It’s like teaching them to look both ways before crossing the street. Reading privacy policies for apps is about learning basic safety tips in the Internet Age and gives parents an opportunity to teach kids about responsibility and self awareness on the Web.
Chicago police say its computers can tell who will be a violent criminal, but critics say it’s nothing more than racial profiling.
When the Chicago Police Department sent one of its commanders to Robert McDaniel’s home last summer, the 22-year-old high school dropout was surprised. Though he lived in a neighborhood well-known for bloodshed on its streets, he hadn’t committed a crime or interacted with a police officer recently. And he didn’t have a violent criminal record, nor any gun violations. In August, he incredulously told the Chicago Tribune, “I haven’t done nothing that the next kid growing up hadn’t done.” Yet, there stood the female police commander at his front door with a stern message: if you commit any crimes, there will be major consequences. We’re watching you.
What McDaniel didn’t know was that he had been placed on the city’s “heat list” — an index of the roughly 400 people in the city of Chicago supposedly most likely to be involved in violent crime. Inspired by a Yale sociologist’s studies and compiled using an algorithm created by an engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the heat list is just one example of the experiments the CPD is conducting as it attempts to push policing into the 21st century.
I won’t lie to you: it’s difficult to protect your smartphones. But after a few weeks of following trackers, I have learned a few things.
Check your smartphone
1 – Some of your apps need your personal data to function. Others don’t. To sort through them, I installed Clueful by Bitdefender. It’s an app that tells you what information is used by each of your apps. It warns you if some apps use your information without your knowledge. You are being tracked but at least you know it.
2 – Before downloading anything, make sure you actually need it. Get rid of the apps that you no longer use. Close apps running in the background. In iOS, just double-click the Home button at the bottom of the screen. In Android, you can do it by opening “Applications” under “Settings”.
3 – If you like, you can also disable geolocation services. In Android, just go to “Settings”, then “Geolocation” and disable. At the bottom of the same page, you can click on “Google Location History” to disable this function. On the iPhone, go to “Settings” then “Privacy” then “Location Services”.
4 – Ad tracking can be limited. If you use Android, you will find “Ads” under “Google Settings”. You can disable “Interest-based advertising” and re-initialise “Advertising ID”, the equivalent of a computer cookie. This method is not fool-proof, since an application that had access to your UDID will recognise your phone, but not all apps do it. The process is the same for the iPhone. You will find “Ads” in “Settings” under “Advertising”.
Be anonymous
5 – To navigate completely anonymously, you can download Tor or Orbot, developed by the Guardian Project. These services are effective but require patience, as uploading pages is slow. The Duckduckgo.com search engine promises “not to spy on you” and does not store user’s personal data.
6 – Use “Off The Record (OTR)” messaging apps. These apps don’t store any messages on any servers, so there’s nothing to snoop on. ChatSecure is a popular option.
7 – Do not connect to free Wi-Fi. If you really must use free Wi-Fi, do not access your personal accounts (email, bank account, social networks, etc.) Otherwise, install a VPN (Virtual Private Network) app which enables you to connect to the Internet securely.
8 – If you want to take it further, do not hesitate to stay informed on the Guardian Project website, which has developed tools that make it possible to make images anonymous, encrypt communications, etc. The new Courier tool makes it possible to access an uncensored Internet. With the “PANIC” button, you can uninstall it quickly. It is available in several languages, including English, Chinese, Tibetan, Ukrainian and Russian.
Zineb Dryef
On Wednesday, nine major publishers began publishing articles straight to Facebook under the social network’s long-anticipated product, called Instant Articles. Facebook sweetened the deal by letting publishers control the ad sales, branding and content; sell ads on the articles and keep all the revenue; and get data on their readers.
Still, publishers were mixed in their embrace: BuzzFeed and NBC News were the only ones to go all in committing to using the product. Others, like The New York Times and the Atlantic, are taking a more cautious approach. There are still plenty of unknowns, chiefly whether Facebook’s terms will remain as generous to publishers as they seem to be now.
On the far left and the far right, users of the social network are stuck in echo chambers of their own making.
Does Facebook filter our political discourse? Last week, the company released a study of user profiles that purported to show that the social network’s News Feed algorithm doesn’t limit our access to diverse and opposing political points of view. Rather, it said, the narrowness of our Facebook conversations is a result of how we naturally behave. Facebook didn’t create the so-called filter bubble, the authors claimed; it merely reflects it.
Is Facebook an echo chamber? Does the social network help us create filter bubbles, through which we’re only exposed to content and opinions that are like our own? According to the company, not really.
In new study published today in the journal Science, Facebook claims that it’s mostly humans, not its News Feed ranking algorithm, that are at fault for making their feeds ideologically consistent.
“While News Feed surfaces content that is slightly more aligned with an individual’s own ideology (based on that person’s actions on Facebook), who they friend and what content they click on are more consequential than the News Feed ranking in terms of how much diverse content they encounter,” according to Facebook’s Data Science page.
The National Security Agency and its closest allies planned to hijack data links to Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware, a top-secret document reveals.
The surveillance project was launched by a joint electronic eavesdropping unit called the Network Tradecraft Advancement Team, which includes spies from each of the countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance — the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.
The top-secret document, obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was published Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept. The document outlines a series of tactics that the NSA and its counterparts in the Five Eyes were working on during workshops held in Australia and Canada between November 2011 and February 2012.
The device in your purse or jeans that you think is a cellphone — guess again. It is a tracking device that happens to make calls.
Which apps and tools actually keep your messages safe?
In the face of widespread Internet surveillance, we need a secure and practical means of talking to each other from our phones and computers. Many companies offer “secure messaging” products—but are these systems actually secure? We decided to find out, in the first phase of a new EFF Campaign for Secure & Usable Crypto.
Janet Vertesi, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, had an idea: would it be possible to hide her pregnancy from big data? Thinking about technology—the way we use it and the way it uses us—is her professional life’s work. Pregnant women, she knew, are a marketing gold mine; a pregnant woman’s marketing data is worth 15 times as much as the average person’s. Could Vertesi, a self-declared “conscientious objector” of Google ever since 2012, when they announced to users that they’d be able to read every email and chat, navigate all the human and consumer interactions having a baby would require and keep big data from ever finding out?
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