Drone goes BRRR. Privacy you can hear. | The Cat Herder, Volume 3, Issue 37
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Brainwave monitoring, the giant brains at Facebook, people versus technology, Jack Russells versus technology.
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The slim chance that buccaneering Brexit Britain would secure an adequacy decision is growing slimmer as the deadline approaches. Things like this don’t help.
Exclusive: proposed rewriting of data protection rules said to put vital cooperation in doubt
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No, this pseudoscience just doesn’t work.
Critics doubt that Emotiv’s earphone-style sensors can reliably track things like stress and attention—and some worry the technology will become yet another form of workplace surveillance.
In a totally unsurprising turn of events, Nicole Kobie explains how ‘The NHS Test and Trace app has two flaws: QR codes and people’ for Wired. People have a long history of not using technology in the way its creators intended, or indeed not using it at all.
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In Australia the government has come over all coy about the numbers of people still using their app.
Digital transformation agency says disclosing information would ‘adversely affect’ commonwealth-state relations
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In Singapore the government has moved on from solely tracking via phone.
Thousands of devices are being distributed to vulnerable groups such as the elderly.
Ring announced the Always Home Cam during Amazon’s annual product event, a new home security camera that can autonomously fly around your home to get different viewpoints when you’re not home. It will be available starting in 2021 for $249.99.
Faine Greenwood has some thoughts on this latest offering from Amazon.
‘The Ring Always Home Drone: A Ridiculous Way For Amazon to Map Your House’
Facebook (market cap $725 billion; staff circa 50,000) said it might have to abandon its operations in Europe entirely if the mean ol’ DPC (annual budget €16.9 million; staff 140) continued to bully it by asking it to abide by the law.
Then Nick Clegg said this wasn’t true at all. Rather undermining the credibility of his legal team’s affidavit. Which was attached to Facebook’s application for a judicial review of a decision which hasn’t been taken yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The reason this will never happen here is also contained in the affidavit (direct link to PDF) at paragraph 84. “the Applicant’s Facebook service alone has approximately 410 million monthly active users in Europe”.
Facebook has acquired, profiled and segmented this enormous user base through network effects, acquisitions, light skullduggery and various other means. Facebook is in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers. “Senator, we run ads.” Facebook has never shown any propensity for walking away from bundles of money.
This week the Department of Education and Skills changed its mind about only giving students access to their class rank order via an Article 15 subject access request. It is unclear whether this abrupt about turn was prompted by the realisation that it would require a significant amount of effort on the department’s part to respond to all the access requests. From tomorrow students will be able to access this information through the department’s Leaving Cert 2020 portal.
Whatever the reason behind the decision, it is a net positive that a public body has realised and publicly affirmed that it has data protection obligations and that data subjects have extensive rights (“Minister for Education Norma Foley said there had been an agreed process and students were entitled to their personal data.”)
The Finnish DPA fined a company €7,000 for carrying out electronic direct marketing without consent and for failing to respond to subject access requests.
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The Garante fined a school €2,000 for uploading a list of students’ personal data onto its website.
- “But there is also a menacing tone in part of Cunnane’s submission. “I say,” she declares, “that the fact that one person is responsible for the entire process is also relevant to the Applicant’s [Facebook’s] concerns, in respect of the inadequacy of the investigative process engaged in and/or independence of the ultimate decision-making process.” This is a legalistic shot directly aimed at the Irish DPC, Helen Dixon, and you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to understand what is being implied here.” John Naughton on Facebook’s tactics in ‘Can democracies stand up to Facebook? Ireland may have the answer’.
- “But today’s rhetoric of disruption frequently applies to things other than companies. This is why people such as Peter Thiel are so intent on claiming that higher education, say, or healthcare as a whole, or government, are oligopolies or even monopolies.” Adrian Daub on ‘The disruption con: why big tech’s favourite buzzword is nonsense’. This piece ran on the same day Leo Varadkar “launched a call for Irish businesses to apply to a €500 million State-backed fund for “disruptive” technologies”. Maybe a prudent government should be considering investing in less disruptive technologies given the amount of destruction in the name of disruption we’ve seen over the last decade.
- “Various European countries have launched a contact tracing app to help in the fight against COVID-19. Some of these apps were initiated by the government and other apps were initiated by private actors and thereafter endorsed by the government. I am doing comparative legal research into these contact tracing apps. I am interested in knowing if these contact tracing apps are based solely on existing legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or if they are accompanied by new legislation.” Sarah Eskens has compiled a comprehensive overview of the lawful bases being used to operate contact tracing apps across the EU.
- “An array of free website-building tools, many offered by ad-tech and ad-funded companies, has led to a dizzying number of trackers loading on users’ browsers, even when they visit sites where privacy would seem paramount, an investigation by The Markup has found. Some load without the website operators’ explicit knowledge—or disclosure to users. Website operators may agree to set cookies—small strings of text that identify you—from one outside company. But they are not always aware that the code setting those cookies can also load dozens of other trackers along with them, like nesting dolls, each collecting user data.” From ‘The High Privacy Cost of a “Free” Website’ by Aaron Sankin and Surya Mattu for The Markup.
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Endnotes & Credits
- The elegant Latin bon mot “Futuendi Gratia” is courtesy of Effin’ Birds.
- As always, a huge thank you to Regina Doherty for giving the world the phrase “mandatory but not compulsory”.
- The image used in the header is by Krystian Tambur on Unsplash.
- Any quotes from the Oireachtas we use are sourced from KildareStreet.com. They’re good people providing a great service. If you can afford to then donate to keep the site running.
- Digital Rights Ireland have a storied history of successfully fighting for individuals’ data privacy rights. You should support them if you can.
Find us on the web at myprivacykit.com and on Twitter at @PrivacyKit. Of course we’re not on Facebook or LinkedIn.
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