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Google Will No Longer Hold Onto People’s Location Data in Google Maps — Meaning It Can’t Turn That Info Over to the Police
Google is making some changes in Google Maps that will increase user privacy. Data from the Timeline feature in Google Maps, which is controlled by the Location History setting and keeps a record of routes and trips users have taken, will soon be stored directly on users’ devices instead of by Google.
That means Google itself will no longer have access to user location history data. And by extension, neither will law enforcement, which has often requested user location data from Google — for example, through “geofence” orders, which request data about every user who was near a specific place at a specific time.
Last July, Google announced it would delete the location history data of users who visited abortion clinics, drug treatment centers, domestic violence shelters, weight loss clinics, and other sensitive health-related locations. The company said that if its systems identified that a user had visited one of these sensitive locations, it would then delete the entry from that user’s location history “soon after they visit.”
Now this control is back in the hands of individual users.
EU Bureaucrats Formally Investigate X Over Lack of ‘Disinformation’ Censorship
Elon Musk’s social media giant X, formerly Twitter, has been targeted by pro-censorship commissioners at the EU. While this has been ongoing for some time, ever since Musk took over the platform last year, and since the introduction of the EU’s new censorship law “The Digital Services Act” came into force this summer, this is the first time X has faced a formal investigation.
The investigation was announced by the EU’s European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton, an unelected bureaucrat who has been pushing both formally and informally for X to censor more speech over the last year.
Of particular interest to the EU is the spread of alleged “disinformation.” Tackling it is part of the EU’s efforts to control global online speech, by equating “disinformation” with “harm.”
It Sure Looks Like Governments Want to Let AI Surveillance Run Wild
By all accounts, the European Union’s AI Act seems like something that would make tech ethicists happy. The landmark artificial intelligence law, which enjoyed a huge legislative win this week, seeks to institute a broad regulatory framework that would tackle the harms posed by the new technology. In its current form, the law would go to some lengths to make AI more transparent, inclusive, and consumer-friendly in the countries where it’s in effect. What’s not to like, right?
Among other things, the AI Act would bar controversial uses of AI, what it deems “high-risk” systems. This includes things like emotion recognition systems at work and in schools, as well as the kind of social scoring systems that have become so prevalent in China. At the same time, the law also has safeguards around it that would force companies that generate media content with AI to disclose that use to consumers.
And yet, despite some policy victories, there are major blindspots in the new law — ones that make civil society groups more than a little alarmed.
Indeed, the European Parliament’s own press release on the landmark law admits that “narrow exceptions [exist] for the use of biometric identification systems (RBI)” — police mass surveillance tech, in other words — “in publicly accessible spaces for law enforcement purposes, subject to prior judicial authorization and for strictly defined lists of crime.”
As part of that exemption, the law allows police to use live facial recognition technology — a controversial tool that has been dubbed “Orwellian” for its ability to monitor and catalog members of the public — in cases where it’s used to prevent “a specific and present terrorist threat” or to ID or find someone who is suspected of a crime.
Howard Zucker to Testify on New York’s Disastrous COVID Response in Front of House Committee
Former state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker will be hauled in front of Congress next week to answer questions about the state’s disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic. Zucker will sit Monday for a closed-door, transcribed interview with members of the House’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
As former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s health czar, Zucker was responsible for a March 2020 order that forced Empire State nursing homes to accept coronavirus-positive residents returning from hospitals.
“Howard Zucker had a role in crafting that policy for Governor Cuomo,” said Staten Island GOP Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, the only New Yorker on the committee. “We want to know what he knows in terms of what led to the [order] and why — when they had alternative options such the U.S. Navy Comfort ship and South Beach Psychiatric Center in Staten Island — they continued to mandate these nursing homes take COVID patients.
“I would like to know what was the difference in reimbursements for individuals put in hospitals versus nursing homes,” Malliotakis continued. “Did that financial decision play a role?”
TikTok Requires Users to ‘Forever Waive’ Rights to Sue Over Past Harms
Some TikTok users may have skipped reviewing an update to TikTok’s terms of service this summer that shakes up the process for filing a legal dispute against the app. According to The New York Times, changes that TikTok “quietly” made to its terms suggest that the popular app has spent the back half of 2023 preparing for a wave of legal battles.
In July, TikTok overhauled its rules for dispute resolution, pivoting from requiring private arbitration to insisting that legal complaints be filed in either the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California or the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Los Angeles. Legal experts told the Times this could be a way for TikTok to dodge arbitration claims filed en masse that can cost companies millions more in fees than they expected to pay through individual arbitration.
Perhaps most significantly, TikTok also added a section to its terms that mandates that all legal complaints be filed within one year of any alleged harm caused by using the app. The terms now say that TikTok users “forever waive” rights to pursue any older claims. And unlike a prior version of TikTok’s terms of service archived in May 2023, users do not seem to have any options to opt out of waiving their rights.
Mortgage Giant Mr. Cooper Hit With Cyberattack Possibly Affecting More Than 14 Million Customers
Mortgage and loan giant Mr. Cooper was hit with a cyber breach that involved “substantially all of our current and former customers” sensitive personal information, according to filings with state and federal regulators.
“The personal information in the impacted files included your name, address, phone number, Social Security number, date of birth, and bank account number,” the company said in a filing with the Maine Attorney General’s Office on Monday.
More than 14 million customers could be affected, according to estimates of Mr. Cooper users. The company says it shut down its systems to contain the incident and to protect customer information.
A Digital-Surveillance State Won’t Make Us Any Safer
On April 18, 2018, Joseph James DeAngelo visited a Hobby Lobby store near his home in Roseville, Calif. As he shopped inside, Sacramento investigators swabbed his car door handle, obtaining a sample of his DNA.
Months later, police arrested DeAngelo under suspicion of being the “Golden State Killer,” a serial murderer and rapist who had evaded capture for 40 years. The swab taken from his car door, coupled with DNA collected from a tissue he discarded from his home, was run through a publicly available DNA database, allowing the cops to construct a family tree of the perpetrator. From there, they narrowed down potential suspects to men of a certain age who lived in the area at the time of the crimes.
This use of DNA wasn’t like the time-honored process of lifting someone’s fingerprints and comparing them with those of known offenders. You leave traces of your genetic makeup everywhere you go, and with the help of forensic genealogy, you can be identified by them. And it’s not just your genetic makeup — you are spreading the DNA of everyone else to whom you are related, which can aid in the identification process whether you know it or not.
The Orwellian end result is, we might all be on the grid at all times. And, of course, DNA identification is a small portion of the way technology is making us perpetually trackable. Of course, everyone wants to be safe, but the ubiquity of cameras, GPS, tracking devices, the internet, and AI is also lulling Americans into a false sense of personal privacy.
How Discord Became a Perfect Conduit for a Leak of Government Secrets
Jack Teixeira led an unruly online chatroom named after a racist and homophobic reference. In Teixeira’s group on the Discord app, bigoted language was common. Users, many of them teenagers or young adults, fantasized about violence.
Now Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, is accused of using Discord chatrooms to share hundreds of classified government documents. It was one of the worst leaks of government secrets in modern American history.
Teixeira pleaded not guilty to six counts of mishandling and disclosing classified information. He remains in jail awaiting trial.
The roots of crime are complicated. But Discord combines anonymity, hands-off monitoring and insular communities in ways that made it an ideal conduit for Teixeira’s alleged leaks, said Samuel Oakford, a reporter with The Washington Post’s visual forensics team.
Britain Weighs New Consultation on Social Media Impact on Teens
Britain could look at further measures to protect young teenagers from the risks of social media in the new year following the introduction of new online safety laws focused on children and the removal of illegal content, a minister said.
The Online Safety Act, which became law in October, requires platforms like Meta‘s (META.O) Instagram and Alphabet‘s (GOOGL.O) YouTube to strengthen controls around illegal content and age-checking measures.
Major platforms including Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat require users to be at least 13 years old.
A Bloomberg report said the British government was studying a crackdown on social media access for children under the age of 16, including potential bans.
