The Thinning Line Between Commercial and Government Surveillance

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: May 19, 2017 at 1:26:47 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Thinning Line Between Commercial and Government Surveillance
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> The Thinning Line Between Commercial and Government Surveillance
> Privacy doesn’t just benefit individuals. It’s crucial for a functioning democracy.
> By ARVIND NARAYANAN AND DILLON REISMAN
> May 15 2017
> <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/the-thinning-line-between-commercial-and-government-surveillance/524952/>
>
> Internet service providers have realized that they are sitting on a treasure chest of data about your online 
> activities that they could be selling to advertisers.
>
> Recognizing the privacy threat, the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules that would have stopped them from 
> doing so without your consent, but Congress recently shot down the regulation.
>
> This is a big deal.
>
> As part of the Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability Project, we’ve been studying who tracks you online and 
> how they do it. Here’s why we think the fight over browsing histories is vital to civil liberties and to a 
> functioning democracy.
>
> Privacy doesn’t merely benefit individuals; it fundamentally shapes how society functions. It is crucial for 
> marginalized communities and for social movements, such as the fight for marriage equality and other once-stigmatized 
> views. Privacy enables these groups to network, organize, and develop their ideas and platforms before challenging 
> the status quo. But when people know they’re being tracked and surveilled, they change their behavior. This chilling 
> effect hurts our intellectual freedoms and our capacity for social progress.
>
> The data that tracks our behavior feeds into machine-learning algorithms that make judgments about us. When used for 
> advertising, they can reproduce our own prejudiced behavior. Latanya Sweeney, the director of the Data Privacy Lab at 
> Harvard University, found that Google searches for black-sounding names more often resulted in ads for arrest records 
> compared to searches for white-sounding names, likely a result of the algorithm learning to predict what users are 
> likely to click on.
>
> Marketers can also use machine learning to figure out your unique quirks—do you respond better to words or to 
> pictures? Do you make impulsive shopping decisions?—to target you with exactly the advertisement that will best 
> persuade you.
>
> When consequential decisions about employment or loans are made using this kind of data, the result can feel 
> Kafkaesque, because these systems aren’t programmed to explain their decisions. There aren’t yet effective ways for 
> humans to hold algorithms accountable for how they categorize us. And when algorithms learn what we like and feed us 
> more of it, they amplify the notorious filter bubble and deepen political polarization.
>
> Web tracking today is breathtaking in its scope and sophistication. There are hundreds of entities in the business of 
> following you from site to site, and popular websites embed about 50 trackers on average that enable such tracking. 
> We’ve also found that just about every new feature that’s introduced in web browsers gets abused in creative ways to 
> “fingerprint” your computer or mobile device. Even identical looking devices tend to behave in subtly different ways, 
> such as by supporting different sets of fonts. It’s as if each device has its own personality. This means that even 
> if you clear your cookies or log out of a website, your device fingerprint can still give away who you are.
>
> Worse, the distinction between commercial tracking and government surveillance is thin and getting thinner. The 
> satirical website The Onion once ran a story with this headline: “CIA's ‘Facebook’ Program Dramatically Cut Agency's 
> Costs.” Reality isn’t far off. The Snowden leaks revealed that the NSA piggybacks on advertising cookies, and in a 
> technical paper we showed that this can be devastatingly effective. Hacks and data breaches of commercial systems 
> have also become a major part of the strategies of nation-state actors.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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