Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.
And…another publication (as second author) in a law journal for our work on social media companies and their privacy practices, as related to compliance with Canadian law.
I think this puts me on track for 5-6 publications this year alone…
Government photograph databases form the basis of any police facial recognition system. They’re not very good today, but they’ll only get better. But the government no longer needs to collect photographs. Experiments demonstrate that the Facebook database of tagged photographs is surprisingly effective at identifying people. As more places follow Disney’s lead in fingerprinting people at its theme parks, the government will be able to use that to identify people as well.
In a few years, the whole notion of a government-issued ID will seem quaint. Among facial recognition, the unique signature from your smart phone, the RFID chips in your clothing and other items you own, and whatever new technologies that will broadcast your identity, no one will have to ask to see ID. When you walk into a store, they’ll already know who you are. When you interact with a policeman, she’ll already have your personal information displayed on her Internet-enabled glasses.
Soon, governments won’t have to bother collecting personal data. We’re willingly giving it to a vast network of for-profit data collectors, and they’re more than happy to pass it on to the government without our knowledge or consent.
Bruce Schneider, “The Public/Private Surveillance Partnership”
It’s the ability for government to prospectively combine public and private data that makes American laws such as CISPA, which would permit the disclosure of private information to public bodies without absent warrant requirements, so significant. Privacy legislation serves as a necessary friction to delay, limit, and prevent governments from accessing citizens’ and resident aliens’ personal information unless such access is absolutely necessary: we need to strengthen such laws to preserve basic democratic freedoms, not weaken or erode them.
In 2010 and 2011, many discounted and differentiated Julian Assange from mainstream journalists by comparing him to a spy or foreign agent, despite the fact that he was just doing what every major US journalism organization does: publishing leaked classified information in the public interest.
Well, the government alleges in Rosen’s case that he acted “much like an intelligence officer would run a clandestine intelligence source” and communicated his “clandestine communications plan.” This is reminiscent of a disturbing House Judiciary hearing last year where the committee’s lead witness compared the New York Times’ David Sanger to a spy, saying he “systematically penetrating the Obama White House as effectively as any foreign agent.”
By that language, the government is arguing journalism is now akin to spying, no matter if its WikiLeaks or the mainstream press.
Trevor Timm, “Virtually Everything the Government Did to WikiLeaks is Now Being Done to Mainstream US Reporters”
Snapchat’s problems with its glaring loopholes are mounting, and this time its fate may end up in the hands of the FTC after EPIC’s complaint.
Just because the American’s lack privacy commissioners doesn’t mean that there aren’t dedicated civil society advocates holding companies’ feet the fire. Nor that violating contract law is any less important in the US than in other jurisdictions.
Just in case you thought that Snapchat’s privacy settings were awesome, researchers have found that the security model is pretty piss poor.
There is a technical term economists like to use for behavior like this. Unbelievable chutzpah.
- Edward Kleinbard, a law professor at USC speaking to NYT about Apple’s overseas tax situation — or lack thereof.
One potentially good thing out of all this, Tim Cook will address it directly tomorrow in front of the Senate:
Mr. Cook is expected to emphasize that Apple is most likely “the largest corporate income tax payer in the U.S., having paid nearly $6 billion in taxes to the U.S. Treasury” in the last fiscal year. “Apple does not use tax gimmicks,” Mr. Cook is expected to testify.
He is expected to seek to rebut the Congressional findings by arguing that some of Apple’s largest subsidiaries do not reduce Apple’s tax liability, and to argue in support of a sweeping overhaul of the United States corporate tax code – in particular, lowering rates on companies moving foreign overseas earnings back to the United States. Apple currently assigns more than $100 billion to offshore subsidiaries.
I figured this would lead to a change in tax policy. Now I’m sure of it.
(via parislemon)
This story, the day before Cook testifies to the Senate, is probably the worst thing Apple PR could have dreamed of. I wouldn’t want to be in Cook’s shoes tomorrow though, by the same token, if I were an American taxpayer I’d be pissed as all hell about Apple’s actions regardless of the legality of those actions.
Yahoo unveils the new Flickr with one terabyte of free space
Looks wild.
As a pretty heavy Google user, I look forward to seeing if Google ups their own storage offerings to ‘compete’ with Yahoo!
Yahoo will need to balance its involvement with Tumblr to let the creative site flourish while also driving some benefits to core Yahoo. While Tumblr likely needs to take its feed advertising slowly so as not to negatively impact the user experience, the company should be able to leverage Yahoo!’s sales force and advertising relationships.
So it’s kind of cool to see what actual analysts say about Yahoo buying Tumblr. But I have a pretty hard time figuring out what benefits the site would be driving to “core Yahoo”. Better integration with Flickr, maybe? Not really sure what core Yahoo comprises, anymore. (via jakke)
This is something I’ve been thinking about a bit. Just off the top of my head, how could Yahoo! leverage Tumblr:
Those are just the most immediate thoughts. I really think that what happens will occur over time and not tomorrow; Yahoo! needs to get ‘integration right’ or else risk drowning their new $1.1 billion dollar baby.
Hackers who breached Google database appeared to seek identities of Chinese spies in U.S. who might be under watch.
This story is incredibly significant: it clarifies an additional target of the Aurora attacks in 2009 (the database that Google stored FISA warrant information in) and, as an extension, provides a notion of why NSA was involved in the investigation (i.e. any revelation of FISA information constitutes a national security issue).
I suspect we’ll never get the full story of what all occurred, but this article very nicely supplements some of the stuff we learned in Levy’s book In the Plex, as well as popular reporting around the series of attacks on major Western companies that happened in late 2009. It also reveals the significant of meta-data/information: it wasn’t necessarily required for attackers to know what specifically waas being monitored to take action to protect agents; all that was needed was information that the surveillance was occurring for countermeasures to be deployed.
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