They Grow Up So Fast These Days: Facial Recognition Tech Edition

from the look-at-all-these-cute-little-misidentified-faces! dept

Looks like there are no more untapped markets for facial recognition tech.

Waldo, a company that uses facial recognition software to help identify subjects in photographs, is making it easier for parents to get a glimpse of life at area summer camps.

The premise is simple, said Waldo Photos CEO Rodney Rice. Camps working with Waldo will give parents a private code to sign up. Parents upload a headshot or selfie of their child to Waldo's system. When photos of campers are uploaded to camp websites, Waldo’s facial recognition software scans for matches to the uploaded headshots. Parents then receive pictures of their children as a text message, Rice said.

Nothing nefarious about this if you subtract the slow drip of surveillance tech into every corner of everyone's existence. By the time the little scamps roll into adulthood, they won't even view omnipresent cameras and their surveillance add-ons as encroachments. They'll just be a normal part of life, like cellphones and high-speed internet connections.

This situation is better than most. Waldo's service is completely opt-in. Parents who want to use it have to go through several affirmative steps, like uploading photos of their kids to be used by the software. The end result is a curated collection of photos containing opted-in kids, saving parents the trouble of weeding through hundreds of photos to find the ones they actually care about.

This is a far more responsible use of facial recognition tech on children than the New York Police Department's version.

The New York Police Department has been loading thousands of arrest photos of children and teenagers into a facial recognition database despite evidence the technology has a higher risk of false matches in younger faces.

For about four years, internal records show, the department has used the technology to compare crime scene images with its collection of juvenile mug shots, the photos that are taken at an arrest. Most of the photos are of teenagers, largely 13 to 16 years old, but children as young as 11 have been included.

The PD, of course, claims this is all above-board, following the time-honored tradition of taking photos of arrestees. Also, apparently, the time-honored tradition of uploading them to a facial recognition database to (mis)match humans wandering past PD cameras.

However, it doesn't seem so above-board when anyone other than the NYPD is asked about it. For one, the judicial system handles juveniles differently, affording them more privacy and protection than adult suspects. The NYPD's program ignores all of this and forces their faces to mingle with all the adults in its database. And the city council itself appears to be unaware of this practice, which means the NYPD's definition of "above-board" doesn't include being honest and upfront with its overseers.

Whatever's already wrong with facial recognition tech will only be made worse by throwing adolescents and children into the mix. The software tends to fail with alarming frequency and adding photos of people still undergoing facial development isn't going to help.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is part of the Commerce Department and evaluates facial recognition algorithms for accuracy, recently found the vast majority of more than 100 facial recognition algorithms had a higher rate of mistaken matches among children. The error rate was most pronounced in young children but was also seen in those aged 10 to 16.

The companies providing this tech to the NYPD are about as open and upfront as the department that pays them. Neither Idemia or DataWorks Plus offered any clarification or comment when approached by the New York Times.

The only comment the NYT was able to secure was one that sounds like a true believer hyping their belief system.

Police officials declined to provide statistics on how often their facial recognition systems provide false matches, or to explain how they evaluate the system’s effectiveness.

“We are comfortable with this technology because it has proved to be a valuable investigative method,” Chief Shea said. Facial recognition has helped lead to thousands of arrests of both adults and juveniles, the department has said.

Very comforting. I guess everyone subjected to the frequently-mistaken tech will be relieved to know the NYPD likes the tools it feels it needs to discuss with no one before deploying. The NYPD refuses to offer up any data showing its tech works but says its comfort level should be good enough for everyone.

Filed Under: facial recognition, privacy
Companies: waldo

Oversight Report Shows The NSA Did Not Delete All The Inadvertently-Collected Phone Records It Claimed It Had Deleted

from the crossing-the-sec-215-finish-line-in-a-blaze-of-failure dept

Ever since Ed Snowden doxed the NSA's phone records collection, the agency has been coughing up documents showing its multiple collection programs have never not been abused since its was granted more power shortly after the 9/11 attacks.

The putative sacrificial lamb offered up to angry Congressional reps and dismayed citizens was the Section 215 program. Well, only a small part of it, actually. The NSA would continue to hoover up business records without a warrant, but it was having trouble working within the confines of modifications forced upon it by the USA Freedom Act.

Rather than use its considerable expertise to tackle the problem of over-collection, the NSA has apparently decided to abandon this collection altogether. It only took six years since the first Snowden leak, but it's something. But the NSA's uninterrupted string of abuses continued right up to its offer to shutter the program -- something that won't actually be official until Congress codifies the abandonment.

Thanks to yet another FOIA lawsuit, more bad news about the tail end of collection's lifespan has been released. Charlie Savage of the New York Times reports the NSA's claims about its purge of over-collected data were as hollow as any of the dozens of public statements it has offered in response to a steady stream of leaked documents.

Even after the National Security Agency announced last year that it had purged records about Americans because some were inappropriately collected, the agency inadvertently continued to retain some of the data, according to a newly declassified report.

The National Security Agency deleted the remaining data in October 2018 after its inspector general discovered it, the report said. The problem surfaced just as the agency was separately discovering that it was again collecting phone records it had no authority to gather, which came to light last month.

As Savage notes, this report [PDF] sheds some more light on the NSA's decision to pull the plug on the collection. Perhaps the agency is simply tired of generating its own bad press with every new document forced out of its hands by public records requests.

That and the program is likely of limited usefulness, given more people communicate with messaging apps than phone calls at this point in time. On top of that, gathering third-party records without a warrant is no longer a given -- not with the USA Freedom Act modifications and recent Supreme Court decisions.

Every recent development has made the program more of a pain in the ass for the NSA. To that I say, "Good!" But it should have been this way from the start. Engaging in domestic surveillance should be a last resort, not default operating mode. It took most of a decade to turn one domestic surveillance program into a burden for the surveillance agency. Everything the NSA does should be this burdensome. This is the only way it will start treating the powers it has with some respect.

Filed Under: nsa, privacy, section 215, surveillance

The FTC's Settlement With Equifax Is Such A Joke, The FTC Is Now Begging You Not To Ask For A Cash Settlement

from the say-what-now dept

Last week there was a bit of news as the FTC released a proposed settlement between the FTC and Equifax over the data brokers' massive security breach that came to light nearly two years ago. We had already noted that the FTC's way of dealing with Equifax seemed particularly tone deaf, but it's getting worse. Much worse. As you may have heard, part of the "settlement" with Equifax is that you could sign up to get $125 from the company (or possibly more). It was either that or free credit monitoring. But, come on: everyone already has so many "free credit monitoring" services from previous breaches that this is a totally meaningless offer. It also costs nothing for Equifax.

So, over the past week or so a ton of (helpful) news sites have been posting explainers on how to get your $125. Except... apparently too many people signed up and now the FTC is helping Equifax by telling people not to ask for money from the company any more. First, the FTC literally deleted that option from its website:

Then, it posted a blog post and a statement both of which encourage people not to ask for money -- and arguing that the credit monitoring that no one needs is a "better deal."

The public response to the settlement has been overwhelming, and we’re delighted that millions of people have visited ftc.gov/Equifax and gone on to the settlement website’s claims form.

But there’s a downside to this unexpected number of claims. First, though, the good: all 147 million people can ask for and get free credit monitoring. There’s also the option for people who certify that they already have credit monitoring to claim up to $125 instead. But the pot of money that pays for that part of the settlement is $31 million. A large number of claims for cash instead of credit monitoring means only one thing: each person who takes the money option will wind up only getting a small amount of money. Nowhere near the $125 they could have gotten if there hadn’t been such an enormous number of claims filed.

So, if you haven’t submitted your claim yet, think about opting for the free credit monitoring instead. Frankly, the free credit monitoring is worth a lot more – the market value would be hundreds of dollars a year.

Of course, the proper response to this is for the FTC to recognize that a $31 million pot for settlements here was way too small. Remember, this is the same organization that was being criticized for "only" dinging Facebook for $5 billion for privacy violations that one could argue were significantly less egregious and damaging as Equifax's breach. The fact that the FTC thinks its job here is now to act as PR shop for Equifax, rather than to maybe go back to the drawing board is pretty telling.

As law professor James Grimmelmann notes, the response to all of this (anger, hatred) certainly suggests that the court should not approve this settlement:

This is pretty damning towards the FTC. If they built a settlement structure that only works if few of the people impacted claim it, then the settlement is objectively ridiculous. Either users who had their data leaked deserve $125 or they don't. The entire structure of setting up a $31 million pool, such that if the people impacted actually claim their money they get less of it, is just mindbogglingly pointless.

Filed Under: breach, cash, credit monitoring, fines, ftc, privacy
Companies: equifax

The Great Hack Wasn't A Hack And Big Tech's Problems Aren't Really About Big Tech

from the symptoms-not-the-disease dept

There must be some irony in the fact that the well-hyped documentary film about Cambridge Analytica/Facebook, called The Great Hack was released by Netflix -- a company who really is kinda famous for trying to suck up as much data as possible to build a better algorithm to keep you using its service more -- and potentially violating people's privacy in the process. I know it's ancient history in terms of internet years, and everyone has decided that Facebook and Google are the root of all internet/data evils, but back in 2006, Netflix launched a contest, offering $1 million to anyone who could "improve" its recommendation algorithm over a certain threshold. It took a few years, but the company awarded the $1 million to a team that improved its algorithm -- though, it never actually implemented that algorithm, claiming that the benefits "did not seem to justify the engineering effort."

But, perhaps more interesting, was that while the contest was ongoing, some computer scientists de-anonymized the dataset that Netflix had released, leading some to point out that the whole project almost certainly violated the law. Eventually, Netflix shuttered its plans for a follow up contest as part of a legal settlement regarding the privacy violations of the original.

So, perhaps feel a bit conflicted when Netflix's vaunted algorithm recommends "The Great Hack" for you to watch.

This is not to say the documentary is not important, but it does highlight our troubling desire to immediately point fingers and describe certain things as "evil." Even the name -- The Great Hack -- is ridiculously misleading. Nothing Cambridge Analytica did involved a "hack" in the way most people think of the word. Yes, you could argue that it was a "hack" of the larger system -- using Facebook's platform in a way that was not intended, but easily done, but it didn't involve any technical proficiency. Just a willingness to use the data that way.

But, it's interesting to me to see the press rush in to use the documentary as the exclamation point to the narrative that's become popular these days: that Silicon Valley is too obsessed with collecting data as a business model. Janus Rose, at Vice, has a big piece that describes the movie as a condemnation of "surveillance capitalism."

The real “great hack” isn’t Cambridge’s ill-gotten data or Facebook’s failure to protect it. It’s the entire business model of Silicon Valley, which has incentivized the use of personal data to manipulate human behavior on a massive scale.

Emily Dreyfuss at Wired, paints a similar portrait:

In that way, The Great Hack is a modern horror story. The villain is Cambridge Analytica, yes, but also Facebook, and all the systems that let people become manipulated by the digital psychological clues they leave through their lives. It's terrifying because it's true.

Natasha Lomas at TechCrunch, points out that Netflix is revealing "the defining story of our time" in the transactional nature of data on social platforms:

But in displaying the ruthlessly transactional underpinnings of social platforms where the world’s smartphone users go to kill time, unwittingly trading away their agency in the process, Netflix has really just begun to open up the defining story of our time.

Oddly, none of them mention Netflix's algorithm and history. Ah, right. Because the narrative these days is Facebook/Google/Silicon Valley. Netflix has mostly migrated south to Hollywood. And, Hollywood and the media industry have no history at all of "manipulating" the public. Nope, no history of that at all.

None of this is to absolve Silicon Valley and the big tech companies -- who really have done a piss poor job of thinking through the consequences of basically anything they've done, but forgive me for being marginally skeptical when the same industries that have a long history of pushing propaganda and trying to manipulate audiences in one direction or another suddenly start clutching pearls at the new kids on the block.

And if you want to point fingers, there are lots of directions they could go as well. All the internet haters seem to have glommed onto Shosana Zuboff's term "Surveillance Capitalism" as a sort of shibboleth to the savvy to show that you know (you know) those internet companies are truly evil in their hearts. But taken to its logical extreme, one might as well blame Wall Street. When you have a company, say, like Pinterest, that tries to avoid social media "growth hacking" then Wall St. punishes it. Witness the ongoing freakout through the past few months from Wall St. as it grapples with Alphabet/Google's revenue growth slowing.

If companies are constantly being told that they have a "fiduciary duty" to increase the stock, and Wall Street flips out any time they can't keep growing at insane, unsustainable rates, is it any wonder that all of the incentives lead us to a place where companies focus heavily on growth?

Again, this is not an excuse. It's all a problem. But we don't solve large societal problems by picking off one symptom of the disease that's really just a link in a larger societal chain. Surveillance capitalism is a symptom. Abusive data practices are a symptom. Propaganda and political grandstanding are symptoms. There are big societal problems at the root of all this -- but very few seem to be interested in exploring what they are and how to deal with them. Instead, we just get one part of the surveillance capitalist propaganda machine to convince everyone that another part of the surveillance capitalist propaganda machine is the problem. And, because that bit of propaganda is successfully manipulative and compelling, lots of people buy into it.

The narrative is here and it won't be changed.

Now, what does Netflix recommend we watch next?

Filed Under: algorithms, data, growth, influence, innovation, privacy, recommendations, surveillance capitalism, the great hack, wall st.
Companies: facebook, google, netflix

Once More With Feeling: 'Anonymized' Data Is Not Really Anonymous

from the nothing-to-see-here dept

As companies and governments increasingly hoover up our personal data, a common refrain to keep people from worrying is the claim that nothing can go wrong because the data itself is "anonymized" or stripped of personal detail. But time and time again, we've noted how this really is cold comfort; given it takes only a little effort to pretty quickly identify a person based on access to other data sets. Yet most companies (including cell phone companies that sell your location data) act as if "anonymizing" your data is iron-clad protection from having it identified. It's simply not true.

The latest case in point: in new research published this week in the journal Nature Communications, data scientists from Imperial College London and UCLouvain found that it wasn't particularly hard for companies (or, anybody else) to identify the person behind "anonymized" data using other data sets. More specifically, the researchers developed a machine learning model that was able to correctly re-identify 99.98% of Americans in any anonymised dataset using just 15 characteristics including age, gender and marital status:

"While there might be a lot of people who are in their thirties, male, and living in New York City, far fewer of them were also born on 5 January, are driving a red sports car, and live with two kids (both girls) and one dog,” explained study first author Dr Luc Rocher, from UCLouvain."

And using fifteen datasets is actually pretty high for this sort of study. One investigation of "anonymized" user credit card data by MIT found that users could be correctly "de-anonymized" 90 percent of the time using just four relatively vague points of information. Another study looking at vehicle data found that 15 minutes’ worth of data from just brake pedal use could lead them to choose the right driver, out of 15 options, 90% of the time.

The problem, of course, comes when multiple leaked data sets are released in the wild and can be cross referenced by attackers (state sponsored or otherwise), de-anonymized, then abused. The researchers in this new study were quick to proclaim how government and industry proclamations of "don't worry, it's anonymized!" are dangerous and inadequate:

"Companies and governments have downplayed the risk of re-identification by arguing that the datasets they sell are always incomplete,” said senior author Dr Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, from Imperial’s Department of Computing, and Data Science Institute. "Our findings contradict this and demonstrate that an attacker could easily and accurately estimate the likelihood that the record they found belongs to the person they are looking for."

It's not clear how many studies like this we need before we stop using "anonymized" as some kind of magic word in privacy circles, but it's apparently going to need to be a few dozen more.

Filed Under: anonymity, anonymized data, data, privacy

The Newest Growth Market For License Plate Readers Is Those Assholes Running The Local Homeowners Association

from the 'we-feel-people-don't-hate-us-enough-already' dept

Everyone loves surveillance creep. Well, by everyone, I mean the government and the vendors that sell to them. Automatic license plate readers have made their way from police cruisers to malls, as has facial recognition tech that very often fails to actually recognize people.

The "everyone" may now include the near-fascist organizations turning neighborhoods into glittering shrines of conformity. I'm talking about homeowners' associations -- the anal-retentive busybodies who want to make sure your grass is cut to the correct length and that no one's offending passersby with creative mailboxes.

The Denver Post reports the newest customers for surveillance tech is HOAs and gated communities.

License plate readers posted at both entrances to an upscale Aurora neighborhood snapped pictures of passing cars Wednesday, recording the type, color and license plate number of each vehicle and inputting that information into a database.

Such technology used to be relegated to law enforcement. But these cameras were purchased by the local homeowner association in January after a few burglaries of cars and a home in the neighborhood. Red signs near the cameras warn passersby of “24/7 Video Recording.”

“It’s going to keep us safer,” said Richard Warshaw, president of the Bel-Aire Estates Owners Association.

I don't want to make too many assumptions, but click through to take a look at Richard Warshaw, who appears to be exactly the way I'd expect him to look.

Anyway, this is the growth market for vendors with surveillance tech to sell. Spy gadgets have gone from military to police to business owners to bitter busybodies who want to know everything about everyone who passes through their carefully -- and forcefully -- curated neighborhoods.

Flock Safety appears to be one of the bigger players in the HOA ALPR business. Its site makes a handful of dubious claims in the space of a single splash box, including the audacious assertion that only its product prevents crime.

I attempted to discuss this claim with the FlockBot, but only got asked for my email address and phone number so the company could pitch some of its camera "solutions" that *squints at screenshots* "capture vehicle lice plates."

This only raises my confidence in the quality of Flock's products.

Back at the Denver HOA, it appears the private surveillance approval process isn't that much different than the public surveillance approval process. In other words, input from the general public is ignored.

Warshaw said the five-person board of the homeowner association decided to add the three cameras and use money from the neighborhood’s dues to pay for it. The entire 75-home neighborhood did not vote on the decision, but Warshaw said he hadn’t heard any negative feedback.

Following government precedent, the HOA's deployment of ALPRs is also pretty much unjustifiable.

Warshaw, who has lived in the neighborhood since 2005, admitted that one home burglary in 15 years is not exactly a rash of crime.

Warshaw insists the product makes residents "feel safer." This is a really curious [pronounced "bullshit"] claim, considering residents don't appear to have been asked their opinion, before or after the purchase.

I guess the only opinion that matters is that of the "leadership," whether it's a city council approving the tech behind closed doors or HOAs doing the same thing. As the Denver Post points out, surveillance tech deployment continues to increase while crime rates continue to decline. These declines preceded the mass rollout of ALPRs, Stingrays, and facial recognition tech, strongly suggesting law enforcement agencies (and HOAs!) had ways to deal with criminal activity that didn't involve pointing invasive tech in the direction of non-criminals.

Finally, Flock Safety -- the preferred provider of HOA surveillance tech -- makes a completely incongruous, if not completely impossible, claim on its website. Whoever approved this copy should be forced to stand naked in front of the nearest CCTV camera until I get tired of mocking them.

Please explain to me how "privacy" is being "protected" by giving law enforcement instant access to license plate photos. The FlockBot remains silent on the issue, but really really really wants to annoy you with emails and sales rep calls.

Filed Under: authoritarians, hoa, home owners associations, license plate readers, neighbors, privacy, spying, surveillance
Companies: flock safety

Google Finally Settles Lawsuit Over Decade-Old WiFi Snooping Accusations

from the that-took-some-time dept

So if you've been around these parts for a while, you might remember a big stink back in 2006 or so when Google's Street View vehicles were found to have been hoovering up data collected via WiFi. The collection came while the company was collecting Street View data via its army of specially-configured vehicles, and included pretty much any and all unencrypted data traveling over those networks, including telephone numbers, URLs, passwords, e-mail, or video streams. The goal was purportedly to ensure better geographical positioning data, but the data collected went well beyond what was needed for that goal.

Initially, Google claimed that the data collection was accidental, something supported by engineering analysis at the time. Here's what Google said in 2010 about the issue:

"So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental Wi-Fi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google's Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data."

In 2012 however, an FCC document detailed how a Google engineer had created a system that collected this data intentionally, but had downplayed the privacy risk because Google Street View vehicles would not be "in proximity to any given user for an extended period of time," and "[n]one of the data gathered ... [would] be presented to end users of [Google's] services in raw form." And while the engineer was probably right that not much useful data was collected, doing so at all was admittedly not a bright idea, and the "mistake" wound up being an intentional, poor engineering choice signed off on by project managers.

Admittedly the real-world risk of the entire scandal was violently over-hyped. The moving vehicles only had access to hotspots as vehicles passed for a few seconds, frequent channel hopping reduced data collection further, and again, the entire effort only collected data from hotspots that didn't use encryption Still, it was a dumb decision any way you slice it.

Fast forward thirteen years after the data collection occurred, and Google has finally put the entire scandal to bed, at least here in the States. The company will wind up paying $13 million to settle a 2010 lawsuit over this data collection. Because the data is so fragmented, it's hard to actually identify whose data was collected during that period; so the payout will largely go to lawyers and a handful of privacy activism organizations:

"Lawyers for the plaintiffs said it would be difficult to identify masses of affected people, a decade later, from the random snippets of data that the company collected when its vehicles drove by their homes.

Instead, what’s left of the $13 million -- after administrative costs and the lawyers who brought the lawsuit get a commission of as much as 25% -- will be distributed to a handful of consumer privacy advocacy groups, according to a court filing detailing the terms of the deal."

While this scandal may have been over-hyped, it still managed to highlight how non-transparent privacy practices are, how companies have few reservations when it comes to misrepresenting what actually happened, and how long it takes to actually achieve anything even vaguely resembling accountability. Of course in the decade-plus since this scandal began, it has become abundantly clear that this sort of casual disregard for user privacy was always more of a feature than a bug, and we're still not doing a very good job coming up with a meaningful model for doing much of anything about it outside of hand-wringing and hysteria.

Filed Under: privacy, street view, wifi
Companies: google

FTC's Privacy Settlement With Facebook Gets Pretty Much Everything Backwards; Probably Helps Facebook

from the guys-come-on dept

So, as was leaked a couple of weeks ago, the FTC has now made its $5 billion settlement with Facebook official. There's quite a bit that's interesting in the stipulated order that is worth reading. I'm actually glad to see that this wasn't just about Cambridge Analytica, where I think the "breach" issue was much less concrete. Instead, it does include a bunch of other very real violations by Facebook, including:

1. Storing passwords in plaintext
2. Using phone numbers that were provided for security (two factor authentication) for advertising (a massively dangerous and stupid practice by Facebook)
3. It's questionable use of facial recognition without consent
4. Sucking up logins to other services.

Frankly, all of those are much more serious breaches than what happened with Cambridge Analytica.

Separately, as I discussed two weeks ago, if you're mad at the size of the fine, you're missing the point. This is, by far, the largest fine the FTC has ever issued, and goes way beyond anything that it's done before. The real problem is that this is basically all that the FTC can do. That's the only weapon it has and it's never going to be enough because the FTC isn't really set up to handle modern privacy questions like this -- and that would require a new mandate from Congress. This is in Congress's court.

That said, my bigger concern, as always, is that everyone's obsession over "protecting privacy" is going to mean significantly less competition. I raised this issue last year, soon after everyone freaked out about Cambridge Analytica, noting that I feared what would happen is that Facebook would be driven to lock down everyone's data rather than making it more accessible to third party and competing services.

There are significant and important trade-offs here. For years now I've been talking about the real way to create more competition on the internet, and much of it involves pressuring the big internet companies into opening up. Have them create APIs that allow others to build services on top of their data so that we're not so locked into the giant platforms. Enable more competition at the service level, rather than the data collection level.

But this agreement does the opposite. It is basically giving up and saying that the FTC and regulators now think that Facebook will be the dominant platform for ages, and therefore it needs to better police data and better lock it down. This is not a good solution (except if you're Facebook). As former Facebook CSO Alex Stamos points out in a very thoughtful thread, while this is a slap on the wrist regarding Facebook's problematic privacy practices, it actually helps stop future competition:

The real threat to the tech giants is competition, not regulation, and everybody is missing what really happened today: Facebook paid the FTC $5B for a letter that says "You never again have to create mechanisms that could facilitate competition."

Facebook already has ~2.5B users. It has the world's second largest ad network. It never again needs data from anybody else to make money or third parties to facilitate growth. This order doesn't include the word competition or include any balancing tests. It's fantastic for FB.

"You need to allow for 3rd party clients."

Sorry, mean FTC won't let us.

"Other companies can build on your graph."

Sorry, mean FTC won't let us.

"You need a real data export feature that allows users to move."

Sorry, mean FTC won't let us.

I can't believe Facebook didn't pay more for this. If the FTC offered to "order" Amazon to help consumers save money by offering house branded options in every top category, Bezos would leap across the table with a $10B check and a massive grin. This is a natural consequence of the shallow nature of the "techlash". The US doesn't have a substantive privacy law, and the FTC has to base work on what they consider unfair or misleading practices. If critics don't understand the equities balance, they can't balance equities. This isn't binding on other companies, but it will be interesting to see if they use this as a reason to reduce APIs and favor their own apps. The data stolen and exported to the cloud (GPS, SMS, contacts, mail, calendar) from Android/iOS dwarfs SCL/CA.

This is part of the problem I keep trying to highlight. When your only focus is on punishing big tech companies like Facebook, be careful about how you do so, because there are so many important tradeoffs, that if you don't pay attention to what you're doing, all you really end up doing is locking them in as the dominant platforms.

And that's really what's happening there. Our lack of understanding about privacy or about data and "ownership" will lead people to a very dangerous place, where we make short term decisions -- such as what happened here -- that are focused on "punishing" one particular set of companies for one particular set of actions (many of which were really bad). But the end result is even worse. You've set up the system such that the only logical and reasonable way out of this bad situation is foreclosed.

The best way out of Facebook's dominance is to have it give up total control over the data it collects. But, here, the FTC has done the reverse. It has given Facebook more control over the data it collects in the name of "protecting" privacy. This is backwards. Rather than saying that Facebook shouldn't be the one protecting all that data, the FTC is just saying "protect it better, and don't let any other service be allowed to come in and do anything." And that includes the kinds of competitive services that are necessary to eat away at Facebook's position.

I know a lot of people are mad the fine wasn't larger, but the fine doesn't matter. All that really matters is whether or not competitive services are enabled or not, and this agreement forecloses the best way to actually chip away at Facebook's market position. And that's the real shame.

Filed Under: apis, competition, fines, ftc, openness, privacy, regulations, settlement, sharing
Companies: facebook

Instead Of Parents Spying On Their Kids Online, Why Not Teach Them How To Be Good Digital Citizens

from the don't-normalize-surveillance dept

Last week, when I wrote about Senator Graham's crazy "But think of the children online!" moral panic hearing, I highlighted comments from a guy named Christopher McKenna, who runs an organization called "Protect Young Eyes," which is one of those organizations that freaks parents out about all the evil things your kids might be up to. Among many of the crazy and misleading comments McKenna made, was one that was actually accurate, but interpreted incorrectly. McKenna whined that it was impossible to "watch over" kids online all the time. His solution was to force companies (and politicians) to censor the internet with filters and other tools. Or, at the very least he seemed to think parents needed better tools to spy on their kids' online activities.

As we pointed out, another person on the panel suggested that rather than spying on our kids all the time, it would be better for parents to educate kids how to be good digital citizens, how to avoid danger, and how to better interact with the world around them. He was almost entirely ignored for the rest of the panel.

This divide in parenting techniques is a big deal, however. Thanks to new technologies it is much easier to spy on kids all the time. But we should be wary of that. Wired just had an article about how the app Life360 is ruining kids' summer as parents are tracking everything they do:

That’s because for many adolescents, adult supervision has turned into adult surveillance. Schools are adopting facial recognition technology to monitor campuses. Parents can now remotely check their child’s browsing histories and social media accounts, watch their movements via motion-sensing cameras, and track everywhere they go with location-sharing apps. In a Pew Research Center study last year, 58 percent of US parents said they sometimes or often look at their teenager’s messages, call logs, and the websites they visit. In a separate study from 2016, 16 percent said they used location-sharing apps.

Life360 is one of the many digital monitoring tools now used by millions of parents in the United States. The app functions like an enhanced version of Apple’s “Find My” feature that lets you share your location with friends or family—or what the company calls “your Circle.” In addition to location sharing, Life360 lets family members see how fast people in their circle are driving, how much battery their cell phones have, and more. The service is free to download and use, although you can pay for additional features. According to the San Francisco-based company, Life360 had over 18 million monthly active users at the end of 2018.

This is... horrifying? We're teaching the exact wrong thing to kids. We're not teaching them to think for themselves, or to have their own life skills and street (or digital) smarts. Instead, we've become so overly worried (at a time when there is significantly less risks), and so infatuated with our ability to spy on someone's every move, that we've not considered what kinds of lessons we're teaching those kids in the first place. For one, teaching them to expect to be surveilled and watched at all times seems like a really awful idea. Second, it's telling kids that parents don't trust them. And, sure, not all kids should be trusted, but defaulting to that position seems like a terrible idea.

And all of this is happening at a time when people are freaked out about Facebook and Google's "surveillance" of everyday activities -- but what are we teaching our kids when apps like Life360 go way, way further. Indeed, much of the Wired article details how Life360 wraps up its constant surveillance in terms about how it's "helping families."

The term "helicopter parenting" became popular when I was a kid, but this seems to go way, way beyond that (perhaps this is "drone parenting?"). Protecting children is certainly a worthy goal, but what exactly are we protecting them from and at what costs? So much of this surveillance seems designed to prevent the very, very rare and very, very unlikely disaster scenarios. Those are horrifying, but given how unlikely they are, the actual "benefit" of this kind of surveillance is extremely low. However, the costs -- training kids to give up their privacy, denying trust, hindering the ability of children to trust their own instincts and learn on their own -- seems much, much higher.

Filed Under: children, educating, parenting, privacy, surveillance, teaching