Tag Archive for Privacy

| April 26, 2020
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Artificial Intelligence on the Throne

Artificial Intelligence on the ThroneThe Internet of Things (IoT) is covering the world with all kinds of devices for the home and industry. Tech prognosticator IDC estimates that by 2025 there will be 41.6 billion IoT devices. The market research firm predicts the IoT devices will dump 79.4 zettabytes (ZB) of data. One class of IoT device for the home has gotten a major upgrade from California’s Stanford. Stanford University medical researchers have created a smart toilet by adding artificial intelligence to the throne. Before Stanford, the smart toilet was often the butt of jokes. The “smart toilet” offered ambient colored lighting, wireless Bluetooth music sync, heated seats, foot warmers, and automatic opening and closing lids. All nice but not really smart. The Stanford Precision Health Toilet (advanced Smart Toilet for healthcare) is really smart it can diagnose diseases. 

Artificial intelligence on the toilet

The Stanford Precision Health Toilet project led by Lead author, Seung-min Park, Ph.D., published A mountable toilet system for personalized health monitoring via the analysis of excreta.” In the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, they describe a toilet designed to detect early warning signs of cancer and other diseases. The Stanford team believes it will be useful for people at an increased risk of developing certain health issues. Dr. Gambhir – a Ph.D., Stanford professor, chair of radiology, and the senior author of the research paper says that currently, the toilet can measure 10 different biomarkers. The device is fitted inside a regular toilet bowl and is connected to an app for evaluation. Dr. Gambhir envisions it as part of an average home bathroom. The sensors would be an add-on that’s easily integrated into “any old porcelain bowl.” Stanford Precision Health Toilet The extra-smart toilet uses cameras and test strips to collect number one and number two samples. It then analyzes both your pee and poo with artificial intelligence to generate diagnoses—a trend in the medical industry. Stanford News says the smart toilet’s algorithms “can distinguish normal ‘urodynamics.’ Urodynamics is the flow rate, stream time, and total volume, among other parameters of urine. The Smart toilet can also check “stool consistencies from those that are unhealthy.” analyze white blood cell countChanges in urine can reveal multiple disorders. The dipsticks can be used to analyze white blood cell count, consistent blood contamination. Certain levels of proteins, that can signify bad things. Including a spectrum of diseases, including infection, irritable bowel syndrome, kidney failure, bladder cancer, and prostate cancer.

A very unique biometric factor

The toilet’s built-in identification system uses fingerprints and analprints to identify users in order to match users to their data. Apparently, analprints turn out to be unique biometric factor like fingerprints or iris prints. Professor Gambhir said, “We know it seems weird, but as it turns out, your anal print is unique.” Stanford says no human will see you analprint biometric data. If the artificial intelligence detects something questionable the smart toilets’ app would alert the user’s healthcare team to conduct a full diagnosis and further tests. researchers are planning upgradesThe researchers are planning upgrades to the Precision Health Toilet. Mr. Park told The Verge the upcoming number two version of the toilet will help detect tumor DNA and viral RNA to help them track the spread of diseases like COVID-19. Dr. Gambhir told NakedSecurity his team is working to customize the toilet’s tests to fit a user’s individual needs. For example, a diabetic’s smart toilet could monitor glucose in the urine. Or if a person with a family history of bladder or kidney cancer could benefit by having a smart toilet that monitors for blood. The Stanford researchers tested the toilet and more than half of their pilot test subjects were comfortable using the extra-smart toilet. 37% were “somewhat comfortable.” 15% were “very comfortable” with the idea of “baring it all in the name of precision health.” rb- Salvador DaliUsing analprints to match your poo with you is based on “work” by 20th-century surrealist painter Salvador Dali. Stanford’s Gambhir pointed out in an interview with Bioengineering that Dali studied anal creases for his unconventional erotic art (NSFW). Dr. Gambhir’s assurances that the health data would be stored with “privacy protections” in “secure, cloud-based systems.” Followers of the Bach Seat know that cloud-based systems is also known as “somebody else’s computer.” That sounds like a bad idea. We know cloud-based storage can be very leaky. And healthcare systems have come under increased attack during the COVID pandemic. The Feds could track people around coming and goingAnother problem with the ultra-smart toilet. When the FBI gets hold of this data, they could literally be up in everybody’s business. The Feds could track people around the world coming and going by adding analprints to their massive facial recognition surveillance database. Dr. Gambhir is quoted by NakedSecurity, 

We have taken rigorous steps to ensure that all the information is de-identified when it’s sent to the cloud and that the information – when sent to health care providers – is protected under [HIPAA],… 

NakedSecurity points out that time and time again Big Data can be dissected, compared, and contrasted to draw inferences about individuals. In other words, it’s not hard to re-identify people from anonymized records, be they records pertaining to location tracking, faceprints, or now-anuses. Dr. Gambhir reminds us all that while the Stanford Precision Health ultra-smart Toile has clear benefits as a diagnostic tool, it should not be a replacement for a doctor.

Stay safe out there!

Related article   Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
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| January 28, 2020
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EULA – The Biggest Lie on the Web

EULA - The Biggest Lie on the WebTuesday, January 28, 2020, is international Data Privacy Day (DPD). The purpose of Data Privacy Day is to raise awareness and promote privacy and data protection best practices. One privacy best practice is to actually read the end-user license agreements (EULA) that come with everything you download from the Internet.

ead the end-user license agreements (EULA)If you can’t wade through the legal gibberish telling you they are going to sell all your data to someone you never heard of? I don’t blame you – two law professors analyzed the terms and conditions of 500 popular U.S. websites and found that more than 99% of them were “unreadable,” far exceeding the level most American adults read at but are still enforced. The researchers wrote that the average readability level of the EULA agreements they reviewed was comparable to articles in academic journals – take a look at “Terms of Service; Didn’t Read” (ToS;DR).

EULA grades

ToS;DR is a project started to help fix the “biggest lie on the web”: almost no one really reads the terms of service we agree to all the time. The service grades website EULA’s from Amazon to Zappos from A (best) to E (worst) once a comprehensive list of cases has been reviewed by volunteers. Some of the ratings are:

  • grades websites from Amazon to ZapposA – The best terms of services: they treat you fairly, respect your rights, and will not abuse your data.
  • B – The terms of services are fair towards the user but they could be improved.
  • C – The terms of service are okay but some issues need your consideration.
  • D – The terms of service are very uneven or there are some important issues that need your attention.
  • E – The terms of service raise very serious concerns.
  • No Class Yet ToS;DR has not sufficiently reviewed the terms yet.

Here are the privacy ratings of the FAANG largest websites according to ToS;DR:

There are a few sites that respect users privacy and get a Class A rating from ToS;DR:

  1. DuckDuckGo search engineDuckDudkGo (Search engine),
  2. Kolab Now (Email/groupware),
  3. SeenThis (Advertising),
  4. WindowsLogic Productions (Software developer).

Other well-known sites with ToS;DR ratings:

  1. IMDb = Class C,
  2. YouTube = Class D,
  3. Twitter = Class D,
  4. Stack Overflow Class E.

You can download the ToS;DR:browser extensions here.

Related article

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| December 11, 2019
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Your Smart TV is Spying On You

Your Smart TV is Spying On YouMany people will find a smart TV under their tree this year. Smart TVs are like regular televisions but with an internet connection. The global smart TVs market is expected to reach 249.9M units by 2024. And all those smart TVs may be spying on you. A while ago I wrote about Vizio (VZIO) getting caught invading your privacy by collecting and selling your personal data. Despite the fact that Vizo had to pay a $2.2M fine, smart TV manufacturers continue to spy on their customers.

Data leakZDNet reports that that smart TVs send user data to tech titans including Facebook (FB), Google (GOOG), and Netflix. These devices are spying on you even when they are idle. U.S. and UK researchers say smart television sets produced by popular vendors including Samsung (005930), Apple (AAPL), and LG (LGLD), alongside content and app streaming devices such as Amazon (AMZN) FireTV, and Roku, are sending out information potentially without the knowledge or consent of users.

Smart TV's sharing users' personal data

Financial Times

Your Smart TV is Spying On You

In a paper titled, “Information Exposure From Consumer IoT Devices” (PDF), the team said that 34,586 controlled experiments found that 88% of devices send information to firms other than the device manufacturer; 56% of U.S. devices and 83.8% of UK devices send your info overseas. They also report every device they studied exposed some kind of information in plain-text.

eavesdroppingThe researchers from Northeastern University and Imperial College London found that 37% could “reliably inferred” user and device behavior from eavesdropping on the user’s interactions with television sets and other household IoT products.

The study found that almost half of the tested devices contacted Amazon. That includes devices not manufactured by Amazon. David Choffnes, one of the authors of the paper warns that Amazon has a lot of information about what you are doing in your home.

According to the paper location data and IP addresses were commonly sent by our IoT devices to third parties in the cloud including Netflix, Spotify, Microsoft (MSFT), Akamai (AKAM), and Google.

Netflix logoWhen it came to smart TVs, however, almost all of the devices included in the study would contact Netflix — whether or not a TV was configured with an account for the content streaming service. “This, at the very least, exposes information to Netflix about the model of [a] TV at a given location,” the paper reads.

Some of the tech titans collecting your data responded to the researchers.

  • Facebook said that it was “common” for services with Facebook integrated into them to send data to third-party services.
  • Netflix said that data transfers were “confined to how Netflix performs and appears on screen,” and
  • Google said user preferences and consent levels dictate how publishers “may share data with Google’s that’s similar to data used for ads in apps or on the web.”

Internet-connected smart TVs combined with streaming services like Netflix and Hulu seem to be a cord-cutter’s dream. But like anything else that connects to the internet, it opens up smart TVs to security vulnerabilities and hackers. But as is the case with most other internet-connected devices, manufacturers often don’t put security as a priority. Not only that, many smart TVs come with a camera and a microphone that attackers can access.

FBI warning

FBI issued a warning about smart TVsBecause manufacturers don’t put security as a priority, the FBI issued a warning about the risks that smart TVs pose. The FBI warned that hackers can take control of your unsecured smart TV and in worst cases, take control of the camera and microphone to watch and listen in.

… TV manufacturers and app developers may be listening and watching you, that television can also be a gateway for hackers to come into your home … your unsecured TV can give him or her an easy way in the backdoor through your router.

TechCrunch notes that some of the biggest attacks targeting smart TVs were developed by the CIA, but were stolen. The files were later published online by WikiLeaks.

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If you are interested in inspecting the IoT network traffic in your smart home, Princeton University has developed and released an open source tool called IoT Inspector. The software uses ARP spoofing to analyze what IoT devices are connected to the Internet, how much data is exchanged, and how often information is traded.

Related Posts

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| September 28, 2019
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Data Privacy End Run

Data Privacy End RunIn an attempt to end-run stricter data privacy regulation the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of America’s largest companies, sent an open letter to the U.S. House and Senate urging the politicians to pass a comprehensive national data privacy law. According to CircleID, the heart of the letter is the creation of federal privacy laws that the companies argue should replace various state-level laws that have already been passed.

CEOs of America's largest companiesThe CEOs want one law that governs all user privacy and data protection across the U.S., which would simplify their lives. From the letter:

Now is the time for Congress to act and ensure that consumers are not faced with confusion about their rights and protections based on a patchwork of inconsistent state laws.

Among the items hidden deep in the CEO’s “consumer privacy framework [more here]” are some onerous provisions.

  • Private individuals should not be allowed to sue companies if those companies violate the data privacy law itself.
  • Potential pay-for-privacy schemes and
  • Overriding existing state data privacy protections already signed into law.

The Data Privacy Blog points out that in 2019, a number of states passed new and expanded data breach notification laws, including:

  • California.
  • data breach notification lawsIllinois,
  • Maine,
  • Maryland,
  • Massachusetts,
  • New Jersey,
  • New York,
  • Oregon,
  • Texas, and
  • Washington.

Also, since July 1, 2019, Delaware, New Hampshire, and Connecticut have enacted laws imposing new cybersecurity requirements on insurance companies.

ZDnet points out that many privacy advocates (and even some tech CEOs) believe the CEOs aren’t really looking after users’ interests, but their own. There’s a belief that companies are trying to aggregate any privacy lawmaking in Congress, where lobby groups can water down any meaningful user protections that may impact bottom lines. Open Secrets reports that the Business Roundtable has spent over $6.6M lobbying in D.C. so far in 2019. As followers of the Bach Seat know, money talk and citizens walk in D.C.

Among the CEOs who were involved in the end run included;

The Data Privacy Blog points out the coincidence that the CEO’s framework comes just months before the California Consumer Protection Act is set to go into effect in 2020.

throw money at the politiciansFollowers of the Bach Seat know many companies make money by selling customers’ personal or device-usage data. Privacy policies with too many teeth could prevent companies from selling your data to pay the CEO’s average salary of $17.2M. The LA Times reports that compensation for American chief executives increased by 940% from 1978 to 2018, while pay for the average worker rose only 12% over the same 40-year period.

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Seems to me that the goal of this proposal of the leading CEO’s is not to protect our privacy. Their goal is to centralize the rule-making in the D.C. swamp and throw money at the politicians to do the Business Roundtable’s bidding. Then the CEOs will be able to maintain the status-quo and normalize the existing digital surveillance system that serves them well.

LobbyingThe CEO’s sudden interest in data privacy has more to do with the growing wave of real reform at the state level and the calculation that Trump will be booted from office and less business-friendly POTUS will take his place in 2020. And little to do with citizen’s privacy.

The digital rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation supports a private right of action for any national consumer privacy law, as such a right would further enable members of the public to fight back against companies that violate the law.

The EFF wrote the best way to protect ordinary people’s privacy is action.

It is not enough for government to pass laws that protect consumers from corporations … to ensure companies do not ignore them … empower ordinary consumers to bring their own lawsuits against the companies that violate their privacy rights.

Signatures from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook were notably absent from the list although both have, in the past, supported a comprehensive federal privacy law.

Related articles

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| December 30, 2018
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Doomba

DoombaA fitting way to close out 2018 is to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the classic first-person shooter game “Doom.” Doom tells the story of a base operated by the Union Aerospace Corporation on the Martian moon Phobos. The base is overrun by demons from Hell after its top-secret teleportation experiments go awry. A detachment of space marines are sent to investigate and all but one are slaughtered. It’s up to the player to fight through the horde of demons on Phobos and, eventually Hell itself, to prevent a massive invasion of Earth.

Roomba self-driving vacuumLike the last space marine, Doom is a survivor. As Motherboard explained, Doom is compatible with many devices because id Software wanted it to be. id Software released Doom‘s source code to the public in 1997 for reuse. Doom has been modified to run in ASCII and on a number of platforms including ATMs and printers.

The latest hack of Doom comes from developer Rich Whitehouse. He exploited the fact that Roomba self-driving vacuum robots create maps of your house as they sweep up. iRobot CEO Colin Angle swears he will totally never sell maps of your home to advertisers. Despite the CEO’s assurances, Mr. Whitehouse demonstrates that these maps can be exported. He uses the Roomba maps to create Doomba a tool that converts Roomba maps for use in Doom. Mr. Whitehouse told Digital Trends.

There’s a lot going on under the hood, though. The Roomba is broadcasting a position and angle across the network in roughly one second intervals, as well as a bunch of other data. I write the relevant data out to a .noeroomba file as it comes in. When you go to load that .noeroomba file [into my own tool] Noesis, that’s when the magic happens.

Related articles

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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