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Category: Privacy

Facebook ‘closed’ and private groups were not confidential

Facebook ‘closed’ and private groups were not confidential

Facebook users may choose to belong to private or closed groups. Some joined a private group for people having a gene associated with breast cancer – and likely did not want that information publicly shared. However, a feature of Facebook enabled Chrome plug-ins to harvest the names of members of closed groups. “A genetic test result like BRCA is protected by HIPAA [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] and it can’t be shared with marketers, if it is in…

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Can email scammers steal medical records? Yes

Can email scammers steal medical records? Yes

This week, one of the largest health care providers in the State of California emailed to me the entire 101 page medical records of one of their patients. I have no relationship with this health care provider and do not live in California. By sending someone’s medical records to a random stranger on the Internet (me), this health care provider lost all control of their patient’s medical records. I informed the provider, and I also filed a HIPAA violation complaint…

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Smart TVs track everything you watch, and link that to your computer and smart phone connected devices too

Smart TVs track everything you watch, and link that to your computer and smart phone connected devices too

Once enabled, Samba TV can track nearly everything that appears on the TV on a second-by-second basis, essentially reading pixels to identify network shows and ads, as well as programs on Netflix and HBO and even video games played on the TV. Samba TV has even offered advertisers the ability to base their targeting on whether people watch conservative or liberal media outlets and which party’s presidential debate they watched. …. Samba TV can also identify other devices in the…

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Google is misleading people about “we don’t read your email”

Google is misleading people about “we don’t read your email”

Google has been a little more careful than Facebook when it comes to protecting your privacy. For example, the company stopped using contents of user emails on Gmail to personalize its ads back in 2017. But if you’re not careful about granting permissions in Gmail to third-party apps, your emails could still theoretically fall into the wrong hands. To check which third-party apps you’ve allowed to access your Gmail, go to myaccount.google.com and click on “Apps with account access.” In…

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WSJ: #Google let’s most any software company read your #Gmail

WSJ: #Google let’s most any software company read your #Gmail

Software developers scan hundreds of millions of emails of users who sign up for email-based services. Disclosures are often buried in user agreements. Source: Tech’s ‘Dirty Secret’: The App Developers Sifting Through Your Gmail – WSJ They also let employees of those companies personally read your email: this is “common practice”. As already suggested on this blog, they data mine the hell of our emails, logging your purchases, financial records, travel records and more. For companies that want data for…

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Computer algorithms that analyze #Facebook “Likes” understand your thinking better than your spouse #DeleteFacebook #Privacy

Computer algorithms that analyze #Facebook “Likes” understand your thinking better than your spouse #DeleteFacebook #Privacy

Facebook (and Youtube and Twitter) have conducted a global experiment on human populations without consent of the guinea pigs by analyzing our “Likes”. Facebook’s digital model of us is more accurate than our own understanding of ourselves. Computers need evaluate as few as 100 Likes to make a judgement more effective than a human. Analyzing just 300 Likes enables the model to know more about the subject than does the subject’s spouse. Computer models achieve “peak” accuracy when more than…

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#Facebook targeted emotionally vulnerable youth for advertising

#Facebook targeted emotionally vulnerable youth for advertising

Facebook … conducted research about exploiting posts by kids as young as 14 to show how its algorithms could help advertisers pinpoint emotionally vulnerable moments for the purpose of targeted ads. Source: Facebook able to target emotionally vulnerable teens for ads | CSO Online Facebook research showed how to identify young people who felt “worthless”, “stupid”, “anxious” and so on, based on their Facebook usage, and researched how this could be used to target them for advertising. Facebook does not…

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Proctor and Gamble decided in 2016 that targeted #Facebook advertising did not work #DeleteFacebook

Proctor and Gamble decided in 2016 that targeted #Facebook advertising did not work #DeleteFacebook

If targeted advertising does not work, then the only remaining business for Facebook is spying on people: Targeting to super-specific audiences was expensive but didn’t result in a big difference to its business, P&G CMO Marc Pritchard told The Wall Street Journal. The company, whose massive portfolio of household brands includes Tide and Crest, had experimented with Facebook’s most sophisticated targeting tools, which allow advertisers to reach a narrowly defined audience. Source: Why P&G Decided Facebook Ad Targeting Wasn’t Worth…

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Privacy policies are bogus and reading all of them would take about 30 days per year

Privacy policies are bogus and reading all of them would take about 30 days per year

The reality is that the incentives of a privacy policy are to not use it to keep your info private. In fact, the incentives are to make a privacy policy as permissive as possible. Because the only time you get in trouble is not if you fail to protect someone’s privacy… but if you violate your own privacy policy. So companies have the incentive to write a privacy policy that is as permissive to the company as possible, so that…

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Purpose of Facebook’s “tag people in photos” is to train their automatic photo recognizer

Purpose of Facebook’s “tag people in photos” is to train their automatic photo recognizer

Facebook has a feature that allows you to tag friends in photos. They encourage you to click on the individual in the photo and then “tag” their user name. This helps Facebook build an image library from multiple angles and perspectives. This data is processed by Facebook to create their automatic facial recognition software. Facebook claims it can accurately identify people’s faces in photos – literally among billions of photos in the world and that it can do this in…

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