Technology firm’s Ad Exchange processing of users’ personal data being investigated
The Irish data protection commission has opened an investigation into Google over suspected infringements of European Union privacy rules.
The statutory inquiry will probe whether Google’s online Ad Exchange violated general data protection regulations (GDPR) covering the sharing of personal data of internet users, the watchdog said in a statement on Wednesday.
Continue reading...We thank West Midlands police’s ethics committee for giving serious attention to the potential for harm arising out of data-driven offending prediction models (Alert over risk of bias in tool to predict who will reoffend, 20 April).
A wider public debate needs to be informed by research into how effectively the use of people’s data predicts and reduces criminality, who else experiences targeting and privacy intrusion due to prediction errors, and whether better use of data could reduce such collateral harm.
Continue reading...Staff review audio in effort to help AI-powered voice assistant respond to commands
When Amazon customers speak to Alexa, the company’s AI-powered voice assistant, they may be heard by more people than they expect, according to a report.
Amazon employees around the world regularly listen to recordings from the company’s smart speakers as part of the development process for new services, Bloomberg News reports.
Continue reading...Facebook has targeted politicians around the world – including the former UK chancellor, George Osborne – promising investments and incentives while seeking to pressure them into lobbying on Facebook’s behalf against data privacy legislation, an explosive new leak of internal Facebook documents has revealed.
The documents, which have been seen by the Observer and Computer Weekly, reveal a secretive global lobbying operation targeting hundreds of legislators and regulators in an attempt to procure influence across the world, including in the UK, US, Canada, India, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Malaysia and all 28 states of the EU. The documents include details of how Facebook:
Continue reading...The recent court decision against the neighbours of Tate Modern in London belies a much wider problem – everyone is constantly being watched
Alexander McFadyen says that he and his family were “more or less constantly watched” while they were at home. They had to be “properly dressed” at all times, and even then they were often photographed or filmed, and sometimes spied on with binoculars. McFadyen set out to measure the problem. While working at the dining table, he counted 84 people taking photographs in 90 minutes. This is the reality of living in a glass-walled flat in Block C of Neo Bankside, just 34 metres from the viewing gallery at Tate Modern, which receives up to 600,000 visitors a year.
A neighbour, Claire Fearn, said being watched like that made her “sick to her stomach”. People waved and made obscene gestures at her and her family. Her husband, Giles Fearn, found pictures of their home posted online by strangers. Many of the images are still on Twitter, often with amused remarks about the misfortune of their wealthy owners. (The flats are worth an average of £4.35m each.) Another neighbour, Lindsay Urquhart, visited the viewing gallery and heard someone remark that she and the other residents of Block C deserved to lose their privacy because they were “rich bastards”.
Continue reading...CNIL found that company failed to offer users transparent information on data use
The French data protection watchdog CNIL has fined Google a record €50m (£44m) for failing to provide users with transparent and understandable information on its data use policies.
For the first time, the company was fined using new terms laid out in the pan-European general data protection regulation. The maximum fine for large companies under the new law is 4% of annual turnover, meaning the theoretical maximum fine for Google is almost €4bn.
Continue reading...Man, 20, driven by ‘annoyance’ at statements made by politicians and celebrities
A 20-year-old man has admitted to police that he was behind one of the country’s biggest data breaches, in which the private details of almost 1,000 public figures were leaked.
The man, who lives with his parents in the central German state of Hesse and is still in the education system, told police he had acted alone and was not politically motivated.
Continue reading...Most popular mobile weather app misled users who shared location information, say Los Angeles prosecutors in lawsuit
People relied on the most popular mobile weather app to track forecasts that determined whether they chose jeans over shorts and packed a parka or umbrella, but its owners used it to track their every step and profit off that information, Los Angeles prosecutors said Friday.
The operator of the Weather Channel mobile app misled users who agreed to share their location information in exchange for personalized forecasts and alerts, and they instead unwittingly surrendered personal privacy when the company sold their data to third parties, the city attorney, Michael Feuer, said.
Continue reading...