Meta will start training its AI models using everyone's social media posts though European Union users can opt out, a luxury the rest of the world won't enjoy. The AI training rules kick in worldwide on June 26.

Meta has so far not included its European userbase in its AI training data, presumably to avoid legal conflict with the continent's privacy regulations. Now it's pushing ahead with that despite complaints.

As training AI from user data is doubtlessly going to be contentious in Europe, Meta has attempted to cover itself in two ways. Firstly, when it says "public content," Meta means posts, comments, photos, and other content posted on its social media platforms by users over the age of 18. Private messages are, apparently, strictly verboten from the training data.

I don't have a FB or Instagram account, I only use Whatsapp because it's work related.

The woman remembers the first time she got a smartphone.

It was 2011, and she was living in Hotan, an oasis town in Xinjiang, in northwest China. The 30-year-old, Nurjamal Atawula, loved to take pictures of her children and exchange strings of emoji with her husband while he was out. In 2013, Atawula downloaded WeChat, the Chinese social messaging app. Not long after, rumors circulated among her friends: The government could track your location through your phone. At first, she didn’t believe them.

In early 2016, police started making routine checks on Atawula’s home. Her husband was regularly called to the police station. The police informed him they were suspicious of his WeChat activity. Atawula’s children began to cower in fear at the sight of a police officer.

Hey guys, I am trying to get rid of my old Facebook accounts. I have not been using them for years, in fact I dont know their login data and for one i dont even have access to the email address any more.

I am a EU citizen and attempted to instruct them to close the accounts per email, since logging in requires me to consent to them using my data or pay money (probably illegal here too).

They sent me a quick response basically to go fuck myself, even after I offered to provide personal identification to verify I am the account owner and reminded them that I am an EU citizen and that my data is subject to those laws.

How can i force these fuckers to comply with my request for deletion of the accounts and associated data?

GDPR rights are being ignored. In practice, this leads to a situation where Microsoft is trying to contractually dump most of its legal responsibilities under the GDPR on schools that provide Microsoft 365 Education services to their pupils or students.

Trying to find out exactly what privacy policies or documents apply to the use of Microsoft 365 Education is an expedition in itself. There is a serious lack of transparency, forcing users and schools to navigate a maze of privacy policies, documents, terms and contracts that all seem to apply. The information provided in these documents is always slightly different, but consistently vague about what actually happens to children’s data when they use Microsoft 365 Education services.

Maartje de Graaf, data protection lawyer at noyb: “Microsoft provides such vague information that even a qualified lawyer can’t fully understand how the company processes personal data in Microsoft 365 Education. It is almost impossible for children or their parents to uncover the extent of Microsoft’s data collection.”

Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at noyb: “Our analysis of the data flows is very worrying. Microsoft 365 Education appears to track users regardless of their age. This practice is likely to affect hundreds of thousands of pupils and students in the EU and EEA. Authorities should finally step up and effectively enforce the rights of minors.”

As the terms and conditions and the privacy documentation of Microsoft 365 Education are uniform for the EU/EEA, all children living in these countries are exposed to the same violations of their GDPR rights. Therefore, noyb also suggests that the authority should impose a fine on Microsoft.

Today we're ecstatic to publish our first demo showing a homemade BusKill Cable (in the prototype 3D-printed case) triggering a lockscreen.

Watch the 3D-Printed USB Dead Man Switch (Prototype Demo) for more info youtube.com/v/vFTQatw94VU

via @Goldfishlaser@lemmy.ml

In our last update, I showed a video demo where I successfully triggered a lockscreen using a BusKill prototype without the 3D-printed body for the case and N35 disc magnets. I realized that the N35 disc magnets were not strong enough. In this update, I show a demo with the prototype built inside a 3D-printed case and with (stronger) N42 and N52 cube magnets.

What is BusKill?

BusKill is a laptop kill-cord. It's a USB cable with a magnetic breakaway that you attach to your body and connect to your computer.

Watch the BusKill Explainer Video for more info youtube.com/v/qPwyoD_cQR4

If the connection between you to your computer is severed, then your device will lock, shutdown, or shred its encryption keys -- thus keeping your encrypted data safe from thieves that steal your device.

Why?

While we do what we can to allow at-risk folks to purchase BusKill cables anonymously, there is always the risk of interdiction.

We don't consider hologram stickers or tamper-evident tape/crisps/glitter to be sufficient solutions to supply-chain security. Rather, the solution to these attacks is to build open-source, easily inspectable hardware whose integrity can be validated without damaging the device and without sophisticated technology.

Actually, the best way to confirm the integrity of your hardware is to build it yourself. Fortunately, BusKill doesn't have any circuit boards, microcontrollers, or silicon; it's trivial to print your own BusKill cable -- which is essentially a USB extension cable with a magnetic breakaway in the middle

Mitigating interdiction via 3D printing is one of many reasons that Melanie Allen has been diligently working on prototyping a 3D-printable BusKill cable this year. In this article, we hope to showcase her progress and provide you with some OpenSCAD and .stl files you can use to build your own version of the prototype, if you want to help us test and improve the design.

Print BusKill

If you'd like to reproduce our experiment and print your own BusKill cable prototype, you can download the stl files and read our instructions here:

• buskill.in/3d-print-2024-05

Iterate with us!

If you have access to a 3D Printer, you have basic EE experience, or you'd like to help us test our 3D printable BusKill prototype, please let us know. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and we're eager to finish-off this 3D printable BusKill prototype to help make this security-critical tool accessible to more people world-wide!