law enforcement is soon going be able to identify the perp in all cases where DNA evidence is available. Decades of unsolved rapes, assaults, and murders will be cleared up – in as little as a couple of years, if we make a serious effort.
Tag: privacy
NeuroRights
Neuro rights advocates propose 5 additions to human rights: the rights to personal identity, free will, mental privacy, equal access to mental augmentation, and protection from algorithmic bias. Who owns the copyright to a recorded dream? What laws should exist to prevent one person from altering the memory of another through a neural implant? How do we maintain mental integrity separate from an implanted device? If someone can read our mind, how do we protect the read-out of our thoughts as our own?
Toward Confidential Clouds
Imagine a future in which end users have complete and verifiable control over how their data is used by any cloud service. If they want their organization’s documents to be indexed, a confidential indexing service could guarantee that no one outside their organization ever sees that data. A confidential videoconferencing service could guarantee end-to-end encryption without sacrificing the ability to record the session or provide transcripts, with the output sent to a confidential file-sharing service, never appearing unencrypted anywhere other than the organization’s devices or confidential VMs. A confidential email system could similarly protect privacy without compromising on functionality such as searching or authoring assistance. Ultimately, confidential computing will enable many innovative cloud services, while allowing users to retain full control over their data.
WaPo hypocrisy
WaPo complains about too much privacy
Basically all of this is wrong or bullshit, and a good reporter would have either (a) immediately pointed out that this is bullshit or (b) not published the bullshit.
France Hypocrisy
France has been among the most vocal critics of “big internet companies” and demanding various regulatory pressures be used to punish them. Last year it fined Google $57m for breaching privacy laws, and appears to be angling for even larger fines. So it’s difficult not to burst out in laughter after finding out that the French government is really, really mad that Google and Apple are protecting people’s privacy, when suddenly the French government wants to use those companies to engage in contact tracing. Indeed, it’s literally demanding both companies ease their privacy protections to help France track people who might have COVID-19.
as usual, europe’s posturing is all bullshit.
For COVID-19 surveillance
I am a privacy activist who has been riding a variety of high horses about the dangers of permanent, ubiquitous data collection since 2012. I believe the major players in the online tracking space should team up with the CDC, FEMA, or some other Federal agency that has a narrow remit around public health, and build a national tracking database that will operate for some fixed amount of time, with the sole purpose of containing the coronavirus epidemic. It will be necessary to pass legislation to loosen medical privacy laws and indemnify participating companies from privacy lawsuits, as well as override California’s privacy law, to collect this data. I don’t believe the legal obstacles are insuperable, but I welcome correction on this point by people who know the relevant law.
this guy is super super tedious, but he raises valid questions this time.
Privacy Optimism
Could information be made less lumpy? Can we develop methods that allow institutions to have all the information they need to provide import services, without requiring so much other information come along for the ride?
Permission to Speak Freely
The Orchid network is a decentralized, open source VPN for securely anonymous internet access, even in China. 75% of humans live with restricted or censored access today
More With Less
There’s still a lot of potential to build more efficient and larger scale computing systems, particularly ones tailored for machine learning. And I think the basic research that has been done in the last 5 or 6 years still has a lot of room to be applied in all the ways that it should be. We’ll collaborate with our Google product colleagues to get a lot of these things out into real-world uses.
But we also are looking at what are the next major problems on the horizon, given what we can do today and what we can’t do. We want to build systems that can generalize to a new task. Being able to do things with much less data and with much less computation is going to be interesting and important.
Data Brokers
Data brokers should be held accountable for the negative externalities they inflict on society. There will always be criminals online, and new regulations will never fully deter them. But governments can deter the complicit middlemen — the data brokers with little security and fewer scruples. While data brokers are often sued for damages if data is breached when it’s in the possession of those they sell to (e.g., Equifax in 2017 and Exactis in 2018), they are not held accountable for data breached by those they sell to, nor are their executives tried for fraud. What if instead they had to answer for the consequent fraud and abuse? What if authorities like the Federal Communications Commission had a strong mandate to punish data brokers for their role in leaks and breaches?
Gregor J. Rothfuss 