Exploring alternative funding models for the web

The online advertising ecosystem is broken. The majority of digital advertising revenue is going to a small handful of companies, leaving other publishers with scraps. Meanwhile users are on the receiving end of terrible experiences and pervasive tracking designed to get them to click on ads or share even more personal data.

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/02/25/exploring-alternative-funding-models-for-the-web/

📡 @NoGoolag
#mozilla #funding #alternatives #BigData

Here are the data brokers quietly buying and selling your personal information
You’ve probably never heard of many of the data firms registered under a new law, but they’ve heard a lot about you.

It’s no secret that your personal data is routinely bought and sold by dozens, possibly hundreds, of companies. What’s less known is who those companies are, and what exactly they do.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90310803/here-are-the-data-brokers-quietly-buying-and-selling-your-personal-information

📡 @NoGoolag
#BigData #privacy #mydata #why #data #brokers

Audit-Protokoll-Analysis with Palantir Gotham

📺 https://archive.org/details/youtube-i4f381YNQdQ

#BigData #surveillance #police #eu #palantir #software #gotham #peterthiel #ebay
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_ES
📡@FLOSSb0xIN

Palantir - UK government using confidential patient data in coronavirus response

Documents seen by Guardian show tech firms using information to build ‘Covid-19 datastore’

Technology firms are processing large volumes of confidential UK patient information in a data-mining operation that is part of the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, according to documents seen by the Guardian.

Palantir, the US big data firm founded by the rightwing billionaire Peter Thiel, is working with Faculty, a British artificial intelligence startup, to consolidate government databases and help ministers and officials respond to the pandemic.

Data is also being used by Faculty to build predictive computer models around the Covid-19 outbreak. One NHS document suggests that, two weeks ago, Faculty considered running a computer simulation to assess the impact of a policy of “targeted herd immunity”. Lawyers for Faculty said the proposed herd immunity simulation never took place.

NHSX, the digital transformation arm of the National Health Service that has contracted the tech companies to help build the “Covid-19 datastore”, said the technology would give ministers and officials “real-time information about health services, showing where demand is rising and where critical equipment needs to be deployed”.

“The companies involved do not control the data and are not permitted to use or share it for their own purposes,” a spokesperson said. Faculty’s lawyers said the firm only had access to aggregated or anonymised data via NHS systems.

The government had previously said it would use Faculty and Palantir in a Covid-19 data project. But the full scope of that operation, and the sensitive nature of patient-level data being used, is revealed in the documents seen by the Guardian.

👉🏼 Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/12/uk-government-using-confidential-patient-data-in-coronavirus-response

#palantir #thiel #BigData #uk #coronavirus #datastore
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv

Your personal data is going on a journey

The EU is constructing a number of new systems for the screening, monitoring and tracking of international travellers that places them under an increasing veil of suspicion. Justified primarily in the name of ensuring security, all non-EU citizens attempting to visit the Schengen area will have their biometric and biographic data registered in large centralised databases, where it will be cross-referenced against a host of other systems and used to feed new databases, profiling tools and watchlists...(...)

👀 👉🏼 Your personal data is going on a journey
https://www.statewatch.org/automated-suspicion-the-eu-s-new-travel-surveillance-initiatives/conclusions-your-personal-data-is-going-on-a-journey/

#ourdata #BigData #eu #screening #monitoring #tracking #biometric #biographic #profiling #watchlist #surveillance #thinkabout
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

BIG DATA - 3.0 - "L1ZY"

Introducing the most advanced artificial intelligence platform in modern history...BIG DATA - 3.0 - "L1ZY"

#BigData #L1ZY #video #thinkabout #why
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates

To an outsider, the fancy booths at a June health insurance industry gathering in San Diego, Calif., aren't very compelling: a handful of companies pitching "lifestyle" data and salespeople touting jargony phrases like "social determinants of health."

But dig deeper and the implications of what they're selling might give many patients pause: a future in which everything you do — the things you buy, the food you eat, the time you spend watching TV — may help determine how much you pay for health insurance.

🎧 👉🏼 https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/07/17/629441555/health-insurers-are-vacuuming-up-details-about-you-and-it-could-raise-your-rates

#insurance #companies #secret #health #insurers #bigdata #BigData #surveillance #thinkabout #podcast
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

How they harvest our data

TL;DR: everything is very bad. Prognosis is not comforting; if we do nothing all the distopias we read in fiction novels will look like a happy holiday at granny's.

It's hard to be in IT, cause your friends have no idea what you do. Engineer, product manager, QA — how does it all differ from fixing a printer in the office? (tip: you don't get $150k/year for fixing printers).

You also can't really talk to normal people about IT, because they use this industry, but they don't get it. But there's a topic you can raise with any mortal, that will get their attention: data privacy.

How do they gather data about us? Will VPN and incognito mode save us? Maybe we should all just pack our stuff and go into the woods and make friends with wolves and bears?

https://dkzlv.com/en/how-they-harvest-data/

#data #bigdata #thinkabout
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_FR
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Spy pixels in emails have become endemic

The use of "invisible" tracking tech in emails is now "endemic", according to a messaging service that analysed its traffic at the BBC's request.

Hey's review indicated that two-thirds of emails sent to its users' personal accounts contained a "spy pixel", even after excluding for spam.

Its makers said that many of the largest brands used email pixels, with the exception of the "big tech" firms.

Defenders of the trackers say they are a commonplace marketing tactic.

And several of the companies involved noted their use of such tech was mentioned within their wider privacy policies.

‼️ Emails pixels can be used to log:

❌ if and when an email is opened

❌ how many times it is opened

❌ what device or devices are involved

❌ the user's rough physical location, deduced from their internet protocol (IP) address - in some cases making it possible to see the street the recipient is on

This information can then be used to determine the impact of a specific email campaign, as well as to feed into more detailed customer profiles.

Hey's co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson says they amount to a "grotesque invasion of privacy".

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56071437

#spy #pixels #email #invisible #tracking #bigtech #BigData #thinkabout
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_FR
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
📡@NoGoolag

Google's short-lived data-advantage

There's a lot of ways to think about the movement to tame Big Tech, but one of the more useful divisions to explore is the "Night of the Comet" people versus the "Don't Believe the Criti-Hype" people.

This is a division over the value of the data that Google, Facebook and other large tech firms have amassed over the years – data on their users, sure, but also data on the advertisers and publishers they serve with their ad-tech platforms.

Big Tech companies and their investors are really bullish on the value of this commercial data-advantage: they say that spying on us – the users – lets them manipulate our opinions and activities so that we buy or believe the things their advertisers pay them to push.

More quietly, their investors believe that the data-advantage extends to publishers and advertisers, a deep storehouse of data that makes it effectively impossible for anyone else to do the precision targeted that Big Tech manages, which is why they have such fat margins.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/11/halflife/#minatory-legend

#google #DeleteGoogle #facebook #DeleteFacebook #BigData #BigTech #AdTech #thinkabout #comment
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry

The information captured by our smartphones, as well as new speech- and facial-recognition technologies, can yield invaluable insights for mental health professionals.

As a physician, I need to figure out three things when a new patient walks into my office: what their life is typically like, what has changed that made them seek treatment and what I can do to help them. It’s a complex problem, and most fields of medicine approach it by taking measurements. If I were a cardiologist evaluating a patient’s chest pain, for instance, I would speak with the patient, but then I would listen to their heart and measure their pulse and blood pressure. I might order an electrocardiogram or a cardiac stress test, tools that weren’t available a century ago.

Because I’m a psychiatrist, however, I evaluate patients in precisely the same way that my predecessors did in 1920: I ask them to tell me what’s wrong, and while they’re talking I carefully observe their speech and behavior. But psychiatry has remained largely immune to measurement. At no point in the examination do I gather numerical data about the patient’s life or behavior, even though tools for taking such measurements already exist. In fact, you likely are carrying one around in your pocket right now.

In the last decade, an entire industry has been built to predict a person’s behavior based on their smartphone use and online activity. Because our search and social media history is digitized and time stamped, it represents a permanent breadcrumb trail of our thoughts and emotions. Tech companies and governments already use these data to monitor and commodify our likes and dislikes; soon psychiatrists might be able to use them to measure and evaluate our mental state.

Our smartphones measure our movements with accelerometers, our location with GPS and our social engagement with the number of calls and texts we send. These data have extraordinary potential for psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. Studies have shown that the words we use to express ourselves on Facebook and Twitter can predict the emergence of conditions like postpartum depression and psychosis. A person’s recent Google search history, it turns out, is a better predictor of suicide than their clinician’s most recent notes.

https://telegra.ph/The-Rise-of-Big-Data-Psychiatry-04-29

via www.wsj.com

#smartphones #BigData #psychiatry #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

RocketReach and the creepy world of data harvesting

You’ve probably never heard of RocketReach. But I think you should, as it’s got me properly riled up.

I just want people to leave me alone. My job is hard enough as it is, without people sliding into my inbox 24/7.

- Hey, got time for a quick 15 minute chat about this random tool you’ll never use? NO

- Hi, I’d love to chat with you about a potential partnership with-GO AWAY.

- We really think your organisation could benefit from- JUST LEAVE ME ALONE.

- I noticed you haven’t replied to our previous emails; just checking you didn’t miss this. I DIDN’T MISS IT I’M DELIBERATELY IGNORING YOU.

It’s constant, and it’s draining. I don’t know who out there is telling people that spamming folks with cold emails is the way to grow your business, but I’m begging them to stop.

I mean, it must be working, or they wouldn’t do it. But it’s just incredibly frustrating. Especially if you’re someone like me that doesn’t like to be mean to people. My deeply-instilled British values of politeness mean it pains me to ignore these people.

But I have to, or I wouldn’t be able to function. Just replying to these people would be a full-time job.

So imagine my dismay when I discovered there are websites out there specialising in making it even easier to contact me. And one of the worst offenders out there is RocketReach.

https://cookywook.co.uk/blog/rocketreach-and-the-creepy-world-of-data-harvesting/

#data #harvesting #BigData #privacy #rocketreach #thinkabout
📡 @nogoolag 📡 @blackbox_archiv

#USA government is openly stockpiling dirt on all its citizens

A newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reveals that the federal government is buying troves of data about Americans.

“This report reveals what we feared most,” says Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at the nonprofit Demand Progress. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.” 

https://www.wired.com/story/odni-commercially-available-information-report

#NSA #USA #BigData

arstechnica@mastodon.social -

Big Tech can transfer Europeans’ data to US in win for Facebook and Google
EU-US data pact approved; privacy advocates to appeal because of US surveillance.

#BigData #EU #US

Even the Government Thinks It Should Stop Buying Corporate Surveillance Data | Electronic Frontier Foundation –

U.S. government intelligence agencies are buying data about us. The danger to our civil liberties is so extreme that even the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said things have gone too far in a detailed report released in June.


#BigData #surveillance

The Loophole That Lets Police Do Warrantless Spying

In this video I discuss how data brokers are are assembling large data sets on people coming from social media, credit card companies, and public data sources and then selling them to law enforcement, and how "The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act" could put an end to this warrantless data collection

#US #BigData #DataBrokers #snoping #FourthAmendment #Warrantless

A woman has shown how to find all the information Google has stored on you

TikTok user @yorgoandlea posted a short clip showing how you can find out what data Google knows about you.

In the clip, she heads to Google and searches for 'ad settings google' and signs in, from here she scrolls down a list where you can quickly see that it has age, gender and even the languages she speaks stored.

It also appears to show things she may be interested in, such as 'architecture' and 'audio equipment'.

The clip has racked up hundreds of thousands of views and has been flooded with comments from people who were surprised just how much Google knows about them.

One person wrote: "Oh God. I tried it - the amount of information!"

#Google the #Devil #Scroogle
#BigData

Palantir’s Reputation Stalks Its Bid for the UK’s National Health Data | WIRED –

US-based Palantir is favored to win a $595 million NHS contract, but activists and doctors worry about its controversial ties to cofounder Peter Thiel, the military, and US border control.

#Palantir #BigData #UK #US #NHS