A Week of Backlash
Some of America's largest corporations are on their heels after their questionable practices are publicized
Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile promise to stop selling their customers’ location data
After Motherboard reported that three of the four major U.S. mobile carriers were selling customers’ real-time location data, and that it was winding up in the hands of people with ethical ambiguities, all three have decided to cease the practice - although not without controversy. In a letter expressing “disbelief and disappointment”, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden is taking on T-Mobile for failing to follow through on a similar commitment it already made in June of last year.
Analysis
It’s a good thing to see an expose of this type getting mainstream attention, but, as the T-Mobile promise from last year shows, it remains to be seen if it will have any tangible impact. I’m skeptical that the mobile carriers won’t find a semantical workaround, such as forming a subsidiary that they “freely” supply with location data, allowing that company to resell it.
Action Items
Outside of sweeping legislation, such as Sen. Wyden’s proposed Consumer Data Protection Act, there is not much that can be done to stop the collection and selling of location data - outside of not engaging with any service or application that uses location. This would include all major social media platforms (Twitter is known to sell such raw information) and service based online platforms, like Google, who use it for targeted advertising.
Hypotheticals
Have we gotten as much out of the last decade of mobile technology as we’ve put in?
France fines Google €50 million for privacy violations
The National Data Protection Commission fined Google over “lack of transparency, inadequate information and lack of valid consent” in targeted advertising Monday, in accordance with the E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation. The crux of the decision was the “forced consent” to intrusive terms of service in order to prevent immediate loss of Google services.
Analysis
Google certainly makes far more from their data collection practices in France than they are being fined here. It will be interesting to see if Google seeks to appeal smaller rulings such as this, or if they will see them as part of their operating costs. Certainly, when the company’s entire revenue model hinges on the collection of as much personal data as possible, fully complying with the GDPR is the most cost prohibitive move.
In Davos Tuesday, Google’s chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, attempted to put a lighter spin on data mining, claiming, “data is more like sunlight than oil”. She likely wouldn’t have been expected to even address such issues a few years ago, proving that awareness of these practices is growing.
Action Items
Check out Nextcloud as a privacy oriented alternative to Google drive. Though it’s a self hosted platform, there are several service providers that will handle the setup and hosting for you.
Hypotheticals
Would Google maintain its market dominance if everyone was given full access to their personal profiles and see the breadth of what’s stored and repackaged for profit?
A hypothesis on the true intent behind Facebook’s “Ten Year Challenge” goes viral
When technology author Kate O’Neil tweeted that Facebook’s Ten Year Challenge, a trend of users sharing profile photos from a decade ago juxtaposed to a current one, could be an underhanded attempt to train artificial intelligence in facial recognition, the idea quickly gained traction on social media. In a follow up article for Wired, she addressed some of the criticisms of her theory and further expanded on its plausibility.
Analysis
Facebook is known to be a company that manipulates its platform in dubious ways for its own research purposes, like when they modified users’ feeds for an undisclosed mood manipulation experiment. O’Neil’s hypothesis is entirely plausible, but there’s no actual evidence to back it up.
That being said, while Facebook’s reported “denial” mentions that the trend was started by users, it doesn’t deny that the company’s facial recognition engines are making use of it as a data set. Facebook can’t make such a denial, because every photo uploaded to the site is run through a facial recognition algorithm to power the tagging feature.
Action items
Before you post anything to Facebook, picture yourself as the unwitting protagonist of an episode of Black Mirror, and you’ll have an accurate sense of the types of AI and photo recognition technology that will be run against your content.
Hypotheticals
Now that the normal response to anything Facebook does is to assume nefariousness intent, can their brand survive?
Honorable Mentions
Quite a few free VPN apps are actually routing traffic through China
DuckDuckGo parters with Apple for map results
The Big Brother of Things is compiled by Blake Callens.