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Submission + - Amazon's Ring doorbell confirmed as spyware by the EFF (eff.org) 1

AmiMoJo writes: Ring isn't just a product that allows users to surveil their neighbors. The company also uses it to surveil its customers.

An investigation by EFF of the Ring doorbell app for Android found it to be packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers’ personally identifiable information (PII). Four main analytics and marketing companies were discovered to be receiving information such as the names, private IP addresses, mobile network carriers, persistent identifiers, and sensor data on the devices of paying customers.

Our testing, using Ring for Android version 3.21.1, revealed PII delivery to branch.io, mixpanel.com, appsflyer.com and facebook.com. Every action is logged, from opening the app to how you interact with it to when it gets closed because you locked the phone. Even data such your full name and email address, timezone, screen resolution and more is collected and shared.

Submission + - Government Privacy Watchdog Under Pressure To Recommend Facial Recognition Ban (thehill.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent agency, is coming under increasing pressure to recommend the federal government stop using facial recognition. Forty groups, led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, sent a letter Monday to the agency calling for the suspension of facial recognition systems "pending further review." “The rapid and unregulated deployment of facial recognition poses a direct threat to ‘the precious liberties that are vital to our way of life,'" the advocacy groups wrote.

The PCLOB "has a unique responsibility, set out in statute, to assess technologies and polices that impact the privacy of Americans after 9-11 and to make recommendations to the President and executive branch," they wrote. The agency, created in 2004, advises the administration on privacy issues. The letter cited a recent New York Times report about Clearview AI, a company which claims to have a database of more than 3 billion photos and is reportedly collaborating with hundreds of police departments. It also mentioned a study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, part of the Commerce Department, which found that the majority of facial recognition systems have “demographic differentials” that can worsen their accuracy based on a person’s age, gender or race.

Comment Service issues? (Score 1) 79

I live in a predominantly ATT area and a couple of years ago tried one of the ATT MVNOs for a month. What I found was worse coverage, a lot of dropped calls, (more) unreliabe data and generally sucky service. I reinstalled the ATT SIM and reset the phone in less than a week. About 2 weeks later I came across an article (I think here on /.) that pretty much said that MVNOs were treated as "2nd class citizens" on the respective network so it pretty much made sense. I haven't seen anything to support the notion that has changed in the last 2 years since the test.

Facebook

Submission + - Instagram Wants to Sell Users' Photos Without Notice (ibtimes.co.uk)

DavidGilbert99 writes: "Many Instagram users have reacted angrily to a proposed change to the apps terms of service by owner Facebook, which would give the social network 'perpetual' rights to all photos on Instagram, allowing it to sell the photos to advertisers without notice — or payment to the user.

The new policy will come into effect on 16 January, just four months after Facebook completed its $1bn acquisition of Instagram. It states that Facebook has a right to distribute any content posted on Instagram without paying the user royalties:"

Comment Re:How many ways can you (Score 4, Informative) 205

Correlation does not imply causation. Your co-worker's paralysis could could have been caused by a number of factors and probably was not thoroughly explored. The curezone article that was shown is a mis-mash of peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed "articles" from main-stream, generally chemophobic press and even some of the books.

Even the recent thermisol flap was debunked by three research agencies in the US: CDC, FDA with the results being reviewed by three independent agencies (NAS-Institute of Medicine, Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Still after this tremendous amount of research, we still have TV stars warning us about the evil of vaccines and those containing thermisol in particular. As people hear the tripe without investigating, the begin to believe then they stop immunizing their children, and as such we have seen a resurgance of childhood diseases such as whooping cough.

Generally speaking, flu vaccines won't "prevent' the flu as much as it helps reduce duration and severity of the sympotons, as the virus mutates pretty rapidly. One has to look at the risk/benefit of vaccination, not only for themselves but for society as a whole.

Comment Grad School = Indentured Servitude (Score 1) 454

I suspect that the system hasn't changed too much since the early 1800s.

80 hr weeks at (Ph.D.-level) grad school seemed to be the norm in the late 80s when I was playing the game. Some research advisors were up front stating that anything less than 75 hours/week was considered a bad work ethic. They considered it "paying one's dues" I suspect. Grad students have been, continue to be and probably will be for the forseeable future - indentured servents. The system has no reason to change: There is no shortage of cheap labor (Ph.D.-seeking graduate students willing to sell a portion of their lives for the degree).

There was an obvious discontinuity however: These same advisors, the tenured ones at least, who also taught both undergrad and graduate classes were frequently out of the office, missing office hours, cancelling appointments for "business" and taking lengthy sabbitacals to exoitic places, so I found the lectures about "work ethic" to ring hollow. The untenured faculty were still putting in 80 hour weeks, just like their grad students.

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