Free Republic

Facebook is asking British users to send naked photos of themselves to the social network, to try to stop revenge porn. If you're worried an intimate photo of you could be shared by someone else, the idea is to get it blocked before it appears online. Similar technology is used to try to stop the spread of child abuse images. Facebook's been testing the system in Australia and is extending the trial to the UK, the USA and Canada. A spokesman told Newsbeat the idea is open to people in the UK now. Facebook hasn't revealed any details about how...

What if your telecom company tracked the websites you visit, the apps you use, the TV shows you watch, the stores you shop at and the restaurants you eat at, and then sold that information to advertisers? In theory, it’s possible, given the stance Washington is taking on online privacy. Lawmakers on Tuesday voted to overturn privacy rules that required telecom companies to get customers’ permission before sharing their web-browsing and app usage history with third parties. The White House said Wednesday President Donald Trump intends to sign the measure into law. Undoing the rules, which had been adopted last...

House Schedules Vote on Eliminating Consumer Online Privacy Rights next week. Majority Leader McCarthy Confirms House to Immediately Act on Behalf of the Cable and Telephone Industry Following the Senate Vote Yesterday, Senate by thin margin of 50 to 48 voted to take away the privacy rights of Internet users as a favor to cable and telephone industry. Now the House is planning to take up the legislation immediately next week before people can discover the damage they are about to inflict to consumer privacy online. These Are Legal Rights To Privacy They're Dismantling: Americans have enjoyed a legal right...

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...

“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...

February 11, 2016 Ted Cruz Launches Internet Data-Mining "Stazi" APP To Identify Friends and Phone Contacts of Cruz by sundance If you begin to receive weird phone text messages, Facebook contacts and weird emails from the Cruz campaign, it’s probably because one of your “friends” is a Ted Cruz supporter – and he or she has you in their contact list. An alarming article from the Associated Press explains how Ted Cruz has moved his campaign from direct cyber contact to data-mining and spyware within the contacts on phones and social media of Ted Cruz supporters.According to the Associated Press...

Cruz has largely built his program out of his Houston headquarters, where a team of statisticians and behavioral psychologists who subscribe to the burgeoning practice of “psychographic targeting” built their own version of a Myers-Briggs personality test. The test data is supplemented by recent issue surveys, and together they are used to categorize supporters, who then receive specially tailored messages, phone calls and visits. Micro-targeting of voters has been around for well over a decade, but the Cruz operation has deepened the intensity of the effort and the use of psychological data. Cruz, a critic of excessive government data collection,...

Requires development of longitudinal data system that maintains individuals' data from preschool through entry into workforce

Big data is watching. You can almost hear the computer servers in Washington buzzing with new activity. If you have never been in a large data center, they actually pulse and throb as systems surge to ingest, process and dump bits. Disks spin, cooling systems lurch and power panels hum. Data centers are seemingly alive, and the bigger the joint, the more ominous they sound – like the devil’s own demon factory. This is the backdrop for recent revelations concerning your government and big data (the phrase “big data” is IT industry slang for massive info crunching, the “crunch” verb...

On Wednesday, the CIA's chief technology officer detailed the Agency's vision for collecting and analyzing all of the information people put on the Internet. The wide-ranging presentation at GigaOM's Structure:Data conference in New York City came two days after it was reported the spy agency is on the verge of signing a cloud computing contract with Amazon — worth up to $600 million over 10 years — that involves Amazon Web Services helping the CIA build a "private cloud" filled with technologies like big data.… "You're already a walking sensor platform," Hunt said, referring to all of the information captured...

Big Data. Are You Ready? Big data can offer big business benefits, but are you ready to acquire, organize, access, and analyze it? Social media, digital sensors, and handheld devices all generate massive volumes of data—and a potential treasure trove of valuable information about customer behavior and business operations. However, this data has not always been readily accessible or integrated in enterprise data warehouses and business intelligence applications. Until now. Oracle offers a complete portfolio of products that enable you to acquire, organize, and analyze big data alongside traditional enterprise data for immediate business value. Join us at the Big...