Personal details from your Internet profile—from your professional history to how many friends you have—are being collected, analyzed, and sold.

New forms of sophisticated digital signage networks are being deployed widely by retailers and others in both public and private spaces. From simple people-counting sensors mounted on doorways to sophisticated facial recognition cameras mounted in flat video screens and end-cap displays, digital signage technologies are gathering increasing amounts of detailed information about consumers, their behaviors, and their characteristics.

Facebook devrait être considéré comme d'autres entreprises qui fabriquent des produits addictifs et potentiellement dangereux. C'est l'avis du PDG de la société Salesforce, Marc Benioff, l'un des dirigeants les plus influents de la Sillicon Valley, qui estime qu'il est temps que le gouvernement américain s'empare du sujet et impose une régulation des réseaux sociaux, comme c'est déjà le cas pour l'industrie du tabac.

Google for the first time spent more than any other company in 2017 to influence Washington, highlighting both the sprawling reach of the country's thriving tech industry and the rising concern by regulators and lawmakers of its ascendance.

All told, the search giant broke its own record by allocating more than $18 million to lobby Congress, federal agencies and the White House on issues such as immigration, tax reform, and antitrust. It also spent money to weigh in on an effort by lawmakers and regulators to regulate online advertising, which is at the core of Google's business, according to disclosures filed to the Senate Office of Public Records.

Few consumers have ever heard of Acxiom. But analysts say it has amassed the world’s largest commercial database on consumers — and that it wants to know much, much more. Its servers process more than 50 trillion data “transactions” a year. Company executives have said its database contains information about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. That includes a majority of adults in the United States.

Le 23 août 2017 paraît l'article de Numerama "Enquête : comment les apps Figaro, L’Équipe ou Closer participent au pistage de 10 millions de Français". C'est à partir de cette date que tout commence. L'article confirme mes suppositions du moment. Le tracking sur mobile collecte une quantité démentielle de données, données qui seront ensuite partagées/achetées/vendues à d'autres sociétés. Par exemple, la société AppsFlyer, éditant le tracker du même nom, est partenaire de la société chinoise MobVista. Plus généralement, les sociétés éditrices de trackers, comme Teemo ou Ad4Screen, ont des partenariats avec des sociétés d'ampleur supérieure.

We blame Walmart for decimating small businesses, but ultimately, small town shoppers chose convenience and lower prices over the more local and diverse offerings from their neighbors. And for the past several years, readers have been doing the same thing in favoring Facebook. What Kamer is arguing is that readers who value good journalism, good writing, and diverse viewpoints need to push back against the likes of the increasingly powerful and monolithic Facebook…and visiting individual websites is one way to do that.

This report focuses on government use of commercial data brokers, the implications for that usage, and what needs to be done to address privacy problems. The government must bring itself fully to heel in the area of privacy. If it is going to outsource its data needs to commercial data brokers, it needs to attach the privacy standards it would have been held to if it had collected the data itself. Outsourcing is not an excuse for evading privacy obligations.

Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques for protecting the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers. These scientists have demonstrated they can often 'reidentify' or 'deanonymize' individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease. By understanding this research, we will realize we have made a mistake, labored beneath a fundamental misunderstanding, which has assured us much less privacy than we have assumed. This mistake pervades nearly every information privacy law, regulation, and debate, yet regulators and legal scholars have paid it scant attention. We must respond to the surprising failure of anonymization, and this Article provides the tools to do so.

Dans un article publié sur Medium, plusieurs ingénieurs de l'entreprise expliquent comment ils s'y prennent pour personnaliser les images d'illustration des séries, films, ou documentaires en fonction des préférences de chaque utilisateur. Au menu : algorithme et machine learning.

Netflix est fière de ses algorithmes de recommandation. La plateforme américaine de vidéo en ligne communique régulièrement sur la façon dont elle s’y prend pour nous faire consommer le maximum de contenu

As Amazon.com Inc. builds out its advertising services and sales team, it increasingly impinges on the turf of two other tech titans, Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

Dans le premier cas, ce qui suscite l'attention est l'influence du domaine de messagerie du client sur le prix de son assurance. Celui qui fournit une adresse Hotmail (mr.x@hotmail.com) paye en effet son contrat jusqu'à 30 livres sterling plus cher que celui qui possède un compte GMail (mr.y@gmail.com). Les responsables d'Admiral n'hésitent pas à confirmer cette différence, qui concerne d'ailleurs d'autres fournisseurs que Hotmail, en indiquant que leurs recherches établissent un risque plus élevé pour ces personnes.

Le deuxième exemple est potentiellement plus polémique puisqu'il semblerait qu'une même police puisse être proposée avec un écart de tarif de presque 1 000 livres, selon que le souscripteur s'appelle John Smith ou Mohammed Ali (les pseudonymes utilisés par les journalistes). Là également, bien qu'aucune réaction officielle ne soit mentionnée, il est probable que c'est une analyse statistique qui conduit à cette différence, repérée aussi, quoique dans des proportions plus modérées, chez d'autres assureurs.

[...]

En prolongeant encore la réflexion, arrive inévitablement le sujet de la nature même du produit d'assurance : que devient son principe originel de mutualisation des risques si, au fil de l'application d'algorithmes de plus en plus pointus sur une masse de plus en plus importante d'information, le prix payé par chaque client est ajusté à son risque individuel ? Cette perspective est-elle acceptable ? Ou faut-il prendre les mesures pour éviter d'en arriver là ? Dans ce dernier cas, le cas d'Admiral signale une urgence…

Instead of reading stories that get to you because they're popular, or just happen to be in your feed at that moment, you'll read stories that get to you because you chose to go to them. Sounds simple, and insignificant, and almost too easy, right?

It's only easy, and simple to do. As for why you should do it: It's definitely not simple, nor insignificant. By choosing to be a reader of websites whose voices and ideas you're fundamentally interested in and care about, you're taking control.

And by doing that, you'll chip away at the incentive publishers have to create headlines and stories weaponized for the purpose of sharing on social media. You'll be stripping away at the motivation for websites everywhere (including this one) to make dumb hollow mindgarbage. At the same time, you'll increase the incentive for these websites to be (if nothing else) more consistent and less desperate for your attention.

This report discusses the issue of cloud computing and outlines its implications for the privacy of personal information as well as its implications for the confidentiality of business and governmental information. The report finds that for some information and for some business users, sharing may be illegal, may be limited in some ways, or may affect the status or protections of the information shared. The report discusses how even when no laws or obligations block the ability of a user to disclose information to a cloud provider, disclosure may still not be free of consequences. The report finds that information stored by a business or an individual with a third party may have fewer or weaker privacy or other protections than information in the possession of the creator of the information. The report, in its analysis and discussion of relevant laws, finds that both government agencies and private litigants may be able to obtain information from a third party more easily than from the creator of the information. A cloud provider’s terms of service, privacy policy, and location may significantly affect a user’s privacy and confidentiality interests.

L'utilisation des algorithmes permet à la fois de mieux connaître ses clients, mais aussi de rendre leur plateforme addictive, voire d'influencer les goûts des internautes. Étrangement, comme l’avait déjà remarqué Mashable, la plateforme fait presque toujours en sorte de mener progressivement ses abonnés à consommer une série Marvel, donc une création originale de Netflix, les deux sociétés ayant conclu un deal historique fin 2013. Même si vous détestez les comics, vous finirez peut-être par découvrir l'histoire de l'un de ces super-héros.

Mobile messaging app Snapchat, which promised its users ephemeral, disappearing picture and video messages, has settled FTC charges that pics and videos sent through its app weren’t as ephemeral as the company promised. According to the FTC, Snapchat transmitted users’ location data, and collected users’ address books without notice or consent. Also, the snaps weren’t protected from disappearing as fully as the company had promised. The FTC complaint also discussed a Snapchat security breach that allowed an attacker to compile a database of 4.6 million Snapchat usernames and phone numbers.

If you are a Facebook user, unless you have actively opted out of the Nielsen tracking, Nielsen can track your clicks and views for its online measurement research. Nielsen/Facebook have already been tracking online advertising that people see, beginning in 2009/2010. Going forward, the Facebook/Nielsen tracking will also measure your TV viewing on mobiles and tablets. The Nielsen/Facebook tracking occurs while you are logged in to Facebook.

An information broker collects information about individuals from public records and private sources including census and change of address records, motor vehicle and driving records, user-contributed material to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, media and court reports, voter registration lists, consumer purchase histories, most-wanted lists and terrorist watch lists, bank card transaction records, health care authorities, and web browsing histories.

The data are aggregated to create individual profiles, often made up of thousands of individual pieces of information such as a person's age, race, gender, height, weight, marital status, religious affiliation, political affiliation, occupation, household income, net worth, home ownership status, investment habits, product preferences and health-related interests. Brokers then sell the profiles to other organizations that use them mainly to target advertising and marketing towards specific groups, to verify a person's identity including for purposes of fraud detection, and to sell to individuals and organizations so they can research people for various reasons. Data brokers also often sell the profiles to government agencies, such as the FBI, thus allowing law enforcement agencies to circumvent laws that protect privacy.