scandals – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Wyden: Data Broker Used Abortion Clinic Visitor Location Data To Help Send Targeted Misinformation To Vulnerable Women

from the the-warning-siren-can't-get-any-louder dept

Every few weeks for the last 20 years there’s been a massive scandal involving some company, telecom, data broker, or app maker over-collecting your detailed personal location data, failing to secure it, then selling access to that information to any nitwit with a nickel. And despite the added risks this creates in the post-Roe authoritarian era, Congress refuses to pass a real privacy law or rein in reckless data brokers.

The latest case in point: Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the SEC and FTC this week urging them to investigate and punish a data broker that collected the sensitive location data of more than 600 visitors to abortion clinics. A Wyden staff investigation found the broker then turned around and sold that data to an anti-abortion group that used it to send “targeted misinformation” to vulnerable women:

“As a result of the Dobbs decision, which reversed Roe v. Wade and allowed states to criminalize abortion, privacy of location data has become increasingly important. Wyden began investigating a data broker named Near Intelligence in 2023, after the Wall Street Journal reported that an anti-abortion organization named The Veritas Society used cell phone location data shared with online advertising companies to target misinformation about reproductive health to people who visited Planned Parenthood locations in Wisconsin.”

The full letter has more detail.

Shortly after Roe fell, privacy activists and a handful of senators warned very clearly how our longstanding refusal to regulate data brokers would result in sensitive behavior and location data being weaponized by extremists, activists and state prosecutors seeking to punish women (and those that help them).

Reporters made it clear how it was easy and cheap to buy granular location data on abortion clinic visitors with little discernment as to who was buying the data and what was being done with it.

The congressional response was to do jack shit, outside of trying to distract everybody with some performative and myopic whining about TikTok.

Wyden is once again (justly) warning regulators and his colleagues in Congress that the hour is getting late when it comes to getting ahead of this obvious problem:

“If a data broker could track Americans’ cell phones to help extremists target misinformation to people at hundreds of Planned Parenthood locations across the United States, a right-wing prosecutor could use that same information to put women in jail,” Wyden said. “Federal watchdogs should hold the data broker accountable for abusing Americans’ private information. And Congress needs to step up as soon as possible to ensure extremist politicians can’t buy this kind of sensitive data without a warrant.”

We’ve long noted that the federal government refuses to regulate data brokers or pass a federal internet-era privacy law for two reasons. One: corrupt politicians clearly believe making gobs of money is more important than market health or public safety. Two: the federal government exploits this corrupt dysfunction to purchase this data and avoid having to get traditional warrants.

The FTC under Lina Khan has been doing some good work in cracking down on a handful of data brokers, but the agency lacks the staff or resources to truly tackle the problem at the scale it’s operating at. It’s essential for Congress to act by passing a privacy law and regulating data brokers, but corruption (fueled by lobbying by numerous industries with near-bottomless budgets) prevents it from happening.

Yet when the press covers this whole mess (the Politico story on Wyden’s letter is a perfect example) they neither ask nor answer why the federal government has spent the better part of two decades tripping over its own ass. There’s no mention of corruption, or the government being utterly incompetent when it comes to doing even the bare minimum. The problem simply exists, utterly free of causation.

So we’ve somehow normalized the dysfunction and entered this holding pattern waiting for a privacy scandal so grotesque and harmful (potentially even fatal) that a corrupt Congress is forced to finally shake off its apathy and pass meaningful reforms. I’m not excited to see what this disaster actually looks like.

Filed Under: abortion, abortion clinic, data brokers, ftc, location data, privacy, reproductive care, ron wyden, scandals, sec, security, surveillance
Companies: near intelligence, planned parenthood, the veritas society

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr Still Doesn’t Understand That Banning TikTok Doesn’t Fix The Actual Problem

from the can-we-ban-brendan-carr-instead dept

Wed, Nov 2nd 2022 05:53am - Karl Bode

We’ve noted repeatedly how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr doesn’t have the authority to regulate social media. And over in the sector he does actually regulate, telecom, Carr is routinely a no show. He’s been a consistent opponent of holding telecom monopolies like AT&T accountable for pretty much anything, and generally doesn’t believe government has any real role telling telecom monopolies what to do.

Those principles routinely get thrown out of the window when Carr discusses TikTok and social media. Carr’s face has been peppered across news outlets for much of the year calling for a ban of the popular social media app, and once again was rewarded with headlines via a new interview with Axios. Again, Carr calls for a complete and total ban of TikTok:

Carr highlighted concerns about U.S. data flowing back to China and the risk of a state actor using TikTok to covertly influence political processes in the United States. There simply isn’t “a world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it’s not finding its way back into the hands of the [Chinese Communist Party],” Carr said.

Here’s the thing: Carr has actively opposed any and all efforts to create any meaningful privacy safeguards over the telecom, adtech, or app sectors. As a result, you could ban TikTok immediately with a giant, patriotic hammer, and the Chinese government could simply buy comparable data from a rotating array of equally dodgy adtech middlemen with zero ethical restraint and little to no oversight.

The sector Carr actually regulates, telecom, has been plagued with a parade of location data scandals showcasing how cellular carriers have repeatedly failed to protect user location data, often to devastating effect. Carr’s been largely a no show on the subject, despite its increased life and death relevance post Roe.

So again, the fixation on “banning TikTok” sounds great until you realize it’s mostly a distraction from our corruption-fueled failure on privacy legislation and consumer protection. Carr again is an absolute no show on this issue in the sector he actually regulates, and his belief (widely shared!) that banning TikTok actually fixes anything indicates he doesn’t understand how any of this works.

For literally twenty-five years we’ve ignored privacy advocates’ call for stricter consumer data safeguards and increased penalties for companies that repeatedly fail to secure data. At almost every turn we prioritized profit over security and privacy. Even when the check came due and we were bombarded with a steady parade of hacks, breaches, and various privacy scandals our solutions were largely performative.

Like most of Trumpland, Carr opposes meaningful privacy laws. Carr also opposes ensuring that privacy regulators at the FTC have the staff and resources to actually do their jobs. The entire policy approach by folks like Carr has been to generally let the biggest corporations do whatever they want, especially when it comes to the over-collection and monetization of user location, browsing, and other data.

Of course, the same broken-ass system routinely exploited by corporations was also going to be exploited by authoritarian governments. Actual privacy proponents made this point for decades.

Now, many of the same folks who helped build this greed-based, zero-accountability paradigm from the ground up want you to believe banning TikTok somehow fixes everything. But the endless hyperventilation about TikTok specifically (which is fueled in no small part by covert Facebook lobbying and in some instances just ignorant bigotry) is a distraction from our corruption-fueled failures on privacy and consumer protection more generally.

If you’re a politician professing you’re serious about consumer privacy and security, support the passage of a meaningful privacy law for the internet era, or shut up and get out of the way.

Filed Under: adtech, brendan carr, hacking, privacy, propaganda, scandals, social media, surveillance
Companies: tiktok

Facebook's Latest Scandals: The Banality Of Hubris; The Messiness Of Humanity

from the it's-not-evil,-it's-not-incompetent dept

Over the last few weeks, the WSJ has run a series of posts generally called “The Facebook Files,” which have exposed a variety of internal documents from Facebook that are somewhat embarrassing. I do think some of the reporting is overblown — and, in rather typical fashion regarding the big news publications and their reporting on Facebook, presents everything in the worst possible light. For example, the report on how internal research showed that Instagram made teen girls feel bad about themselves downplays that the data actually shows a significantly higher percentage of teens indicated that Instagram made them feel better:

But, of course, the WSJ’s headline presents it very differently:

None of this is to say that this is okay, or that Facebook shouldn’t be trying to figure out ways to minimize people using the sites being made to feel worse about themselves. But the reporting decisions here do raise some questions.

Another one of the articles highlights how Facebook has different rules for different users with regards to content moderation. And, again, on a first pass this sounds really damning:

The program, known as ?cross check? or ?XCheck,? was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company?s normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are ?whitelisted??rendered immune from enforcement actions?while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.

The report notes that nearly 6 million people are on that list (including, somewhat ironically, some high profile conservatives who have whined about how the site’s policies are biased against them). There’s simply no way this looks good — as insiders at Facebook readily admitted in internal documents. But, rather than being particularly nefarious, there are some pretty understandable reasons why this might have come about. As early Facebook content policy guy, Dave Willner, explained on Twitter, such systems are pretty common and “they get proposed spontaneously as a way of controlling the chaos that occurs when moderation affects high-profile or influential accounts.”

Another way to think about this is that — as I’ve said often — one of the trickiest parts of content moderation is understanding the wider context of any individual piece of content. This is way more difficult than most people realize. But context actually matters and looking at an individual piece of content outside of the context in which it was created gives you a misleading picture of the intent and impact of that content. And the idea of a sort of “be more careful with these accounts” list is a very inexact, and very messy, but is also a very quick and easy way of adding a contextual layer. It is basically initiated as a tool to say “hey, be careful with these accounts, because making a mistake with them has extra consequences.” But, over time, because of human nature, it evolves into “these accounts are protected.”

This isn’t a defense of the list. As Robyn Caplan and Tarleton Gillespie rightly note in the Washington Post, no matter what the reasons for the list, any sort of setup that is (1) not transparent, and (2) seen to lead to unequal treatment very naturally breeds suspicion and distrust.

In the days since the Facebook Files came out I’ve been having a few conversations with people about the write-ups and what it all means. There is general agreement that none of this makes Facebook look good. And it shouldn’t. There’s really nothing in all of this that’s good for Facebook. A few of the discussions, though, jumped to the argument that Facebook’s executive team is “evil.” A lesser version of this is that they’re totally incompetent. I don’t think either is quite true. Thinking it through, I think Facebook’s executive team (1) is in deeper than they realize, and (2) falsely thinks it has a better handle on things than it really does.

This is an issue that is all too common, especially in the internet world, where there’s a kind of myth around “visionary” founders. And that’s certainly been applied to pretty much every successful internet founder. Indeed, recent research throws some cold water on the idea of brilliant founders leading to big breakthroughs, and suggests more that successful companies are about being in the right place at the right time with minimally competent leaders to keep everything from going off the rails.

This is (quite obviously) from the outside looking in, but my impression of much of Facebook leadership is that they’ve bought a bit too much into the myth of their own brilliance, and their own ability to work their way through challenges — at the size and scale of an operation that isn’t just providing a service to basically a third of the globe, but which is also seeking to get those people to interact with one another. Nearly all of human history is about our general failures to get along with one another, and many of the problems facing Facebook are also of that very nature.

There is something of an open question about which of these problems are merely revealed or exposed due to Facebook, which are exacerbated by Facebook, and which are actually decreased by Facebook. It seems likely that all three of these forces are at play, and there is no one who has a full grasp on how to deal with the problems that are a part of human nature — or how to try to minimize humanity’s worst impulses across the globe. I don’t think Facebook has the answers, but sometimes I fear that some of the leaders at the company think that they do — or that they can outthink the world in how they approach these problems.

The issues, which become clear in all of this reporting, are not of a company that is nefariously run by evil geniuses toying with people’s minds (as some would have you believe). Nor is it incompetent buffoons careening human society into a ditch under a billboard screaming “MOAR ENGAGEMENT! MOAR CLICKS!” It seems pretty clear that they are decently smart, and decently competent people… who have ended up in an impossible situation and don’t recognize that they can’t solve it all alone.

Over and over again, this recognition seems to explain actions that might otherwise be incomprehensible. So many of the damning reports from the Facebook files could be evidence of evilness or incompetence — or they could be evidence of a group of executives who are in way too deep, but believe that they really have a handle on things that they not only don’t, but simply can’t due to the nature of humanity itself.

Facebook and Instagram were never going to cure depression, or keep teen girls from feeling bad about themselves. And, hell, to give the company a tiny bit of credit (don’t worry, I’ll take it away in a moment), the very fact that they did this research in the first place and realized how shitty some people feel on the site is a step that many, many companies never take. On the flip side, how they actually handled this is a part of the problem. As Will Oremus points out at the Washington Post, the real issue here is in the burying of the findings, not necessarily in the findings themselves.

And, again viewed through the prism of a hubristic “we can fix this, because we’re brilliant!” mentality, you can see how that happens. There’s a correct realization that this report will look bad — so it can’t be talked about publicly, because Facebook seems to have an inferiority complex about ever looking bad. But the general belief seems to be that if they just keep working on it, and just make the latest change to the UI or the algorithm, maybe, just maybe, they can “show” that they’ve somehow improved humanity. It’s a belief in themselves and their ability that simply isn’t realistic. But it does explain how the company handles nearly all of these scandals.

One thing I’ve grown to appreciate as I’ve gotten older is how much more complex the world is than it seems at times. More and more often, I’ve realized how the complex interplay of different variables means that nobody understands anything perfectly. There’s always another variable (or several) missing. I’m realizing that I am (increasingly) valuing input from a larger and more diverse set of sounding boards that can point out the giant thing that I’m missing in trying to understand complex topics. But it also makes me that much more skeptical of those who act as though they have figured it all out.

I don’t think the Facebook Files show a company that is evil or incompetent. It seems to show a company that is in way too deep, but still thinks it can totally get things back under control.

Filed Under: depression, evil, humanity, incompetence, mark zuckerberg, scandals, social media, social problems
Companies: facebook

DailyDirt: Problems With Peer Reviewed Publications

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Peer review isn’t exactly a sexy topic, but it’s an essential part of academic publishing — and it may need to change a bit to keep up with the times. Peer review is typically a thankless chore that is distributed among academics working in a network of related fields, and sometimes personal politics can enter into the process if the subject matter is obscure enough. Misconduct in peer review doesn’t usually get the same kind of coverage as various journalistic scandals (eg. Rolling Stone, Buzzfeed, etc), but the damages done can be even more significant to society.

After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: academia, journals, media, natural language processing, peer review, publications, retractions, rubriq, scandals

There Is No Way That Hillary Clinton Didn't Know She Was Supposed To Use A Government Email Account

from the this-makes-no-sense dept

As you may have heard, the latest political “scandal” involving a major Presidential contender comes via the NY Times reporting that when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she refused to have a government email address, and conducted all her work via a personal email account.

Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials? correspondence be retained as part of the agency?s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

This is dumb on many, many levels and there appears to be no excuse for it happening. First off, using a personal email as Secretary of State seems like a massive privacy and security risk. While one hopes that there was at least some attempt to better secure her personal account by government security experts, it’s still almost certainly less secure. Given how much sensitive information the Secretary of State has to deal with, it seems inexcusable that she was allowed to conduct official business via her personal account. That to me seems like an even bigger deal than the part that everyone else is focused on: the failure to preserve her emails as required by law.

Of course, the failure to preserve the emails is a big deal as well. But here’s the really stunning thing: there is simply no way that Clinton and others in the administration didn’t know that she was supposed to be using a government email address and preserving those emails. That’s because both the previous administration and others in her own administration got in trouble for using personal email addresses. As Vox notes, towards the end of the Bush administration there was a similar scandal involving a variety of high level administration members using personal email to conduct government business and to avoid transparency requirements.

That scandal unfolded well into the final year of Bush’s presidency, then overlapped with another email secrecy scandal, over official emails that got improperly logged and then deleted, which itself dragged well into Obama’s first year in office. There is simply no way that, when Clinton decided to use her personal email address as Secretary of State, she was unaware of the national scandal that Bush officials had created by doing the same.

That she decided to use her personal address anyway showed a stunning disregard for governmental transparency requirements. Indeed, Clinton did not even bother with the empty gesture of using her official address for more formal business, as Bush officials did.

But that’s not all. What the Vox report doesn’t note is that the scandal actually carried over to the Obama administration also, as the White House’s first Deputy CTO was reprimanded for using his personal email address as well, early in 2010. So there was both a scandal about the similar use of private email accounts in the previous administration and in the Obama administration. It’s impossible to believe that Clinton or the other key people who worked for her in the State Department were unaware of one or both of these issues while she was using her personal email address.

While the White House’s email system may be clunky and annoying to use (as I’ve heard repeatedly), there’s simply no excuse for Clinton not to have used it at all — and for the emails she did send not to be preserved as required under the law. A few years ago, we mocked Homeland Security boss Janet Napolitano for refusing to use email entirely — though at least she was upfront about the reason. She didn’t want to be held accountable for what she said — though, the reality was she would still have staff members send emails for her. Clinton appears to have wanted to be free of that accountability as well, but to still have the benefits of direct electronic communication herself. In short, she purposely ignored the law for her own benefit.

Filed Under: email, hillary clinton, personal email accounts, public records, scandals, transparency

WIPO Boss Accused Of Surreptitiously Collecting DNA Samples From WIPO Employees

from the paranoid-much? dept

Francis Gurry, the head of the World Intellectual Property Organization, seems to be running from scandal to scandal these days. While it has shown brief moments of enlightenment, for the most part, WIPO tends to be an organization very supportive of the copyright and patent maximalist agenda. Last year, we wrote about two incredible scandals that directly involved Gurry. Despite WIPO being a part of the UN, Gurry apparently defied UN sanctions against both North Korea and Iran to give them computers, in the wacky belief that those countries would use the computers to bolster their local patent system. Gurry, apparently blind to the fact that North Korea, especially, was desperately seeking computing power for its nuclear program and had very little concern or need for a patent program, seemed to think that this was a good idea, and even defended the decision, though he agreed to kill the program.

The latest, however, involves a few more crazy scandals, including accused attempts to sneakily set up WIPO offices in both Russia and China and (even more bizarre) trying to surreptitiously collect DNA samples on employees he was convinced were sending anonymous letters. First, the DNA situation:

Among them, an embarrassing case involving DNA sampling. Prior to his election, Francis Gurry had been the target of anonymous letters. Convinced that the letters’ authors were among those within his entourage, the successor of Kamil Idris filed a complaint with the prosecutor in Geneva in October 2007 and surprisingly authorized the police to enter WIPO’s premises to take statements and DNA samples. But the suspected employees later discovered that additional samples had been taken from their offices without their consent and thus illegally. On November 13, an ex-employee – who was made redundant after a corruption allegation of which he has since been cleared – filed a criminal complaint for “slander” with the prosecutor of Geneva. His lawyer sent a letter to the representatives of the Member States informing them that this procedure would require them to vote to lift Francis Gurry’s diplomatic immunity.

Given all of this, many are questioning why Gurry should be allowed to stay in charge of WIPO. A bunch of Congressional Representatives had raised some concerns about Gurry about a month ago, but with this latest story, they’ve sent another letter to Secretary of State John Kerry expressing their serious concerns about allowing Gurry to continue to lead WIPO:

As you may recall, concerns were expressed following reports that Mr. Gurry was running a secret program to ship high-end computers and other electronic gear to North Korea and Iran. When called to account, he claimed that U.S. law did not constrain him, and he refused to cooperate with an investigation by the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Since the time of that letter, the situation at WIPO has substantially deteriorated. As you know, the recent annual meeting of Member States collapsed due to the revelation of secret agreements made by Gurry to open satellite WIPO offices in China and Russia — we understand that he even proposed opening an office in Tehran.

But even more disturbing, we understand Gurry is involved in a scheme to illegally acquire DNA samples of WIPO employees in a failed effort to develop evidence to support a personal complaint that he had filed with the Swiss authorities. There is also concern that he has been working since to suppress this information and to prevent any independent investigation of it.

Yikes. It would seem that WIPO is quite a disaster currently. That’s not to say that a new leader would necessarily be any better, but it would appear that the series of scandals around Gurry, many of which include incredibly serious charges, raises all sorts of questions about WIPO under his leadership.

Filed Under: francis gurry, scandals, un, wipo

Not Your Every Day Tech Exec Scandal

from the um.-wow. dept

While the good folks over at Valleywag might have you believe otherwise, most tech execs lead rather boring lives. There aren’t that many “scandals” that happen around these parts — and the ones that do happen, tend to be rather mundane. Some stock option backdating and maybe a bit of lying on the old resume, seem to be about as scandalous as it normally gets. But Henry Nicholas of Broadcom apparently decided to go with the more made-for-Hollywood sort of scandal. There is the option backdating issue here, but that’s nothing compared to the fact that he’s now been indicted for also keeping a warehouse full of drugs which he used for things like putting ecstasy in other tech execs’ and customers’ drinks, as well as supplying speed, cocaine and pot to tech execs. And then there were the prostitutes. Oh yeah, and the sex lair that leaked to the press last year. There’s definitely a movie coming out of all of this one day. In the meantime, though, I think I prefer the Silicon Valley with more mundane executive scandals.

Filed Under: backdating, drugs, ecstasy, henry nicholas, prostitution, scandals, spiked drinks
Companies: broadcom