Kashmir Hill
An Internet Veteran’s Guide to Not Being Scared of Technology
How can we protect ourselves from A.I.? That was the question that Mike Masnick found himself fielding this summer in a WhatsApp chat with about 100 directors, actors and screenwriters. The group, including marquee talent, was worried about a grim possible future in which deepfake versions of actors perform screenplays written by ChatGPT.
Cops are raiding the homes of innocent people based only on IP addresses
Internet Protocol (IP) addresses can be incredibly useful for a police investigation, but they can also lead cops astray.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants police officers and judges to be more careful in how they use IP addresses, thinking of them as helpful clues rather than a smoking gun. “Police too often take IP address information to mean that a person associated with an address is the party who committed a crime,” write EFF lawyer Aaron Mackey, technologist Seth Schoen, and Executive Director Cindy Cohn in a white paper aimed at courts and cops. “For many reasons, connecting an individual to a crime linked to an IP address, without any additional investigation, is irresponsible and threatens the civil liberties of innocent people.”
Facebook Added 'Research' To User Agreement 4 Months After Emotion Manipulation Study
[Commentary] Four months after the Facebook emotion study happened, in May 2012, Facebook made changes to its data use policy, and that’s when it introduced this line about how it might use your information:
“For internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.” Facebook helpfully posted a “red-line” version of the new policy, contrasting it with the prior version from September 2011 -- which did not mention anything about user information being used in “research.”
Defenders of the Facebook study including my colleague Jeff Bercovici say that everyone on the Internet is doing A/B testing -- showing users two versions of something to see which resonates more based on how they click, share, and respond.
But the Facebook study with its intention to manipulate the Facebook environment for unknowing users to see whether it made them feel elated or depressed seems different to me than the normal “will this make someone more likely to buy this thing” kind of testing.
“They actually did a test to see whether it would have a deleterious effect on their users,” says Pam Dixon of the World Privacy Forum. “This isn’t A/B testing. They didn’t just want to change users’ behaviors, they wanted to change their moods.”