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Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 21, 2024 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few.
On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness.
Five highlights from this week: FTC Says Social Media Platforms Engage in ‘Vast Surveillance’ of Users; AI voices are officially too realistic; Tor Network Denies Report That ‘Anonymity Is Completely Canceled’; ‘Terrorgram’ Charges Show US Has Had Tools to Crack Down on Far-Right Terrorism All Along; and DuckDuckGo Joins AI Chat, Promises Enhanced Anonymity.
Washingtonian: “Do you regularly check Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform? Unless you’re a faithful Trump supporter or a journalist who covers the former president, Chris Herbert would bet that you probably don’t. That’s why Herbert—a web developer based in DC—and his team at the conservative, anti-Trump nonprofit Defending Democracy Together created Trump’s Truth, a database that tracks all of the content that Trump posts to Truth Social. Users of the site, which launched today, can search Trump’s Truth by keyword, filter the results by date, and access content that Trump has deleted from his page.
How to Spot a Fake Review on Amazon
PCMag: “As wonderful as the internet can be, it also lies to us every day. Fake reviews—seemingly legitimate assessments created by a seller or someone paid by them—are becoming harder to spot.
The online shopping boom has made them a big business, but they can end up costing you serious money. In 2021, it was discovered that over 200,000 people were involved in a fake reviews schemewith third-party Amazon vendors. Worse yet, the AI boom has made it more difficult to tell real people from robots. Amazon now has tools that allow sellers to generate product descriptions and create listings and users to ask questions or compare products.
The FTC has been empowered to go after scam reviewers, but will that prevent you from being duped? If you can’t tell a genuine review from a fraud, we recommend that you consult our comprehensive reviews across multiple categories before making a tech purchase.
PCMag reviews over 1,500 tech products a year, and our experts know their markets inside and out. However, if you’re browsing Amazon, there are a few telltale signs a review may not be genuine. And if you really can’t tell them apart, some helpful online tools can help clear things up…”
How A.I., QAnon and Falsehoods Are Reshaping the Presidential Race
Social Media and News Fact Sheet
Pew Research Center: “Digital sources have become an important part of Americans’ news diets – with social media playing a crucial role, particularly for younger adults. Overall, just over half of U.S. adults (54%) say they at least sometimes get news from social media, up slightly compared with the last few years. News consumption on social media. Facebook and YouTube outpace all other social media sites as places where Americans regularly get news. About a third of U.S. adults say they regularly get news on each of these two sites.
Smaller shares of Americans regularly get news on Instagram (20%), TikTok (17%) or X, formerly known as Twitter (12%). And even fewer get news on several other sites, including Reddit (8%), Nextdoor (5%), Snapchat (5%), WhatsApp (5%), LinkedIn (4%), Truth Social (3%) and Rumble (2%). Some social media sites – despite having relatively small overall audiences – stand out as destinations for news among many of their users. For example, 59% of X users get news there, as do a similar share of users on Truth Social (57%), the site owned by former President Donald Trump. On the other hand, only 14% of LinkedIn users regularly get news on that platform. About half of TikTok users (52%) say they regularly get news on the site, up from 43% in 2023 and just 22% in 2020. The share of users who get news also has risen on several other sites, including YouTube and Instagram…”
See also The Harris Poll – What Gen Z thinks about its social media and smartphone usage“…
Perhaps the most surprising result was that in this generation, the first to grow up with social media woven into their lives, nearly half report that they wish that each of TikTok (47%), Snapchat (43%), and X (formerly Twitter, 50%) were never invented, while less than a quarter wish that YouTube (15%), Netflix (17%), the internet itself (17%), messaging apps (19%), and the smartphone (21%) were never invented. Nearly all have taken steps to limit their social media usage at some point.”