Corrupt Personalization
A new story by Ellen Nakashima and Barton Gellman details the almost completely global scope of the NSA’s surveillance activities, covering 193 countries, and explains how Americans’ information is being swept up in that data collection.
According to a recently disclosed letter from DNI director James Clapper to Senator Ron Wyden, the FBI and CIA are regularly drawing on NSA PRISM data for domestic investigations. TechDirt’s Mike Masnick says “this would seem to be a pretty blatant attempt to end run around the 4th Amendment.”
ProPublica’s Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson have put the NSA’s programs on one two-dimensional chart, grouping them by whether they are focused on foreign or domestic targets and how much they collect bulk or targeted data.
Glenn Greenwald, who has been promising a very big story on how Americans are being surveilled, tweets that “After 3 months working on our story, USG today suddenly began making new last-minute claims which we intend to investigate before publishing.”
PayPal has frozen ProtonMail’s account, questioning whether it has government approval to encrypt email, according to a post from Andy Yen of ProtonMail.
In the New Statesman, Laurie Penny ties together Facebook’s power to manipulate users’ moods with its ability to nudge users to go vote, saying “for you and me, this is a massive secret political experiment on the creepy-totalitarian side of interesting. For a senator, or a Member of Parliament, this news means…power that demands to be paid attention to and courted.”
Facebook’s emotional contagion experiment likely didn’t violate any federal law, experts tell Mashable’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai.
It was only four months after researchers ran their emotional manipulation survey that the company updated its terms of service to include “research” in its data use policy, reports Kashmir Hill for Forbes. She notes that this all occurred in the precise context of Facebook’s negotiating a consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission promising to get users consent to user privacy changes.
Mike Isaac reminds us of the many, many times Facebook has violated its users privacy, only to apologize afterwards.
On the New York Times op-ed page, Jaron Lanier decries the lack of transparency in Facebook’s study, pointing out that “It is unimaginable that a pharmaceutical firm would be allowed to randomly, secretly sneak an experimental drug, no matter how mild, into the drinks of hundreds of thousands of people, just to see what happens, without ever telling those people.”
Christian Sandvig’s essay on “corrupt personalization” and how he gets his college students to pay attention to the issue is a must-read backgrounder on the whole Facebook controversy. This issue isn’t going away, folks. As
Zeynep Tufekci just tweeted, “Look, a tiny newsfeed manipulation has people alarmed when reality is constant algorithmic manipulation. That’s the gap we need to discuss.”
Jennifer Lyn Morone is an American living in London who has decided to become a trademarked corporation in order to gain more ownership and control over her data, reports the Economist’s Schumpeter blog. With the help of some techie friends, she is building the “Database of ME” to help her better monetize her personal data.
The House Ethics Committee has quietly decided to stop requiring Members to disclose when they receive free travel junkets, Shane Goldmacher reports for National Journal. While lobbyists can no longer directly pay for such travel, non-profit groups with close ties to special interests have filled that void, he notes.
This is cool: Rainforest Action is turning recycled smartphones into solar-powered sensors hidden in endangered forests designed to alert local reserve managers when they pick up the sounds of chainsaws or other encroachments,