Our Phones Are Changing The Ways Families Behave

How encrypted communications apps failed to protect Michael Cohen

FastCompany: “Within the detailed federal allegations against former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty yesterday to eight charges including campaign finance violations, are multiple references to texts sent by Cohen and even a call made “through an encrypted telephone application.” Cohen was apparently a fan of encrypted communications apps like WhatsApp and Signal, but those tools failed to keep his messages and calls out of sight from investigators. In June, prosecutors said in a court filing the FBI had obtained 731 pages of messages and call logs from those apps from Cohen’s phones. Investigators also managed to reconstruct at least 16 pages of physically shredded documents.

Spyware Company Leaves ‘Terabytes’ of Selfies, Text Messages, and Location Data Exposed Online

This story is part of When Spies Come Home, a Motherboard series about powerful surveillance software ordinary people use to spy on their loved ones. A company that markets cell phone spyware to parents and employers left the data of thousands of its customers—and the information of the people they were monitoring—unprotected online. The data exposed included selfies, text messages, audio recordings, contacts, location, hashed passwords and logins, Facebook messages, among others, according to a security researcher who asked to remain anonymous for fear of legal repercussions. Last week, the researcher found the data on an Amazon S3 bucket owned by Spyfone, one of many companies that sell software that is designed to intercept text messages, calls, emails, and track locations of a monitored device. Motherboard was able to verify that the researcher had access to Spyfone’s monitored devices’ data by creating a trial account, installing the spyware on a phone, and taking some pictures. Hours later, the researcher sent back one of those pictures…”

Marie Johnson: why My Health Record is flawed
"As the former chief technology architect of the Health and Human Services Access Card, I opted out of My Health Record on day one. Here’s why." (CIO)

Given our collective mania for attention, and the boundless opportunities we now have to seek it, we might ask: What did people believe they lost when they lost their privacy? Story of Privacy
Race, Unemployment, and Mental Health in the USA: What Can We Infer About the Psychological Cost of the Great Recession Across Racial Groups? (PDF) Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy

HOW TO KEEP DIGITAL SUBSCRIBERS: A study highlighted by Nieman Lab's Shan Wang finds a few clues among European subscribers: 1. One publisher says need-to-know content trumps nice-to-know (guides, arts, reviews) on conversion, but the latter is key for retention. 2. High local or subject value. 3. Stories that prompt readers to subscribe are the same types of stories they'll consume as subscribers.

On the current spate of world leaders avoiding blame. ↩︎ The Guardian

This is a two-part series that explores the rise of Privacy by Design (PbD)
from the basic framework, to its inclusion in the GDPR, to its application
in business practices and infrastructure especially in the wake of Artificial Intelligence.

Forbes – “We had the pleasure of sitting down with Ann Cavoukian, former 3-Term Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and currently Distinguished Expert-in-Residence, leading the Privacy by Design Centre of Excellence at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada to discuss this massive shift that will upend current business practices. This article includes contributions from Scott Bennet, a colleague researching privacy and GDPR implications on emerging technology and current business practices.
I call myself an anti-marketer, especially these days. My background has predominantly come from database marketing and the contextualization of data to make more informed decisions to effectively sell people more stuff. The data that I saw, whether it be in banking, loyalty programs, advertising and social platforms – user transactions, digital behavior, interactions, conversations, profiles – were sewn together to create narratives about individuals and groups, their propensities, their intents and their potential risk to the business. While it was an established practice to analyze this information in the way that we did, the benefit was largely to businesses and to the detriment of our customers. How we depicted people was based on the data they created, based on our own assumptions that, in turn, informed the analysis and ultimately, created the rules which governed the data and the decisions. Some of these rules unknowingly were baked in unintended bias from experience and factors that perpetuated claims of a specific cluster or population While for many years I did not question the methods we used to understand and define audiences, it’s clear that business remained largely unchecked, having used this information freely with little accountability and legal consequence…”

Law.com, Law Firms Looking to Game the New Tax Law? Think Again:

To the chagrin of creative tax lawyers who saw promising loopholes in the Trump administration’s sweeping tax reform legislation, the Internal Revenue Service has shut down avenues for high-earning lawyers to take advantage of a hefty new 20 percent deduction on pass-through partnership income.

In proposed regulations released Aug. 8, the IRS and Treasury Department addressed questions that have been raised about the new deduction for income from pass-through entities—and pointedly blocked the two main gambits for lawyers with law firm-specific examples.

“They did a pretty good job,” said Alex Raskolnikov, a tax law professor at Columbia University. “They went so far as to specifically address in examples two work-around strategies, one for partners and one for associates.”

Blog of the London School of Economics: “In Crime and Global Justice: The Dynamics of International Punishment, Daniele Archibugi and Alice Pease delve into the hypocrisies and failings of international justice projects. Their book offers a timely reminder that the current international justice regime has not offered a silver bullet for complex political problems, writes Teemu Laulainen.

“In the absence of truly cosmopolitan jurisdiction, international criminal justice has remained in the shackles of powerful political interests, even though law by its nature should strive towards categorical impartiality. This is the central conundrum addressed by Daniele Archibugi and Alice Pease in Crime and Global Justice: The Dynamics of International Punishment. Archibugi is a Research Director at the Italian National Research Council (INRC) and a Professor of Innovation, Governance and Public Policy at Birkbeck College; and Pease, a freelance researcher and a graduate of University of Edinburgh and University of Bologna. The former has an impressive back catalogue in the field of International Relations, while for Pease, Crime and Global Justice is a formidable debut. The subtitle of the volume incorporates a zinger. All too often international justice comes across as the powerful punishing the weak by ‘turning [their] enemies into criminals’ (19) under the veil of legalism. An oft-heard critique of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is that nine out of ten of its investigations have focused on Africa, while the global heavy hitters are shielded from its jurisdiction. One only has to think of the Hague Invasion Act passed by the US Congress in 2002 to see the discrepancies here. If true impartiality remains unachieved, why would it not be more meaningful to talk about international punishment rather than international justice? In Crime and Global Justice, Archibugi and Pease dissect the politics of globalising law and show how political forces continue to influence judicial discretion and prevent prosecution altogether…”