In my years covering cybersecurity, there’s one variation of the same lie that floats above the rest. “We take your privacy and security seriously.”
You might have heard the phrase here and there. It’s a common trope used by companies in the wake of a data breach — either in a “mea culpa” email to their customers or a statement on their website to tell you that they care about your data, even though in the next sentence they all too often admit to misusing or losing it.
The truth is, most companies don’t care about the privacy or security of your data. They care about having to explain to their customers that their data was stolen.
I’ve never understood exactly what it means when a company says it values my privacy. If that were the case, data hungry companies like Google and Facebook, which sell data about you to advertisers, wouldn’t even exist.
I was curious how often this go-to one liner was used. I scraped every reported notification to the California attorney general, a requirement under state law in the event of a breach or security lapse, stitched them together, and converted it into machine-readable text.
About one-third of all 285 data breach notifications had some variation of the line.
It doesn’t show that companies care about your data. It shows that they don’t know what to do next.
A perfect example of a company not caring: Last week, we reported several OkCupid users had complained their accounts were hacked. More likely than not, the accounts were hit by credential stuffing, where hackers take lists of usernames and passwords and try to brute-force their way into people’s accounts. Other companies have learned from such attacks and took the time to improve account security, like rolling out two-factor authentication.
Instead, OkCupid’s response was to deflect, defend, and deny, a common way for companies to get ahead of a negative story. It looked like this:
It would’ve been great to hear OkCupid say it cared about the matter and what it was going to do about it.
Every industry has long neglected security. Most of the breaches today are the result of shoddy security over years or sometimes decades, coming back to haunt them. Nowadays, every company has to be a security company, whether it’s a bank, a toymaker, or a single app developer.
Companies can start off small: tell people how to reach contact them with security flaws, roll out a bug bounty to encourage bug submissions, and grant good-faith researchers safe harbor by promising not to sue. Startup founders can also fill their executive suite with a chief security officer from the very beginning. They’d be better off than 95 percent of the world’s richest companies that haven’t even bothered.
But this isn’t what happens. Instead, companies would rather just pay the fines.
Target paid $18.5 million for a data breach that ensnared 41 million credit cards, compared to full-year revenues of $72 billion. Anthem paid $115 million in fines after a data breach put 79 million insurance holders’ data at risk, on revenues that year of $79 billion. And, remember Equifax? The biggest breach of 2017 led to all talk but no action.
With no incentive to change, companies will continue to parrot their usual hollow remarks. Instead, they should do something about it.
Source: TechCrunch
A final report by a British parliamentary committee which spent months last year investigating online political disinformation makes very uncomfortable reading for Facebook — with the company singled out for “disingenuous” and “bad faith” responses to democratic concerns about the misuse of people’s data.
In the report, published today, the committee has also called for Facebook’s use of user data to be investigated by the UK’s data watchdog.
In an evidence session to the committee late last year, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) suggested Facebook needs to change its business model — warning the company risks burning user trust for good.
Last summer the ICO also called for an ethical pause of social media ads for election campaigning, warning of the risk of developing “a system of voter surveillance by default”.
The UK parliamentary enquiry looked into both Facebook’s own use of personal data to further its business interests, such as by providing access to user data to developers and advertisers in order to increase revenue and/or usage; and examined what Facebook claimed as ‘abuse’ of its platform by the disgraced (and now defunct) political data company Cambridge Analytica — which in 2014 paid a developer with access to Facebook’s developer platform to extract information on millions of Facebook users in build voter profiles to try to influence elections.
The committee’s conclusion about Facebook’s business is a damning one with the company accused of operating a business model that’s predicated on selling abusive access to people’s data.
“Far from Facebook acting against “sketchy” or “abusive” apps, of which action it has produced no evidence at all, it, in fact, worked with such apps as an intrinsic part of its business model,” the committee argues. “This explains why it recruited the people who created them, such as Joseph Chancellor [the co-founder of GSR, the developer which sold Facebook user data to Cambridge Analytica]. Nothing in Facebook’s actions supports the statements of Mark Zuckerberg who, we believe, lapsed into “PR crisis mode”, when its real business model was exposed.
“This is just one example of the bad faith which we believe justifies governments holding a business such as Facebook at arms’ length. It seems clear to us that Facebook acts only when serious breaches become public. This is what happened in 2015 and 2018.”
“We consider that data transfer for value is Facebook’s business model and that Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that ‘we’ve never sold anyone’s data” is simply untrue’,” the committee also concludes.
We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the committee’s report.
Last fall the company was issued the maximum possible fine under relevant UK data protection law for failing to safeguard user data from Cambridge Analytica saga. Although Facebook is appealing the ICO’s penalty, claiming there’s no evidence UK users’ data got misused.
During the course of a multi-month enquiry last year investigating disinformation and fake news, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) committee heard from 73 witnesses in 23 oral evidence sessions, as well as taking in 170 written submissions. In all the committee says it posed more than 4,350 questions.
Its wide-ranging, 110-page report makes detailed observations on a number of technologies and business practices across the social media, adtech and strategic communications space, and culminates in a long list of recommendations for policymakers and regulators — reiterating its call for tech platforms to be made legally liable for content.
Among the report’s main recommendations are:
Among the areas the committee’s report covers off with detailed commentary are data use and targeting; advertising and political campaigning — including foreign influence; and digital literacy.
It argues that regulation is urgently needed to restore democratic accountability and “make sure the people stay in charge of the machines”.
Ministers are due to produce a White Paper on social media safety regulation this winter and the committee writes that it hopes its recommendations will inform government thinking.
“Much has been said about the coarsening of public debate, but when these factors are brought to bear directly in election campaigns then the very fabric of our democracy is threatened,” the committee writes. “This situation is unlikely to change. What does need to change is the enforcement of greater transparency in the digital sphere, to ensure that we know the source of what we are reading, who has paid for it and why the information has been sent to us. We need to understand how the big tech companies work and what happens to our data.”
The report calls for tech companies to be regulated as a new category “not necessarily either a ‘platform’ or a ‘publisher”, but which legally tightens their liability for harmful content published on their platforms.
Last month another UK parliamentary committee also urged the government to place a legal ‘duty of care’ on platforms to protect users under the age of 18 — and the government said then that it has not ruled out doing so.
Competition concerns are also raised several times by the committee.
“Companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law,” the DCMS committee writes, going on to urge the government to investigate whether Facebook specifically has been involved in any anti-competitive practices and conduct a review of its business practices towards other developers “to decide whether Facebook is unfairly using its dominant market position in social media to decide which businesses should succeed or fail”.
“The big tech companies must not be allowed to expand exponentially, without constraint or proper regulatory oversight,” it adds.
The committee suggests existing legal tools are up to the task of reining in platform power, citing privacy laws, data protection legislation, antitrust and competition law — and calling for a “comprehensive audit” of the social media advertising market by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, and a specific antitrust probe of Facebook’s business practices.
“If companies become monopolies they can be broken up, in whatever sector,” the committee points out. “Facebook’s handling of personal data, and its use for political campaigns, are prime and legitimate areas for inspection by regulators, and it should not be able to evade all editorial responsibility for the content shared by its users across its platforms.”
The social networking giant was the recipient of many awkward queries during the course of the committee’s enquiry but it refused repeated requests for its founder Mark Zuckerberg to testify — sending a number of lesser staffers in his stead.
That decision continues to be seized upon by the committee as evidence of a lack of democratic accountability. It also accuses Facebook of having an intentionally “opaque management structure”.
“By choosing not to appear before the Committee and by choosing not to respond personally to any of our invitations, Mark Zuckerberg has shown contempt towards both the UK Parliament and the ‘International Grand Committee’, involving members from nine legislatures from around the world,” the committee writes.
It doubles down on the accusation that Facebook sought to deliberately mislead its enquiry — pointing to incorrect and/or inadequate responses from staffers who did testify.
“We are left with the impression that either [policy VP] Simon Milner and [CTO] Mike Schroepfer deliberately misled the Committee or they were deliberately not briefed by senior executives at Facebook about the extent of Russian interference in foreign elections,” it suggests.
In an unusual move late last year the committee used rare parliamentary powers to seize a cache of documents related to an active US lawsuit against Facebook filed by a developer called Six4Three.
The cache of documents is referenced extensively in the final report, and appears to have fuelled antitrust concerns, with the committee arguing that the evidence obtained from the internal company documents “indicates that Facebook was willing to override its users’ privacy settings in order to transfer data to some app developers, to charge high prices in advertising to some developers, for the exchange of that data, and to starve some developers… of that data, thereby causing them to lose their business”.
“It seems clear that Facebook was, at the very least, in violation of its Federal Trade Commission [privacy] settlement,” the committee also argues, citing evidence from the former chief technologist of the FTC, Ashkan Soltani .
On Soltani’s evidence, it writes:
Ashkan Soltani rejected [Facebook’s] claim, saying that up until 2012, platform controls did not exist, and privacy controls did not apply to apps. So even if a user set their profile to private, installed apps would still be able to access information. After 2012, Facebook added platform controls and made privacy controls applicable to apps. However, there were ‘whitelisted’ apps that could still access user data without permission and which, according to Ashkan Soltani, could access friends’ data for nearly a decade before that time. Apps were able to circumvent users’ privacy of platform settings and access friends’ information, even when the user disabled the Platform. This was an example of Facebook’s business model driving privacy violations.
While Facebook is singled out for the most eviscerating criticism in the report (and targeted for specific investigations), the committee’s long list of recommendations are addressed at social media businesses and online advertisers generally.
It also calls for far more transparency from platforms, writing that: “Social media companies need to be more transparent about their own sites, and how they work. Rather than hiding behind complex agreements, they should be informing users of how their sites work, including curation functions and the way in which algorithms are used to prioritise certain stories, news and videos, depending on each user’s profile. The more people know how the sites work, and how the sites use individuals’ data, the more informed we shall all be, which in turn will make choices about the use and privacy of sites easier to make.”
The committee also urges a raft of updates to UK election law — branding it “not fit for purpose” in the digital era.
Its interim report, published last summer, made many of the same recommendations.
But despite pressing the government for urgent action there was only a cool response from ministers then, with the government remaining tied up trying to shape a response to the 2016 Brexit vote which split the country (with social media’s election-law-deforming help). Instead it opted for a ‘wait and see‘ approach.
The government accepted just three of the preliminary report’s forty-two recommendations outright, and fully rejected four.
Nonetheless, the committee has doubled down on its preliminary conclusions, reiterating earlier recommendations and pushing the government once again to act.
It cites fresh evidence, including from additional testimony, as well as pointing to other reports (such as the recently published Cairncross Review) which it argues back up some of the conclusions reached.
“Our inquiry over the last year has identified three big threats to our society. The challenge for the year ahead is to start to fix them; we cannot delay any longer,” writes Damian Collins MP and chair of the DCMS Committee, in a statement. “Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day. Much of this is directed from agencies working in foreign countries, including Russia.
“The big tech companies are failing in the duty of care they owe to their users to act against harmful content, and to respect their data privacy rights. Companies like Facebook exercise massive market power which enables them to make money by bullying the smaller technology companies and developers who rely on this platform to reach their customers.”
“These are issues that the major tech companies are well aware of, yet continually fail to address. The guiding principle of the ‘move fast and break things’ culture often seems to be that it is better to apologise than ask permission. We need a radical shift in the balance of power between the platforms and the people,” he added.
“The age of inadequate self-regulation must come to an end. The rights of the citizen need to be established in statute, by requiring the tech companies to adhere to a code of conduct written into law by Parliament, and overseen by an independent regulator.”
The committee says it expects the government to respond to its recommendations within two months — noting rather dryly: “We hope that this will be much more comprehensive, practical, and constructive than their response to the Interim Report, published in October 2018. Several of our recommendations were not substantively answered and there is now an urgent need for the Government to respond to them.”
It also makes a point of including an analysis of Internet traffic to the government’s own response to its preliminary report last year — in which it highlights a “high proportion” of online visitors hailing from Russian cities including Moscow and Saint Petersburg…
Source: Web and publications unit, House of Commons
“This itself demonstrates the very clear interest from Russia in what we have had to say about their activities in overseas political campaigns,” the committee remarks, criticizing the government response to its preliminary report for claiming there’s no evidence of “successful” Russian interference in UK elections and democratic processes.
“It is surely a sufficient matter of concern that the Government has acknowledged that interference has occurred, irrespective of the lack of evidence of impact. The Government should be conducting analysis to understand the extent of Russian targeting of voters during elections,” it adds.
Another interesting tidbit from the report is confirmation that the ICO has shared the names of three “senior managers” at Facebook who knew about the Cambridge Analytica data breach prior to the first press report in December 2015 — which is the date Facebook has repeatedly told the committee was when it first learnt of the breach, contradicting what the ICO found via its own investigations.
The committee’s report does not disclose the names of the three senior managers — saying the ICO has asked the names to remain confidential (we’ve reached out to the ICO to ask why it is not making this information public) — and implies the execs did not relay the information to Zuckerberg.
The committee dubs this as an example of “a profound failure” of internal governance, and also branding it evidence of “fundamental weakness” in how Facebook manages its responsibilities to users.
Here’s the committee’s account of that detail:
We were keen to know when and which people working at Facebook first knew about the GSR/Cambridge Analytica breach. The ICO confirmed, in correspondence with the Committee, that three “senior managers” were involved in email exchanges earlier in 2015 concerning the GSR breach before December 2015, when it was first reported by The Guardian. At the request of the ICO, we have agreed to keep the names confidential, but it would seem that this important information was not shared with the most senior executives at Facebook, leading us to ask why this was the case.
The scale and importance of the GSR/Cambridge Analytica breach was such that its occurrence should have been referred to Mark Zuckerberg as its CEO immediately. The fact that it was not is evidence that Facebook did not treat the breach with the seriousness it merited. It was a profound failure of governance within Facebook that its CEO did not know what was going on, the company now maintains, until the issue became public to us all in 2018. The incident displays the fundamental weakness of Facebook in managing its responsibilities to the people whose data is used for its own commercial interests.
Source: TechCrunch
El número de investigaciones, el volumen de inversiones, las menciones de los políticos, el rendimiento de la tecnología… se mire donde se mire, la inteligencia artificial no hace más que crecer. Así lo refleja un reciente informe del MIT, Harvard y Stanford sobre el estado actual del campo
Source: MIT
Los vehículos sin conductor requieren que los mapas se actualicen constantemente, y parece que el mejor enfoque para lograrlo es el de ‘start-up’ sueca Mapillary. La empresa depende de en un ejército de voluntarios para que tomen imágenes de las calles y las analiza con inteligencia artificial
Source: MIT
El material deja salir la radiación infrarroja cuando el cuerpo está caliente y suda, pero la retiene cuando la temperatura baja para mantener el calor. Además puede teñirse y lavarse como cualquier prenda. ¡El sueño de todos los trabajadores de oficina que se pelean por el termostato!
Source: MIT
As Samsung prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary Galaxy, remember that the first Galaxy S wasn’t just one phone. It was four.
Source: CNET
There’s no reason to spend more than $10 for 6 feet, even with the most expensive TVs. Here’s what we recommend.
Source: CNET
It only opened 10 months ago.
Source: CNET
The ‘below the belt selfie’ media circus surrounding Jeff Bezos has made encrypted communications top of mind among nervous executive handlers. Their assumption is that a product with serious cryptography like Wickr – where I work – or Signal could have helped help Mr. Bezos and Amazon avoid this drama.
It’s a good assumption, but a troubling conclusion.
I worry that moments like these will drag serious cryptography down to the level of the National Enquirer. I’m concerned that this media cycle may lead people to view privacy and cryptography as a safety net for billionaires rather than a transformative solution for data minimization and privacy.
We live in the chapter of computing when data is mostly unprotected because of corporate indifference. The leaders of our new economy – like the vast majority of society – value convenience and short-term gratification over the security and privacy of consumer, employee and corporate data.
We cannot let this media cycle pass without recognizing that when corporate executives take a laissez-faire approach to digital privacy, their employees and organizations will follow suit.
Two recent examples illustrate the privacy indifference of our leaders…
If our leaders do not respect and understand online security and privacy, then their organizations will not make data protection a priority. It’s no surprise that we see a constant stream of large corporations and federal agencies breached by nation states and competitors. Who then can we look to for leadership?
GDPR is an early attempt by regulators to lead. The European Union enacted GDPR to ensure individuals own their data and enforce penalties on companies who do not protect personal data. It applies to all data processors, but the EU is clearly focused on sending a message to the large US based data processors – Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. In January, France’s National Data Protection Commission sent a message by fining Google $57 million for breaching GDPR rules. It was an unprecedented fine that garnered international attention. However, we must remember that in 2018 Google’s revenues were greater than $300 million … per day! GPDR is, at best, an annoying speed-bump in the monetization strategy of large data processors.
It is through this lens that Senator Ron Wyden’s (Oregon) idealistic call for billions of dollars in corporate fines and jail time for executives who enable privacy breaches can be seen as reasonable. When record financial penalties are inconsequential it is logical to pursue other avenues to protect our data.
Real change will come when our leaders understand that data privacy and security can increase profitability and reliability. For example, the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council reports that an enterprise will spend as much as $50 million to protect 10 petabytes of data, and that $34.5 million of this is spent on protecting data that should be deleted. Serious efficiencies are waiting to be realized and serious cryptography can help.
So, thank you Mr. Bezos for igniting corporate interest in secure communications. Let’s hope this news cycle convinces our corporate leaders and elected officials to embrace data privacy, protection and minimization because it responsible, profitable and efficient. We need leaders and elected officials to set an example and respect their own data and privacy if we have any hope of their organizations to protect ours.
Source: TechCrunch
That goes against US efforts to convince European allies to ban the Chinese supplier from 5G efforts due to espionage concerns.
Source: CNET