Monday, September 12, 2022

News Habits and Attitudes of the Gen Z and Millennial Generations

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released Cybersecurity Best Practices for the Safety of Modern Vehicles, an update to its 2016 edition. The document describes NHTSA’s guidance to the automotive industry for improving vehicle cybersecurity for safety. “As vehicle technology and connectivity develop, cybersecurity needs to be a top priority for every automaker, developer, and operator,” 


Sex at noon taxes? We need a new word for that


AP/NORC: “A new in-depth survey of 16- to 40-year-olds shows that members of the Gen Z and Millennial generations are active consumers of news and information, with nearly a third of them willing to pay for it. But their relationship with the news is complex — their trust in the press is low, many are experiencing digital fatigue, and they are worried about misinformation in both traditional and social media. News consumption among Americans ages 16 to 40 is high. Seventy-nine percent report getting news daily. Thirty-eight percent describe themselves as active seekers of news and information. And a third pay for news subscriptions. Millennials and Gen Z get news frequently from social media, but also use a wide range of sources — including traditional news outlets. They follow a variety of news topics every day, including so-called “hard news”.


New York City sues Starbucks for firing union-organizing barista The Guardian 



Qatar deports workers who protested against unpaid salaries Middle East Eye


Trader Joe’s broke labor laws in effort to stop stores unionizing, workers say The Guardian 



Tech tool offers police ‘mass surveillance on a budget’

AP: “Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, at times without search warrants, that gives them the power to follow people’s movements months back in time, according to public records and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press. Police have used “Fog Reveal” to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices, and harnessed the data to create location analyses known among law enforcement as “patterns of life,” according to thousands of pages of records about the company.

 Sold by Virginia-based Fog Data Science LLC, Fog Reveal has been used since at least 2018 in criminal investigations ranging from the murder of a nurse in Arkansas to tracing the movements of a potential participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. The tool is rarely, if ever, mentioned in court records, something that defense attorneys say makes it harder for them to properly defend their clients in cases in which the technology was used. The company was developed by two former high-ranking Department of Homeland Security officials under former President George W. Bush. It relies on advertising identification numbers, which Fog officials say are culled from popular cellphone apps such as Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on a person’s movements and interests, according to police emails. That information is then sold to companies like Fog. “It’s sort of a mass surveillance program on a budget,” said Bennett Cyphers, a special adviser at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group…”


EFF: “In Part 1 of our series on Fog Data Science, we saw how when you give some apps permission to view your location, it can end up being packaged and sold to numerous other companies. Fog Data Science is one of those companies, and it has created a sleek search engine called Fog Reveal that allows cops to browse through that location data as if they were Google Maps results. In this article, we’ll be taking a deep dive into Fog Reveal’s features. 

Although accounts for Reveal are typically only available to police departments, we were able to analyze the app’s public-facing code to get a better understanding of how it works, how it’s used, and what it looks like when cops get warrantless access to your location data…”