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How Google and big tech watch your money
by Alberto Cammozzo Aug. 6, 2019

Aug. 6, 2019

<https://www.fastcompany.com/90349518/gmail-keeps-a-record-of-your-purchase-…> It’s no secret that Google gathers up large amounts of your data based on your search history. But far less known is that the company has also been automatically tallying up your digital and real-world financial transactions based on receipts found in your Gmail accounts and other Google services. It’s just another sign of the enormous reach of tech titans, including Facebook, mining our real-world transactions to generate new insights into our behavior and new revenue streams. If you have a Google account, see for yourself: In the Google Account Activity section, a tab called “Payments & subscriptions” reveals a page of your Purchases, Subscriptions, and Reservations, along with your stored Payment Methods. The page—which I stumbled upon recently, and which CNBC also reported on—includes transactions, like deliveries and online orders, gathered from receipts or confirmations received in Gmail as well as from Google services like the Google Play Store. (View yours at https://myaccount.google.com/payments-and-subscriptions by clicking on “Manage purchases.”) The data can be eye-opening: a partial catalog of years of purchases that you probably didn’t know Google had yanked from the depths of your digital life. Like many, I’ve long used Gmail like a cabinet or shoebox to keep track of receipts. But I was unaware that I had consented for the Google bots to scan my inbox, identify specific emails, and assemble a dossier of my purchases. Google says the purchase data is not used to target ads and is only viewable by the individual user. “To help you easily view and keep track of your purchases, bookings and subscriptions in one place, we’ve created a private destination that can only be seen by you,” a Google spokesperson explained in an email. The idea is to help you do things like track a package, cancel a reservation, or renew a subscription, according to Google. “We don’t use any information from your Gmail messages to serve you ads, and that includes the email receipts and confirmations shown on the Purchase page.” Plus, says Google, “you can delete this information at any time.” Not easy to delete But there is a catch. Removing data from “Purchases” requires users to click each purchase individually: There is no way for users to easily delete their entire purchase history from Google’s servers. Removing the original emails doesn’t work either: When CNBC reporter Todd Haselton bravely deleted every single email in his Gmail, the transactions in his purchase history still remained. [...]

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Google "Street View" Wiretap Allegations Settled for a "Modest" $13 Million
by Alberto Cammozzo Aug. 6, 2019

Aug. 6, 2019

<https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/google-street-view-wiretap-allegations-79…> In 2007, Google began gathering photographs for its Google Maps “Street View” application featuring adjustable panoramic, street-level images tied to addresses searched in Google Maps. Google captured these photographs with cameras mounted on company vehicles traveling on public roads. However, the cars were also equipped with Wi-Fi reception antennas collecting data transmitted by homes and businesses over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks in areas where the Street View vehicles photographed. In addition to collecting basic identifying information about the Wi-Fi networks, Google also collected “payload data,” including messages, search queries, and other communications sent and received over the unencrypted Wi-Fi networks as the vehicles travelled and photographed the surroundings. In 2010, plaintiffs filed a number of class action lawsuits alleging Google violated the Wiretap Act and other state laws and wiretap statutes by collecting this payload data from the unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. The cases were consolidated in the Northern District of California where Google’s motions to dismiss were denied. [...]

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Revealed: The Secret Scripts Amazon Give to Cops to Promote Ring Surveillance Cameras - VICE
by Alberto Cammozzo Aug. 6, 2019

Aug. 6, 2019

<https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjwea4/revealed-the-secret-scripts-amazo…> [...] The “Reactive Q&A” obtained by Motherboard was given to the police department of Maywood, NJ. The document includes sample answers that police can give to questions people might have about the partnership. One sample question is, “What is the partnership benefit?” “The Neighbors app lets you easily share and communicate with your neighbors about crime and safety so you can have real-time, local crime data at your fingertips,” Ring instructs police to say. “The Neighbors app facilitates communication between neighbors, which is a crucial element of crime prevention.” [...] Greer said that most forms of private surveillance costs police time and money because they have to get a court order before collecting private footage. Ring, meanwhile, allows police to request footage directly from camera owners. [...]

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Riders, copertura Inail e mix cottimo-paga oraria: ecco il decreto - CorCom
by Mauro Alovisio Aug. 6, 2019

Aug. 6, 2019

Gent.mi segnalo news di interesse in arrivo mercoledì 8nhttps:// www.corrierecomunicazioni.it/digital-economy/riders-copertura-inail-e-mix-c… Buona estate Mauro Alovisio

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Airbnb, via per via la mappa degli alloggi nelle grandi città italiane
by Luigi Scorca Aug. 5, 2019

Aug. 5, 2019

https://www.infodata.ilsole24ore.com/2019/08/05/airbnb-via-via-la-mappa-deg…

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Pentagon testing mass surveillance balloons across the US
by Giacomo Tesio Aug. 5, 2019

Aug. 5, 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/02/pentagon-balloons-surveilla… Exclusive: the high-altitude balloons promise a cheap monitoring platform that could follow multiple cars and boats for extended periods The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons, documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal. Up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons are being launched from rural South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois. Travelling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 65,000ft, the balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats”, according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation, an aerospace and defence company. [...] rthur Holland Michel, the co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in New York, said, “What this new technology proposes is to watch everything at once. Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘combat TiVo’ because when an event happens somewhere in the surveilled area, you can potentially rewind the tape to see exactly what occurred, and rewind even further to see who was involved and where they came from.” [...] The new balloons promise a cheap surveillance platform that could follow multiple cars and boats for extended periods. And because winds often travel in different directions at different altitudes, the balloons can usually hover over a given area simply by ascending or descending. Neither Sierra Nevada nor US Southcom responded to requests for comment on this story. However, the rival balloon operator World View recently announced that it had carried out multi-week test missions in which its own stratospheric balloons were able to hover over a five-mile-diameter area for six and a half hours, and larger areas for days at a time.

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Terminating Service for 8Chan
by Giacomo Tesio Aug. 5, 2019

Aug. 5, 2019

https://new.blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/ The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio are horrific tragedies. In the case of the El Paso shooting, the suspected terrorist gunman appears to have been inspired by the forum website known as 8chan. Based on evidence we've seen, it appears that he posted a screed to the site immediately before beginning his terrifying attack on the El Paso Walmart killing 20 people. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. Nearly the same thing happened on 8chan before the terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. The El Paso shooter specifically referenced the Christchurch incident and appears to have been inspired by the largely unmoderated discussions on 8chan which glorified the previous massacre. In a separate tragedy, the suspected killer in the Poway, California synagogue shooting also posted a hate-filled “open letter” on 8chan. 8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate. 8chan is among the more than 19 million Internet properties that use Cloudflare's service. We just sent notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific Time. The rationale is simple: they have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths. Even if 8chan may not have violated the letter of the law in refusing to moderate their hate-filled community, they have created an environment that revels in violating its spirit. We do not take this decision lightly. Cloudflare is a network provider. In pursuit of our goal of helping build a better internet, we’ve considered it important to provide our security services broadly to make sure as many users as possible are secure, and thereby making cyberattacks less attractive — regardless of the content of those websites. Many of our customers run platforms of their own on top of our network. If our policies are more conservative than theirs it effectively undercuts their ability to run their services and set their own policies. We reluctantly tolerate content that we find reprehensible, but we draw the line at platforms that have demonstrated they directly inspire tragic events and are lawless by design. 8chan has crossed that line. It will therefore no longer be allowed to use our services. # What Will Happen Next Unfortunately, we have seen this situation before and so we have a good sense of what will play out. Almost exactly two years ago we made the determination to kick another disgusting site off Cloudflare's network: the Daily Stormer. That caused a brief interruption in the site's operations but they quickly came back online using a Cloudflare competitor. That competitor at the time promoted as a feature the fact that they didn't respond to legal process. Today, the Daily Stormer is still available and still disgusting. They have bragged that they have more readers than ever. They are no longer Cloudflare's problem, but they remain the Internet's problem. [...] # Rule of Law We continue to feel incredibly uncomfortable about playing the role of content arbiter and do not plan to exercise it often. Some have wrongly speculated this is due to some conception of the United States' First Amendment. That is incorrect. [...] Instead our concern has centered around another much more universal idea: the Rule of Law. The Rule of Law requires policies be transparent and consistent. While it has been articulated as a framework for how governments ensure their legitimacy, we have used it as a touchstone when we think about our own policies. [...] Cloudflare is not a government. While we've been successful as a company, that does not give us the political legitimacy to make determinations on what content is good and bad. Nor should it. [...] The unresolved question is how should the law deal with platforms that ignore or actively thwart the Rule of Law?

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The ‘Amazon of Africa’ faces a big challenge: No addresses
by Luigi Scorca Aug. 5, 2019

Aug. 5, 2019

https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?destination=%2fworld%2fafrica%…

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“I’m a data scientist who is skeptical about data”
by J.C. DE MARTIN Aug. 4, 2019

Aug. 4, 2019

I’m a data scientist who is skeptical about data By Andrea Jones-RooyJuly 24, 2019 Professor of data science, NYU https://qz.com/1664575/is-data-science-legit/ (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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A big US maker of paperless voting systems now says paper is essential - MIT Technology Review
by J.C. DE MARTIN Aug. 4, 2019

Aug. 4, 2019

https://www.technologyreview.com/f/613651/a-big-us-maker-of-paperless-votin… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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