Friday, February 18, 2022

TikTok shares your data more than any other social media app — and it’s unclear where it goes, study says

If government were a product, selling it would be illegal.

P. J. O'Rourke


Your arguments strong, your conclusions sound.
Citations of my work, alas, have not been found.
– Reviewer #2

Living with the lingering effects of the coronavirus Deutsche Welle


The Stasi poetry circle


People on Twitter are using more political identifiers than before.  And more yet if you count pronouns


Cold emailing Mark Cuban



We’ve just updated the search function on the main Flightradar24.com map page to make finding the flights you’re looking for even easier. These updates bring the features that have been available in the app to the web and improve the speed and responsiveness of search as well. In this post we walk through some of the updates to show you how to get the most out of the new features…”



Creativity art 20 ordinary places that turned into art


Can a Congressional Committee Subpoena Members of Congress? - LawFare

LawFare: “As part of its investigation into the attack on the U.S. Capitol and efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, the Jan. 6 committee has requested information and testimony from several sitting members of the House of Representatives.  The committee has also requested that telecommunications companies preserve the phone records of some members of Congress. However, Reps. Scott Perry and Jim Jordan and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have all announced that they will not cooperate with the committee.  Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair of the committee, has stated there is “no reluctance to subpoena” any member who does not cooperate if their “testimony is germane to the mission of the select committee.” But other than the House and Senate Ethics Committees, it appears that no congressional committee has ever issued a subpoena to a sitting member of Congress. Some committee members, including Thompson, have raised questions about the committee’s authority to subpoena members of Congress. And numerous press outletshave reported that the committee’s authority to issue a subpoena to a member of Congress is a matter of dispute.  In this post, we offer a guide on the authority of a congressional committee to issue a subpoena to a sitting member of Congress—and the potential to have that subpoena enforced if the recipient defies it. The committee’s subpoena authority depends on three basic questions: whether its subpoenas are legally valid, whether it has a mechanism to enforce its requests, and whether the committee determines that attempting to subpoena members is worth the political and institutional costs. On the first question, the committee is very likely on solid ground. The second and third questions are far more complicated…”



TikTok shares your data more than any other social media app — and it’s unclear where it goes, study says

CNBC: “Two of your social media apps could be collecting a lot of data on you — and you might not like what one of them is doing with it. That’s according to a recent study, published last month by mobile marketing company URL Genius, which found that YouTube and TikTok track users’ personal data more than any other social media apps. The study found that YouTube, which is owned by Google, mostly collects your personal data for its own purposes — like tracking your online search history, or even your location, to serve you relevant ads. But TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, mostly allows third-party trackers to collect your data — and from there, it’s hard to say what happens with it. With third-party trackers, it’s essentially impossible to know who’s tracking your data or what information they’re collecting, from which posts you interact with — and how long you spend on each one — to your physical location and any other personal information you share with the app. As the study noted, third-party trackers can track your activity on other sites even after you leave the app..”


 – Pete Recommends Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, February 12, 2022 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, 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: The MY2022 app is a required download for Olympians and looks like a security nightmare; The country inoculating against disinformation; The IRS Says It Will Ditch ID.me’s Facial Recognition; How Phishers Are Slinking Their Links Into LinkedIn; and Health Sites Let Ads Track Visitors Without Telling Them.