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CCPA: Facebook non può più sottilizzare sulla questione della vendita di dati
by Antonio Casilli Jan. 5, 2020

Jan. 5, 2020

Se, come me, non ne potete più dei saccenti corporate che pretendono che "Facebook non vende i vostri dati" (di solito basandosi su sottili distinzioni lessicali: "condivisions", "monetizzazione", ecc.), apprezzerete il California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), entrato or ora in vigore. Propone una definizione comprensiva della nozione di "vendita". "Many companies have made changes to their privacy policies to follow this new law, and there's a directory that lists how you can request your data and improve your privacy settings. But a handful of companies aren't complying with the new law, whether by failing to provide, essentially, a "do not sell my data" link or button on their websites -- which the law requires -- or arguing that the rules don't apply to them. Facebook said in a December blog post that it doesn't plan to make any changes to its web tracking, believing that the law's definition of selling data doesn't apply to it. The social networking giant argued that it shares data with third parties, which it doesn't consider selling. But under the new law, sharing is still considered a sale, according to Mary Stone Ross, co-author of the CCPA. "The definition of 'sell' is written in a way to include the sharing of personal information," said Ross, associate director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC. "They are playing fast and loose with the definition of 'sell.'" Facebook didn't immediately respond to a request for comment for this story." https://www.cnet.com/news/californias-new-privacy-law-puts-you-first-too-ba… -- Antonio A. Casilli Professor, Telecom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris Member, Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (i3 UMR 9217 CNRS) Associate Member, LACI-IIAC (EHESS) Faculty Fellow, Nexa Center for Internet & Society *We respect your right to disconnect. This email send time is due to my own workflow efficiency. You are in no obligation to take action or reply to it outside your office hours.*

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Technology in 2050: will it save humanity – or destroy us? | Technology | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo Jan. 5, 2020

Jan. 5, 2020

A quanto pare la /artificial general intelligence/ --scusate, il nome corretto come sappiamo è /general SALAMI/-- è il "magic pony" che arriva volando al momento giusto per salvare il mondo. Se noi umani siamo stati così stupidi da rischiare l'estinzione, l'intelligenza delle macchine lo salverà al posto nostro, sollevandoci dalla fastidiosa responsabilità di comprendere e agire. Buon anno! <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jan/03/technology-2050-save-hum…> Amid the calamitous effects of climate change, artificial intelligence could make the difference between a livable future or a dystopian one Alex Hern Futurism is a mug’s game: if you’re right, it seems banal; if you’re wrong, you look like the founder of IBM, Thomas Watson, when he declared in 1943 that there is room in the world “for maybe five computers”. David Adams knew these risks when he wrote about the future of technology in the Guardian in 2004 – even citing the very same prediction as an example of how they can go awry. And from our vantage point in 2020, Adams certainly did a better job than Watson. When he looked ahead to today, he avoided many of the pitfalls of technology prediction: no promises about flying cars nor sci-fi tech such as teleportation or faster-than-light travel. But in some ways, the predictions were overly pessimistic. Technology really has made great leaps and bounds in the past 16 years, nowhere more clearly than AI. “Artificial intelligence brains simply cannot cope with change and unpredictable events,” wrote Adams, explaining why robots would be unlikely to interact with humans any time soon. “Fundamentally, it’s just very difficult to get a robot to tell the difference between a picture of a tree and a real tree,” Paul Newman, then and now a robotics expert at Oxford University, told Adams. Happily, Newman proved his own pessimism to be unwarranted: in 2014, he co-founded Oxbotica, which has hopefully solved the problem he mentioned, because it makes and sells driverless car technology to vehicle manufacturers around the world. If we move on from worrying over details, there are two key points at which the 2020 predictions fall apart: one about tech, the other about society. “Gadget lovers could use a single keypad to operate their phone, PDA [tablet] and MP3 music player,” Adams wrote, “or combine the output of their watch, pager and radio into a single speaker.” The idea of greater convergence and connectivity between personal electronics was correct. But there was a very specific hole in this prediction: the smartphone. After half a century of single-purpose consumer electronics, it was difficult to perceive how all-encompassing a single device could become, but just three years after Adams pubished his piece, the iPhone launched and changed everything. Forget carrying around a separate MP3 player; in the real 2020, people aren’t even carrying separate cameras, wallets or car keys. Failing to foresee the smartphone is an oversight about the progress of technology. But the other missing point is about how society would respond to the changing forces. The 2004 predictions are, fundamentally, optimistic. Adams writes about biometric healthcare data being beamed to your doctor’s computer; about washing machines that automatically arrange their own servicing based on availability in your “electronic organiser”; and about radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips on your clothes that trigger customised adverts or programme your phone based on where you are. And through it all is a sense of trust: these changes will be good, and the companies making them well-intentioned. Robots are here to stay … an automated production line in China. “There is a loss of privacy that is going to be very difficult for people and we haven’t figured out how to deal with that,” one of Adams’s interviewees admitted, when describing technology in 2020. “But if you explain what it does, how much information it provides and where it goes – and that the trade-off is that you don’t have to wait as long in line at the supermarket – then people will take the trade-off.” In fact, over the past decade and a half, the vast majority of people were simply never given the choice to accept the trade-off, and it is increasingly clear that many of them never would have if they had understood what was at risk. If the Guardian missed the advent of the smartphone, despite writing just three years before the launch of the iPhone, how can we possibly do better today, looking 10 times further ahead? The world of 2050 will be unimaginably different in many ways, even if we can safely assume people will still generally have two arms, two legs and an unpleasant smell if they don’t wash for long periods of time. But there are forces working in our favour. The internet is far more entrenched now than it was in 2004, and while its chaotic effect on our lives shows no sign of abating, it is at least predictably unpredictable. Similarly, smartphone penetration in the west is now as high as it looks likely to go. However the world changes over the next 30 years, it won’t be as a result of more Britons or Americans getting phones. Other predictions can be as simple as following trendlines to their logical conclusion. By 2050, the switchover to electric cars will have mostly finished, at least in developed nations – as well as in those developing nations, such as China, that are starting to prioritise air quality over cheap mechanisation. The “next billion” will be online, mostly through low-cost smartphones receiving increasingly ubiquitous cellular connections. But what they do on the internet is harder to guess. In 2020, there are two countervailing trends at work: on the one hand, providers, principally Facebook, have been trying to use subsidised deals to push newly connected nations on to stripped-down versions of the internet. If they succeed at scale, then many of the benefits of the web will be stolen from whole nations, reduced instead to being passive participants in Facebook and a few local media and payment companies. But pushback, from national regulators in places such as India and from competing carriers, could bring the new nations to the real internet instead. Unless, that is, national regulators push in a different direction, copying China, Iran and Russia to keep Facebook out by building a purely nationalistic internet. How better to ensure that the benefits of the web accrue domestically, they reason, than by requiring your citizens to use home-grown services? And if it makes it easier to impose censorship, well, that’s just another benefit. James Bridle, the author of the unsettling book New Dark Age, points out that the discussion can’t lose sight of who the next billion actually are. “I keep thinking about the way the tech industry talks about ‘the next billion users’ without acknowledging that those people are going to be hot, wet and pissed off,” he says, “and we’re only talking about hardening borders, rather than preparing – politically, socially, technologically – for this reality.” Because, if we are guessing the future from simple trend lines, there is another one that we need to acknowledge: the climate. The specifics of what will change are not for this piece, but the human response very much is. One possibility is plan A: humanity, in time, reaches net zero when it comes to emissions. In that scenario, we will live in a world where plant proteins replace meat in everyday consumption, where electrically powered networked mass transit reaches into the suburbs and beyond, a world of video-conferencing and remote attendance steadily chipping away at business flights, and of insulation inside the walls of British homes. (Look, it can’t all be high-tech.) If plan A fails, then there is a chance we turn to plan B. That is a world in which megascale injections of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere turn the heavens a milky-white, and a whole generation never sees a clear blue sky, in order to reflect more of the sun’s rays and pause the greenhouse effect. It is one in which we turn on gigantic processing plants that do nothing but extract carbon dioxide from the air and pump it underground into disused oil wells. It is one in which whole cities are abandoned and populations relocated to avoid the worst effects we can’t prevent. Plan B – geoengineering – is neither optimistic nor pessimistic about the future of humanity, says Holly Jean Buck, the author of After Geoengineering. “The worst thing would be we fail plan A and plan B. Over the next decade, I think geoengineering will definitely be tried. Right now, it’s toned down, I think because of people not wanting to talk about it. We don’t have the body of knowledge, and would need 20 or 30 years to develop it. Right about midcentury means it will be a crunch point: climate change will be really apparent.” But for Buck, as for Bridle, the distinctions that really matter aren’t necessarily the technology. “The choices around whether we have a livable future or a dystopian one are about social attitudes and social changes. “Right now, we’re in this era of stopgaps. Society used to be able to make a long-term plan: people built long-term infrastructure and thought a bit further out. That’s not something that happens now: we go to quick fixes. We need a cultural change in values, to enable more deliberate decision-making.” There is another possibility: that technology really does save the day, and then some. John Maeda, the chief experience officer at the digital consultancy Publicis Sapient, says that by 2050, “computational machines will have surpassed the processing power of all the living human brains on Earth. The cloud will also have absorbed the thinking of the many dead brains on Earth, too – and we all need to work together to survive. So I predict that we will see a lasting cooperation between the human race and the computational machines of the future.” This sort of thinking has come to be known as the singularity: the idea that there will be a point, perhaps even a singular moment in time, when the ability of thinking machines outstrips those who created them, and progress accelerates with dizzying results. “If you interview AI researchers about when general AI – a machine that can do everything a human can do – will arrive, they think it’s about 50/50 whether it will be before 2050,” says Tom Chivers, the author of The AI Does Not Hate You. “They also think that AGI” – artificial general intelligence – “can be hugely transformative – lots of them signed an open letter in 2015 saying ‘eradication of disease and poverty’ could be possible. But also,” he adds, citing a 2013 survey in the field, “on average they think there is about a 15% to 20% chance of a ‘very bad outcome [existential catastrophe]’, which means everyone dead.” There is, perhaps, little point in dwelling on the 50% chance that AGI does develop. If it does, every other prediction we could make is moot, and this story, and perhaps humanity as we know it, will be forgotten. And if we assume that transcendentally brilliant artificial minds won’t be along to save or destroy us, and live according to that outlook, then what is the worst that could happen – we build a better world for nothing?

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Re: [nexa] CCPA: Facebook non può più sottilizzare sulla questione della vendita di dati
by Antonio Casilli Jan. 4, 2020

Jan. 4, 2020

Certo che sì ----- Mail original ----- De: "cristina" <cristina(a)cossuavv.191.it> À: "Antonio Casilli" <antonio.casilli(a)telecom-paris.fr>, "nexa" <nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it> Envoyé: Samedi 4 Janvier 2020 18:05:51 Objet: Re: [nexa] CCPA: Facebook non può più sottilizzare sulla questione della vendita di dati Grazie infinite! Molto importante.. Posso "diffondere" ? M. Cristina Cossu Inviato da smartphone Samsung Galaxy. -------- Messaggio originale -------- Da: Antonio Casilli <antonio.casilli(a)telecom-paris.fr> Data: 04/01/20 16:38 (GMT+01:00) A: nexa <nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it> Oggetto: [nexa] CCPA: Facebook non può più sottilizzare sulla questione della vendita di dati Se, come me, non ne potete più dei saccenti corporate che pretendono che "Facebook non vende i vostri dati" (di solito basandosi su sottili distinzioni lessicali: "condivisions", "monetizzazione", ecc.), apprezzerete il California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), entrato or ora in vigore. Propone una definizione comprensiva della nozione di "vendita". "Many companies have made changes to their privacy policies to follow this new law, and there's a directory that lists how you can request your data and improve your privacy settings. But a handful of companies aren't complying with the new law, whether by failing to provide, essentially, a "do not sell my data" link or button on their websites -- which the law requires -- or arguing that the rules don't apply to them. Facebook said in a December blog post that it doesn't plan to make any changes to its web tracking, believing that the law's definition of selling data doesn't apply to it. The social networking giant argued that it shares data with third parties, which it doesn't consider selling. But under the new law, sharing is still considered a sale, according to Mary Stone Ross, co-author of the CCPA. "The definition of 'sell' is written in a way to include the sharing of personal information," said Ross, associate director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC. "They are playing fast and loose with the definition of 'sell.'" Facebook didn't immediately respond to a request for comment for this story." https://www.cnet.com/news/californias-new-privacy-law-puts-you-first-too-ba… -- Antonio A. Casilli Professor, Telecom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris Member, Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation (i3 UMR 9217 CNRS) Associate Member, LACI-IIAC (EHESS) Faculty Fellow, Nexa Center for Internet & Society *We respect your right to disconnect. This email send time is due to my own workflow efficiency. You are in no obligation to take action or reply to it outside your office hours.* _______________________________________________ nexa mailing list nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa _______________________________________________ nexa mailing list nexa(a)server-nexa.polito.it https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa

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dopo 100 giorni di silenzio...
by Flavia Marzano Jan. 4, 2020

Jan. 4, 2020

Qui ho scritto, dopo 100 giorni di silenzio da quando sono stata mandata via dalla giunta romana, alcune mie considerazioni che condivido volentieri con voi e su cui, se vorrete, mi farà piacere leggere la vs opinione https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-miei-primi-100-giorni-nei-due-sensi-ma-anc… Buon anno Flavia *Questo documento è digitale e vorrei che (digi)tale restasse :) * *Please consider the environmental impact before printing this e-mail* *Avviso di riservatezza* *Le informazioni contenute nella presente comunicazione e i relativi allegati sono destinate esclusivamente alle persone o alla Società sopraindicati. La diffusione, distribuzione e/o copiatura del documento trasmesso da parte di qualsiasi soggetto diverso dal destinatario è proibita ai sensi dell'art. 6165 c.p., che ai sensi del D.Lgs 196/2003. Se avete ricevuto questo messaggio per errore vi preghiamo di distruggerlo e di informarmi immediatamente.*

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Un algoritmo “spia” i social per scovare gli evasori fiscali: il caso in Francia | QuiFinanza
by don Luca Peyron Jan. 3, 2020

Jan. 3, 2020

Una notizia non particolarmente tecnica dal nostro punto di vista, ma comunque curiosa. Buona lettura e buon 2020 a tutti Dl https://quifinanza.it/fisco-tasse/algoritmo-spia-social-scovare-evasori/339…

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Proposal di Legge Captatore Informatico del 2017
by Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) Jan. 3, 2020

Jan. 3, 2020

Ho preparato un archivio di tutto quanto fatto per la Proposta di Legge sui Captatori del 2017. C’è documentato con riferimenti il riuso nella expert opinion da parte del CCC, i commenti di Access Now, il punto sull’irrobustimento legale fornito da Privacy International e gli apprezzamenti dell’EU Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. Per uso di ricerca e policy lobbying: https://github.com/fpietrosanti/Trojan-USe-Bill-Proposal-In-Italy Fabio

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Yasha Levine: "Still censored by Twitter"
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 3, 2020

Jan. 3, 2020

Yasha Levine, giornalista investigativo, è autore, oltre al resto, del recente libro "Surveillance Valley - The Secret Military History of the Internet" (https://surveillancevalley.com/) che menziono senza averlo ancora letto. jc *Still censored by Twitter** */Surveillance Valley wins. Immigrants as a Weapon never stood a chance./ Yasha Levine Dec 27, 2019 It’s been a week since Twitter locked my account <https://yasha.substack.com/p/twitter-censored-my-tweet-locked> because of a tweet connected to my recent Immigrants as a Weapon letter <https://yasha.substack.com/p/trumps-impeachment-ukraine-and-war> — the one about Trump’s impeachment and the “Ukraine Doctrine.” I still have no idea how Twitter made this decision and how it happened — and that’s even after a Twitter PR rep responded to my email <https://yasha.substack.com/p/twitter-censorship-and-political> and offered to explain what happened. Actually, the company’s response is the most annoying thing about this. […] Continua qui: https://yasha.substack.com/p/still-censored-by-twitter

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"I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left."
by J.C. DE MARTIN Jan. 3, 2020

Jan. 3, 2020

Già ripreso da varie testate, tra cui https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/2/21046522/google-china-dragonfly-ross-laje… Buon Anno! juan carlos *----------- I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left.** */The company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” Things have changed.// / Ross LaJeunesse Jan 2 When I walked out the door on my last day as Google’s Head of International Relations, I couldn’t help but think of my first day at the company. I had exchanged a wood-paneled office, a suit and tie, and the job of wrestling California’s bureaucracy as Governor Schwarzenegger’s deputy chief of staff for a laptop, jeans, and a promise that I’d be making the world better and more equal, under the simple but powerful guidance “Don’t be evil.” I joined Google in 2008, when those words still mattered. I saw them used to guide product designs that put the company’s success above a user’s privacy, such as during the development of Google’s ill-fated social network, Buzz. I used those words myself in 2010 as Head of Public Policy for Asia Pacific, when I executed the company’s landmark decision to stop censoring Search results in China, putting human rights ahead of the bottom line. […] Continua qui: https://medium.com/@rossformaine/i-was-googles-head-of-international-relati…

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La sinistra e la rivoluzione digitale
by de petra giulio Jan. 3, 2020

Jan. 3, 2020

Una rivista un po’ vintage, che si chiama ‘Critica Marxista’, ha pubblicato un mio articolo su come la politica della sinistra potrebbe confrontarsi con la trasformazione digitale, nella cui scrittura ho fatto riferimento a molti dei temi trattati in questa lista. Mi permetto di segnalarlo a chi può essere interessato. Giulio

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Quarantining online hate speech: technical and ethical perspectives | SpringerLink
by Alberto Cammozzo Jan. 2, 2020

Jan. 2, 2020

Trattare lo hate speech come un virus: dove zoppica il paragone? <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-019-09516-z> In this paper we explore quarantining as a more ethical method for delimiting the spread of Hate Speech via online social media platforms. Currently, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google generally respond reactively to such material: offensive messages that have already been posted are reviewed by human moderators if complaints from users are received. The offensive posts are only subsequently removed if the complaints are upheld; therefore, they still cause the recipients psychological harm. In addition, this approach has frequently been criticised for delimiting freedom of expression, since it requires the service providers to elaborate and implement censorship regimes. In the last few years, an emerging generation of automatic Hate Speech detection systems has started to offer new strategies for dealing with this particular kind of offensive online material. Anticipating the future efficacy of such systems, the present article advocates an approach to online Hate Speech detection that is analogous to the quarantining of malicious computer software. If a given post is automatically classified as being harmful in a reliable manner, then it can be temporarily quarantined, and the direct recipients can receive an alert, which protects them from the harmful content in the first instance. The quarantining framework is an example of more ethical online safety technology that can be extended to the handling of Hate Speech. Crucially, it provides flexible options for obtaining a more justifiable balance between freedom of expression and appropriate censorship.

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