private data is compromised.
Other than empowering State Attorney Generals to investigate and pursue legal action against violating companies, the primary purpose of data breach notification laws is to ensure that if personal information belonging to platform users and service consumers is compromised, then the target of the breach is under obligation to duly notify any person whose data has been leaked. But our current data breach notification system is broken. A good analogy is to say that tn the case of Facebook, these laws only take into account the cybersecurity “walls” surrounding Facebook’s databases, because they only recognize the security perimeter above the surface. What these laws fail to understand, is that there are tunnels underneath the surface accessing Facebook’s databases, where personal information is being extracted from almost unrestrictedly. If our current laws are unable to characterize similar incidents as data breaches, then they are missing their purpose.
There should be no material difference if the personal information was obtained through a breach or through manipulating and exploiting Facebook’s data ecosystem. The result is the same – user personal information in unauthorized hands. The users should have the right to know, and potentially pursue legal action against Facebook and other involved parties. The distinction currently drawn by data breach notification laws between active and passive breaches should be abandoned, because it provides an incentive for malicious actors to obtain personal data through social engineering, rather than through hacking.
Just as we expect from companies to invest in cybersecurity to prevent future breaches, we should also expect that they ensure that personal information is shared with thoroughly vetted and trusted parties. The best way to achieve this goal is through direct regulation – amending any data breach related laws to accommodate that. Unfortunately, the tech industry has long resisted such regulation, and created the appearance that its own self-regulation would solve the problem. This has not been effective, since tech companies do not have the incentive to follow their own regulations, and these self-regulations only come after a crises of the Cambridge Analytica sort have already occurred. This creates a reality where users’ data is vulnerable, and companies do not seem to take any preventative measures in response.
This is a call to amend our current data breach notification laws to encompass personal data obtained through social engineering as a recognized form of data breach. That would not necessarily mean that companies would be under obligation report every personal data leak, but that they will have to employ measures to prevent manipulation techniques from gaining access to personal information, and if such techniques are occasionally successful, that they notify users and consumers in due course, and that appropriate legal action is authorized to ensure compliance. It is up to states to make this happen, because the boilerplate corporate “we care about your privacy” announcements are not working.
Source: TechCrunch
Voter profiling firm Cambridge Analytica got hold of the data without the consent of Facebook’s users, say reports by The New York Times and the UK’s Observer and Guardian papers.
Source: CNET
Commentary: The USS Colorado has a new way of operating its photonics masts, and it’s something younger sailors are already familiar with.
Source: CNET