Data Protection

Even worse, profiling and similar techniques are increasingly used not just to classify and understand people, but also to make decisions that have far-reaching consequences, from credit to housing, welfare and employment. Intelligent CCTV software automatically flags “suspicious behaviour”, intelligence agencies predict internet users’ citizenship to decide they are foreign (fair game) or domestic (usually not fair game), and the judicial system claims to be able to predicts future criminals.

ALTwitter »
EDRi: ALTwitter – profiling with metadata »

Big data has a potential to improve society – much like electricity or antibiotics. From health care and education to urban planning and protecting the environment, the applications of big data are remarkable. However, big data comes with big negative impacts. Big data can be used – by both advertisers and government agencies – to violate privacy. The power of big data can be exploited to monitor every single detail of people’s activities globally.

It was a perfect service: sorting your mail and not just removing all spam for you, but also unsubscribing you from all of that spam garbage going forward. It kept your inbox perfectly clean. But behind the curtains, it also sold your inbox to the highest bidder.

Did Donald Trump become president because he hired the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which uses profiling and micro-targeting in political elections? Some say yes, many say no. But what we know is that we are subjected to extensive personalised commercial and political messaging on the basis of data, including metadata, collected and used without our awareness and consent. It can result in changes in our behaviour, at least to some extent.

Bose Corp spies on its wireless headphone customers by using an app that tracks the music, podcasts and other audio they listen to, and violates their privacy rights by selling the information without permission, a lawsuit charged.

Reuters: Bose headphones spy on listeners: lawsuit »

Reuters: Hacker documents show NSA tools for breaching global money transfer system »

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New rules allowing the US National Security Agency (NSA) to share private data with other US agencies without court oversight, recent revelations about surveillance activities by a US electronic communications service provider and vacancies on US oversight bodies are among the concerns raised by MEPs in a resolution passed on Thursday.

On the better web Berners-Lee envisions, users control where their data is stored and how it’s accessed. For example, social networks would still run in the cloud. But you could store your data locally. Alternately, you could choose a different cloud server run by a company or community you trust. You might have different servers for different types of information—for health and fitness data, says—that is completely separate from the one you use for financial records.