Who would have guessed a hundred years ago that Stanley Baldwin was right?
I dunno - he looks a little Woodrow Wilsonish to me. But if you're right, you're right.
And Nota Bene: it seems that DuckDuckGo can't find the link to that last post. Strangely, Google can. Search sting site:borepatch.blogspot.com best worst presidents on each site. So long, DuckDuckGo, it's been fun. But I can't trust you, and neither should my readers.
Lawrence has the details. You can turn the damn stuff off. And oh by the way, they're getting sued over it.
This starts out "yaknow, that sounds like a good idea" but gets creepier and creepier as you read more:
Ring doorbells and cameras are using AI to "learn the routines of your residence," via a new feature called Video Descriptions.
...Once they do this, as Ring founder and Amazon VP of product Jamie Siminoff wrote in a blog today announcing Video Descriptions:
Ring notifications will provide more meaningful information like, 'A person is walking up the steps with a black dog,' or 'Two people are peering into a white car in the driveway.'
The aim, according to Siminoff, is to shift more of the heavy lifting involved with home security to Ring's AI. This will also include "custom anomaly alerts," which are generated when "something happens on your property that is an anomaly to your property."
So far, so good. Getting alerts only when something is unusual is generally considered A Good Thing when it comes to security. But there's a downside:
And here's where it gets a little bit creepy: "It will learn the routines of your residence, get smarter, and deliver peace of mind by only notifying you when it is something out of the ordinary."
This gives us pause, as opposed to peace of mind, and sounds like super-charged snooping wrapped in an AI bow. If this kind of information is not properly secured, it could be a treasure trove for thieves, burglars, stalkers, and all other sorts of mischief-makers. In December 2022, a grand jury indictment charged two US men with breaking into Ring accounts to make fake emergency calls to police ("swatting"), then streaming the audio and video as the police arrived.
How long until AI will hack into your AI-enabled Ring account? Asking for a friend.
Ring's response to The Register's reporter does not reassure:
The Register asked Ring where this information about users' home routines is stored, how it's secured, and under what circumstances it might be shared with law enforcement.
"We do not log the descriptions generated from Video Descriptions," a spokesperson emailed in response to our questions.
In the meantime, your humble vulture will continue to stick with dumb doorbells and barky dogs to deliver peace of mind about out-of-the-ordinary occurrences at home.
Endorsed. Particularly the barky dog bit.
US health insurance giant Blue Shield of California handed sensitive health information belonging to as many as 4.7 million members to Google's advertising empire, likely without these individuals' knowledge or consent.
The data shared may have included medical claim dates and providers used, which raises the specter of Google targeting ads based on the fact that you booked an appointment with a certain type of doctor - say, a cancer specialist, fertility clinic, or psychiatrist.
Other info potentially shared with Google ranged from patient names, insurance plan details, city of residence and zip code, gender, family size, and Blue Shield-assigned account identifiers, to financial responsibility info, and search queries and results for the "Find a Doctor" tool — including location, plan type, and provider details.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln - how did you like the play?
Blue Shield declined to answer The Register's questions, including how it discovered this years-long data leak, and what other third-party trackers (if any) are on its websites.
...
"This isn't just a technical misstep. It's a HIPAA compliance failure," Ensar Seker, CISO at threat intel firm SOCRadar, told The Register, referring to America's Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that safeguards medical data.
Bingo is his name-o. Just to emphasize that: this wasn't just a "data breach", it was a criminal violation of US law.
It seems that they often withhold that information from Courts and defense attorneys:
Police around the United States are routinely using facial recognition technology to help identify suspects, but those departments rarely disclose they've done so - even to suspects and their lawyers.
Documents concerning the use and disclosure, of facial recognition technology were provided to the Washington Post as part of its ongoing investigation into use of the technology in the US, but only from around 40 departments in 15 states out of the "more than 100" departments who were asked. Most, WaPo noted, declined to answer anything.
Police records reportedly indicate that, aside from not disclosing that facial recognition technology, police also frequently obscured use of the technology by saying they identified suspects "through investigative means," while others have outright policy documents that tell officers to "not document this investigative lead."
In multiple cases documented in police reports and court filings, WaPo found those charged with crimes based on facial recognition often weren't aware that it had been used to identify them until after they were already in jail – several times incorrectly.
Emphasis added by me.
It seems that the Police sometimes don't even tell the DA's office about this. While I Am Not A Lawyer, this seems like a great argument to abolish Qualified Immunity. The secrecy itself is the best evidence that the process is being abused. I mean, if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to worry about, right?
Good:
One of the major data brokers engaged in the deeply alienating practice of selling detailed driver behavior data to insurers has shut down that business.
Verisk, which had collected data from cars made by General Motors, Honda, and Hyundai, has stopped receiving that data, according to The Record, a news site run by security firm Recorded Future. According to a statement provided to Privacy4Cars, and reported by The Record, Verisk will no longer provide a "Driving Behavior Data History Report" to insurers.
Skeptics have long assumed that car companies had at least some plan to monetize the rich data regularly sent from cars back to their manufacturers, or telematics. But a concrete example of this was reported by The New York Times' Kashmir Hill, in which drivers of GM vehicles were finding insurance more expensive, or impossible to acquire, because of the kinds of reports sent along the chain from GM to data brokers to insurers. Those who requested their collected data from the brokers found details of every trip they took: times, distances, and every "hard acceleration" or "hard braking event," among other data points.
You will no doubt be shocked to hear that car dealers "helped" customers opt-in, as part of getting their brand new vehicles ready for the road.
But it looks like the revenue from this didn't offset the bad PR and customer bad feelings associated with the program, and so they dropped it like a hot potato.
GM quickly announced a halt to data sharing in late March, days after the Times' reporting sparked considerable outcry. GM had been sending data to both Verisk and LexisNexis Risk Solutions, the latter of which is not signaling any kind of retreat from the telematics pipeline. LexisNexis' telematics page shows logos for carmakers Kia, Mitsubishi, and Subaru.
...
Disclosure of GM's stealthily authorized data sharing has sparked numerous lawsuits, investigations from California and Texas agencies, and interest from Congress and the Federal Trade Commission.
Act like a Rat Bastard, get treated like a Rat Bastard.
