Free Republic

The Senate overturned late Obama-era rules Thursday meant to protect consumer privacy from internet service providers that want to sell it. The regulations were passed in October, but hadn’t yet gone into effect. They would have required ISPs like Comcast and Verizon to ask permission before using or selling personal information. ISPs collect data like your browsing history, your physical location, the apps you’re using, and your financial and health information. They can then sell that data to advertisers, who use it to tailor their marketing to your individual wants and needs. If customers don’t want their data to be...

House GOP would let employers demand workers' genetic test results https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/10/workplace-wellness-genetic-testing/ House Republicans would let employers demand workers’ genetic test results By Sharon Begley @sxbegle March 10, 2017 A little-noticed bill moving through Congress would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let employers see that genetic and other health information. Giving employers such power is now prohibited by legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating explicitly that GINA and other protections do...

During a 2013 interview with Roland Martin, Congresswoman Maxine Waters propped up the Obama administration for “[putting] in place” a “database [that] will have information about everything on every individual.”*snip* “Well, I don’t know. The thing I think some people are missing here is the president has put in place an organization that contains the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life,” Waters answered, unprompted. “That’s going to be very, very powerful.” Read more at DC

The major poll that shows who the most trusted news networks are is a fake. The data is flawed and biased, the samples are weighted in favour of the “expected results” and the conclusions are erroneous. IN this article, we’ll show you exactly where the lies come from and look at why such a poll was first conducted. The poll was carried out by Morningconsult.com on the 1st and 2nd of December last year and their results show that ABC, CBS, WSY, NYT and CNN are among the “most credible news sources” in the US. News sources that were deemed...

Psychologist Michal Kosinski developed a method of analyzing people’s behavior down to the minutest detail by looking at their Facebook activity—thus helping Donald Trump to victory. On November 9th, around 8:30 in the morning, Michal Kosinski awoke in his hotel room in Zurich. The 34-year-old had traveled here to give a presentation to the Risk Center at the ETH [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule or Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich] at a conference on the dangers of Big Data and the so-called digital revolution. Kosinski gives such presentations all over the world. He is a leading expert on psychometrics, a data-driven offshoot...

For supporters of Donald Trump who are discouraged by the latest slate of polls showing Hillary Clinton up 5 percent just days before Election Day, polling guru Nate Silver had some reassuring words Sunday morning. "Some people are saying Clinton's up 5-6 nationally. That's just not a good representation of what the data says," Silver tweeted. But, he admitted, Clinton does have a lead.

European privacy watchdogs warned WhatsApp on Friday over sharing user information with parent company Facebook, and cautioned Yahoo over a 2014 data breach and scanning of customer emails for U.S. intelligence purposes. The popular messaging service's recent change in privacy policy to start sharing users' phone numbers with Facebook - the first policy change since WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook in 2014 - has attracted regulatory scrutiny in Europe. The Italian antitrust watchdog on Friday also announced a separate probe into whether WhatsApp obliged users to agree to sharing personal data with Facebook. (emphasis mine) The European Union's 28 data...

"The key is a psychological model for identifying voters that can “determine the personality of every single adult in the United States of America,” said Alexander Nix, chief executive of Cambridge Analytica. The little-known company, which has operated in the United States for four years, opened its office here only a month ago and is clearly at the center of Trump’s quest for a last-minute comeback against Democrat Hillary Clinton. New federal filings show the campaign’s payments to the firm ballooning from $250,000 in August to $5 million in September. The reliance on Cambridge reflects a recognition by Trump’s campaign...

They know how you browse the internet, your favorite TV shows and where you shop and travel. Data collected by internet and media companies is a powerful tool, and the big mergers planned by AT&T with Time Warner and Verizon with Yahoo offer those firms more data that can be used to target consumers with content and advertising. Privacy advocates say the prospect of firms using all that online and offline data without safeguards could be alarming. (emphasis mine ) "Twenty-first century media is all about the ability to gather information on a single individual regardless of where they are—whether...

The most precise map of the night sky ever assembled is taking shape. Astronomers working on the Gaia space telescope have released a first tranche of data recording the position and brightness of over a billion stars. And for some two million of these objects, their distance and sideways motion across the heavens has also been accurately plotted. Gaia's mapping effort is already unprecedented in scale, but it still has several years to run. Remarkably, scientists say the store of information even now is too big for them to sift, and they are appealing for the public's help in making...

Rental Cars Can Steal Phone Data Like Contacts and Text Messages http://fortune.com/2016/09/01/rental-cars-data-theft/ Tech Internet of Things Watch Out That Your Rental Car Doesn't Steal Your Phone Data By: Jeff John Roberts September 1, 2016, 10:51 AM  Watch out how you connect to cars. Here’s something to think about the next time you plug your phone into a rental car: The vehicle may be slurping up and recording all sorts of data, including your location, personal contacts, and even your text messages and web browsing. That warning comes via a Federal Trade Commission blog post this week, which highlights a downside...

<p>The new movie "Southside With You," which opens Friday, is a feature film about Barack and Michelle Obama's first date in 1989. It's perhaps best described as a "Before Sunrise" for political wonks: The story spans a single day as the future first couple catch a movie, visit an art museum, and talk about their hopes and dreams while meandering through Chicago. On a more meta level, the movie is about the creation of the Obamas' private-life narrative - a shaping of how the public will understand them in the future and an acknowledgment of how it sees them now.</p>

No youtubes, no streaming, yet every month I use more Data. I don't have many apps. I use my phone almost exclusively.

Announcing the Net Data Directory Posted on June 02, 2016 by Rebekah Heacock Jones Filed under: Internet Monitor The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is delighted to announce the launch of the Net Data Directory, a free, publicly available, searchable database of different sources of data about the Internet. The directory is intended to make finding useful quantitative data about a broad range of Internet-related topics—broadband, cybersecurity, freedom of expression, and more—easier for researchers, policymakers, journalists, and the public. "A large number of organizations are producing data about all different facets of the Internet," said Fernando Bermejo, Berkman Center...

“Big data” could play a huge role in the 2016 US election, even if Donald Trump doesn’t think so. Trump, who sailed through the Republican primaries using unconventional campaign rallies and Twitter messages, has indicated that he sees little use for popular data analytics tools to help target specific voters. But analysts say he may be at a disadvantage in the general election if he stays on that course. “In the primaries, he was only looking for Republican voters, and in the general he needs all voters,” said Alan Rosenblatt, a digital political strategist...

Precision Medicine Initiative and Data Security | whitehouse.gov (05/25/2016 White house decree) https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/05/25/precision-medicine-initiative-and-data-security?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTVRFNE1Ua3laRGRqTlRZMyIsInQiOiJ1R1VHbTk3M2o5NmhHSFQrOHNYdXZKakE4OW1tWTJlSUszSThzbnRnRkNlSGZjK2VCREJGWG5xemdyanpIQUdLU3pJSjBHYTdZd2hPUERUdmliaVBMZjA3SjNUYVY2WUt2Z1pTS0xXdTNqcz0ifQ%3D%3D Precision Medicine Initiative and Data Security May 25, 2016 at 3:00 PM ET by Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, Lisa O. Monaco Twitter Facebook Email Summary: Today, we are pleased to release the final Data Security Policy Principles and Framework (Security Framework) for President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI).     “We’re going to make sure that protecting patient privacy is built into our efforts from day one.”     - President Barack Obama, January 30th 2015 The health care system of the future is taking shape right now, and...

The state’s economic picture took on a completely different look Friday with the Connecticut Labor Department’s latest employment report. Though the state economy added 900 jobs in January, its unemployment rate increased by one-tenth of a percentage point to 5.5 percent. But even more troubling than that were the Labor Department’s revised employment numbers for 2015: Connecticut only added 12,200 jobs last year instead of 26,900 that the state agency had originally reported. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said January’s new employment data and the revised employment numbers for 2015 are “emblematic of our new economic reality.” .... “Connecticut’s economy is...

despite his commitment to Americans' privacy and civil liberties, a balance was needed to allow some intrusion when needed. Obama Wants Access To All Your Data While He Keeps All His Data Totally Hidden

His "Cruz Crew" mobile app is designed to gather detailed information from its users' phones -- tracking their physical movements and mining the names and contact information for friends who might want nothing to do with his campaign. That information and more is then fed into a vast database containing details about nearly every adult in the United States to build psychological profiles that target individual voters with uncanny accuracy. Cruz's sophisticated analytics operation was heralded as key to his victory in Iowa earlier this month -- the first proof, his campaign said, that the system has the potential to...

When presidential candidates turn to data crunchers at Rocket Fuel in Silicon Valley for help finding voters who want tougher immigration enforcement, the firm comes up with a surprisingly specific answer: Chevy truck drivers who like Starbucks. The data modeling from Rocket Fuel shows that this group leans against a path to citizenship for workers in the U.S. illegally. And these particular voters have become surprisingly easy – some argue creepily so – for campaigns to find and approach. So have consumers of frozen vegetables, who are more likely to oppose abortion. As have people curious about diabetes, a group...