Free Republic

COVID-19 is so new and information is changing so rapidly that it is difficult to separate fact from fiction and truth from partial truth. Like everyone else, I'm just trying to make sense of the evolving information. Many of us have been monitoring the daily reports measuring the number of deaths relative to the number of cases. We've been treated to crash courses in lay epidemiology via daily press briefings and voluminous articles. We understand that the administration and state governments have been trying to "flatten the curve" of the coronavirus by slowing its spread. The main purpose, as has...

Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos. Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it...

On Twitter, people shared screenshots of how their photos were tagged. "To be fair, 'one person, beard' is pretty much a spot-on description of me," Zack Whittaker, an editor at TechCrunch, wrote. Facebook automatically scans all photos on the social network with facial- and image-recognition software powered by AI to detect who or what is being pictured. At times, it appeared the AI incorrectly tagged the photo, as in the case of the Fortune reporter Danielle Abril's where the photo description read: "5 people, including Danielle Abril, people smiling, people standing, hoes and indoor." Hopefully there was a gardening tool...

When the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted the online accounts of legally targeted foreigners over a four-year period it also collected the conversations of nine times as many ordinary Internet users, both Americans and non-Americans, according to a probe by The Washington Post. Nearly half of those surveillance files contained names, email addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents, the Post reported in a story posted on its website Saturday night. […] At the same time, the intercepted messages contained material of considerable intelligence value, the Post reported, such as information about...

A coalition of child and consumer advocacy groups on Wednesday accused Facebook of illegally collecting data on children with its new Messenger Kids app. In a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and other organizations argued that the service’s disclosures about its privacy practices are overly vague, allowing Facebook to share children’s data with third parties. The groups allege that Messenger Kids is in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) because it doesn’t ensure that the adult giving a child permission to use the app is actually the...

It's 21 years old, but interesting to see what was being proposed to the government as a way of collecting massive amounts of data and automatically processing it. This was before nav units in cars were common, and portable interaction was normal. Another earlier video, our first home production, describes more nitty-gritty data collection by topic in various languages, with people able to correct and adjust confidence in the collected data. PLUM is referenced in the video above.PLUM - Probabilistic Language Understanding ModelAnd the government has now had two decades to refine their massive data collection techniques.

In an Internet of Things future, everything from your toothbrush to your car could be collecting data on you -- about your personal habits as well as the way your business works. But with 50 billion objects set to come online by 2020, who will really own that goldmine of information? Data gathered by IoT sensors and systems can pass through any number of hands -- those of the end-user that creates it, or of the company whose hardware collects it, even the software business the processes it, and the app maker that shares it, and all of them may...

More and more people are having the disturbing experience of seeing their doctors spend more time pecking at a computer keyboard than examining them. The doctors are entering data into their patients’ electronic health records (EHRs) in compliance with federal rules introduced a few years ago. EHRs drive doctors crazy. Their own experience tells them that electronic recordkeeping interferes with care, by taking time away from patients. In a survey conducted by the Deloitte consulting group, three of four doctors said EHRs are not worth the cost. The influential RAND Corporation, which had long endorsed EHRs, reported in 2013 that...

At a conference of the Annual Strategic Data Project (SDP) last year, Common Core "architect" and current president of the “non-profit” College Board, David Coleman, praised the collection of student data via the Common Core State Standards initiative.  Furthermore, he welcomed to that effort members of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign who, Coleman said, would be reaching out, as they did for the campaign, to the “low-hanging fruit,” or low-income and Latino students.In the video below, recorded last May by the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research CEPR, Coleman gave his audience several important pieces of information. First, Coleman admitted, as former...

The launch of the new iPhone 6 late last month set a record for Apple, selling 10-million units in the first three days. In spite of the record-setting sales, it was not long before consumer enthusiasm for the new technology dulled with reports of alleged problems, including a potential for bending if sat on for long periods; a phenomenon quickly dubbed “Bendgate.” The release of the iPhone 6 presented another, more serious problem for a much different demographic: government snoops. Rather than continuing to be the rope in a tug-of-war between consumer privacy and warrantless government requests for consumer data,...

The NSA isn’t the only government agency raising concerns about electronic privacy. Local police departments are coming under similar scrutiny—not only for using spying technology, but for hiding their use from the public. At least 25 police departments now use what is known as “Stingray,” a briefcase-sized box that swallows up cell phone data within a mile radius. More than one in three large police departments are also using license-plate readers, which can record every plate—even on a four-lane highway—from vehicles going at speeds of up to 150 miles per hour. […] But the two technologies raise broader questions about...

The NSA and its British counterpart are tapping popular smartphone apps such as Angry Birds to peek into the tremendous amounts of very personal data those bits of software collect -- including age, location, sex and even sexual preferences, according to new reports from the New York Times and The Guardian. Citing confidential documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the reports detail efforts to supplement data collection from cell phone carriers and smartphones by tapping into “leaky” apps themselves. “Some apps, the documents state, can share users' most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in...

In New York, a bill has been proposed by Democrat Assemblywoman Margaret Markey that would require all public school students to undergo mental health exams, more than once, in order to attend. Loesch points out how this fits into a larger picture that is forming with Common Core requirements and various state legislatures across the country. Schools are collecting information such as parental political affiliations, firearm ownership, religious affiliations, and other forms of data mining. She also poses the important question of who would pay for this. Is it going to be yet another financial burden for low and middle...

Progressive Insurance wants its insurance agents to take a 30-day ride-along with its customers. While the agents themselves are not physically in the vehicles, the Progressive “Snapshot” device -- which functions much like a car’s Event Data Recorder, or “EDR” (also known as a “black box”) -- constantly monitors and records every move a driver makes; including how often drivers slam on the brakes, how many miles they drive, and how much time they spend driving at high-risk hours (Midnight to 4:00 AM). Progressive claims collecting such data will save money for “safe-drivers,” but in actuality it is simply a...

(Update: Adding more on opposition to Core, where Duncan spoke) U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a group of state schools superintendents Friday that he found it “fascinating” that some of the opposition to the Common Core State Standards has come from “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.” Yes, he really said that. But he has said similar things before. What, exactly, is he talking about? In his cheerleading for the controversial Common Core...

America President Obama Channels Lord Cromwell: Great Statesmen Tamper with Packets By John Stanton National Security Writer National Security Advisor Susan Rice — Former US Ambassador to UN Susan Rice (48: center) was appointed by President Obama as the National Security Advisor (NSA) on July 1, 2013. She succeeded Tom Donilon as NSA, the top advisor to the US president on all national secutiry and foreign policies. Glenn Greenwald’s Snowden dossier concerning the American Leviathan’s practice of harvesting, storing and analyzing the information/conversations of its own and the world’s political, military, economic and cultural gate keepers is fascinating. This is...

The Obama administration has been collecting enormous amounts of communications and other data on Americans. The justification which is offered (and which is being accepted on both sides of the aisle) is the need to monitor this information to protect us in the age of modern terrorism. The most credible complaint we hear is that they’re gathering data on their political opposition. The IRS scandal gives weight to this thought. But an overlooked motive will play a pivotal role in 2014: this data-mining effort, in significant part, is a vehicle for getting votes. We’re told that no one is listening...

Notorious RINO and Blind Sheik prosecutor Andrew McCarthy posted this at NationalReview.com’s The Corner yesterday afternoon: What gaineth a president if he wins over knuckle-dragging right-wing loon commentator McCarthy but loses the New York Times? ”The administration has now lost all credibility.” Ouch! Ouch indeed, but if you really need reassurance that President Obama’s thought police are not monitoring your every move, read McCarthy’s longer essay on the NSA program here. McCarthy had reached his conclusion before I posted mine, but I got to the same place before going on air Thursday. The PRISM story followed later in the day,...

How Much Has It Cost Us? I was pondering a possible block diagram or flow chart of the steps and the technology necessary to mine data on this grand scale. Without getting into details, I assert it is very expensive. How much did the electronic collection hardware cost? How much did the data storage hardware cost? How much did the network hardware cost? How much did the network software cost? How much did it cost to create a searchable database? How much did it cost to enter the collected data? How much did it cost to maintain the database? How...

PayPal is making changes to its privacy policy that will go into effect on April 1, 2012. The online payments unit of eBay is also adding extensively to its "Identity Authentication" section that all buyers and sellers must agree to as part of the User Agreement. PayPal said it was making changes to its Customer Identification program "as a result of changes in the law." Somewhat ironically, an alert reader noticed that PayPal users are unable to opt-out of AdChoice, a program that allows PayPal and other eBay entities to share information about visitors' past activities with its partners in...