Tag Archives: public

Related News: DARPA funded studies to see how you use social networks

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One new article link has been added to our Related News page. Engadget published an article titled DARPA funded studies to see how you use social networks.

DARPA’s been spending its money on many, many things other than robots and exoskeletons — including several experiments that seek to determine how we use social media. Apparently, Pentagon’s most adventurous division has quite a number of studies under its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program since it was announced in 2011. And thanks to The Guardian (which spotted the details SMISC quietly posted on its website), we now know the projects the agency’s been working on… and they involve not only Facebook, but also Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, Kickstarter and even Digg. According to the researchers involved, they used only data available to the public, and it doesn’t look like they violated any law. But just like Facebook’s mood experiment, some of these studies might make people a tad uncomfortable.

Source: Engadget

Related News: Stalker: A creepy look at you, online

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One new article link has been added to our Related News page. CNN published an article titled Stalker: A creepy look at you, online.

While you were having a latte and hunting for a Tinder date on your local coffee shop’s open Wi-Fi, you were giving away your personal information.

Want to know how much? Stalker will tell you.

Stalker is a tool created by security firm Immunity Inc. to demonstrate the hazards of connecting to insecure public Wi-Fi networks.

Source: CNN

Related News: Facebook sued for allegedly making private messages into public “Likes”

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One new article link has been added to our Related News page. Ars Technica published an article titled Facebook sued for allegedly making private messages into public “Likes”.

Facebook is being sued by two users for intercepting the “content of the users’ communications,” including private messages, with the intent to “mine user data and profit from those data by sharing them with third parties—namely, advertisers, marketers, and other data aggregators.” The plaintiffs argue in a December 30 class action complaint that Facebook’s use of the word “private” in relation to its messaging system is misleading given the way the company treats the info contained within those messages.

Many of the allegations in this case are based on research done in 2012 by the Wall Street Journal for a series of articles about digital privacy. Facebook is far from the first company to use private messages to mint money. Gmail continues to be dinged for creating text ads based off of the content of e-mails ten years after the ads were first introduced. (And Gmail has been sued for that, too.)

Source: Ars Technica

Related News: Unannounced use of license photos in criminal probes puts Ohio AG under fire

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One new article link has been added to our Related News page. CNN published an article titled Unannounced use of license photos in criminal probes puts Ohio AG under fire.

Two months after a controversial facial recognition technology program was launched in Ohio without public notice, state Attorney General Mike DeWine conceded Monday he should have let Ohioans know that their images from driver’s licenses were being used by law enforcement in criminal investigations.

“If I had to do it over again, would we have announced it when we did it? Yeah, we would have. And I’ll take responsibility for that,” DeWine said at a news conference.

Although DeWine said he should have gone public with the program sooner, he gave no indication that the state would change or stop using the program. He did announce that an advisory board will be created to review the system’s usage and to suggest policy changes to avoid misuse of the program.

Source: CNN

Related News: Study: Vast Majority Of Homemade Porn, Private Photos End Up Online

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One new article link has been added to our Related News page. CBS DC published an article titled Study: Vast Majority Of Homemade Porn, Private Photos End Up Online.

WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – The vast majority of homemade pornography and private images on personal computers ends up on public websites called “parasites.”

Eighty-eight percent of homemade pornography, including videos and still images, finds its way onto porn sites, often without the owners’ knowledge, a new study from Britain’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has found.

The study analyzed more than 12,000 sexually explicit images uploaded by young people and found that the great majority of images had been stolen and published to what the organization calls, “parasite” websites.

Source: CBS DC