Category: Privacy

No legalese please, we’re in business

Which translates to: A DPO better be an IT expert who has learnt [for clear thinking, UK English is preferred by far; ed.] the legalese of the GDPR, than a legal expert who has learnt some tidbits of IT. Despite the usual suspects exceptions, you do recognise the former and latter types in practice. And exceptions those are.
And debunking the myth that a legally schooled ‘GRC’ operative might pick up sufficient IT skills in a couple of courses or a bit of privacy practice, needn’t be necessary or you have done zero investigation re this. What a sorcerer’s apprentice of the pastiche kind do they portray. Because the mindset is inappropriate; the mindset of accidentally finding an interesting problem and for once not being dazed by those in the know, studying it extensively, how interesting this all, and then       hardly anything. Certainly (sic) no actual solution to the problem…
The IT side, so often and so extensively underestimated in its intricacies throughout the vast wide scope of it in particular qua privacy concerns even in the GDPR itself that core document around which so many circle, on the other hand is qua background focused on (actively going out and) finding problems and then creating and implementing a solution.
And at the same time, recognising that the legal stuff is not as hard as it is sometimes portrayed (instigated) to be and does not require more than a trade diploma level of intellectual development, if even that.

One could easily remain on the subject but without much gain. We retire, having made sufficient argument why DPOs have no legal basis need in their functional requirement.

Oh, and:
[Feel free to pose and shine – with pretense of superiority through some legal jargon most probably devoid of meaning; NY]

Take me out of the loop, (as I) please

Considering that there is this thing with privacy — where people are getting more and more aware that yes, they do have a legal right to not opt in to any scam’ish spam and Shallows-ing of their filter bubble [where the latter sounds soft and pleasant, pink, instead of crushingly dusty and petrifying your mind, the one thing that so far keeps you human].
Considering, too, that there is a push to have at least a human in the loop of math destruction. Which will fail if it’s a click-yes-or-be-fired job. Which it will, in the current setting and developments, be. Unless the human, and all of hes [her/his; LGBTQ-neutral] superiors all the way up to and including in particular, the Board members individually fully accountable, remain accountable for all that the click-yes leads to. They should be are or else they have to legal title to any income of any kind. But since the legal side is all set but the 0.1% is above the law, this isn’t happening.

At least then, we should aim for something similar to the cookie directive [so villified because it was such a glorious and simple idea it could work. could have.]; I propose:
The right to be left out of (statistical or other) profiling. Since the profiling follows from matching patterns that are different things from the data I provided – most probably to some party other than the one doing the profile extraction out of statistical masses – fitting me to the profile is a direct form of de-anonymisation to identification to which you have no legal right and a legal duty not to. Check your brain to see whether it is capable of the most basic functioning, which is sufficient to understand articles 11 and 12 of the Universal Declarations of Human Rights. Name one set of principles that applies more widely, globally, than that. Doing away not only with the nuisance but also with the filter bubble et al. including the atrocious downsides of false positives as per the link above.

Maybe the online ad markets would crash. Report has it that they already do; imploding under their own emptiness. There is no inherent reason any market should exist per se. The world would a. continue to prosper, so infinitely more so than before when ad markets would crumble; b. be a better place and who could be against that?

So after this bombshell of an idea, I leave you with:
[Peace of mind; at a borgho just North of Siena]

Your unbody double

So, there now is a thing being Artificially Intelligent 3-D Avatars. As per here. How nice.
And then you realise time travel may be possible once you don’t have the physical duplication problem anymore. Though we still would have the other problems; bummer.

But still, one of the problems has been solved. The others, actually … may need re-study. Because, there may now be differences in travelling forward (possibility approaching, when ‘time’ in your physical life needs to stay synchronised in some form or another with others, and your AI3DAvatar can speed up ..?) but then, returning to Now might (creation of possibility here) be equivalent or the same [which aren’t] to travelling back in time. Duh. Too bad it’s still so hard to reason (positive-)logically and consistently about this.

And, it will make the ‘need’ to have dirty, planet-soiling flesh-and-blood humans around, much less. There’s no such thing required anymore as people being trapped in The Matrix and then wanting blue or red pills, but rather it’s the attachment of AI3DAvatars to the Singularity Machine; their subsumption into it (removing duplicate or false/inconsistent memories – that will be there IF the AI3DAvatar’s anything like you) leading to their disappearance — all they ever (in the future) were, had already been included (thought out on its own) by the SingMach.

For now, we’re still here; individually. And:
[“Tape”copies of the views from up there, will be loaded to your AI3dAvatar in a millisec; no need for that either; CNN Tower, Toronto]

FOMO as FOYA gone bad

The enslavement to socmed seems to be a generation- … less thing: Unfortunately, all too many seem to need to be connected — mistakenly, just liking things will not lead to a true connection; how many are there that actually grow into such? Only on apps that are specifically aimed to that –swipe-left– otherwise, not so much. Or hardly. Most socmed like-affiliations are a. for sheeple attaching themselves to some brand(s), indicating their lack of self-esteem by submitting themselves as consumer-onlies, b. for lack of dare to actually do something for a Good Cause but wanting to be associated with Successful-in-life people [i.e., actual do-somethings] nevertheless. No c. to think of, qua ‘most’.

What remains, is a hard to miss impression of the truth, being that socmed attachments (mostly to the worst-on-ethics corp behemoths rather than anything) are panicked FOMO symptoms to the world, signalling a much deeper problematic psyche, being the Fear Of Youself As-is; FOYA.
That’s right. Individualism having gone so far as to drive all those that subconsciously cling to group belonging much more than is societally acceptable ( or so it seems!), i.e., the vast majority (of Like-serfs), to seek ways to still attach to something that can slurp up their feeling of insecurity (on their own) and return a pat on the back for group support.

You get it. Can ramble on, but have little time. And:
[An affiliation choice!; Amsterdam]

Leaking profiles

Got an attention raiser during an off-the-cuff discussion on data leakage. Qua, like, not getting the first thing about what privacy has been since Warren&Brandeis’ eloquent definition, and subsequent codification in pretty hard-core, straightforward laws.
The problem being, that no theory of firm (incl public) allows subsumption of employees into slavery, of mind or otherwise. Think Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 12. Hence, tracking and tracing every keystroke of employees, i.e., treating them as suspect of e.g., data leakage before one has any a priori clue about everyone individually actually doing anything wrong, not having been granted any rights of surveillance in this jurisdiction, is a crime in itself.
And no, the comparison with street cameras that bother no-one and make everyone safer, is a lie on two counts. And, in many countries (the civilised ones; a criterion in reverse), such (total or partial) surveillance isn’t outlawed without reason.
So, your data leakage prevention by tracing everyone is an illegal act. Don’t.

No, your security concerns are not valid. Not the slightest, compared to the means you want to deploy. Stego to files of all kinds, when all are aware of its implementation, may help much better. And supplies you with the trace you want; not to your employee that you (but no-one else) suggest is rogue – (s)he knows about the traceabilitry so will be self-censored (ugch) into compliance – but to the third party that spilled the beans. Since stego-cleansing tools may exist, your mileage may vary. Encryption then, the destruction of content accessibility for those not authorised (through holding a password/token/~), will fail when anything you send out, might have to be read off a screen; the PrtScn disabling being undone by good ol’ cameras as present in your good ol’ S8 or P900 (though this at 0:50+ is probably the typical TLA stakeout vid/result).

Conclusion: Excepting very, very rare occasions, your data leakage prevention by employee surveillance will land you in prison. Other methods, might be legal but fail. Your thoughts now on outbound traffic keyword monitoring. [Extra credit when including European ‘human in the loop’ initiatives.]

And:
[No privacy in your prayers, or ..?? Baltimore Cathedral]

Imminent enrichment through AI — of jobs ..?

Anyone else feels like the breakthrough of AI in all sorts of jobs (yes, most certainly not only the bohrrring repetitive-manual-labour kind — that may be one of the kinds that comes much later in the sequence since it requires extremely sophisticated physical/intellectual (yes) interactions than previsouly thought (by humans))
is imminent?

And anyone see that the horror of replacement of humans XOR your co-workers is to come only (a bit) later, when AI-driven systems have become good enough to replace you, completely — leaving the spoils of labour to the (intensive people-farming) factory owners ..?
With in the shortish mean time, your job being ‘enhanced’ through AI, by the enrichment of having to deal less with the simple stuff and you having more time available to do more Intelligent (parts of) your job. Possile, on conditions of:

  • Such more intelligent parts of your job existing; a great many a manager may find there is no such thing, or the room for manoeuvre isn’t there;
  • You being able, capable, of performing such more intelligent job parts; with the focus on reporting (send/receive; hardly ever anything more than the extremely-simpleton processing in between) probably your capabilities have shrivelled into unusability;
  • Time availability is what holds you back so far; extending on the previous condition, you may find yourself to actually – be honest now! – already have had that time available but used it for busywork, like, being a Manager or so. And/or, by loafing or do I repeat myself. Now that you may get time available for Intelligent stuff, you may not notice that;
  • You getting paid more, or at least the same; as it turns out that the enrichment-by-cutting-out-the-bottom-part, leads to a serious pay cut as your Overlords now see your function as much less time-consuming or bottom-line-feeding. Especially the latter may turn out to be an eye-opener…
  • You getting sufficient time to build a new job; the creeping replacement of You by AI-based systems might speed up significantly as the first rewards transpire — to the Owners again — and hence the cry [not tag; ed.] for More may intensify the efforts to replace you ever more, funded by … your increased utility if at all, or the increasing utility of the you-replacing AI at least.

Suffice to notice that a priori it will be very, very difficult to meet all these conditions, if even anyone would try (apart from you, but you’re too singleton in this to pull that off). So…

Oh well, there’s always:
[A different look at Casa de Musica; Proto]

Meta / Attrib-ShareAlike- … Commercial

For the following, one would best resort to …
Who are we kidding; are there still believers out there apart from te truly stupid-to-beyond-dysfunctionality-capacity defenders, that metadata is something less bad than just privacy-sensitive data points outright? Well, <spoiler> it’s the other way around— as is exemplified in this here piece. From which I’ve blatantly copied:

  • They know you rang a phone sex line at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. But they don’t know what you talked about.
  • They know you called the suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge. But the topic of the call remains a secret.
  • They know you got an email from an HIV testing service, then called your doctor, then visited an HIV support group website in the same hour. But they don’t know what was in the email or what you talked about on the phone.
  • They know you received an email from a digital rights activist group with the subject line “52 hours left to stop SOPA” and then called your elected representative immediately after. But the content of those communications remains safe from government intrusion.
  • They know you called a gynecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then searched online for the local abortion clinic’s number later that day. But nobody knows what you spoke about.

So blatantly I might as well add:

But then the Non element in there warps things. Nevertheless, I’ll use the example in my upcoming pres.

And I’ll leave you for now with:
[Full of info, too, innocious that aint but no invasion on you; Prague]

Forever on Page 50

With all the talk about whatever ends up on the Internet, will be around to be found forever, there’s a couple of things:
 

  • It may be on the Internet still, however erased according to the Right to be Forgotten, but that doesn’t mean it can be found. When you’ve taken care to not re-raise attention too much, your shame-news will be on search results page 50+ and nobody will ever go there;
  • But then, if someone took care to actually download the items to some off-line storage, you’re doomed indeed. Yes I too have a lot of electronic files from 1-1-1980, a slew of them actually from around that time. Barely readable qua format but of course easily upgradable, script-wise.
  • Bots may be deployed, to compromise any site or so that has your want-disapperable info; may not be legal in all cases (could be, when an offline court ordered to be Forgotten…) but when the attention dies down, so few will want to restore your info once outdated. Society-beneficial to deploy ransomware on xyz-old site/db data ..?
  • Oh and the title certainly refers to your reading of Sloterdijk’s Spheres Part III as well, probably. Have past that point handsomely, but with considerable effort. Applies to Musil’s Man Without Qualities Part III (Vol. II) also.

But then:
??????????[A Cordoníu — note the accent! — may ‘save’ your sanity by unsaving your memory]

Tragic users

Isn’t it a tragedy that those that would most need full but fully inconspicuous, unnoticable security on socmed et al., are the ones that care the least?

This, both in careful scouring of legalese and practical settings, tools, and what have we, and qua effort to keep messaging (Email dies out hard, doesn’t it ..? Or doesn’t it due to very valid reasons..?) secure and data private ..?
On the other hand / end, not all ‘professionals’ practice what they preach to the hilt… And may do too little.
Flip side of “There exists no 100% security”: If you do only a little less, the huge costs aren’t worth it whereas if you do quite a bit less, you’re much more efficient. Hence, even reasoning from the other side, maximum security will leave gaping holes you (sic) will get caught in.

So, all are in an inverse Catch-22 of sorts… [there should be a name for that; suggestions?]

And:
Photo11[The one that checked water temp, wasn’t the one to go swimming…; Cyprus]

One extra for Two AI tipping point(er)s

To add, to the post below of a month ago.
This here piece, on how AI software is now writing (better) AI software. Still in its infancy, but if you recall the Singularity praise (terroristic future), you see how fast this can get out of hand. Do you?

The old bits:

You may have misread that title.

It’s about tips, being pointers, two to papers that give such a nice overview of the year ahead in AI-and-ethics (mostly) research. Like, this and this. With, of course, subsequent linkage to many other useful stuff that you’d almost miss even if you’d pay attention.

Be ware of quite a number of follow-up posts, that will delve into all sorts of issue listed in the papers, and will quiz or puzzle you depending on whether you did pay attention or not. OK, you’ll be puzzled, right?

And:
DSCN1441[Self-learned AI question could be: “Why?” but to be honest and demonstrating some issues, that’s completely besides the point; Toronto]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord