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I was just logging in to youtube and after entering my password I got a prompt similar to the password prompt that said to enter my Android PIN to verify it is me. I thought "No way" and entered a bogus number. I used 1692 and it logged me in. Is there nothing that youtube (google) does not want to know?

The post office’s law enforcement arm has faced intense congressional scrutiny in recent weeks over its Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP), which tracks social media posts of Americans and shares that information with other law enforcement agencies. Yet the program is much broader in scope than previously known and includes analysts who assume fake identities online, use sophisticated intelligence tools and employ facial recognition software, according to interviews and documents reviewed by Yahoo News.Among the tools used by the analysts is Clearview AI, a facial recognition software that scrapes images off public websites, a practice that has raised the ire...

The real reason Facebook is so worried? Transparency is a much bigger threat to its business.. It's no secret that Facebook has feelings about the upcoming changes Apple plans to introduce to iOS 14.5. Apple has said it will require developers to request permission from users before they can collect data or track them while they use their apps. That comes after Apple previously required developers to disclose what information they collect with the introduction of privacy nutrition labels in the iOS App Store. Those changes apply to all developers, but Facebook seems to be taking it personally. And, the...

The Ulysses Group says it has real-time access to 15 billion cars worldwide.. They monitor cars through GPS and sensors on equipment such as airbags.. The data may be from car makers and through manufacturers of individual parts.. The Ulysses Group has strong ties to the U.S. military and promotes its capability.. .... A South Carolina-based surveillance firm that has sold services to the U.S. military is promoting its ability to provide real-time location information about 15 billion cars every month. The company, called The Ulysses Group, says it can monitor vehicles in every country in the world, except North...

BGI Genomics—the Chinese Communist Party-linked genomics firm flagged by U.S. officials as “mining” the DNA of Americans—has collaborated extensively with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The National Pulse can reveal.The company has recently come under fire following a 60 Minutes exposé on the company’s use of COVID-19 tests to “collect, store and exploit biometric information” on American citizens, according to former U.S. intelligence officials. What’s more, a recent Reuters article linked the firm to the Chinese Communist Party’s military.In addition to the Obama administration enabling the firm to gain a foothold in the U.S., the Bill & Melinda Gates...

Over these past few weeks, Apple has experienced something it isn't used to: bad PR in the wake of essentially banning popular social media app Parler from its phones without publicly providing any truthful explanationWar is brewing in Silicon Valley. A long-simmering fight between Apple and Facebook — two of the architects of Big Tech — spilled into the avenue this past week, with commercial and legal threats hitting the pages of both tech publications and broader media.To read the Cult of Mac journalists who dominate Big Tech reporting, you’d think America had flipped the calendar back 10 years to...

A Democratic effort is underway in at least 16 states to overturn restrictions on mail-in balloting and third-party ballot harvesting. A nationwide effort by Democrats is underway in at least 16 states to overturn restrictions on mail-in voting and third-party ballot harvesting. States where suits have been filed include the swing states of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Florida. The effort is being backed by the National Redistricting Foundation, a Democratic group headed by the Obama administration’s Attorney General Eric Holder. The suits appear to be funded by Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC. A Wall Street Journal headline from April read,...

SPRINGFIELD – The Illinois Department of Employment Security has confirmed that a new online portal that processes claims for federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance briefly allowed public access to applicants’ personal information including Social Security numbers. The PUA system, which went online May 11, is a federal program that provides unemployment benefits to gig workers and other independent contractors who are not normally covered by regular unemployment insurance. The data breach was first made public Saturday when state Rep. Terri Bryant, a Murphysboro Republican, said in a news release that she had been alerted to the issue by a constituent the...

Big Data Can Lie: SimpsonÂ’s Paradox SimpsonÂ’s Paradox illustrates the importance of human interpretation of the results of data mining. There are many ways data analytics can lead to wrong conclusions. Sometimes a dishonest data cruncher interprets data to further her agenda. But misleading data can also come from curious flukes of statistics. SimpsonÂ’s Paradox1, 2 is one of these flukes. HereÂ’s an example. Baseball player Babe has a better batting average3 than Mickey in both April and May. So, in terms of batting average, Babe is a better baseball player than Mickey. Right? No. It turns out that...

As citizens in the digital age, we deal with so many privacy scandals and data breaches that entire books could be filled with stories about them. And it's not just high profile individuals anymore, either. Between Yahoo's billions-strong security hack or Facebook's Cambridge Analytica debacle, nearly everyone you know has probably suffered a privacy breach at some point recently. Thanks to recent reports, it's becoming even more clear that you or someone you know has likely had their data accessed without their explicit permission. Only this time, the culprits aren't criminals or hackers on the internet, but ordinary bureaucrats at...

No, no, no. Hell, no! That’s my response to the latest trial balloon floated by the White House to join with Silicon Valley on a creepy program monitoring Americans’ “neurobehavioral signs” to (purportedly) prevent gun violence. President Donald Trump’s old friend, former NBC head Bob Wright, has been pushing an Orwellian surveillance scheme called “Safe Home” — “Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes” — that would cost taxpayers between $40 million and $60 million. The Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, reports that the plan could incorporate “Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google...

Full title: Apple CEO Cook calls for U.S. Congress to pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation in TIME op-ed “In 2019, it’s time to stand up for the right to privacy—yours, mine, all of ours,” Apple CEO Tim Cook writes in an op-ed for TIME Magazine. “Consumers shouldn’t have to tolerate another year of companies irresponsibly amassing huge user profiles, data breaches that seem out of control and the vanishing ability to control our own digital lives.” “This problem is solvable—it isn’t too big, too challenging or too late.... {snip} ….“We believe the Federal Trade Commission should establish a data-broker clearinghouse,...

The federal government is spending nearly $1 million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter. ... “This service could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda [?], and assist in the preservation of open debate,” the grant said. ... “Truthy” claims to be non-partisan. However, the project’s lead investigator Filippo Menczer proclaims his support for numerous progressive advocacy groups, including President Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action, Moveon.org, Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, and True Majority. ... The government-funded researchers hope that the public will use...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has adopted a new rule that allows the agency to collect social-media data from those who cross the border. The agency claims the exemption from Privacy Act provisions is necessary because it needs “to identity and understand relationships between individuals, entities, threats and events, and to monitor patterns of activity over extended periods of time that may be indicative of criminal, terrorist, or other threat.” A number of privacy groups and interests had opposed the expansion of the exemptions to the privacy law, but the agency in a filing in the Federal Register explained that...

A file containing personal information on millions of Texas voters was found on an unsecured online server, Techcrunch reported Thursday. An estimated 14.8 million records were found on the server, representing files on the majority of Texas’s 15.2 million registered voters. It is unknown who owns the server, but analysis suggests the data was likely aggregated by the GOP data analytics firm Data Trust, according to Techcrunch.

If you’ve managed to make it this far in life without quite figuring out what demographic boxes to tick on the Census form, a recent working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research might have some clues for you. According to the Washington Post, University of Chicago economists Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica “taught machines to guess a person’s income, political ideology, race, education, and gender based on either their media habits, their consumer behavior, their social and political beliefs, and even how they spent their time.” The results are, at times, surprisingly granular and seemingly nonsensical: Owning...

Top campaign leader offers them data-mining tips What can Indian Information Service (IIS) officers, at the vanguard of government communication, gain from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in what is a crucial election year ahead? Plenty, if you go by the fact that the IIS Association invited Avinash Iragavarappu, the executive director of Mr. Trump’s campaign in Arizona, to do a presentation on how to mine big data for tailored communications. Speaking to The Hindu, Mr. Iragavarappu, an IIM-Lucknow alumni who worked with the YSR Congress Party campaign in 2014, said the association had asked him to do a presentation on...

SACRAMENTO - DNA is back in the spotlight, cracking cold cases. But questions are being raised after the state spent decades collecting the DNA of infants without parents realizing it. California has been collecting newborn blood samples since 1983. Many parents were shocked to hear their children’s blood is being stored in a state database, and possibly even sold to outside researchers. Pricking the toes newborns, to test their blood for certain disorders. The remaining blood becomes “property of the state,” and could be shared with outside researchers. “I feel like that’s something that should have been discussed with us,...

While congresscritters expressed outrage at Facebook’s intrusive data grabs during Capitol Hill hearings with Mark Zuckerberg this week, not a peep was heard about the Silicon Valley–Beltway theft ring purloining the personal information and browsing habits of millions of American schoolchildren. It doesn’t take undercover investigative journalists to unmask the massive privacy invasion enabled by educational technology and federal mandates. The kiddie data heist is happening out in the open — with Washington politicians and bureaucrats as brazen co-conspirators. ... Under the guise of customizable assessments, public and private preschools in Colorado experimented with toddlers whose student activities and social/emotional...

This concentration of power as a means to absolute power is the threat that warrants continued identification, exposure and accountability Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. —Albert Einstein Some may say we don’t have a right to privacy as we consume and use social media applications and platforms. Some, like Apple, will say the right to privacy is an inherent right. Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, left Facebook over data collection. According to reports, Wozniak is one of up to 50 million Facebook users who have deleted their accounts in protest. Data sharing and...