Free Republic

Find out what @Facebook thinks you are politically: Open your FB account “Settings.”Select “Ads” Click “Your Information”Click "Your Categories.” They had me down as "very conservative" which is right on the money and downright creepy because I don't post about politics on Facebook.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christoper Wylie, appearing before a committee of British MPs on Tuesday, said that Facebook has the ability to spy on users in their homes and offices. The British parliament is investigating Cambridge Analytica's involvement in the Brexit election. MP Damian Collins, who chaired the committee, asked Wyle whether Facebook has the ability to listen to what people are talking about in order to better target them with ads. "There's been various speculation about the fact that Facebook can, through the Facebook app on your smartphone, listen in to what people are talking about and discussing and using...

In an interview with Wired magazine, Mark Zuckerberg revealed Facebook’s political agenda — he wants to curb free speech and free expression on the platform in exchange for “safety.” From the Wired interview: I think at the heart of a lot of these issues we face are tradeoffs between real values that people care about. You know, when you think about issues like fake news or hate speech, right, it’s a tradeoff between free speech and free expression and safety and having an informed community. These are all the challenging situations that I think we are working to try to...

Former top FBI official Andrew McCabe, who was fired late Friday night by Attorney General Jeff Sessions two days before becoming eligible for full pension benefits, said in an extraordinary statement that he was targeted because President Donald Trump wants to destroy him as part of his "war" against special counsel Robert Mueller. "This attack on my credibility is one part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally, but to taint the FBI, law enforcement and intelligence professionals more generally," McCabe said in a statement released shortly after Sessions announced his decision. "It is part of this...

Owners of Amazon Echo devices with the voice-enabled assistant Alexa have been pretty much creeped out of their damn minds recently. People are reporting that the bot sometimes spontaneously starts laughing — which is basically a bloodcurdling nightmare.

VICTOR — Sean Martineck...(spoke to) the government class of Victor Senior High School teacher Mike Myers ... on ... the ...serious topic of gun violence, the Second Amendment and getting illegal guns off the streets — something that takes up a great deal of his time as a special agent for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, assigned to the Violent Crime Task Force in the Rochester satellite office. Martineck read (the Second Amendment), noting it was passed in 1791. “What did our Founding Fathers mean by that?” he asked. “Do you think our Founding Fathers envisioned...

MENLO PARK, CA—Giving his arms and legs a nice little stretch while reclining in his office chair Friday afternoon, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, confirmed that he had successfully completed another long day of deciding what people around the world should believe. The tech titan, worth $71 billion, went on to describe the weight that comes along with being the arbiter of moral fitness and objective truth, able to make or break nearly any website on the internet by lowering the organic reach of their posts or outright banning them, based upon Facebook’s opinion of the views expressed in their...

...Marketers spent $16 billion on location-targeted ads served to mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers in 2017... .The data required to serve you any single ad might pass through many companies’ systems in milliseconds—from data broker to ad marketplace to an agency’s custom system... There are plenty of ways to track you without getting your permission. Some of the most intrusive are the easiest to implement... The spy in your pocket... Your telco knows where you are at all times, because it knows which cell towers your phone is near. In the U.S., how much data service providers sell...

Former CIA chief John Brennan on Friday predicted "rough waters ahead," particularly on international issues, because President Trump is "unstable, inept, inexperienced, and also unethical." In an interview with MSNBC's "Deadline: White House," Brennan told host Nicole Wallace that the president was "ill prepared" to take on the duties of commander-in-chief, particularly growing military aggression from Russia and North Korea. "It is no secret to anybody that Donald Trump was very ill prepared and unexperienced in terms of dealing with matters that a head of state needs to deal with, head of government, and I think this is now coming...

Stratumseind in Eindhoven is one of the busiest nightlife streets in the Netherlands. On a Saturday night, bars are packed, music blares through the street, laughter and drunken shouting bounces off the walls. As the night progresses, the ground becomes littered with empty shot bottles, energy drink cans, cigarette butts and broken glass. It’s no surprise that the place is also known for its frequent fights. To change that image, Stratumseind has become one of the “smartest” streets in the Netherlands. Lamp-posts have been fitted with wifi-trackers, cameras and 64 microphones that can detect aggressive behaviour and alert police officers...

Delivering remarks on domestic terrorism at an event co-sponsored by the George Washington University’s program on extremism and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Assistant Attorney General John P. Carlin announced on Wednesday the creation of a new position within the Department of Justice (DOJ) aimed at investigating violent extremism. “We are here to talk about combating domestic terrorism, which the FBI has explained as ‘Americans attacking Americans based on U.S.-based extremist ideologies.’ The threat ranges from individuals motivated by anti-government animus, to eco-radicalism and racism,” stated Carlin. He continued, “Homegrown violent extremists can be motivated by any viewpoint on...

"Did you ever sleep with him?" Brandi asked Omarosa in the middle of a conversation about something else entirely. That's our girl! It was so abrupt, Omarosa had no idea who she was talking about, so she asked. "Trump," Brandi clarified to the delight and horror of the room. "God, that is disgusting," Omarosa finally said about the very notion... "There is somebody in the White House sleeping with everybody, but she is not me." Junior slueths, get on the case! Omarosa also described briefing prep with Sean Spicer as a "special form of torture." She said, "The funniest thing...

Facebook is not a privacy company; it’s Big Brother on PCP. It does not want to anonymize and protect you; it wants to drain you of your privacy, sucking up every bit of personal data. You should resist the urge to let it, at every turn. There’s a new menu item in the Facebook app, first reported by TechCrunch on Monday, labeled “Protect.” Clicking it will send you to the App Store and prompt you to download a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service called Onavo. (“Protect” shows up in the iOS app. Gizmodo looked for it on an Android device...

Facial recognition technology is improving by leaps and bounds. Some commercial software can now tell the gender of a person in a photograph. When the person in the photo is a white man, the software is right 99 percent of the time. But the darker the skin, the more errors arise — up to nearly 35 percent for images of darker skinned women, according to a new study that breaks fresh ground by measuring how the technology works on people of different races and gender. These disparate results, calculated by Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the M.I.T. Media Lab, show...

Fox News’ Tucker Carlson reported Tuesday on patents filed by Google that purport to show a bizarre plan to spy on you and parent your children. “In another patent application from September 2016, Google imagines how it could take control of your parenting, your relationship with your children,” Carlson explained. “Google’s smart home system could detect children near a liquor cabinet for example, or in their parents bedroom, infer that ‘mischief is occurring’ and deliver a verbal warning.” The Daily Caller co-founder said, “In another example, Google imagines a hypothetical child called Benjamin. Google’s cameras would be watching Benjamin at...

Just a month after her rocky White House exit, former Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman will be joining the cast of CBS’ debut season of “Celebrity Big Brother,” the network announced Sunday. Omarosa resigned from the Trump administration in December. Now it looks like she's going from the White House to the “Big Brother” house.

ICE has struck a deal to track license plates across the US https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/26/16932350/ice-immigration-customs-license-plate-recognition-contract-vigilant-solutions Exclusive: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US By Russell Brandom@russellbrandom  Jan 26, 2018, 8:04am EST SHAREMORE The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians. The source of the data is not named in the contract, but an ICE representative said the...

PowerPost Follow @powerpost PowerPost Analysis The Health 202: NIH wants 1 million Americans to contribute to new pool of gene data By Paige Winfield Cunningham January 16 THE PROGNOSIS Starting this spring, Americans across the country will be invited to contribute to a massive new pool of genomic information being assembled by the government, a project that represents the most ambitious effort yet to capitalize on the promising new frontier of gene-based medicine. Three years after the National Institutes of Health first announced its Precision Medicine Initiative — subsequently redubbed “All of Us” — the agency’s director, Francis Collins, says...

This move also relocates Chinese customers' iCloud data from the US to China.... Per a clause in the terms and conditions,.... Apple and GCBD "will have access to all data that you store on this service, including the right to share, exchange and disclose all user data, including content, to and between each other under applicable law." China passed a controversial cybersecurity law last July that required companies that operated data centers in China to store all data in the country.

Coca-Cola will sell smaller bottles at higher prices in response to the sugar tax. The soft drinks manufacturer has refused to alter its famous sugar-laden recipe. But from March the cost of some bottles of the fizzy drink will rise by more than 10 per cent – before the new tax takes effect the following month. The plans mean that a 1.75 litre bottle of Coke will shrink to 1.5 litres, while increasing in price by 20p to £1.99. The cost of a 500ml bottle will also rise from £1.09 to £1.25 – increasing by 25 per cent from just...