Apple Is Now Giving People “Trust Scores” Based on Their Calls and Emails

PlanetFreeWill.com ^

[PFW]

This information will likely not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to Big Tech’s increasing propensity to violate the privacy of users and use their data for questionable reasons, but here we are.

Two days ago, the tech website Venture Beat noticed an eyebrow-raising bit in the latest update to Apple’s privacy policy:

"Apple’s promise of transparency regarding user data means that any new privacy policy update might reveal that it’s doing something new and weird with your data. Alongside yesterday’s releases of iOS 12, tvOS 12, and watchOS 5, Apple quietly updated some of its iTunes Store terms and privacy disclosures, including one standout provision: It’s now using an abstracted summary of your phone calls or emails as an anti-fraud measure."

[JustaTech]

How Chicom of them.

Yep. Apple has handed the Chinese government the keys to its cloud data as a condition of doing business in China. Amazon and other silicon giants are doing the same. The Chinese market is the big prize, and these corporations have allegiance only to money. The Chinese use this data about an individual's online activities to determine a social score for the person.

Your privileges in China (and soon here as well if the technocracy has its way) hinge on your social score, such as the privilege of traveling. If you score low enough, you lose important privileges such as the privilege of retaining valuable internal organs which can be sold for big bucks.

In China today, as well as the near-future America envisioned by Apple and most of Silicon Valley, you are a resource which will be exploited to the fullest one way or another.

[Larry Lucido]

(Excerpt) Read more at planetfreewill.com ...

***********

Why?

Admit it. You didn’t write anything over there. You copied and pasted everything there from two other sources, then teased a paragraph over here as “clickbait” to drive traffic to your blog.

Nice try, newb.

If you want to share it, we can share it here.

*************

Apple Is Now Giving People “Trust Scores” Based on Their Calls and Emails

September 20, 2018

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By: Mac Slavo | SHTFplan

This information will likely not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to Big Tech’s increasing propensity to violate the privacy of users and use their data for questionable reasons, but here we are.

See the source image

Two days ago, the tech website Venture Beat noticed an eyebrow-raising bit in the latest update to Apple’s privacy policy:

Apple’s promise of transparency regarding user data means that any new privacy policy update might reveal that it’s doing something new and weird with your data. Alongside yesterday’s releases of iOS 12, tvOS 12, and watchOS 5, Apple quietly updated some of its iTunes Store terms and privacy disclosures, including one standout provision: It’s now using an abstracted summary of your phone calls or emails as an anti-fraud measure.

The provision, which appears in the iTunes Store & Privacy windows of iOS and tvOS devices, says:

To help identify and prevent fraud, information about how you use your device, including the approximate number of phone calls or emails you send and receive, will be used to compute a device trust score when you attempt a purchase. The submissions are designed so Apple cannot learn the real values on your device. The scores are stored for a fixed time on our servers.

Venture Beat points out that this provision is unusual, in part because it includes Apple TVs, which do not have the capability to make calls or send emails.

It is unclear how Apple is going to collect the data, and

It’s equally unclear how recording and tracking the number of calls or emails traversing a user’s iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch would better enable Apple to verify a device’s identity than just checking its unique device identifier. Every one of these devices has both hardcoded serial numbers and advertising identifiers, while iPhones and cellular iPads also have SIM cards with other device-specific codes.

An Apple spokesperson contacted Venture Beat and confirmed that the device trust score is an update included in iOS 12. It was designed to detect fraud in iTunes purchases, as well as to reduce false positives in fraud detection, the rep said. “It apparently gives Apple a better likelihood of accurately determining whether content is being bought by the actual named purchaser,” Venture Beat explains.

Apple claims that they are still going to protect user data and privacy, and said details of calls and emails will not be collected. The data will be kept for a “limited period.”

We already know that Big Tech giants like Facebook and Google collect and store massive amounts of user data. If you still use Facebook and would like to see what kind of information they have on you, here’s how to get that data. And, if you once used Facebook but have since deleted your account, don’t get too comfortable – the social media giant can still track you.

Speaking of Facebook, in August it was revealed that the social media platform rates users based on their “trustworthiness,” as reported by Engadget:

The company’s Tessa Lyons has revealed to the Washington Post that it’s starting to assign users reputation scores on a zero-to-one scale. The system is meant to help Facebook’s fight against fake news by flagging people who routinely make false claims against news outlets, whether it’s due to an ideological disagreement or a personal grudge. This isn’t the only way Facebook gauges credibility, according to Lyons — it’s just one of thousands of behavior markers Facebook is using.

What other criteria does Facebook measure to determine a user’s score? Do all users have a score? How are the scores used? These are questions that remain unanswered.

Facebook won’t reveal exactly how it evaluates users, claiming that to do so might tip off “bad actors” who would then game the system.

As Engadget writer Violet Blue recently pointed out,

The company with the reputation for being the least trustworthy is rating the trustworthiness of its users. We’d be fools to think that it hasn’t been doing this all along in other areas. Some animals are more equal than others. The thing is, Facebook long ago decided who was more trustworthy — its real customers, its advertisers. It only pretended you’d be more trustworthy if you gave them your ID.

People are abandoning social media platforms – particularly, Facebook – in record numbers, in part because so many privacy violations and data collection practices have been exposed.

Hopefully, this is not a sign that humanity is heading for a Communist China, Big Brother-style social credit rating system. Just two days ago, we reported that “the Communist Party’s plan in China is for every one of its 1.4 billion citizens to be at the whim of a dystopian social credit system, and it’s on track to be fully operational by the year 2020”.

If you have watched the Netflix series Black Mirror – in particular, the episode called Nosedive – the increasing use of social credit rating systems and “trust scores” will seem eerily familiar.

If it isn’t government spying on us, it is private companies. The surveillance line is becoming more and more blurred, as tech companies increasingly give user data (sometimes forced, sometimes not) to governments upon demand. Edward Snowden exposed the existence of PRISM, under which the National Security Agency (NSA) accesses emails, documents, photographs and other sensitive users’ data stored by major companies. Documents leaked by Snowden revealed that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple give the NSA direct access to its users’ information.

Going entirely off-grid is looking more and more appealing.

VIAMac Slavo

SOURCESHTFplan

[Retvet]

Isn’t this essentially what communist China is doing?

[Albion Wilde]

Hey, Swordmaker, this is the type of thing that I have been objecting to about Apple. They can promise not to share info all they want, but nothing is stopping a rogue employee or a change of executives or company policy. Personally, I have little or nothing to hide, but it doesn’t take much for a disgruntled Democrat in the woodpile to make a Federal case out of nothing.

On the other hand, what is the alternative for the total non-geek? Can’t think of any. Would rather have a root canal than go back to the pc platform.

[Swordmaker]

Apple has listed in its privacy statement that it is using a "summarized number of calls, messages, and emails" as part of an anti-fraud prevention system when a user makes a purchase from a mobile device or the AppleTV on the iTunes App, or content Stores. This has gotten some people up in arms thinking that Apple is somehow tracking their usage and listening into their calls, monitoring the email, reading their messages.

However that is not the case.

What Apple is doing is using a summary approximation to protect the USER from someone hijacking their account and making fraudulent purchases using another device by comparing the accumulated calls, message, and email historic number data to see if they at all compare with the current purchaser's data, if not within reasonable ranges of your previous purchases contacts' usage, Apple may require the purchaser to re-enter the credit card's security code before completing the purchase or re-enter the entire credit card information to prove that you are you, thus stopping a fraudulent purchase from being made on a user's card. I know this because a good friend's daughter is a manager in Apple's Fraud prevention department. ALL such data is kept on the user's personal devices except for a hashed, encrypted comparison summary number for comparison on the user's own account.

This article is conflating Apple's fraud detection system with Facebook's "trust scoring" plan to rate user's political correctness rating. They are nowhere near the same thing. Apple's has nothing to do with social media rating. It is entirely internal to your device and your account to prevent fraud.

NEITHER CONTENT NOR EXPRESSED OPINION HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT BECAUSE APPLE DOES NOT EVER SEE USER'S CONTENT OR OPINIONS. — PING!

NO, Apple is NOT monitoring or tracking
your calls, email, or messages
Ping!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[House Atreides]

While you’re BLOG PIMPING Newby, read post 25 and try to comprehend it. Or are you simply a mindless bot?

[Swordmaker]

Hey, Swordmaker, this is the type of thing that I have been objecting to about Apple. They can promise not to share info all they want, but nothing is stopping a rogue employee or a change of executives or company policy. Personally, I have little or nothing to hide, but it doesn’t take much for a disgruntled Democrat in the woodpile to make a Federal case out of nothing.

It is NOT what is being done by Apple, Albion. Apple doesn't have ANYTHING useful about your usage that anyone could learn a damn thing about you.

Apple has less data about you than could be much more easily learned from your cellular phone carrier.

These dodos are conflating Apple's fraud prevention system which protects YOU from someone hijacking your Apple iTunes account which has an OPEN CHARGE CARD ACCOUNT from someone using another device from using YOUR charge card to buy hundreds of dollars of apps, movies, etc. using your account on a device that doesn't match your usage profile that the cannot match by cloning your iPhones' basic data.

Read the PING post above for more info on how it works. . . The data Apple is interested in is GENERAL, just enough to give them an edge to give them a clue the user is the user, that you are you, but not specific enough to pick you out of a line up of two or three people.

[Swordmaker]

No way that Big Tech Apple would spy on their customers.

They aren't. This is generic data. What part of summarized numeric data of the approximate number of calls or email made on a device do you think is going to be useful in telling anyone anything about you that could be interpretable to show your opinions, who you were calling, or even when, that could not have been acquired from your cellular phone carrier easier and more accurately and NOT SUMMARIZED or by waiting months until you happen to connect to iTunes?

These people can't read what is being collected and love to conflate what Apple is doing and project it as the same thing as what FaceBook and Google do. It isn't. Not even close.

[Swordmaker]

These Apple “executives” need to be arrested for sedition and treason. Put that in your little data base, you pu$$ified geeks. We see you.

Why? You believe the press now? This has NOTHING to do with tracking, monitoring, or reading users' mail or phone messages. Nothing, Zip, nada. Nil.

These bozos have found something in Apple's privacy statement and are CONFLATING it into being the same thing that FACEBOOK does in rating their members by political correctness and how left they are. It is not the same thing at all.

This is merely a snapshot of normal user usage of the device that Apple's iTunes Store can use to compare one purchase visit with the next to assure that the user making a purchase has a similar usage profile. If the profiles are at all dissimilar, then the new purchaser may have to jump through some more hoops before just being allowed to use the ACTIVE on-flle credit card.

For example, if a user normally sends approximately 100 emails, and makes 300 phones calls a month then that becomes the profile. The next time that user connects to rent or purchase an app or movie, and his device shows 110 emails and 280 phone calls, there is no problem, because his profile is close enough to a normal expected variation of what would be expected. However, if the next time a someone connects using the account tries to make a purchase on that user's iTunes account shows only TEN phone calls and 2000 emails, a red flag would be raised, requiring the purchaser to re-enter the Credit Card's security code, or even re-enter the entire credit card information before completing the purchase.

Now, do you get it?

[Swordmaker]

Not quite ready to trust Apple, given that their present leader hasn’t had an idea.

Oh? AppleWatch. Now the number one selling Watch in the world, not just smartwatch, WATCH, of all kinds of Watch. With the release of AppleWatch 4 this week, It is now also the first over the counter consumer purchasable, medical grade, EKG capable wearable device that is FDA certified. It does not require a doctor to read the EKG, nor does it require a doctor to activate the EKG. It works out of the box.

Google search of people who have had their lives saved due to the AppleWatch

Nice try, but no banana. Insurance companies are starting to provide AppleWatches as part of their health Insurance Plans.

When An Insurer Sells You an Apple Watch For $25, How Much Are You Giving Away?

[Swordmaker]

Are you cool with this crap?

Absolutely, because I know how it works and what it is for. . . and it has NOTHING to do with any private data. It is purely and simply an encrypted, summarized number that will help prevent someone from STEALING MONEY FROM ME.

These bozos don't know anything about what they are blithering about and are conflating what Apple is doing with the really reprehensible things that Facebook and Twitter are doing, which I am NOT cool with.

Apple's approach carries ZERO personal data. None, nada , nichevo (for those trolls watching FR), zip!

Try reading for context and comprehension.

Of course, it helps that I have friends whose daughter works in Apple's Fraud Prevention Department and we've talked thoroughly about this months ago.

[Swordmaker]

Hey — your guys meet expectations!!!

And you do too. Able to leap to a completely wrong conclusion in a single bound.

Amazing.

[Swordmaker]

I dread the day they stop supporting it or the battery dies.

Batteries are available with replacement tool kits for all iPhones on Amazon and eBay. Depending on your model, it can take as short a time as two minutes to replace the battery. Videos on how to do it are on YouTube.

The real problem is the carriers are planning to phase out 3G someday. 2G is almost gone now.

[Swordmaker]

They’re appropriating China’s Sesame Credit system. It ranks each person per the Communist ideal from purchasing habits to criminal behavior to not tweeting government propaganda enough.

No, that's FACEBOOK and TWITTER. Apple is not doing that at all. Read my explanation above about what Apple is doing. Apple is not rating PERSONS for anything at all. They aren't even looking at purchasing habits for this. . . although they might be in the iTunes Store because someone who consistently buys Classical music is not suddenly going to buy hundreds of HipHop tracks. That would likely be a huge red flag for fraud.

Read the article again and pay attention to what Apple said, not what some bozo is saying they are doing. Apple is taking a snapshot of the DEVICE, not the user. They could not care less what the user is doing. It's whether the device is the same device as the user was using the last time or not that's important. If it's not, then there's a stronger likelihood that a scam is being played and a fraudulent purchase is being attempted using the owner of the account's online ACTIVE credit card.

[Swordmaker]

Yep. Apple has handed the Chinese government the keys to its cloud data as a condition of doing business in China.

Sigh. No, Apple has not handed over the keys to the iCloud data to the Chinese Government. Following the LAWS in China, Apple is required to have the data for Chinese iCloud customers within China's borders. As part of that law, the encryption keys ALSO have to be stored somewhere within the physical borders of China. That does not mean in the possession of the Chinese Government. Apple has those encryption keys in their Peking Apple China Corporate office, where, if necessary the Chinese Court system can require Apple to unlock various court ordered accounts.

Yes, you are correct, Amazon and the other silicon giants are doing the same because to do business within the borders of China, they have to comply with the laws of China, just as they have to comply with the laws of the United States to do business here.

The social score in China is determined by their participation on SOCIAL MEDIA, not by their participation on the Apple iCloud which is not a social media platform. The Chinese have equivalents to Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. That is what their social scores are being based on. And no, the Chinese do not lose their organs if their score goes too low. That's an urban legend. They do lose travel passports and jobs are put in jeopardy.

In China today, as well as the near-future America envisioned by Apple and most of Silicon Valley, you are a resource which will be exploited to the fullest one way or another.

Apple is not interested in selling its customers, contrary to your statement above. They do want to "exploit" them as customers. . . but not as products, the way Facebook and Google intend. Apple has been vehement about customer's privacy, sometimes to the point of fighting the government about it.

[Mears]

I had to log onto iCloud to locate my iPod a few days ago-———since then they have been steadily offering a “Two-factor Authentication” as an extra layer of security.

.

[CJ Wolf]

Is that really true? I figured they all (phones and computers) were tracking everything.

[mrsmith]

“How Chicom of them.”

Well, sorta. But this a fiscal, not a political, tool.

Sounds like they’re using programming they’ve already paid to develop to please China, etc to make the device more secure as a financial tool in free countries.

But they’re acting like a credit reporting firm (if the info is used by non-Apple stores). May be regulatory problems there.

[CJ Wolf]

“because someone who consistently buys Classical music is not suddenly going to buy hundreds of HipHop tracks” or they could have a new girlfriend. ;-)

[Swordmaker]

Is that really true? I figured they all (phones and computers) were tracking everything.

There a limit to everything. I try to keep google off of my mobile devices as much as possible as their ads track you, your searches track you, and their mail system tracks you. . . and YouTube tracks you. I only goto fakebook on my home Mac in a protected partition to see pics of my Granddaughter. I never had a Twitter account. . . and when I go there to see something for Q, it's in a sandboxed partition.

Everything about Apple is sandboxed and secure. Apple does NOT have access to your data, even on iCloud. Your uploaded iCloud data is encrypted. It is split into four discrete pieces, each of which is stored in four different locations, each encrypted by Apple to a 256 bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) standard. It can only be put back together when you recall your data. What you store on iCloud is by your choice. Everything on your iPhone or iPad is ALSO encrypted to a 256 bit a, stronger than most financial security, which uses a password that would require 5.62 X 10¹⁹⁵ years to crack using brute force guessing, which right now is the only way to hack into a 256 bit AES encryption, using the fastest supercomputer on the planet. You've probably heard about the police having a GrayBox that can crack even the most modern iPhone, but that merely hacks the device's passcode. . . but If you merely change your passcode to a seven character alphanumeric complex passcode, even that GreyBox would require 46 years to crack that. . .

Keep in mind that Apple does not have your passcode and It is NOT stored on your device. . . so don't forget it.

On the other hand, anything you do that LEAVES the device and goes through an Internet carrier is no longer yours. They can see it. Anyone can see it. It is essentially fair game for anyone to try and grab ahold of it and try to decipher it. Legal? Probably not. . . but you must assume they will try. That even includes the very minute radio waves that the screen gives off as you press virtual keys on the virtual keyboard. If someone is close enough with a sensitive enough device, they may be able to pickup and interpret those radio wave and determine your passcode. Unlikely, but entirely possible. Accurate? Probably not. However it's been done in locked rooms with two computers.