Dust Yourself Off

Phylagen, a San Francisco biotech company, has developed a technique for tracking previous locations of objects based on the composition of dust the object has collected.

In another experiment, the sampling technology allowed researchers to determine where a person had walked within 1 kilometer in San Francisco, because of the microbes picked up by their shoes.

Right now, this technique is proposed for use in tracking manufacturing locations in supply chains.  If it’s successful, expect it to be used first in forensics, and then in ubiquitous “backwards” location tracking for behavior profiling.

Oh, great.  Now, in addition to fresh clothes and a good scrub in the shower, I need to swap/brush/scrub my shoes to keep the snoops of the world at bay.

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The Cyberfascism Bulleting #3: Spring Cleaning Edition

BIG BIZ

• Uh, oh. The punditry is starting to wise up. Here’s 4 Reasons Why Big Tech is Hazardous to Our Lives.
• Google AI Ethics Council is Falling Apart. Part artistic ethical differences, part Googloid mau-mauing. Only the truly clueless would use “Google” and “ethics” in the same sentence.
• Time for a ‘Third-Party Audit’ of De-Platforming Policies. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo) doesn’t think folks like Twitter are holding up their end of the bargain
  

  Social media platforms have been given a “sweetheart deal,” according to Hawley, which includes “immunity from liability for illegal content posted by third parties.”
  They were given special consideration, he said, because they promised to provide “a forum for a true diversity of political discourse.”

• Pop antiquarian James Lileks tries to pull a fast one and cadge an extra discount on a Coke 12-pack, and runs afowl of real-time big data.
  

  Went to Lunds. They had a sale: $1.99 on Coke 12-packs. Well! I bought one, the new Orange-Vanilla Dreamsicle flavor. LIMIT ONE PER DAY said a handwritten sign, because obviously people had been loading up. Drove south, decided I would check the other Lunds for the large paper bags. They had them! I also picked up another 12-pack, and I was thinking: this goes against the rules. I wonder if I can get away with this.

  On the way out I noticed that the receipt did not give me the sale price; I went back. A manager asked: did you buy one earlier today?

  “I did!” I said. “I’m sorry! I wasn’t trying to get away with anything. Well I guess I was.”

  “The computer knows everything,” she said.

  Doofus. If you’re going to sail close to the wind, pay cash. It leaves no footprints.

• Google is thrashing.
  

  For a while there has been a subset of people concerned about Google’s privacy and antitrust issues, but now Google is eroding trust that its existing customers have in the company. That’s a huge problem. Google has significantly harmed its brand over the last few months, and I’m not even sure the company realizes it.

BIG MED

• John Cook explains how Big Cloud People might infer your religion from your Fitbit. This is a great example of what Zuboff calls mining the behavioral surplus (metadata).
• John Cook is on a roll. Your health data is only protected by “covered entities.” More entities are covered in Texas than in most other places.

CYBER CREEPS

Surveillance technology enables bad behavior from individuals as well as large institutions. Looking for a new way to be a creep? a pervert? an asshole? There’s an app, or gadget for that.

• Airbnb has a hidden-camera problem.

ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA

• UNIX guru Linus Torvalds: “I absolutely detest modern “social media”
  

  The whole “liking” and “sharing” model is just garbage. There is no effort and no quality control. In fact, it’s all geared to the reverse of quality control, with lowest common denominator targets, and click-bait, and things designed to generate an emotional response, often one of moral outrage.

• Writing in USA Today, Glenn Reynolds says “It’s too easy to form a mob today.” Quoting John Hayward
  

  Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, mob action no longer requires any significant investment of time or physical energy. In essence, mobs have been subsidized, so we’re getting more of them.

GOING DARK

• Here’s a great discussion and “how to” if you’re thinking about bailing out on Twitter.

THINGS TO THINK ABOUT

• Zones of Order and Chaos. Richard Fernandez lays out a model for the New World (Dis)Order.
  

  What if live-streaming required a government permit, and videos could only be broadcast online after a seven-second delay? What if Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were treated like
  traditional publishers, expected to vet every post, comment and image before they reached the public? Or like Boeing or Toyota, held responsible for the safety of their products and
  the harm they cause?

  Imagine what the Internet would look like if tech executives could be jailed for failing to censor hate and violence.

  

  https://remodernreview.wordpress.com/2019/03/31/paintings-the-conspirators/

• My continuing review of Shoshanna Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance CapitalismZuboff’s focus is the explosive growth of the invasive exploitation of metadata by large corporations like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. She is much less concerned with the advent of surveillance states, who she treats mainly as enablers of Big Data. I think Big Biz and Big State are in competition (cahoots?) and both exploit both our metadata and the CyberMob to advance their agendas. The value of Zuboff’s analysis is that she builds frameworks that describe and predict the behavior of both Big State and Big Biz. For example, in collecting metadata, the Biggies follow the simple dictum “more is better.” Zuboff calls this the extraction imperative. How do they get “more?” Through economies of scope: “…behavioral surplus must be vast, but it also must be varied.”
  • Expand the scope of data collection. Google Maps and Streetview anyone? How about that FitBit?
  • Expand the depth of data collection. Amazon tracks your purchases. In the future, the store freezer case doors will track your gaze with facial recognition displays.

The Cyberfascism Bulletin #2: April Fool’s Edition

I wish I was foolin’. All this stuff’s real, so the joke’s on us.

BIG BIZ

• An oldie but goodie: Kim DuToit discovers that the Weather Channel app is selling his location data in near real time. He is not amused.
• Heck, I didn’t even realize that drunken online shopping was a thing. How naive of me. Of course, the Amazonians and Googleoids would never try to reinforce or exploit this behavior pattern, would they?

BIG STATE

• Life’s a bitch for a “discredited individual” under China’s social credit system.
• Two US state Teachers’ Retirement Systems are investing pension funds in Hikvision, a Chinese firm whose surveillance equipment is reportedly used in Muslim detention reeducation camps. Which states? Why California and New York, of course.
• Google is going to improve Internet access in Cuba.
  

  As an authoritarian regime with an abysmal human rights record, Cuba’s got an incentive to keep its citizens offline, and regularly harasses and arrests digital dissidents. Reporters Without Borders calls the nation an “Internet Enemy,” putting in the same list as North Korea, Syria, and Iran.

  The censorship manifests itself in a really interesting way. While there’s not much actual site-level blocking, Cuba does surveil its citizens online.

  Google just wants a piece of the action.

BIG ED

• Smart speakers may snoop on family conversations. More than 4 in 10 parents of 6- to 8-year olds say their children use the assistants for homework help. OK, letting your kids be raised by robots may actually be a step up from having them raised by wolves their peers.

ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA

Smartphones and their ilk are the ultimate tools for pooling our ignorance. And pettiness. And intolerance.

• Wikipedia Editors Paid to Protect Political, Tech, and Media Figures. I had no
  idea there was such a job as “paid Wikipedia fixer.”
• Human contact is becoming a luxury good
• There’s an epidemic of teenage loneliness. One obvious culprit is the overuse of ­social media. A 2017 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that “young adults with high” ­social media use “seem to feel more ­socially isolated than their counterparts” who use social media less
• Suggesting your fellow students get a grip will only get you death threats. Thanks, Twitter.
• Apparently, Twitter has an aversion to the anti-abortion film Unplanned.

GOING DARK

• News Flash! ‘Technoference’ Is Making Our Lives More Sluggish, Study Finds. Just put the phone down. As Groucho may have said “I love my cigar, too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.”
• Francis Turner takes Twitter to task. Is he exaggerating? I think not.

The Cyberfascism Bulletin #1: Spring Break Edition

This is the first in a continuing series of “callouts” detailing the onslaught of the ubiquitous surveillance and behavioral influence state. Remember, whether the state seizes industry, or industry seizes the state, the result is still fascism.

BIG BIZ

• Volvo wants to spy on you while you drive. Two thoughts immediately came to mind: (1) Isn’t Volvo owned by those “social credit” folks, the Chinese? and (2) I find it impossible to utter the phrase hot-rod Volvo without laughing.
• Google tracks users’ phones–even when their location history is turned off. If you want to keep your movements to yourself, you need to do two things: (1) turn location services OFF and (2) don’t keep any of that GoogleSh1t on your phone.
• Heck, I didn’t even realize that email tracking was a thing. How naive of me.

BIG STATE

• Facial recognition is coming to an airport near you. With sketchy privacy controls, and a less-than-upfront opt-out policy. Our reporter makes the classic statistical of drilling down on the false positive rate, and ignoring the false negatives.
• Know your surveillance cameras. They’re everywhere.
• How did the police know you were near a crime scene? Google told them What did I just say about that GoogleSh!t?

BIG ED

• Public schools are enabling Google to track kids in school. Glenn Reynolds is right: In the future, we’ll view sending your kids to public school as a form of child abuse.

BIG MED

• Rwanda has proposed the world’s first country-wide DNA database…in an effort to crack down on crime. Really? Rwanda? No way THAT could be abused.

ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is pretty much a blight on society, a timewasting temptation to reveal way too much information that should be kept private. The rise of cyberbullying and online outrage mobs are symptoms of what I call the Cyber Sturmabteilung, the Internet incarnations of san-coulottes, lynch mobs, Red Guards, Khmer Rouge. The only way to win that game is to not play.

• Chelsea Clinton(!) called out for NZ Muslim massacre
• When Kids Realize Their Whole Life Is Already Online

GOING DARK

• Cybersocials get freaked out by The Antisocial
• Google Chrome may be improving incognito browsing. Why do I suspect a catch?

 

Cyberfacsism, Canadian-Style

Big Mountie is watching you, eh?

Documents obtained by Motherboard from Ontario’s Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services (MCSCS) through an access to information request show that at least two provinces—Ontario and Saskatchewan—maintain a “Risk-driven Tracking Database” that is used to amass highly sensitive information about people’s lives. …

Information about people believed to be “at risk” of becoming criminals or victims of harm is shared between civilian agencies and police and is added to the database when a person is being evaluated for a rapid intervention intended to lower their risk levels. Interventions can range from a door knock and a chat to forced hospitalization or arrest.

Sounds faintly Orwellian, the cops using healthcare records to decide who gets a knock on their door, based on an algorithm. What could go wrong, eh?

Tip from Sarah Hoyt at the Instapundit.

Big Brother is watching…

…with this collection of creepy gizmos.  Know your opposition.

 flock of stationary license plate readers

Read it for the cameras, then follow the link to Tattoo Recognition Programs.

Tip from the Geek Press.  He links, you decide.

Sorry, you’ve reached your social credit limit

China has blocked millions of “discredited” travellers from buying plane or train tickets as part of the country’s controversial “social credit” system aimed at improving the behaviour of citizens.

This is where ubiquitous surveillance by the state (directly or via contractors) eventually leads.  This is why you shouldn’t trust the folks who want to dispossess you of your car; their motives are not what they professs.

Tip from the Instapundit, who predicts some Chinese people will find their social credit card inoperable in the bread lines of the near future.