Is marathon running actually safe? The pros and cons of pushing yourself to the brink
Google to pay $68 million over allegations its voice assistant eavesdropped on users
TikTok is tracking you now. Here’s how to protect yourself
Fast Company: “TikTok’s U.S. operations are now managed by a new American joint venture, ending a long-standing debate over whether the app would be permanently banned in the United States.
The good news for TikTok users is that this deal guarantees that the app will continue to operate within America’s borders. But there’s some bad news, too. Successive U.S. administrations—both Biden’s and Trump’s—argued that TikTok posed a national security threat to America and its citizens, partly because of the data the app collected about them.
While all social media apps collect data about their users, officials argued that TikTok’s data collection was a danger (while, say, Facebook’s was not) because the world’s most popular short-form video app was owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. The ironic thing is that TikTok will actually collect more data about them now than it did under ByteDance ownership.
The company’s new mostly American owners—Larry Ellison’s Oracle, private equity company Silver Lake, and the Emirati investment company MGX—made this clear in a recent update to TikTok’s privacy policy and its terms of service. If this new data collection unnerves you, there are some things you can do to mitigate it…”
How ICE is using facial recognition in Minnesota
The Guardian: “Immigration enforcement agents across the US are increasingly relying on a new smartphone app with facial recognition technology. The app is named Mobile Fortify.
Simply pointing a phone’s camera at their intended target and scanning the person’s face allows Mobile Fortify to pull data on an individual from multiple federal and state databases, some of which federal courts have deemed too inaccurate for arrest warrants. The US Department of Homeland Security has used Mobile Fortify to scan faces and fingerprints in the field more than 100,000 times, according to a lawsuit brought by Illinois and Chicago against the federal agency, earlier this month.
That’s a drastic shift from immigration enforcement’s earlier use of facial recognition technology, which was otherwise limited largely to investigations and ports of entry and exit, legal experts say. The app’s existence was The app’s existence was first uncovered last summer by 404 Media, through leaked emails. 404 Media also reported, in October, about internal DHS documents that say people cannot refuse to be scanned by Mobile Fortify.
“Here we have ICE using this technology in exactly the confluence of conditions that lead to the highest false match rates,” says Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s speech, privacy and technology project. “A false result from this technology can turn somebody’s life totally upside down.” The larger implications for democracy are chilling, too, he notes:
“ICE is effectively trying to create a biometric checkpoint society.” Use of the app has inspired backlash on the streets, in courts, and on Capitol Hill. Protesters are using a variety of tactics to fight back. They include recording masked agents, using burner phones and donated dashboard cameras, according to the Washington Post. Underpinning resistance to ICE’s use of facial recognition are doubts about the technology’s efficacy.
Research has uncovered higher error rates in identifying women and people of color than for scans of white faces. ICE’s use of the technology is often occurring in intense and fast-moving situations, which makes misidentification more likely. Those being scanned may be people of color. They could be turning away from officers because they don’t want to be identified. The lighting could be poor…’
