How people who work in the adtech/data industry rationalize what they do, from a Reddit thread about John Oliver's segment on data brokers:
reddit.com/r/adops/commen…

1) #whatabout
2) #whatabout bigtech?!

"Anti-data broker activism is shilling for big business"

...and while data is anonymized and aggregated anyway, privacy is over THINK ABOUT QUANTUM COMPUTING! 🙄
3) "I can understand the argument that people may not know this" BUT all of the data obtained is freely given and/or agreed to be collected!

And ya know, "the internet is not a right and there is no obligation to use it".
4) Really, "just don't use the internet ... easier than it sounds" 🤡
To be fair, there are other people in the industry I can relate more to.
And I admit, this guy has a point.

It's something I've long been trying to emphasize. Much of the data in adtech is flawed or fraudulent but broadcasting personal data on billions across myriads of firms and its systematic misuse are still a massive problem for several reasons.

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More from @WolfieChristl

Apr 30
Creating public digital infrastructure is not without risks.

But 'governments' are not monolithic entities, there are different ways to organize public infrastructure, and the less we risk, the more likely we'll end up just with authoritarian tech platforms and a security state.
We need more public digital infrastructure from cities to states to supranational, in different societal areas, based on open technology, with different democratic governance mechanisms, relatively independent bodies, checks, balances.

And yes this may include data processing.
There's always the risk of corruption, capture, misuse, function creep, for example, in the name of security.

This is what we must fight against, but if we're always afraid of the risks that may arise of public digital infrastructure, the situation will just get worse and worse.
Read 5 tweets
Apr 26
Wow this internal FB document is dynamite, a straight and clear confession that Facebook's whole business is based on a massive GDPR violation at the most fundamental level.
Purpose limitation is one of the most basic principles in the GDPR. A company can generally only collect personal data for a *specified* purpose.

If a company cannot specify the purpose it collects personal data for, it is simply not allowed to collect or process it. Image
"We do not have an adequate level of control … over how our systems use data, and thus we can't confidently make … commitments such as 'we will not use X data for Y purpose'"

From the summary of the internal doc "written to advise leadership" in 2021:
documentcloud.org/documents/2171… Image
Read 15 tweets
Apr 25
Die Landesdatenschutzbehörde Baden-Württemberg stellt den Schulen die Rute ins Fenster. Auch nach mehrjährigen Pilotprojekten mit dem Kultusministerium konnte keine Möglichkeit gefunden werden, Microsoft 365 gesetzeskonform einzusetzen. Sie müssen den Einsatz bis Herbst beenden.
"Trotz umfangreicher Bemühungen seitens des LfDI im direkten Gespräch mit Vertretern von Microsoft war es nicht möglich, eine vollständige Übersicht über alle Verarbeitungen personenbezogener Daten (auch zu eigenen Zwecken seitens Microsofts) zu erhalten"

baden-wuerttemberg.datenschutz.de/ms-365-schulen…
"Es wurden bei den Messungen des LfDI Übermittlungen an über 500 Server von Microsoft registriert. Die Zwecke für diese Übermittlungen sind nur zum kleinen Teil dokumentiert"
Read 6 tweets
Apr 22
Anomaly Six, a private intelligence firm that sells to the US military, claims to have access to commercial GPS location data from 3 billion mobile devices mapped to 2bn email addresses, according to materials provided to @tech_inquiry and @theintercept:
theintercept.com/2022/04/22/ano… Image
@tech_inquiry @theintercept Detailed and very worrying report based on a video recording of a sales presentation Anomaly Six gave to Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring firm with ties to government and special access to Twitter data. Image
I told The Intercept that even if Anomaly Six’s capabilities are exaggerated or based partly on inaccurate data, a company possessing even a fraction of these spy powers would be deeply concerning.

I mean this is data from smartphone apps, consumer services, digital advertising.
Read 18 tweets
Apr 22
Hab mir kurz angeschaut, wie Websites von österreichischen Medien versteckt Daten über meinen Besuch an Drittfirmen übertragen, darunter an Google, FB und viele unbekanntere Werbe-Datenhandelsfirmen wie Oracle, Experian, Neustar, Adition, Criteo, Adform, PubMatic, Taboola uvm. Image
Die Visualisierung stellt dar, mit welchen Servern von Drittfirmen die Websites von ORF, Presse, Standard, Kurier, Kleine Zeitung, Krone und oe24 bei nur einem Besuch dieser 7 Seiten Kontakt aufgenommen haben.

In den meisten Fällen wurden dabei personenbezogene Daten übertragen.
Read 9 tweets
Apr 20
It still feels odd to see the EFF fighting and cheering for a shady data mining company's right to create extensive digital profiles on employees without their knowledge by scraping personal information from LinkedIn and selling it to employers.
eff.org/deeplinks/2022…
It really does not align with my understanding of liberty in the digital age.

Yes, I also think that journalists, academics and watchdogs must be able to analyze public information, but advocating for the case by siding with a worker profiling firm is the worst possible choice.
This is how the worker profiling company HiQ describes its products.

Based on public data, it calculates scores about the 'connectedness', job 'mobility history' and 'external footprint' of employees, predicts their 'flight risk', rates their skills.
hiqlabs.com/new-index
Read 9 tweets

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