Happy Saturday, everyone!
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Holy shit. Reported by Wonkette...
Marcie Jones / Wonkette: "It should also be noted, 404 Media reports that DHS has purchased two new apps, called Tangles and Webloc, that let them see the recent location data of any phone in a given area and cross-references it with commercial data sets. Now if they want to see, say, whose phone in any city was at a protest earlier that day, DHS can, with no warrant. Just a touch of a button, and they can access detailed data from ordinary cellphone apps, like Facebook or the weather, and compile that data for an extremely detailed record of almost any phone users’ activity."
...and from the 404 Media site:"A social media and phone surveillance system ICE bought access to is designed to monitor a city neighborhood or block for mobile phones, track the movements of those devices and their owners over time, and follow them from their places of work to home or other locations, according to material that describes how the system works obtained by 404 Media. Commercial location data, in this case acquired from hundreds of millions of phones via a company called Penlink, can be queried without a warrant, according to an internal ICE legal analysis shared with 404 Media. The purchase comes squarely during ICE’s mass deportation effort and continued crackdown on protected speech, alarming civil liberties experts and raising questions on what exactly ICE will use the surveillance system for."
I've been numb to these assholes for so long that, I am just beyond words to piece together how I feel or how to react. There has to be some countermeasure? From reading the 404 Media outline, they are basing the surveillance on location-specific data. I wonder if turning off location and GPS services would curtail this data from being divulged? Encrypt the phone of itself?
Been a long week... going to set this aside and do more research.
Rade
Wow! To think one year ago today, I began the Morning Coffee blog! Over the year, I have gained many diehard followers and over 92,000 visits from every corner of the world!
I had been on Facebook for many more years than I care to contemplate, though I never allowed myself to en mass hundreds of "friends"; I kept that number down to under 20. 20 friends was enough; it still required an hour or so every morning to "check in" - I can only imagine the slog someone with several hundred "Friends" would have to go through to effectively be present! No wonder people on Facebook are just so emotionally fried! My only contribution was a Daily Meme (check) and posting some missive or snark (check and check).
With SCROTUS back in power and the Tech Bros lining up to kiss his ass, along with the infiltration and proliferation of AI in the social media platforms (Meta) I had enough of feeding Zuckerberg's algorithms. Around January 5, I began deleting the content of my Facebook account (it took a couple days of just going through my feed to delete years of identifiable photos, pseudo-personal information, like content and personal postings), then on January 9, I said good bye and deleted the account That afternoon, I created "Morning Coffee", and have posted memes, missives and snark every day ever since.
Sidebar note:If you decide to leave Facebook, you should delete or change your personal data first, anything that has your face, your family, your property, vehicles, change your birth date, address, phone numbers, etc. give that deletion and those changes at least 24 hours to proliferate to all of the Meta servers, and then delete your account.
So I am here! It's been a very enjoyable and somewhat cathartic year. I am just overjoyed that you folks have found Morning Coffee, and popped in for a visit! I have also met some great people in this blogosphere; Ricky, Debra, Pat, Leanna, Infidel, Mitch and MM - thank you for your advice and support!
My first post...
Onto year two!
Thank you, everyone! Cheers!
Onward!
Rade
LUDDITES, REJOICE!!! Like there was ever any doubt...
The annual contest that no tech company wants to win announced its decisions Thursday. Among those getting the notorious “anti-awards” for invasive, wasteful or fragile products were an eye-tracking AI “soulmate” companion for combating loneliness, a musical lollipop and new AI features for Amazon’s widely used doorbell cameras. Samsung’s “Bespoke AI Family Hub” refrigerator received the overall “Worst in Show” recognition from the group of consumer and privacy advocates who judged the contest."
Yet someone thinks this crap will sell. Highlights from the AP story are:
An array of new features for Amazon’s Ring doorbell camera system won the “Worst in Show” for privacy for “doubling down on privacy invasion and supporting the misconception that more surveillance always makes us safer,” said Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Among the new Ring features is an “AI Unusual Event Alert” that is supposed to detect unexpected people or happenings like the arrival of a “pack of coyotes.”
“That includes facial recognition,” Cohn said of the new Ring features. “It includes mobile surveillance towers that can be deployed at parking lots and other places, and it includes an app store that’s going to let people develop even sketchier apps for the doorbell than the ones that Amazon already provides.”
Winning the “People’s Choice” of worst products was an AI companion called Ami, made by Chinese company Lepro, which mostly sells lamps and lighting technology. Ami appears as a female avatar on a curved screen that is marketed as “your always-on 3D soulmate,” designed for remote workers looking for private and “empathetic” interactions during long days at the home office. It tracks eye movements and other emotional signals, like tone of voice.
The group says it is calling out Lepro “for having the audacity to suggest that an AI video surveillance device on a desk could be anyone’s soulmate.” Advocates acknowledged the device comes with a physical camera shutter but said they were unsettled by its “always-on” marketing.
Lollipop Star attracted attention early at CES as a candy that plays music while you eat it. Its creators say it uses bone induction technology to enable people to hear songs — like tracks from Ice Spice and Akon — through the lollipop as they bite it using their back teeth. But the sticks can’t be recharged or reused after the candy is gone, leaving consumer advocate Nathan Proctor to give it a “Worst in Show” for the environment.
“We need to stop making so many disposable electronics, which are full of toxic chemicals, require critical minerals to produce and can burn down waste facilities,” said Proctor, who directs the Public Interest Research Group’s right-to-repair campaign.
Amen.
Oh, what a shame! She was one of the better chefs on "America's Test Kitchen".
Things found while having the first sip of the morning...
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