The chatter about how AI will change the world, take your job, out-consult the consultants, displace management, perform reviews, identify potential criminals and reoffenders, diagnose illnesses, etc., especially etc., is never ending.
AI is supposed to bring true objectivity to its many applications creating longed for change.
AI is good at increasing bias in the name of efficiency and objectivity.
It is even better at automating the loss of privacy and increasing surveillance in the name of safety.
Long before AI got hot Lou Gerstner knew the solution.
Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.
Something tech has forgotten in its love affair with data and its warped view of progress.
Or founders who plan to walk their talk even after them become successful, unlike the “don’t be evil” guys.
More entrepreneurs are pursuing social or environmental goals, said Greg Brown, a professor of finance at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina.
Companies like Toms, Warby Parker and Uncommon Goods have pushed this concept into the mainstream by creating successful business models built around helping others. This trend has led to the rise of B Corporations, a certification for companies that meet high standards of social responsibility. The program started in 2007, and now more than 2,500 companies have been certified in more than 50 countries.
Not all these startups make it and many are choosing to do it sans investors who often start pushing for growth and revenue, social mission be dammed.
And they are slowly succeeding.
Companies like Moka are a reflection of how consumers think as well, Professor Brown said. As people’s wealth increases, they think more about quality and less about quantity. They also consider the social context of what they’re buying.
The “bracelet of silence” is not the first device invented by researchers to stuff up digital assistants’ ears. In 2018, two designers created Project Alias, an appendage that can be placed over a smart speaker to deafen it. But Ms. Zheng argues that a jammer should be portable to protect people as they move through different environments, given that you don’t always know where a microphone is lurking.
These may not be the solution, assuming there is one, but this definitely isn’t.
Rather than building individual defenses, Mr. Hartzog believes, we need policymakers to pass laws that more effectively guard our privacy and give us control over our data.
You have on to consider tech’s actions in Europe to know that laws don’t stop tech.
There’s another potential positive brewing in tech — actually a disruption of sorts.
As brilliant as young coders are, though, the industry can’t survive on technical chops alone. Last year, Harvard Business Review shared that the average age of a successful startup founder isn’t 25 or 30—it’s 45 years old.
Call it a miracle, but investors, the majority over 40, are starting to value the experience that comes with age.
Hopefully, in the long-run, the potential for success will outweigh the hang-up on age.
As a whole, entrepreneurial communities also need to do more to bring diverse groups to meet-ups, panels and speaking engagements. The importance of having more voices at the table can’t be diminished.
Last week in a post about responsibility and the difference between Microsoft and other tech giants I said that change was coming, driven in by a surprising source.
The University of Chicago is the intellectual birthplace of the consensus in antitrust thinking over the last four decades — that monopoly law should place consumer interests, usually in the form of lower prices, above the concerns of smaller business rivals.
Big tech has been protected, because you can’t get lower than free, but people are waking up to the fact that free isn’t actually free.
More importantly, so is the University of Chicago and a growing list of experts.
But amid growing concerns about the unchecked power of today’s tech giants, economists and legal scholars are questioning whether the Chicago School still makes sense. Even the university’s own faculty is starting to publicly challenge the ideology.
It’s about time.
Considering how fast the world moves these days there is no excuse for those who are supposed to protect us to move at glacial speed.
At last year’s summit, Makan Delrahim, the Justice Department official in charge of antitrust, told attendees that his view of the cost of free platforms “has changed” with a greater understanding of the nature and scope of data collection and sharing.
Duh. No kidding.
Makes you wonder how the European Union figured it out so much quicker.
Yesterday you met the founder of a tech company that voluntarily shut down because its app was being abused.
Google, however, is playing its standard game of privacy announcements that sound great, but…
Users can now opt-in to have their location data automatically deleted from Google every three or every 18 months, depending on their preference.
The catch, of course, is the timeframe. If you bother deleting your info daily or weekly, as do many people, especially from their kids phones, Google’s offer of three or 18 months isn’t very attractive.
That’s plenty of time for the data to migrate.
Win-win for Google.
Makes them sound as if they are doing something big for your privacy, without actually costing them anything.
Guess that’s the difference between a company with a real conscience and one with a good feel for PR.
Every day when I look through the headlines there’s always another story about Facebook, Google, or another tech company abusing their users and offering the same old platitudes about how important user privacy is to them or being investigated/fined by the Feds, European Union and some other country.
Ho-hum, business as usual.
There is still a certain amount of choice about using Facebook, Google-Android, various apps, and smart products, such as Samsung’s smart TV, all of which can be hacked. And while it takes effort, to some extent you can protect yourself and your privacy.
But even Facebook and Google’s efforts to dominate pale in comparison, as do the dreams of power of every despot, politico, religious zealot, or military organization, to the future Amazon sees for itself.
Amazon’s incredible, sophisticated systems are no longer being used just to serve up good deals, fast delivery times, or cheap web storage. Its big data capabilities are now the tool of police forces, and maybe soon the military. In the corporate world, Amazon is positioning itself to be the “brains” behind just about everything.
Add to that Amazon’s belief that they have no responsibility in how their tech is used.
Rekognition, Amazon’s facial recognition software is a good example.
Civil rights groups have called it “perhaps the most dangerous surveillance technology ever developed”, and called for Amazon to stop selling it to government agencies, particularly police forces. City supervisors in San Francisco banned its use, saying the software is not only intrusive, but biased – it’s better at recognising white people than black and Asian people. (…) Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, doesn’t feel it’s Amazon’s responsibility to make sure Rekognition is used accurately or ethically.
Writing in the New York Times last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai argued that it is “vital for companies to give people clear, individual choices around how their data is used.” Like all Times opinion pieces, his editorial included multiple Google tracking scripts served without the reader’s knowledge or consent. Had he wanted to, Mr. Pichai could have learned down to the second when a particular reader had read his assurance that Google “stayed focused on the products and features that make privacy a reality.”
Writing in a similar vein in the Washington Post this March, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for Congress to pass privacy laws modeled on the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). That editorial was served to readers with a similar bouquet of non-consensual tracking scripts that violated both the letter and spirit of the law Mr. Zuckerberg wants Congress to enact.
An Ovia spokeswoman said the company does not sell aggregate data for advertising purposes. But women who use Ovia must consent to its 6,000-word “terms of use,” which grant the company a “royalty-free, perpetual, and irrevocable license, throughout the universe” to “utilize and exploit” their de-identified personal information for scientific research and “external and internal marketing purposes.” Ovia may also “sell, lease or lend aggregated Personal Information to third parties,” the document adds.
Good grief. As any search will tell you “de-identified” is a joke, since it’s no big deal to put a name to so-called anonymous data.
By now you should know that tech talks privacy, but walks data collection.
That means it’s up to you to do what you can, starting with always adjusting all default privacy settings.
Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
This post and the quote from the FTC dates back to 2015. Nothing on the government side has changed; the Feds are still investigating and Congress is still talking. And as we saw in last weeks posts the company executives are more arrogant and their actions are much worse. One can only hope that the US government will follow in the footsteps of European countries and rein them in.
Entrepreneurs are notorious for ignoring security — black hat hackers are a myth — until something bad happens, which, sooner or later, always does.
They go their merry way, tying all manner of things to the internet, even contraceptives and cars, and inventing search engines like Shodan to find them, with nary a thought or worry about hacking.
Concerns are pooh-poohed by the digerati and those voicing them are considered Luddites, anti-progress or worse.
“Any device that is connected to the Internet is at risk of being hijacked,” said Ms. Ramirez, who added that the large number of Internet-connected devices would “increase the number of access points” for hackers.
Interesting when you think about the millions of baby monitors, fitness trackers, glucose monitors, thermostats and dozens of other common items available and the hundreds being dreamed up daily by both startups and enterprise.
She also confronted tech’s (led by Google and Facebook) self-serving attitude towards collecting and keeping huge amounts of personal data that was (supposedly) the basis of future innovation.
“I question the notion that we must put sensitive consumer data at risk on the off chance a company might someday discover a valuable use for the information.”
At least someone in a responsible position has finally voiced these concerns — but whether or not she can do anything against tech’s growing political clout/money/lobbying power remains to be seen.
Offered to select Facebook partners, the data includes not just technical information about Facebook members’ devices and use of Wi-Fi and cellular networks, but also their past locations, interests, and even their social groups. This data is sourced not just from the company’s main iOS and Android apps, but from Instagram and Messenger as well. The data has been used by Facebook partners to assess their standing against competitors, including customers lost to and won from them, but also for more controversial uses like racially targeted ads.
Facebook owns Instagram, so it should come as no surprise that the private phone numbers and email addresses of millions of celebrities and influencers were scraped by a partner company.
Then there is Google, which dumps location data from millions of devices, not just Android, into a database called Sensorvault and makes it available for search to law enforcement, among others. On May 7 Google claimed it had found privacy religion, but on CNBC reported that Gmail tracks and saves every digital receipt, not just things, but services and, of course Amazon. Enterprise G Suite customers don’t fare much better. Their user passwords were kept un-encrypted on an internal server for years. Not hacked, but still…
The European Union is far ahead of the US in terms of privacy, anticompetitive actions, etc., but US consumers are finally waking up. So-called Big Tech is no longer popular politically and the Justice Department is opening an antitrust investigation of Google (Europe already fined it nearly 3 billion in 2017 for anticompetitive actions).
As promised yesterday, I’m updating the “don’t trust them, they lie” list (in mostly alphabetical order) with new links to the nefarious doings of your favorite “can’t live without ‘em” companies.
First up: Amazon. Anyone who has bought from Amazon is aware of how it uses your buying data to suggest additional purchases, as do all ecommerce sites. And there have been multiple stories about Alexa listening and responding even when it’s supposedly not on. But did you know that those supposedly anonymous recordings are discussed for amusement in Amazon employee chatrooms?
On a far more serious note, Ring, the video doorbell company Amazon acquired, is teaming up with police departments to offer free or discounted smart doorbells. And although it supposedly goes against Ring’s own policy, some of those PDs are adding to the terms of service the right to look at the saved video footage sans subpoena.
Sadly, Apple is on the nefarious list, in spite of it’s famous “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone” philosophy. But, as with other companies, the facts are more complicated — the thieves are in the apps.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
