Category: Privacy, Surveillance, & Security

Source: We Need More Alternatives to Facebook – MIT Technology Review, by Brian Bergstein

Chastened by the negative effects of social media, Mark Zuckerberg says he will tweak his service and upgrade society in the process. Should any company be that powerful?

As the head of the Federal Communications Commission observed in a 1961 speech to broadcast executives, … The problem, the FCC chairman told the group, was the way the business was making money: … Newton Minow … called it “a vast wasteland.”
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As for why it mattered, Minow told the TV executives:

Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership.

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how to make a mass communication medium better for us? In 1961, Minow had a clear answer: “I believe that most of television’s problems stem from lack of competition.”

the problem is not that we need a slightly better Facebook. … What we need is to spend less time on Facebook.

Ideally, people would be able to form robust online communities and engage in the public square without letting any single company build a comprehensive dossier on them.

Source: You Cannot Encrypt Your Face – The Atlantic by Alvaro M. Bedoya

We have grown accustomed to the monitoring of our technology and communications. There is something different, something intractable and ominous, about the tracking of our bodies.

From the Boston Tea Party to the printing of Common Sense, the ability to dissent—and to do it anonymously—was central to the founding of the United States. … Our history is replete with moments when it was a “crime” to do the right thing, and legal to inflict injustice.

The latest crime-fighting tools, however, may eliminate people’s ability to be anonymous. … Face recognition is not just about finding terrorists. It’s about finding citizens. … As law enforcement develops increasingly powerful surveillance tools, we need to ask ourselves: Are we building a world where no dissent is anonymous?

Democracy may be impossible in a world where no dissent is anonymous.

Until recently, voice cloning—or voice banking, as it was then known—was a bespoke industry which served those at risk of losing the power of speech to cancer or surgery. Creating a synthetic copy of a voice was a lengthy and pricey process. … Not any more.

any voice—including that of a stranger—can be cloned if decent recordings are available on YouTube or elsewhere. Researchers at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, led by Nitesh Saxena, were able to use Festvox to clone voices based on only five minutes of speech retrieved online. When tested against voice-biometrics software like that used by many banks to block unauthorised access to accounts, more than 80% of the fake voices tricked the computer.

The upshot, according to George Papcun, an expert witness paid to detect faked recordings produced as evidence in court, is the emergence of a technology with “enormous potential value for disinformation”.

it is easy to imagine the mayhem that might be created in a world which makes it easy to put authentic-sounding words into the mouths of adversaries—be they colleagues or heads of state.

Source: Cloning voices: Imitating people’s speech patterns precisely could bring trouble | The Economist

See Also: Demo – Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone

Is Facebook a structural threat to free society? I make the argument.

I don’t want to hammer the data point too much, but it is important to show just how much data Facebook has. If it interests you, privacy advocates have written thousands of words on the subject.

Remember that Facebook feeds are not chronological. Facebook decides what posts you see, and who sees your posts.

I’d like you to seriously consider the idea that Facebook has a greater ability to understand the human psyche than every psychologist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and behavioral economist in human history combined.

Facebook’s user manipulation, detailed above, is both ethically questionable and terrible PR. What if you could get the same results without actually testing on users?
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Facebook is openly and proudly building the capability to simulate the human psyche. When such capacity is sufficiently advanced, there will be no need to test on actual users. Those users can be used only to verify results from the simulation.

Facebook is the biggest personal data collector in history. It is openly working on simulating human beings for research. It has all the tools needed to manipulate people’s realities, emotions, thoughts, and political preferences. And it continues to build these capabilities, especially with virtual reality.

This alone is a risk center for our society. This centralization of private data, power, and influence is dangerous.

Facebook will be the most powerful tool for political power and manipulation in history. Someone, somehow, will take control of it. We are sleepwalking into allowing a gaping weakness to develop in our social and political structure.

Source: Is Facebook A Structural Threat To Free Society? – TruthHawk

On Sunday’s Face the Nation, Sen. Rand Paul … explained how the NSA routinely and deliberately spies on Americans’ communications — listens to their calls and reads their emails — without a judicial warrant of any kind

A key purpose of the new 2008 FISA law — which then-Senator Obama voted for during the 2008 general election after breaking his primary-race promise to filibuster it — was to legalize the once-controversial Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping program, which the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing in 2005.

Perhaps the growing recognition that nobody is immune from such abusive powers will finally reverse that tide.

If nothing else, this debate ought to finally obliterate that pleasing though utterly false myth that the U.S. government does not and cannot spy on Americans’ communications without warrants. It does so constantly, easily, deliberately, and by design.

Source: Rand Paul Is Right: NSA Routinely Monitors Americans’ Communications Without Warrants