Tag Archives: Privacy

Facebook doesn’t like privacy!

[Primeiramente #ForaTemer; First of all #TemerOut]

Unfortunately, the Panopticam stopped broadcasting the exact hour I was showing this message. So, the very last image broadcasted from their Twitter and YouTube accounts was the one just before me. The text below was ready since the day before and I was waiting until Jeremy was back online to release it, but after realising they are not going to resuscitate the project before I finish my sabbatical leave, I decided to post it anyway. So, this message was originally planned and delivered on February 24th 2016, and is being released on June 23rd 2016, with no images from the Panopticam…

Day 76: Facebook doesn't like privacy

Day 76: Facebook doesn’t like privacy

Inspiration for this message/quote came from the Channel 4 series called Data Baby, with lots of very interesting reports on issues involving privacy, Internet of Things, social media, surveillance, and obviously big data.

In one of the articles, “Ten reasons we should quit Facebook of good”, I found this quote saying Facebook doesn’t like privacy, despite its long and visible privacy policy. The problem, according to this text, the change the policy too much, sometimes unannounced, all according to their own interests and to adjust new features and avoid being sued later – and, of course, having the right to sell users’ data, which is what really matters to them.

Data is today’s goldmine and privacy settings are always calibrated to the amount of “freedom” companies have to monetise personal data. They will say they’re never interested in content and the actual personal data, and this is true, but they can do a lot more to what is known as metadata (data about data). Ask the NSA and GCHQ what kind of data they collect and the answer is exactly the same (have a look at this: “Phew, NSA Is Just Collecting Metadata”). US  Senator Dianne Feinstein (chair of the Senate intelligence committee) has this to say about NSA bulk metadata collection programmes:

“The call-records program is not surveillance. It does not collect the content of any communication, nor do the records include names or locations. The NSA only collects the type of information found on a telephone bill: phone numbers of calls placed and received, the time of the calls and duration.”

They usually don’t want to read our emails or listen to our phone calls, when all they need to build “profiles” is to know who we’re emailing/phoning or when, where from, and things like that. So, with metadata they have users’ habits, connections, movements, necessities, preferences, consumer records, you name it! Ok, this message isn’t about NSA or GCHQ, but Facebook. So, just imagine what Facebook can do with everything its users post/like/share/comment on their profiles?!

A final update to this message (June 23rd 2016) comes from the funny picture posted by Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, recently, where it’s possible to spot his own laptop on the background with tape covering its webcam and microphone. If there’s anyone who knows what’s possible to collect from someone else’s computers, I guess this is him…

Zuck's covered camera and mic

Zuck’s covered camera and mic

Who has the rights to be where, when and how?

This message is, in fact, a quote by sociologist Paul Jones during an interview to Mark Townsend for his interesting article published by the Guardian titled “Will privatisation of UK cities rip out their hearts?” earlier this week.

This is part of a series of articles by the Guardian on the privatisation of public spaces in the UK. Townsend’s article focused on Liverpool and its central Liverpool One private development which, obviously, resembles any other privatised development in London or elsewhere in Britain: clean, full of nice cafés, sanitised, and with its own rules when it comes to public gatherings, skating, biking, and, as they usually say, inappropriate “anti-social behaviour”.

The discussion is timing and relevant, as real public spaces are being squeezed to a few ones surrounded by a merchandised city private companies, groups and individuals assume control of large portions of urban land, dictating the kind of behaviour they expect from people “publicly” using “their” places. Then, the issue raises questions about the legitimacy of publicness in today’s city and about the rights to access, experience and share open spaces.

In the end it is, indeed, as Paul Jones stated in his interview, about asking local authorities and city makers “who has the rights to be where, when and how?”. This is the kind of question to be asked when private developers assume every citizen is a potential customer who should have their rights restricted in deciding whether to consume Cocal-Cola or Pepsi, or to go to Starbucks or Costa!

These are times when I caught myself rethinking about a concept I really never liked,  Marc Augé’s famous non-place idea, which he uses to describe, very shortly, homogenised spaces in supermodernity times. Analogously, and using another quote from Townsend’s piece, Anna Minton resonates this notion of places without identity while commenting about Liverpool One:

“But then Liverpool One is not for the people of Liverpool, it’s basically a regional centre where you can drive straight into an underground car park, come out for an all-day shopping experience, head back and not even know you’ve been in Liverpool. It’s like a hermetically sealed bubble that could be anywhere in the world.”

Day 74: Who has the rights to be where, when and how?

Day 74: Who has the rights to be where, when and how?

US wants our devices to have “backdoors”

We have witnessed in the past few days, a heat debate about the judicial requests by the FBI to force Apple, the giant corporation, to open up backdoors on the iPhone. The FBI is trying to unlock the iPhone of one of the killers in the mass shooting spree in San Bernardino, California, last December, and insists Apple should, technically, help them doing so.

Apple, on the other hand, rejected, so far, any demand and said that, even though the FBI is trying to access one single device, the development of this limitation in securing access to iPhones could set a dangerous precedent and compromise electronic security and encryption of every device from then on. Here is what Apple said about the case in an open letter to their customers:

“Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.

The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.”

Backdoor is a method of bypassing authentication to enter on a device or system. In other words, it’s a master key that gives its holder access to our personal data. It’s no secret that the US government, through it’s various agencies, wanted all devices to have this kind of hidden access, and it has now found an opportunity to force this to happen via court order and with the excuse of a real sensitive and violent case under investigation.

It’s unusual to see privacy activists on the same side of companies like Apple or Google, but this is happening now and everyone seems uncomfortable with the situation. Reacting to Apple’s letter, Edward Snowden posted yesterday on Twitter that “The FBI is creating a world where citizens rely on Apple to defend their rights, rather than the other way around.” David Murakami Wood, a well known surveillance scholar said, also on Twitter, that “Big corporations vs. big government is just one Big Brother against another”.

On the technical side, apparently there is a way of protecting the iPhones against unauthorised access, even if a backdoor was built by Apple to help the FBI against its will. On an article to The Intercept, Micah Lee explains how to do so. Lee justifies this saying that

“If it sounds outlandish to worry about government agents trying to crack into your phone, consider that when you travel internationally, agents at the airport or other border crossings can seize, search, and temporarily retain your digital devices — even without any grounds for suspicion. And while a local police officer can’t search your iPhone without a warrant, cops have used their own digital devices to get search warrants within 15 minutes, as a Supreme Court opinion recently noted.”

It seems that, after becoming the holy graal of our personal data for the sake of convenience and a connected life, smartphones are also, finally being turned into one of the ultimate levels of protection to our privacy. Sooner or later, this kind of dispute between agencies with investigatory powers and companies that produce our devices would come to light. It’s highly possible that this is not the last time we will witness this happening. I just hope the debate only grows and things are not dealt with under the table, as sometimes we know they are.

Day 72: US wants our devices to have "backdoors"

Day 72: US wants our devices to have “backdoors”

Your gadgets know a lot about you!

Carnival in Brazil, servers down (back just as soon as the party finished). Coincidence?…

Anyway, back to normal, I was reading a lot of articles and stories about Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) theses days. One of stories on the media this week was about the possibility of fitness tracking devices knowing its user is pregnant even before any clear body signal of it. The story was about a user reporting problems with his wife’s Fitbit wrist tracker that apparently were getting all readings wrong. After a while the company realised there wasn’t any problem with the product, but that his wife’s body was changing, suggesting she could be pregnant…

This story immediately reminds us the famous Target case when the company asked its statisticians to discover pregnant customers as they are more likely to change their consumer habits, preferably in their second trimestre (when they start shopping for the newcomer).

Any doubt that in this “smart future” our gadgets (and retailers) will know more and more about us and compromise more and more of our privacy and our choices?

Day 67: Your gadgets know a lot about you!

Day 67: Your gadgets know a lot about you!

Stop hunting whistleblowers!

We all know Julian Assange isn’t a whistleblower, he (or Wikileaks) just facilitates the job of these guys. Let’s face it, whistleblowing became a crucial humanitarian service in today’s confusing, blurred and obscure world. In a time when (mega) corporations and powerful governments do lots of things under the table, whistleblowers are a necessary balance in favour of ordinary citizens.

They’ve been around for a long time, but have become more visible recently because of the pervasive nature of electronic communications and the permanent attempt of intelligent agencies and corporations to collect and manipulate information about other people and other government/companies.

We must recognise the importance of organisations such as Wikileaks, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others alike which protect important information and whistleblowers. We must also praise people like Daniel Ellsberg, Katharine Gun, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and many others for coming forward and risking their own lives…

Day 66: Stop hunting whistleblowers!

Day 66: Stop hunting whistleblowers!

And as one of these coincidences, while visiting the vigil in solidarity to Julian Assange at the Ecuador Embassy, I was given a poster to help the protest, that was exactly about stopping the attacks on whistleblowers…

Stop the attack on whistleblowers

Stop the attack on whistleblowers

There was a big hope that Assange would walk free from the embassy today, as the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled his deprivation of liberty as arbitrary. However, the British and Swedish governments declared that UN ruling changes nothing, threatening to arrest Assange if he stepped out of the embassy. This is probably an unprecedented decision by major nation-state members against UN recommendation, and sets dangerous prospects for future rulings against dictatorship or abusive regimes, as Ed Snowden tweeted:

“This writes a pass for every dictatorship to reject UN rulings. Dangerous precedent for UK/Sweden to set.”

UK Terrorism Act is incompatible with human rights!

“Terrorism” as a concept is a true black box and its definitions is freely and openly determined according to the convenience of certain state and corporate interests. It has become an excuse in current legal systems around the world – and, consequently, for police and border control forces – to skip citizen and human rights in investigations and check points, allegedly for the sake of “national security” – another obscure term.

In recent years, after the phenomenon of Wikileaks and, more recently, the Snowden revelations, we have witnessed the increase in the attempts to use terrorism-based law and regulations against journalists and whistleblowers. In one of the most notorious cases, David Miranda was detained for 9 hours at Heathrow airport during a trip from Germany to Brazil, after a meeting with filmmaker Laura Poitras. David Miranda has knowingly been helping her and journalist Glenn Greenwald in publishing the documents carefully released by Edward Snowden.

British officers used what is officially known as stop powers in schedule 7 of the UK Terrorism Act 2000. Apparently 85,000 travellers a year are “randomly” stopped at British ports and airports under this legal justification. And guess what are the allegations used by officers to invoque schedule 7? A suspicion of a person’s involvement in “terrorism”. Miranda appealed against his detention and yesterday the Court of Appeal’s ruling established that, although his detention was considered lawful, the powers contained in schedule 7 are flawed and that the Terrorism Act is incompatible with European convention on human rights. This is being seen by many, including Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden, as an important win for press freedom.

According to the ruling, the government and the parliament will have to re-examine the act and the (considered) broad definition of terrorism.

Day 61: UK Terrorism Act is incompatible with human rights!

Day 61: UK Terrorism Act is incompatible with human rights!

How much of your rights are you ready to give in for security?

Today’s message was inspired by a recent article on The Guardian about 2015 Paris attacks, questioning the balance between security/surveillance and what they called “France’s love of liberté and fraternity”.

Indeed, I think authorities and ordinary citizens should be more open to debate how much of our rights to privacy and anonymity we are prepared to compromise for an alleged safer world. This is exactly what organisations such as Privacy International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been doing for years…

Day 52: How much of your rights are you ready to give in for security?

Day 52: How much of your rights are you ready to give in for security?

In a digital and codified world, do we still have any privacy, Jeremy?

Ideal day for asking questions about codes, digital technologies, big data, and privacy. After leaving my message, I run straight to Somerset House to see the inspiring exhibition Big Bang Data. It’s definitely a must-see!

Day 43: In a digital and codified world, do we still have any privacy, Jeremy? [thanks to D.T.]

Day 43: In a digital and codified world, do we still have any privacy, Jeremy?
[thanks to D.T.]