Alexandra S. Levine , Forbes; Suicide Hotline Left Ethics Board Out Of The Loop About Data-Sharing With For-Profit Spinoff
"“Data-sharing with a for-profit company? That's bad... and you can't get consent from people for that in the moment when they're signing up with [a] crisis,” Ranney says. “This would never have passed a sniff test.”"
Jennifer King, The Washington Post,; Opinion: After a rape survivor’s arrest, it’s time to rethink genetic databases
"Jennifer King is a privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence...
This episode offers a glimpse of the concerns over privacy — as well as matters such as consent to data collection — that will arise as genetic information is stored in ever-greater amounts, and as governments take an ever-greater interest in exploiting it."
MICHAEL LEVITT, NPR; AirTags are being used to track people and cars. Here's what is being done about it
""As technology becomes more sophisticated and advanced, as wonderful as that is for society, unfortunately, it also becomes much easier to misuse and abuse," she told NPR. "I wouldn't say that we've necessarily seen an uptick with the use of AirTags any more or less than any cutting edge technology."
Williams said that what was rare was a technology company taking the issue seriously and moving to address it.
"[Apple is] not only listening to the field, but actively reaching out at times to do safety checks. That in and of itself might sound like a very small step, but it's rare," she said.
Still, Galperin thinks that Apple should have done more to protect people ahead of time.
"The mitigations that Apple had in place at the time that the AirTag came out were woefully insufficient," Galperin said.
"I think that Apple has been very careful and responsive after putting the product out and introducing new mitigations. But the fact that they chose to bring the product to market in the state that it was in last year, is shameful.""
Jessica Bursztynsky , CNBC; Google plans privacy change similar to Apple’s, which wiped $230 billion off Facebook’s market cap
"Google on Wednesday announced it’s adopting new privacy restrictions that will cut tracking across apps on its Android devices, following a similar move made by Apple last year that upended several firms’ advertising practices."
, The Conversation ; Your sense of privacy evolved over millennia – that puts you at risk today but could improve technology tomorrow
"Many people think of privacy as a modern invention, an anomaly made possible by the rise of urbanization. If that were the case, then acquiescing to the current erosion of privacy might not be particularly alarming.
As calls for Congress to protect privacy increase, it’s important to understand its nature. In a policy brief in Science, we and our colleague Jeff Hancock suggest that understanding the nature of privacy calls for a better understanding of its origins.
Research evidence refutes the notion that privacy is a recent invention. While privacy rights or values may be modern notions, examples of privacy norms and privacy-seeking behaviors abound across cultures throughout human history and across geography.
As privacy researchers who study information systems and behavioral research and public policy, we believe that accounting for the potential evolutionary roots of privacy concerns can help explain why people struggle with privacy today. It may also help inform the development of technologies and policies that can better align the digital world with the human sense of privacy.
Humans have sought and attempted to manage privacy since the dawn of civilization. People from ancient Greece to ancient China were concerned with the boundaries of public and private life. The male head of the household, or pater familias, in ancient Roman families would have his slaves move their cots to some remote corner of the house when he wanted to spend the evening alone.
Attention to privacy is also found in preindustrial societies. For example, the Mehinacu tribe in South America lived in communal accommodations but built private houses miles away for members to achieve some seclusion.
Evidence of a drive toward privacy can even be found in the holy texts of ancient monotheistic religions: the Quran’s instructions against spying on one another, the Talmud’s advice not to place windows overlooking neighbors’ windows, and the biblical story of Adam and Eve covering their nakedness after eating the forbidden fruit.
The drive for privacy appears to be simultaneously culturally specific and culturally universal. Norms and behaviors change across peoples and times, but all cultures seem to manifest a drive for it. Scholars in the past century who studied the history of privacy provide an explanation for this: Privacy concerns may have evolutionary roots."
Editorial Board, The Washington Post; Opinion: A lawsuit against Google points out a much bigger privacy problem
"The phenomenon the recent suits describe, after all, is not particular to Google but rather endemic to almost the entirety of the Web: Companies get to set all the rules, as long as they run those rules by consumers in convoluted terms of service that even those capable of decoding the legalistic language rarely bother to read. Other mechanisms for notice and consent, such as opt-outs and opt-ins, create similar problems. Control for the consumer is mostly an illusion. The federal privacy law the country has sorely needed for decades would replace this old regime with meaningful limitations on what data companies can collect and in what contexts, so that the burden would be on them not to violate the reasonable expectations of their users, rather than placing the burden on the users to spell out what information they will and will not allow the tech firms to have.
The question shouldn’t be whether companies gather unnecessary amounts of sensitive information about their users sneakily — it should be whether companies amass these troves at all. Until Congress ensures that’s true for the whole country, Americans will be clicking through policies and prompts that do little to protect them."
"The use of artificial intelligence in HR processes is a new, and likely unstoppable, trend. In recruitment, up to 86% of employers use job interviews mediated by technology, a growing portion of which are automated video interviews (AVIs).
AVIs involve job candidates being interviewed by an artificial intelligence, which requires them to record themselves on an interview platform, answering questions under time pressure. The video is then submitted through the AI developer platform, which processes the data of the candidate — this can be visual (e.g. smiles), verbal (e.g. key words used), and/or vocal (e.g. the tone of voice). In some cases, the platform then passes a report with an interpretation of the job candidate’s performance to the employer.
The technologies used for these videos present issues in reliably capturing a candidate’s characteristics. There is also strong evidence that these technologies can contain bias that can exclude some categories of job-seekers. The Berkeley Haas Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership reports that 44% of AI systems are embedded with gender bias, with about 26% displaying both gender and race bias. For example, facial recognition algorithms have a 35% higher detection error for recognizing the gender of women of color, compared to men with lighter skin.
But as developers work to remove biases and increase reliability, we still know very little on how AVIs (or other types of interviews involving artificial intelligence) are experienced by different categories of job candidates themselves, and how these experiences affect them, this is where our research focused. Without this knowledge, employers and managers can’t fully understand the impact these technologies are having on their talent pool or on different group of workers (e.g., age, ethnicity, and social background). As a result, organizations are ill-equipped to discern whether the platforms they turn to are truly helping them hire candidates that align with their goals. We seek to explore whether employers are alienating promising candidates — and potentially entire categories of job seekers by default — because of varying experiences of the technology."
Drew Harwell, The Washington Post; IRS plan to scan your face prompts anger in Congress, confusion among taxpayers
"The $86 million ID.me contract with the IRS also has alarmed researchers and privacy advocates who say they worry about how Americans’ facial images and personal data will be safeguarded in the years to come. There is no federal law regulating how the data can be used or shared. While the IRS couldn’t say what percentage of taxpayers use the agency’s website, internal data show it is one of the federal government’s most-viewed websites, with more than 1.9 billion visits last year."
, Israel Defense; Ethical aspects relating to cyberspace: copyright and privacy
"A further right - the right to privacy - is one of the most fundamental rights: it reflects the natural human need for privacy, confidentiality and autonomy, as well as for the protection of one's own “personal sphere” from outside intrusion, and the ability to make decisions without being spied on and to remain oneself and maintain one’s own individuality.
It is no coincidence that in all international documents declaring human rights and freedoms, as well as in all codes of ethics related to the sphere of information, privacy is proclaimed as a fundamental moral value, which constitutes the foundation of human freedom and security, and therefore requires respect and protection."
PAMELA WOOD, The Baltimore Sun; Maryland lawmaker-doctor won’t face ethics violation for tuning into legislative meetings from the operating room
"Hill had initially defended her decision to join video meetings while at work as a doctor, saying her patients knew about it and she wasn’t putting them in any danger.
A Board of Physicians investigation found that one patient did not know Hill tuned into a legislative meeting, while the other patient was told about 10 minutes before surgery, but no consent paperwork was on file. Both legislative meetings where she appeared on camera from the operating room were streamed on the General Assembly’s website and YouTube channels."
Evgeny Morozov, The Guardian; Privacy activists are winning fights with tech giants. Why does victory feel hollow?
"Something similar is likely to happen in other domains marked by recent moral panics over digital technologies. The tech industry will address mounting public anxieties over fake news and digital addiction by doubling down on what I call “solutionism”, with digital platforms mobilizing new technologies to offer their users a bespoke, secure and completely controllable experience...
What we want is something genuinely new: an institution that will know
what parts of existing laws and regulations to suspend – like the
library does with intellectual property law, for example – in order to
fully leverage the potential inherent in digital technologies in the
name of great public good."
, The New York Times; Balancing Privacy With Data Sharing for the Public Good
"Governments and technology companies are increasingly collecting vast amounts of personal data, prompting new laws, myriad investigations and calls for stricter regulation to protect individual privacy.
Yet despite these issues, economics tells us that society needs more data sharing rather than less, because the benefits of publicly available data often outweigh the costs. Public access to sensitive health records sped up the development of lifesaving medical treatments like the messenger-RNA coronavirus vaccinesproduced by Moderna and Pfizer. Better economic data could vastly improve policy responses to the next crisis."
Cat Zakrzewski The Washington Post ; Virginia governor signs nation’s second state consumer privacy bill
"Gov. Ralph Northam signed data privacy legislation into law on Tuesday, making Virginia the second state in the nation to adopt its own data protection rules.
The law, known as the Consumer Data Protection Act, had broad support from the tech industry, including Amazon, which is building an Arlington, Va., headquarters. The legislation will allow residents of the commonwealth to opt out of having their data collected and sold, similar to a California law that went into effect last year. Under the new law, Virginia residents can also see what data companies have collected about them, and correct or delete it. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The Virginia law is widely viewed as more industry friendly than the California provision, however, and privacy advocates have called for Virginia to adopt some of California’s provisions that make it easier for people to opt out of data collection from multiple companies. The Virginia law also does not allow individuals to bring lawsuits against tech companies for violations and will be enforced by the state’s attorney general, not a separate enforcement agency."
