L’Union européenne s’apprête à modifier la protection de notre vie privée en ligne en adoptant un nouveau règlement ePrivacy.
Le 26 octobre 2017, la Parlement européen a arrêté un premier texte.
I understand this reaction, but it’s also an unfair one: Deleting Facebook is privilege. The company has become so good at the many things it does that for lots of people, leaving the service would be a self-harming act. And they deserve better from it, too. Which is why the initial answer to Facebook’s failings shouldn’t be to flee Facebook. We need to demand a better Facebook.
Unlike broadcast television and radio, which are also free for the price of having to endure ads, on Facebook you can’t change the channel. If you leave Facebook—which is where your friends, scene, and community already is—you’re alone, because for many people, Facebook is becoming the internet and the internet is becoming Facebook.
Facebook, for all its problems, has become a necessary part of life for people, one that they can’t afford to shed, personally or professionally.
And in countries with lower internet adoption, Facebook is often people’s foray onto the whole internet. Facebook’s Free Basics program is operating in 63 countries and municipalities across Africa, Asia, and Latin America—and with that, people get free access to Facebook and a small handful of websites that partner with Facebook, though they can’t access other sites or email. For those users, Facebook is, in a sense, the whole internet.
Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers—even when location services are disabled—and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals’ locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy.
The section of Google’s privacy policy that covers location sharing says the company will collect location information from devices that use its services, but does not indicate whether it will collect data from Android devices when location services are disabled
« Si c’est gratuit, c’est vous le produit ! » En lançant le premier forfait de téléphonie mobile entièrement financé par la publicité, l’opérateur français Prixtel adapte un modèle économique bien installé et sans cesse en progression dans le paysage du Web : un modèle qui, au premier abord, semble gratuit.
« Si vous êtes le produit, alors ce n’est pas gratuit car l’utilisation du service n’est pas sans contrepartie : vous acceptez l’utilisation de vos données personnelles, vous acceptez des contrats d’utilisation léonins qui font de vous une main-d’oeuvre sans droit ni titre, vous acceptez d’être pisté, tracé, traqué pour que le client final, généralement une régie publicitaire, sache tout de vous pour mieux vous cibler…
Le réseau social est à nouveau montré du doigt après la découverte de l’utilisation de données personnelles de plusieurs millions d’utilisateurs, par une entreprise d’analyse liée à la campagne présidentielle de Donald Trump.
L’affaire Cambridge Analytica tourne autour d’une application, nommée «thisisyourdigitallife» (littéralement «cestvotrevienumérique») et accessible via le réseau social, jusqu’à sa suppression en 2015.
Derrière cette façade, présentée comme «une application de recherche utilisée par les psychologues», un système bien plus complexe. Non seulement les 270 000 personnes ayant utilisé l’application ont fourni des informations volontairement sur eux-mêmes, mais ils en ont aussi fourni d’autres de manière bien moins consciente (l’application avait accès aux contenus qu’ils avaient «aimé» sur le réseau social ou à leur ville actuelle).
Pire, ils ont aussi permis à l’application d’accéder aux données des contacts de ces personnes sur Facebook. Un effet boule de neige qui rend difficile d’évaluer l’ampleur de cette collecte : entre 30 millions (pour le New York Times) et 50 millions (selon le Guardian) de personnes. Des données récupérées par une première société (SCL) puis une seconde (Cambridge Analytica).
The command-line option –gen-key is used to create a new primary keypair.
Nothing to Hide (Oct. 2016), by Marc Meillassoux and Mihaela Gladovic, questions the growing, puzzling and passive public acceptance of massive corporate and governmental incursions into individual and group privacy and rights through the «I have nothing to hide» argument.
Amazon Go, the «human-free» grocery store from Amazon.com, watches your every move with hundreds of cameras and sensors. And ties everything to an account with your smart phone and credit card. This is absolutely terrifying on multiple levels. Let me walk you through why and the related services that make this abomination possible.
Here are some things Strava may reveal
Whether you run, swim, ski or cycle.
If you tell it, what bicycles you have.
Who you go out on a run or ride with
When you are away from your house
Where you commute to, and when
Your fitness, and whether it is getting better or worse.
When you travel, what TZ, etc.
The fact that you can infer nation-state secrets is an interesting escalation. Currently it’s the heatmap which is getting the bad press, which is part of the dataset that Strava offer commercially to councils. FWIW, the selection bias on Strava data (male roadies or mountain bikers) means that its not that good. If someone bought our local data, they’d infer that muddy wood trails with trees and rocks are what the city needs. Which is true, but it doesn’t address the lack of any safe way to cross the city.
What is interesting about the heat map, and not picked up on yet, is that you can potentially deanonymize people from it.
Like most of my friends, I use Facebook on a daily level. I use the website, the Facebook app, and the Messenger app. It should come as no surprise, that Facebook keeps track of every time you visit them through any of those means. The creepy thing is, that your friends can keep track of this too.
In the web-based Messenger, it is possible to see when a user was last active.
By creating a simple service that checks Facebook every 10 minutes, I’m able to get an accurate picture of my friends’ Facebook usage. Many people visit Facebook as the first thing in the morning, and the last thing before going to bed. It is therefore possible to get a good impression of their sleeping habits (or lack thereof).
