Toilet bowl wars: The next frontier in the attack on privacy

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Who knew Number 2 would be number 1 in monitoring your health?

First, they came for your sleep, then your heart rate, then your step counts, and ovulation, oxygen levels, and blood sugar. It was only a matter of time before they targeted the most personal of all details: the contents deposited in your porcelain throne.

Companies like Kohler and Withings are marketing devices that install in your toilet to track various health metrics. Withings first announced its U-Scan “ecosystem” at the Consumer Electronics Show two years ago and launched them in the US and Europe this week. Two different cartridges inside the seashell-shaped device allow users to monitor their health and nutrition by measuring urinary biomarkers such as hydration, ketones, vitamin C, and calcium levels.

Kohler’s Dekoda, on the other hand, uses a camera to analyze your poop. The $599 clip-on camera stares into your toilet bowl and provides insights about gut health and hydration, even alerting users when it may have found blood in water or stool.

While Kohler carefully reminds you that the camera only points downward, making it impossible to photograph your private parts, once your toilet identifies you, there’s no pretending privacy still lives in your home.

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UK Rights Group’s Legal Challenge Shows MI5 Illegally Preserved Surveillance Data

Sputnik

The ongoing legal challenge of UK human rights group Liberty over data privacy breaches committed by MI5 has revealed new details about the violations, showing that the security service has been failing to remove collected bulk surveillance data on time and received surveillance warrants based on knowingly false information.

Under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA), MI5 has the authority to collect, upon authorization, personal data of a large number of innocent people and store it for potential future investigations. Security services, however, cannot store such data indefinitely: they are obliged to delete it within certain time limits.

Documents released during a court hearing on Tuesday showed that the MI5 legal team said, as quoted by the Liberty, that there is “a high likelihood [of material] being discovered when it should have been deleted, in a disclosure exercise leading to substantial legal or oversight failure.”

Moreover, a senior official from the intelligence service said that people’s personal data was being kept in “ungoverned spaces,” the rights group said in a statement, published on its official website.
“These shocking revelations expose how MI5 has been illegally mishandling our data for years, storing it when they have no legal basis to do so. This could include our most deeply sensitive information – our calls and messages, our location data, our web browsing history,” Liberty lawyer Megan Goulding said, as quoted by the rights group.

Investigatory Powers Commissioner and Lord Justice Adrian Fulford, who is responsible for verifying that the security services respect data privacy provisions laid out in the IPA, described MI5’s actions as “undoubtedly unlawful.” 

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Big brother Britain: Facial recognition cameras deployed in London, man fined for covering his face

Mark Duell
Daily Mail

Police fined a pedestrian £90 for disorderly behaviour after he tried to cover his face when he saw a controversial facial recognition camera on a street in London.

Officers set up the camera on a van in Romford, East London, which then cross-checked photos of faces of passers-by against a database of wanted criminals.

But one man was unimpressed about being filmed and covered his face with his hat and jacket, before being stopped by officers who took his picture anyway.  


After being pulled aside, the man told police: 'If I want to cover me face, I'll cover me face. Don't push me over when I'm walking down the street.'

It comes just weeks after it was claimed the new technology incorrectly identified members of the public in 96 per cent of matches made between 2016 and 2018.

The cameras have been rolled out in a trial in parts of Britain, with the Met making its first arrest last December when shoppers in London's West End were scanned.

But their use has sparked a privacy debate, with civil liberties group Big Brother Watch branding the move a 'breach of fundamental rights to privacy and freedom of assembly'. Police argue they are necessary to crack down on spiralling crime.

Officers previously insisted people could decline to be scanned, before later clarifying that anyone trying to avoid scanners may be stopped and searched.

It was first deployed by South Wales Police ahead of the Champions League final in Cardiff in 2007, but wrongly matched more than 2,000 people to possible criminals.

Police and security services worldwide are keen to use facial recognition technology to bolster their efforts to fight crime and identify suspects.

But they have been hampered by the unreliability of the software, with some trials failing to correctly identify a single person.

The technology made incorrect matches in every case during two deployments at Westfield shopping centre in Stratford last year, according to Big Brother Watch. It was also reportedly 96 per cent accurate in eight uses by the Met from 2016 to 2018. 

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Christchurch Terror Attack: Mass Censorship, Mystery Shooters, And The Globetrotting Lone Gunman

Niall Bradley
Sott.net

Censorship has been put into effect like never before in the aftermath of the multi-site terror attacks in Christchurch last Friday. There's no other word for what governments and Internet corporations have instituted. New Zealand and Australian Internet Service Providers have been blocking access to video-hosting sites, forums and other websites that mirrored, in part or whole, the 17-minute long video footage 'lone gunman' Brenton Tarrant recorded from a GoPro camera attached to his head-gear, along with footage of the aftermath of the shooting at the Linwood mosque, and copies of Tarrant's 'manifesto'. Media outlets and social media platforms globally have followed suit. The Internet has effectively been 'bleached' of this evidence (though it's not entirely gone, if you're prepared to look hard enough for it).

Tarrant's video in particular has been "classified by the Chief Censor's Office as objectionable," under a 1993 New Zealand law, meaning Kiwis face prison time and a $10,000 fine for 'downloading a copy of it' or 'distributing' it. The government has been leaning heavily on ISPs to block websites until they have removed it while, globally, several million iterations (including just links to it) have been removed by all media outlets and all social media platforms - and not just by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter; it's also gone from BitChute and similar lesser-known video-hosting platforms. New Zealand Police have also been demanding personal data on users who even discuss Tarrant's 'manifesto' or video.

Though ostensibly done out of consideration for the victims of the attacks and their families, to 'protect children and the vulnerable from seeing these images', and to not 'give the attacker the attention he wants', no such 'clean sweeps' have previously been conducted following the many gruesome mass shootings and bombings in terror attacks around the world, particularly those in non-Western countries. All these years 'ISIS' and affiliated terrorists have enjoyed full use of Western social media platforms to share footage of their crimes - footage which is then typically shown by corporate media outlets, complete with running commentary (just search 'Charlie Hebdo massacre' or 'ISIS beheadings' on YouTube) - but now suddenly it's imperative that all "objectionable materials" relating to this event be excised from global consciousness. Why would that be the case? 

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The European Union's MANDATORY National Biometric ID Card Will Affect 512 Million People

 

Mass Private I

A recent European Union (EU) announcement about national ID's will destroy millions of people's privacy and create a near global biometric database.

An article in State Watch News revealed that the EU has agreed to create a MANDATORY national biometric ID card.

"Measures being negotiated as part of the EU's 'Security Union' are moving ahead swiftly, with the Council and Parliament reaching provisional agreements on new rules for immigration liaison officers, the EU's Visa Code and the introduction of mandatory biometric national identity cards; and the Council agreeing its negotiating position on the new Frontex Regulation."

Earlier this week the Nepal government announced their plans to roll-out a national biometric ID card that will affect 30 million people.

Last month, I wrote an article warning people about the global effort to restrict everyone's right to travel. But what is happening across Europe and Asia should send chills down everyone's back.

If you combine what is happening in Europe with America's national biometric ID card, Real-ID it becomes painfully obvious that everyone's right to travel freely is in jeopardy.

512 million people will be forced to give up their privacy.

A European national biometric ID card is all but a certainty.

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Facebook Finally Shuts Down Its Snooping, Bullshit 'VPN' After A Full Year Of Complaints

Techdirt

Just about a year ago we noted how Facebook was taking some heat on the security and privacy fronts for pitching a "privacy protecting" VPN to consumers that actually violated consumer privacy. Based on the Onavo platform acquired by Facebook back in 2013, the company's "Onavo Protect – VPN Security" app informed users that the product would "keep you and your data safe when you browse and share information on the web" and that the "app helps keep your details secure when you login to websites or enter personal information such as bank accounts and credit card numbers." 

It didn't take long before many began to notice those claims weren't, well, true. 

A wide variety of different news outlets were quick to point out that Facebook was actually using the "privacy" app to track users around the internet when they wandered away from Facebook, then using that data to its own competitive advantage:

"Interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with Facebook’s use of Onavo data show in detail how the social-media giant employs it to measure what people do on their phones beyond Facebook’s own suite of apps. That information shapes Facebook’s product and acquisition strategy—furthering its already formidable competitive edge, the people said."

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Surveillance Guinea pigs? Facebook paying teens $20/month for unfettered access to mobile data

RT

Facebook has been paying users $20 a month to install an app which monitors their phone and web activity and sends it back to the social media giant, a report has revealed. The app may run afoul of Apple’s privacy guidelines. 

Launched in 2016, the “research app,” first uncovered by TechCrunch, allows Facebook to continuously collect a user’s private data, including chats from instant messaging apps, photos and videos, emails, web browsing activity, and more. Aimed at people aged 13 to 25, the app, according to Facebook, is designed to study mobile usage habits. Users were also asked to take screenshots of their Amazon order history page.

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Facebook Patent Imagines Triggering Your Phone’s Mic When a Hidden Signal Plays on TV

Rhett Jones
Gizmodo

You may have seen the ads that Facebook has been running on TV in a full-court press to apologize for abusing users privacy. They’re embarrassing. And, it turns out, they may be a sign of things to come. Based on a recently published patent application, Facebook could one day use ads on television to further violate your privacy once you’ve forgotten about all those other times.

First spotted by Metro, the patent is titled “broadcast content view analysis based on ambient audio recording.” (PDF) It describes a system in which an “ambient audio fingerprint or signature” that’s inaudible to the human ear could be embedded in broadcast content like a TV ad. When a hypothetical user is watching this ad, the audio fingerprint could trigger their smartphone or another device to turn on its microphone, begin recording audio and transmit data about it to Facebook.

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HART: Homeland Security’s Massive New Database Will Include Face Recognition, DNA, and Peoples’ “Non-Obvious Relationships”

EFF

Why do we know so little about it?   

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly building what will likely become the largest database of biometric and biographic data on citizens and foreigners in the United States. The agency’s new Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART)database will include multiple forms of biometrics—from face recognition to DNA, data from questionable sources, and highly personal data on innocent people. It will be shared with federal agencies outside of DHS as well as state and local law enforcement and foreign governments. And yet, we still know very little about it.

The records DHS plans to include in HART will chill and deter people from exercising their First Amendment protected rights to speak, assemble, and associate. Data like face recognition makes it possible to identify and track people in real time, including at lawful political protests and other gatherings. Other data DHS is planning to collect—including information about people’s “relationship patterns” and from officer “encounters” with the public—can be used to identify political affiliations, religious activities, and familial and friendly relationships. These data points are also frequently colored by conjecture and bias.

In late May, EFF filed comments criticizing DHS’s plans to collect, store, and share biometric and biographic records it receives from external agencies and to exempt this information from the federal Privacy Act. These newly-designated “External Biometric Records” (EBRs) will be integral to DHS’s bigger plans to build out HART. As we told the agency in our comments, DHS must do more to minimize the threats to privacy and civil liberties posed by this vast new trove of highly sensitive personal data.

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Early Facebook Investor And Zuckerberg Mentor: "I Feel My Baby Has Turned Out To Be Something Horrible"

Zero Hedge

Even if Facebook's stellar Q1 earnings report hadn't helped erase some of the losses that Facebook shares incurred in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sanderberg would still believe that the company's troubles are largely behind them and that the company had essentially repaired the damage done to its reputation.

That was the assessment delivered by early Facebook investor and one-time Zuckerberg mentor Roger McNamee, who warned during an appearance at an event organized by Quartz in Washington DC last week that the company's leaders are deeply complacent and still haven't accepted the fact that Facebook has badly mislead its users about how the company profits off their data.

Despite Zuckerberg's warning, embedded in his opening statement to Congress earlier this month, that the company planned to make changes that could "significantly impact" profitability, McNamee believes it's likely Facebook is "going to get away" with the bad things that it has done, which is "particularly dangerous" considering the 2018 midterm elections are only months away. McNamee said he's deeply disappointed in how Zuckerberg and Sandberg have responded to the crisis by refusing to accept responsibility.

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The NSA Wants a Skeleton Key to Everyone’s Encrypted Data

Gavin Hanson
Activist Post

Like it or not, you are your data. In this day and age, your receipts, social media activity, public records, GPS data, and Internet search history are the proof of who you are. And while you may have thought you had secrets, the Federal Government would like the rest of them.

The seemingly innocuous pieces of information we trade away every day create a detailed mosaic of our lives used to target advertising and create personality profiles that are exploited by the FBI, political operatives like Cambridge Analytica, and Russian propagandists.

And those are just the legal shenanigans! Instances of malicious hacking that jeopardize social security numbers and other important data are on the rise as well.

But all hope is not lost! There is but one meaningful defense against such intrusions, one used by whistleblowers, banks, the government (often poorly), and college students: encryption.

Encryption, to oversimplify, is the process of putting your data in a combination locked safe, and it’s becoming more popular. Like all passcodes, these combinations are best stored non-electronically.

Automatically encrypted search engines and Internet services simplify the process for users. They protect individuals’ data from hacking, theft, and even the government, but they also retain a repository for all the combinations they use to lock data up.
But that may soon change.

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Ready to #DeleteFacebook? Follow these 7 steps

The Parallex

Like a lot of people lately, I’ve decided to #DeleteFacebook.

I feel that I’m giving up too much data for too little in return. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the shady consulting firm managed to steal information from as many as 87 millionunsuspecting Facebook users and use it for political purposes, was just the latest in a long series of egregious data privacy violations (like here, here, here, here, and here).

Granted, Facebook is the only Internet access some people have. But I’ve had enough. If I hear one more Facebook executive claim to respect its users, I’m going to have an aneurism. And despite the new limits Facebook just put on the data its application programming interfaces (APIs) can access, it’s time to say goodbye.

I’m not leaving Facebook rashly. I’m giving myself time to do it properly, making sure that I don’t lose anything valuable—like photos, videos, or the contact details of my gracefully aging high-school friends—in the process. Here’s how you can do it too.

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Worried about your social media privacy at the border? Take these steps

Privacy SOS

 

Yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told Congress the Trump administration may soon require that visitors to the United States provide their social media passwords and internet activity history to DHS agents before entering the country.

In response to a question from Congressman Higgins about what DHS will do to make sure visa applicants don’t mean harm to the United States, Kelly said:

[I]f they come in…we want to say for instance, ‘What sites do you visit? And give us your passwords.’
So that we can see what they do on the internet. And this might be a week, might be a month. They may wait some time for us to vet. If they don’t want to give us that information then they don’t come. We may look at their—we want to get on their social media with passwords. What do you do? What do you say? If they don’t want to cooperate, then they don’t come in.
 There’s other things like that. So these are the things we’re thinking about. No one should take this as this is what we’re going to do right now. But over there, we can ask them for this kind of information. And if they truly want to come to America they’ll cooperate. If not, you know, next in line.

It appears as if Secretary Kelly was talking about demanding social media passwords and internet history records during the visa application process, but there are reasons to fear the Trump administration could extend these surveillance demands to other groups—even US citizens and legal permanent residents.

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'Secret' ministers, teachers and social workers are spying on us

image credit: tommygioelisvoice 

Mass Private I 

Police State America is using 'secret' ministers, teachers, social workers to spy on us.

According to a NJ.com article, the FBI/DHS are enlisting clergy, social workers and mental health professionals to counsel (spy on) troubled people who voice support for terrorism. They're calling this group of spies "Shared Responsibility Committees" (SRC).

The FBI and DHS have led forums in NJ and even launched a social media campaign warning about terror groups like ISIS, environmental extremists and sovereign-citizen movements. In other words, they're attempting to vilify anyone speaking out against the government.

Police are 'secretly' using priests, social workers and doctors to spy on us.

SRC members, must sign confidentiality agreements, and can't consult outside experts on treatment plans. Police are using "secret non-disclosure agreements" to spy on our cell phones and now this. Having ministers and doctors sign 'secret' agreements to spy on us, is this some sort of sick, perverted joke?

But wait, it gets worse.

Law enforcement is also allowed to pose as clergy, social workers etc.

"The church and faith community are now being faced with the reality that the government is sending IRS agents pretending to be members of the clergy into Christian meetings, gatherings and services for the distinct purpose of the government "spying" on them said Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, Director of the Christian Defense Coalition.

Unfortunately, churches spying on members is nothing new, last year I warned everyone that "Churches were paying the gov't up to $100 a month to spy on families! 

The gov't hopes the money churches donate to spy on parishioners will be used to support a regional (spying) supervisor in the future.

"The service is free for the state and instead relies on donations from enrolled churches. The suggested monthly rate of $100 would eventually support a regional supervisor to mediate between churches and the department."

And if they doesn't turn your stomach, churches have begun using facial recognition to spy on their members.

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Just trust them? ‘Unbelievable’ amount of child porn on US military, intelligence computers

Privacy SOS

 

If you’ve got nothing to hide, why worry about warrantless mass surveillance? One reason among many: The people who have access to your private communications may not have your—or your child’s—best interest at heart.

NextGov reports that officials at a recent Intelligence and National Security Alliance symposium in Chantilly, Virginia discussed the widespread storage of child pornography on NSA and other military computer systems. Daniel Payne, director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Service, reportedly said that “the amount of child porn [he sees on government devices] is just unbelievable.” An NSA official agreed, saying “what people do is amazing.”

It’s often difficult for us to pinpoint direct, personal harms from warrantless dragnet spying. Sure, policies like those established after 9/11 may threaten democratic, open society, freedom of speech, and due process. But for many of us, drawing a direct line between the erosion of democratic norms and our day-to-day lives can be challenging, if not impossible. It’s not hard, on the other hand, to imagine a government employee using his access to warrantless surveillance data to fish for bath-time photos of our naked children.

Don’t forget: The surveillance systems Snowden exposed may seem too big to comprehend, but the individual people behind them are just as real (and flawed) as you or me. According to these officials and older reports, sexual abuse of children is rampant in the military and intelligence worlds. That’s yet one more reason why we shouldn’t ever give government institutions and the people who run them nearly limitless power to exercise in the dark.

Facebook develops algorithm that will learn EVERYTHING about you from photos and gives details to advertisers

Daily Mail
 

Facebook wants to become your new best friend by knowing everything about you – and it’s going to happen whether you like it not. 

From the bottles of beer you drink, to the places you visit on vacation, the social networking site will compile everything there is to know about you (and the billion other people online) – and then make sense of it with the hope of selling better, targeted advertising in your news feed.

The social networking giant has teamed up with New York University to set up a research lab designed to learn about artificial intelligence.  

The California-based social network giant is hiring professor Yann LeCun of NYU’s Center for Data Science to head up a new artificial intelligence lab, aiming to use cutting-edge science to make Facebook more interesting and relevant.

It would enable Facebook to learn more about individuals and ultimately  achieve better results for targeted ads and news feed improvements 

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The last person on Earth not burned by Facebook’s privacy settings realizes her entire wall is public

Pando Daily
By Carmel DeAmicis
November 29, 2013


It could be the headline to an Onion article. It should be the headline to an Onion article. But in this case the story is real and the joke is on me.

I recently learned this horrifying fact. Although my privacy settings on Facebook were set to “friends only,” anyone with a Facebook account could access my wall. What the hell Facebook?

I’m of the Millennial Generation, the sort raised to share my photos, status updates, and tweets with abandon. I’ve been doing so since the MySpace days in junior high, when Facebook wasn’t even a thing. I’m trained, conditioned even, not to give much of a damn about my privacy.

Whenever scandals would erupt over Facebook’s privacy settings because hackers could access users’ contact information or apps were sharing user data, I would roll my eyes. I didn’t care if advertisers could target me based on my profile information or people could tag me in photos without my permission. I didn’t care that the new Timeline made it easy for my Facebook friends to dig up old stories from my past. These are all natural side effects of being online, the price I paid for social.

Plus I always had one reassurance to keep me safe: as long as my Facebook wall was set to be viewed by Facebook friends only, Facebook was a safe enough place for me. I could be silly or swear, whine about a bad day or gleefully post party pictures from the weekend before. I wasn’t dumb enough to say anything that could hurt me professionally, but my Facebook profile was definitely a personal representation, not meant for the public’s eye.

And now, I realize my posts have been public for anyone with an account to see. For god knows how long. Despite my settings still saying “friends only.” What the hell?

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