Alias is a teachable “parasite” that is designed to give users more control over their smart assistants, both when it comes to customization and privacy. Through a simple app the user can train Alias to react on a custom wake-word/sound, and once trained, Alias can take control over your home assistant by activating it for you. When you don’t use it, Alias will make sure the assistant is paralyzed and unable to listen by interrupting its microphones.
Tag: privacy
China Global Surveillance
Bike-Sharing Services Are Sending Personal Data To China
through the collection and analysis of this data the Chinese Government now likely have access to your name, address (yes it will track your address based on the location data it collects), where you work, what devices you use, who your friends are (yes it will track the places you regularly stop and if they are residential it is likely they will be friends and family). They also buy data from other sources to find out more information by combining this data with the data they collect directly. They know what your routines are such as when you are likely to be out of the house either at work, shopping or engaging in social activities; and for how long.
Facebook SMS Exfiltration
The other big thing that comes out in the released documents is all the way at the end, when Facebook is getting ready to roll out a Facebook app update on Android that will snoop on your SMS and call logs and use that information for trying to get you to add more friends and for determining what kinds of content it promotes to you. Facebook clearly recognized that this could be a PR nightmare if it got out, and they were worried that Android would seek permission from users, which would alert them to this kind of snooping.
Tracking Clothes
a new line of clothes and accessories that all come bugged with “smart chip technology,” which tracks how often you wear them and where you go with them on.
China AI Ethical Issues
Many, though not all, of these new surveillance technologies are powered by AI. Recent advances in AI have given computers superhuman pattern-recognition skills: the ability to spot correlations within oceans of digital data, and make predictions based on those correlations. It’s a highly versatile skill that can be put to use diagnosing diseases, driving cars, predicting consumer behavior, or recognizing the face of a dissident captured by a city’s omnipresent surveillance cameras. The Chinese government is going for all of the above, making AI core to its mission of upgrading the economy, broadening access to public goods, and maintaining political control.
FBI regroups its going dark cosplay
So it appears that the mainstage event over the DOJ’s ability to force Apple to help it get around the security features of an iPhone is ending with a whimper, rather than a bang. The DOJ has just filed an early status report saying basically that it got into Syed Farook’s work iPhone and it no longer needs the court to order Apple to help it comply by writing a modified version of iOS that disables security features.
Apple is a huge hypocrite
Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Salesforce / Heroku, and a handful of other tech companies just betrayed billions of people’s trust. They signed a letter endorsing CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act.
aww, hypocrites.
Location Exfiltration from Power Consumption
Our approach enables known route identification, real-time tracking, and identification of a new route by only analyzing the phone’s power consumption
Privacy vs. User Experience
Apple is going to realize very soon that it has made a grave mistake by positioning itself as a bastion of privacy against Google, the evil invader of everyone’s secrets. The truth is that collecting information about people allows you to make significantly better products, and the more information you collect, the better products you can build. Apple can barely sync iMessage across devices because it uses an encryption system that prevents it from being able to read the actual messages.
Zentai
there are ways to deal with the end of privacy.
By day, she is a mild-mannered office clerk whose modest make-up and conservative hairstyle allow her to blend in with any crowd. By night, she dresses in a skin-tight, all-in-one Spandex body suit that covers everything — including her eyes — and sits in bars, alone but liberated, she believes, from the judgment of others.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 