Tesla data helped police after Las Vegas truck explosion, but experts have wider privacy concerns

The data collected by Musk’s electric car company after the Cybertruck packed with fireworks burst into flames in front of the Trump International Hotel Wednesday proved valuable to police in helping track the driver’s movements.
Wrong! The data was collected BEFORE the truck burst into flames. It was provided to the police after the explosion. Tesla is a surveillance company.

I, Cringely Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and our personal data - I, Cringely

Much like Nigerian spammers purposely including spelling errors in their emails to trap “dumb” people —the quizzes on Facebook about “Which Star Wars character are you?” are there just to get you to authorize them. Then they go harvest your data. The authorization is built into the terms of service when you take the test.

So don’t take any Facebook quizzes, surveys, or tests — EVER.

The aspect of this story that ought to be of most concern to Facebook members is that once I have authorized someone to use my Facebook data I have authorized them to use not only my data but also that of all my Facebook friends!

As of this morning I have 2,980 Facebook friends. If I was stupid enough to authorize the release of my data I’d be authorizing the release of all the data on 2,980 other people, too. Now maybe I have more Facebook connections than most people, but you can see how getting only a few thousand survey responses can yield hundreds of thousands of records.

I’m told the average active Facebook member has 250 friends, so one person signing up is like getting 250 full and complete profiles. It’s such a broken system with no way to ever opt out.

Facebook Can Now Find Your Face, Even When It's Not Tagged | WIRED

Facebook’s head of privacy, Rob Sherman, positions the new photo-notification feature as giving people more control over their image online. “We’ve thought about this as a really empowering feature,” he says. “There may be photos that exist that you don’t know about.” Informing you of their existence is also good for Facebook: more notifications flying around means more activity from users and more ad impressions. More people tagging themselves in photos adds more data to Facebook’s cache, helping to power the lucrative ad-targeting business that keeps the company afloat.

Once Facebook identifies you in a photo, it will display a notification that leads to a new Photo Review dialog. There you can choose to tag yourself in the image, message the user who posted an image, inform Facebook that the face isn’t you, or report an image for breaching the site’s rules.

Sounds like a nice feature, but I would like to know more about what Facebook does behind the scenes with those identified images. Sure, you can choose not to be tagged on the poster's photo, but you are always tagged in the database.

How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You've Ever Met

Having issued this warning, and having acknowledged that people in your address book may not necessarily want to be connected to you, Facebook will then do exactly what it warned you not to do. If you agree to share your contacts, every piece of contact data you possess will go to Facebook, and the network will then use it to try to search for connections between everyone you know, no matter how slightly—and you won’t see it happen.

Facebook doesn’t like, and doesn’t use, the term “shadow profiles.” It doesn’t like the term because it sounds like Facebook creates hidden profiles for people who haven’t joined the network, which Facebook says it doesn’t do. The existence of shadow contact information came to light in 2013 after Facebook admitted it had discovered and fixed “a bug.” The bug was that when a user downloaded their Facebook file, it included not just their friends’ visible contact information, but also their friends’ shadow contact information.

John Lanchester reviews ‘The Attention Merchants’ by Tim Wu, ‘Chaos Monkeys’ by Antonio Garcia Martinez and ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ by Jonathan Taplin - LRB 17 August 2017

What this means is that even more than it is in the advertising business, Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens. It’s amazing that people haven’t really understood this about the company. I’ve spent time thinking about Facebook, and the thing I keep coming back to is that its users don’t realise what it is the company does. What Facebook does is watch you, and then use what it knows about you and your behaviour to sell ads. I’m not sure there has ever been a more complete disconnect between what a company says it does – ‘connect’, ‘build communities’ – and the commercial reality. Note that the company’s knowledge about its users isn’t used merely to target ads but to shape the flow of news to them. Since there is so much content posted on the site, the algorithms used to filter and direct that content are the thing that determines what you see: people think their news feed is largely to do with their friends and interests, and it sort of is, with the crucial proviso that it is their friends and interests as mediated by the commercial interests of Facebook. Your eyes are directed towards the place where they are most valuable for Facebook.

I, Cringely News we aren't supposed to know - I, Cringely

I’m writing this post on Wednesday evening here in California. Normally I wouldn’t point that out but in this case I want to put a kind of timestamp on my writing because at this moment we’re at the end of the second day of a concerted attack by the UAE Electronic Army on various DNS providers in North America. If you follow this stuff and bother to check, say, Google News right now for “UAE Electronic Army,” your search will probably generate some Facebook entries but no news at all because — two days into it — this attack has gone unnoticed by the world at large. My last column was about fake news. This one is about real news you never hear about.

Denny Hastert is Contemptible, But His Indictment Exemplifies America's Over-Criminalization Pathology - The Intercept

When everything – even trivial transgressions – can become a serious felony, it empowers law enforcement to punish whomever they want. It’s a key reason they are able to basically use arrest and prosecution powers to control and punish minority populations in the U.S. The arrest and destruction of Eliot Spitzer for prostitution was accomplished through the same type of detection system and charges being used against Hastert.

Turning someone into a felon and putting them into prison for years, or even threatening to do so, is one of the most repressive things a government can do to its citizens. Only serious acts of wrongdoing should enable that. The “past misconduct” in which Hastert allegedly engaged may qualify, but that’s not part of his charges. The acts for which he has been charged – hiding withdrawals and lying to the FBI about why he wanted that money – do not qualify.

Scalia Thinks Having Two Phones Is Suspicious -- NYMag

"Owning a second cell phone, like, say, a BlackBerry for work in addition to a better one for everything else, is not a concept familiar to the Supreme Court justices, never known for their technological acumen. During arguments today about the rights of police to search phones without a warrant following an arrest, Chief Justice Roberts, 59, and Justice Scalia, 78, expressed shock at the very idea..."

It's not that complex, really. It's just a series of tubes...

Reports of the Death of a National License-Plate Tracking Database Have Been Greatly Exaggerated - The Intercept

"The next day, however, the Post called off the alarm. The plan, the newspaper reported, had been canceled. Threat averted. Move along.

"But the Post had gotten it all wrong. DHS wasn’t planning to create a national license-plate tracking database — because several already exist, owned by different private companies, and extensively used by law enforcement agencies including DHS for years."

Homeland Security Wants to Scan Every Single License Plate - The Wire

"To immediately damper any comparisons to the NSA, Gillian Christensen, a spokeswoman for the DHS's Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) stressed that the private company the agency chooses to use will store the data, not the government. Because that makes it so much better.

"The data gathered could also 'only be accessed in conjunction with ongoing criminal investigations or to locate wanted individuals,' and suspects that pose a threat to public safety. Gathering data from license plates would also reduce the time needed to perform surveillance, Christensen said."

Sadly, not from The Onion.