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The Data Collector’s Holiday Gift Guide

The Data Collector’s Holiday Gift Guide

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Let’s face it: privacy is gone. Still, there are a few people out there in the wild who don’t use electronic payments, still shop at actual brick and mortars – where they may even pay in cash – and feel that they have no use for social media, with the possible exception of a Facebook profile, and only because they were missing too many of their friends’ and family’s social gatherings and announcements.

Since we’re nearly 20% of the way into the 21st Century, it may be time to change all of that and what better time than the holiday season?  So we’ve compiled a short list of gifts that you may want to consider giving those on your list who are still living in the past:

23 & me or some other DNA-tracking/sharing genetic testing service. Who knows? They may discover long-lost relatives. Or an ethnic background that they never knew they had. Or you may discover that your friend is a criminal and you’ve given the police the break they had been looking for, since there are no rules or oversight when it comes to law enforcement collecting that information. Win-win! Read More...

The Buck Stops Where?

The Buck Stops Where?

Tech has always been lax about security, while the average consumer has been socialized more or less to a plug and play environment. Plug in the (non-IoT) iron, plug in the (non-IoT) fridge – they work. If there’s a problem, and the warranty is still in effect, the manufacturer or retailer steps in. The problem is generally resolved.

Just his week, a indignant father reported that the voice from our Nest camera threatened to steal our baby. Worse, he Googled ‘Nest + camera + hacked’ and found out that this happens frequently. As the Mercury News reported, “Nest, which was designed to keep intruders out of people’s homes, effectively allowed hackers to get in.” Read More...

Surveillance Capitalism: We Are Definitely the Product

Surveillance Capitalism: We Are Definitely the Product

The tech cartel has been labeled many things. “Attention Merchants” being one of them. In her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff has designated a new category for them: Surveillance Capitalists. “Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data.

The Business of the Internet

“When the security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “surveillance is the business model of the internet,” The Guardian reports, “he was really only hinting at the reality that Zuboff has now illuminated. The combination of state surveillance and its capitalist counterpart means that digital technology is separating the citizens in all societies into two groups: the watchers (invisible, unknown and unaccountable) and the watched. This has profound consequences for democracy because asymmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power. But whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its privatised counterpart. This is intolerable.” Read More...