Every little piece of information you give away online can reveal something about you—but it seems your Facebook likes could reveal rather more than you bargained for. More »
Facebook has announced that it’s teaming up with four of the world’s largest corporate data brokers to “enhance” the ad experience for users. Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom, and BlueKai obtain information gathered about users through online means (such as through cookies when users surf the web) as well as through offline means (such as through loyalty cards at supermarkets and product warranty cards). Through the new relationship with Facebook, companies will be able to display advertisements to Facebook users based on data that these data brokers have on individuals. More »
This week the Facebook developer team revealed a series of changes (read: feature additions) to their News Feed that’ll allow you to see a much more simplistic and aesthetically beautiful vision of what your friends, associates, and likeables are sharing. The immediate reaction from many will be that this, like so many Facebook updates before, will once again adversely affect what the easily startled call their “online privacy.” In fact this newest change only changes one thing for those of you that want to remain as “private” as you were before – the location of the Privacy Settings button.
If you clicked that Privacy Settings button a whole lot in the past, you’ll know that it appeared in the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook user interface up until now. After the change-over to the newest update to your News Feed, the same access to said controls will be appearing on the left of your layout. The left of your layout is now similar to what we’ve seen in the past on mobile versions of Facebook, complete with a collection of inside-Facebook apps.
Up top of this list on the right (still inside the left-side panel), you’ll find a tiny padlock icon. This icon links you to your Privacy Settings the same as the link did before today. The new features this week – outlined in our handy guide: SlashGear 101: this week’s Facebook News Feed redesign – does not open up any new doors to terrifying changes the likes of which would rip your eyes out and tear your body asunder. The only thing you should still be watching for is the wider update to Graph Search for all.
If you’d like to see how Graph Search in Facebook is affecting how you are able to be searched in the largest Social Network of all, head back to our Graph Search update guide as well as the Facebook Privacy Guarantee posted immediately after Graph Search was revealed. There you’ll find out why if you’ve liked both “Vegitarianism” and “Cheeseburgers”, you’re going to be coming up as a weird friend to your friends rather soon. Seeya then!
Facebook News Feed update’s privacy changes: the one is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Carnegie Mellon University conducted a study following more than 5,000 Facebook users over six years, from 2005 and 2011, and found that changes in the social network’s privacy policies caused users to share more — not less — personal data. Lest you think this means that users suddenly trusted the site more, Carnegie Mellon says that Facebookers became more and more protective of their personal details as the social network grew in membership — and that the uptick in shared information is a result of increasingly granular privacy settings. If you recall, Facebook introduced new in-depth privacy controls in 2010, and the study found that the release of these new settings corresponded to users sharing more personal data, both within their network of friends and with strangers and third-party applications.
It’s been quite some time since the new privacy policy was introduced, but the university says the sample group didn’t reduce the amount of info shared with non-friends on the network, even as of 2011. The takeaway? Well, it’s safe to say that more privacy controls doesn’t equal more vigilance in protecting personal data, and it’s certainly not a stretch to call Facebook’s settings confusing. The researchers’ comparison of the struggle for privacy to the eternal plight of Sisyphus? That might be a touch more dramatic.
Filed under: Internet, Alt, Facebook
Via: Huffington Post
Path’s newest update solves all the wrong problems. The mobile-only social network that limits you to 150 friends rolled out version three of its app yesterday. It adds several new features, like stickers you can use in conversation, private location …
Google’s Transparency Report is published to show the public what governments and companies want to know about us. It can get pretty personal. And the government wants more. The FBI is now using National Security Letters to obtain information from Google. These NSLs have now been included in the Transparency Report give a general gist on how frequent the FBI is doing this. More »
Google has revealed the number of National Security Letters (NSL) that it has received in the last four years alone. The numbers are a general estimate of NSLs sent to Google by the government. The FBI sends NSLs to various entities, including businesses, internet service providers, credit card companies, and more. They demand that those entities deliver confidential information about their customers such as phone numbers, e-mail addresses, purchase history, web history, and more. Anything is fair game as long as it pertains to the FBI’s investigation.
Google has received 0-999 NSLs each year for the past 4 years from the FBI. Google isn’t allowed to release the exact amount legally because the numbers may interfere with the FBI’s investigations, but it is able to provide a range. In 2009, the FBI asked Google to deliver confidential information from over 1000-1999 of its users. In 2010, it was asked to deliver info on 2000-2999 users, and in 2011 and 2012, it was asked to deliver info on 1000-1999 users each year.
National Security Letters can be issued by the FBI even without a court order, which makes them powerful and abusive. The Electronic Frontier Foundation stated, “Of all the dangerous government surveillance powers that were expanded by the USA Patriot Act, the National Security Letter… is one of the most frightening and invasive.” Many people have voiced their concerns over the NSLs and their extensive use.
Google has stated that whenever it receives a NSL, they go through a screening process before delivering the requested information. They scrutinize the NSL to make sure that they follow the law and Google’s policies. They try to narrow down requests, especially if they’re extremely broad. They try to notify users (if they are legally allowed to do so) so that the user can talk to a lawyer about the situation. Lastly, they require the government to issue a search warrant if private content, like emails and documents, are being demanded. Google plans on updating their NSL figures report annually.
[via Google]
Google reveals number of National Security Letters sent in last 4 years is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
Google’s Transparency Report has sometimes supplied an unsettling level of detail as to what companies and governments want to know. Americans won’t feel much more comfortable now that Google has added the FBI’s National Security Letters to the mix. The investigative branch wants the numbers vague for secrecy’s sake, but curious residents at least have access to annual data that shows the range of requests for information and roughly how many users were affected — in this case, about 1,000 to 2,000 Google account holders every year since 2009. Google is quick to note that it does what it can to narrow the scope of requests and require search warrants for anything private. We’re slightly reassured by that extra line of defense, although the Transparency Report’s addition is still a reminder that the government is watching some of us.
Via: Google Official Blog
Source: Google Transparency Report
Evernote is planning on implementing two-factor authentication with its services soon in light of its recent security blunder. Evernote was hacked over the weekend and its users’ emails, usernames, and passwords were all compromised. The company had to initiate a password reset on all accounts in order to protect its users information. While all of the accounts were compromised, Evernote says that there were no signs of personal notes or account details being accessed
The company stated that it had planned on implementing the two-factor authentication sometime in the future, but because of this security breach, it plans on accelerating the implementation very soon. The authorizations can be delivered in a variety of ways, including SMS messaging, a code delivered via phone call, a one-time code delivered by a smartphone app, or perhaps (and least likely) a code delivered via a hardware token, similar to the Battle.net Authenticator.
Evernote isn’t the first company to be taking advantage of two-factor authentication. Like I mentioned above, Battle.net has its own Authenticator that players can purchase to further protect their accounts. There is also a Battle.net authenticator app available for free on Android and iOS. The authenticator was a security feature added after many player accounts were hacked resulting in many valuable in-game items being lost. Dropbox also implemented a two-factor authentication feature when they had a security breach that compromised all of its users’ emails.
There is no specific date as to when two-factor authentication will find its way to Evernote’s services, but it’s a step in the right direction. Security officials stated that Evernote used the MD5 cryptographic algorithm to hash its passwords, but it turns out that that algorithm is considered to be a terrible choice for security. If they had two-factor authentication, Evernote would still have been hacked, but at least its users’ account information would have been protected.
[via Android Community]
Evernote will implement two-factor authentication soon is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
If you thought Intel’s plans for a viewer-watching Web TV box were intrusive, you might want to bury your face in your hands (and leave it there permanently) after seeing Fraunhofer‘s clever and creepy SHORE facial ID system. On show at CeBIT, SHORE can not only identify a face in a still image or real-time video stream, but figure out gender, age, and even what mood the person is in: happy, surprised, angry, or sad. Meanwhile, while Intel’s home entertainment tracking system is already mired in controversy, Fraunhofer tells us commercial implementations of SHORE are already out in the wild.
In Fraunhofer’s demo, a computer running SHORE was able to identify and classify multiple people walking in and out of frame, with the results of the analysis floated over each person on a wall display. The measurements happen almost instantaneously – the research institute says SHORE can identify a face at 107.5fps if it’s directly facing the camera, while full analysis including facial expression detection is at 45.5fps – and the system can handle head tilts of +/- 60-degrees and head rotation of +/- 90-degrees.
So far so good, but it’s the measurements not the identification which is what makes SHORE so impressive. Fraunhofer claims a 91.5-percent accuracy rate on face detection and a 94.3-percent accuracy rate on gender detection: by identifying the face, the eyes, nose, and mouth, and the rest of the facial shape, it can decide how happy or sad, angry or surprised they are. The extent of those criteria are displayed on red bars: when we smiled, it accurately picked up on that, while widening our eyes boosted our “surprised” rating.
More patchy was the age detection, which gives an estimate with a degree of confidence (so, for instance, SHORE could decide you’re 38, with a range of +/- 8-years). That proved susceptible to being confused by the ambient lighting: with strong ceiling lights, for instance, those wearing glasses were often confused for someone much older, because the shadows of the glasses frames on their cheeks were mistaken for evidence of old age.
Nonetheless, it’s a mighty impressive system in all, not least because of the incredibly low minimum specifications. Fraunhofer says SHORE will run on a single core of an Intel Core 2 Duo 6420 processor, under Windows XP, and with facial detection from anything down to an 8 x 8 pixel image (though you won’t get the more complex analysis). It’ll also run on mobile devices, such as smartphones, and can either be a standalone system or integrated into another, more complex monitoring package.
That flexibility – and the fact that Fraunhofer is licensing out the technology together with the offer of customizing it depending on client need – means the possibilities for implementation are far greater than, say, Intel’s proposed advertising tailoring on the Web TV box. Market research is an obvious one, for instance a camera above a store window display to track reactions of those glancing in, as well as customizing advertising playlists depending on the demographics of those watching. Car dashboards could monitor drivers and ensure they were alert and calm, as well as better track which person was giving which spoken command.
In hospitals, the degree of pain to which patients are suffering could be monitored autonomously, helping the more efficient use of painkillers (and avoiding unnecessary suffering). Augmented reality games are another possibility, but Fraunhofer is also keen on the idea of using the SHORE technology to enhance “virtual actors” and “intelligent agents” for customer services and entertainment, reacting to those they are talking to, behaving appropriately for their mood, and even mimicking that mood themselves. In fact, Fraunhofer had a robotic head which, using a camera in the forehead, could replicate the viewer’s expressions with animated eyes, mouth, and other elements.
Behind the scenes, the magic is in the huge amount of education Fraunhofer has given the system, teaching it to recognize common schema of mood and reaction from thousands of images of expressions. Called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) it allows the computer to quickly calculate what each viewer is showing in a matter of milliseconds. That’s even if there are dozens of people in the frame, too; Fraunhofer showed the camera a print out covered in face thumbnails – over a hundred of them, packed tightly together – and SHORE spotted them all and ran its mood analysis. The system has short-term memory, too; Fraunhofer tells us that faces aren’t stored long-term, but there is a shorter-term caching system which can spot if a face was in-frame very recently, and collate all the data from each sighting. Each gets a temporary ID code, and a timer to show how long they were attentive for.
Perhaps most alarming is the fact that this isn’t a simple piece of prescient, Minority Report-style research: SHORE is already out in the wild. Fraunhofer couldn’t tell us all of its clients, but did confirm that market research firm GFK is using SHORE for its consumer surveys. There, participants simply allow the standard webcam on their computer to feed their expressions back to the server, as they watch a series of commercials or other content. Meanwhile, there are SHORE installations already watching passers-by from within store display windows, though Fraunhofer wouldn’t be pressed on which retailers exactly are using it.
Meanwhile, you can try it for yourself. Fraunhofer offers a free trial version of SHORE to download, as a proof of concept, which you can find here. Those particularly paranoid might prefer to spend their time knitting balaclavas, however, as the possibility that you’re being watched, analyzed, and generally figured out by a machine running something like SHORE is growing every day.
Forget creepy Intel: SHORE unlocks your face at a glance, and it’s already in use is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
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