Privacy

cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/20954019

Reddit.

Source: Intelligence Committee’s annual Worldwide Threats hearing, question by Senator Ron Wyden.

Clip by Headquarters News.

The Indian government has introduced countless rules supposedly to make smartphone safer. In reality, the rules will make phones less safe, and enable further mass surveillance and authoritarianism.

Experts say that claims UK data remains under government ownership miss the point that the company has the capability to build its own detailed picture of the British population, and even infer state secrets. Report by Charlie Young and Carole Cadwalladr

Burner accounts on social media sites can increasingly be analyzed to identify the pseudonymous users who post to them using AI in research that has far-reaching consequences for privacy on the Internet, researchers said.

While How to Fix the Internet is on hiatus, we wanted to share a great conversation with you from last week. EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn spoke with bestselling novelist, journalist, and EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow about Cindy’s new book, “Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against...

Hello,

yes, I use Instagram even though I don’t like it because well all of my friends does and I can’t convince them to use something else. it’s really sad how hard it is to convince people to join open networks specially in fascist country like India where people are just boot lickers of politicians and rich people. but I digress.

I found the other day that google analytics can be easily tricked since it doesn’t verify the input. you can just open network tab and watch for any request going to https://www.google-analytics.com/ and just copy that request as curl command now you can tweak the parameters of the query and it will just accept it. ig, you can say I have 1920x1080 monitor and google will just accept it. it’s an effective way to fill up google analytics with garbage data to the point that it’s harder to separate real data from the garbage data.

now I want to know if there is something similar to poison data of Instagram/Facebook/Meta. I opened network tab on instagram but couldn’t find anything interesting.

any help would be appreciated! :)

Source: https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/2032600868005310638#m

Yeah, so basically the current prevailing schizo internet theory is that AI nerds have destroyed the >internet and created infinite spam.

The advertisement goons are now incapable of determining who is a bot and who is an actual human. The advertisement goons no longer want to pay as much to social media networks.

Social media networks, in full blown panic of losing potential revenue, decided to lobby governments saying "we gotta protect the kids! ID everyone to protect the kids from pedophiles!".

The social media networks know this doesn't really protect kids. But, it does two things (and a third accidentally).

1. They now can identify who is human and who is AI slop machine, or enough to appease the advertisement goons

2. Advertising to children is a general no-no from politicians, or something, so with ID verification they can say with confidence they're not advertising to children because it's been ID verification. Basically, they can weed out the children and focus on advertising to adults

3. The feds can now tell who is human and who is AI slop. This inadvertently helps them with tracking people and serving fresh daily dumps of propaganda, or whatever they want to do.

It's a win-win-win for advertisers, social media networks, the government, and any business which does data collections.

It fucks over everyone else.

Chat, I'm not going to lie to you. This is an extremely good conspiracy schizo theory and I unironically believe it.

The teacher opens an app on their phone, holds it up, and takes several photos of the room. Within seconds, the images travel to a cloud server, where a facial-recognition algorithm detects each student’s face, extracts it, and compares it against a database of biometric profiles. The app LRCO Paraná returns a list of names. Students identified in the photos are marked present; those the system does not find are marked absent.

For some students, a false absence is a bureaucratic irritation. For others, it could threaten their family’s access to welfare. In Brazil, eligibility for the Bolsa Família program depends in part on school attendance, and in Paraná such records are now largely generated by an algorithm.

This vote fails to reject the whole regulation but approves text amendments and now the whole process goes back to the LIBE Committee (Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs)

Amendment 5, tabled by Pirate Party MEP Markéta Gregorová (Greens/EFA group) and adopted by a narrow margin, demands that any scanning of private communications must be strictly limited to individual users or groups of users suspected by a competent judicial authority of being linked to child sexual abuse. This aligns with the European Parliament’s 2023 mandate on the permanent Chat Control regulation (CSAR).

• Vote details
• Amendments

Other sources:

• MEPs Vote to End Untargeted Mass Scanning of Private Chats
• Chat Control Timeline

I was reading a review of Firefox's experimental Smart Window feature, and this stood out as a potential huge issue:

Smart Window uses ‘memories’, things Mozilla says “…it learns from your activity” to inform its responses.

You can delete memories individually, and you can set any given chat session to not use/store them.

Fine so far.

The problem? My memory list isn’t populated with things Smart Window learned since I enabled it. Oh no.

It has activity going back months. We’re talking searches and website interactions from long before I enabled this. features.

Firefox just handed that history to the AI models to plough from, without telling me upfront.

I found this the creepiest aspect of Smart Window.

Mozilla says this was a flub; it will refine the onboarding around Smart Window to limit memory formation to post-opt-in activity only. That’s obviously the right fix.

Because sharing a user’s prior browsing history with third-party AI models, silently, on feature activation, without any headset? Yeah, a bit icky – but that’s the price of testing features that are finished, I guess.

This news leaves me with more questions than answers:

• Was this summarized on enabling this window, or earlier?
• Did it use an existing model, or re-use one that someone may have already downloaded for a different feature?
• Is this activity going anywhere else, like Mozilla's recent "privacy-preserving" advertising?
• When this releases, what will the default be?

Originally Umbrachat was a web app named Peersuite ( that I also developed) that was distributed as a docker image, web site, or electron app. Umbrachat has chat with channels, file sharing, threaded replies, and image preview in chat. Also, audio/video conferencing and screenshare.

I pulled out the non-social business type features ( document editing, whiteboard, and kanban ) and simplified the CSS and the code. I got everything down to under 200k in size and packaged it as a browser extension, which IMO is a way simpler method to use it.

All datastreams ( chat, audio, video) are encrypted end to end. After the initial connection to the server you are connected directly to your friends in a mesh network with superpeer capability.

github: >https://github.com/openconstruct/umbrachat peersuite github: https://github.com/openconstruct/Peersuite

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umbrachat/

Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/umbrachat/jdgneoijldkiffdnhkibcdnajchecaip?hl=en-US

By Developer @jerrimu@lemmy.world

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116200110686604617