Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Last week, Walmart made headlines with a claim that new weight loss drugs might be making people buy less food. Walmart US CEO John Furner told Bloomberg that people taking Wegovy, Ozempic, and similar drugs showed a “slight change” in their purchasing habits: “just less units, slightly less calories.” How does Walmart know this? Because,…
“Anonymised” data lies at the core of everything from modern medical research to personalised recommendations and modern AI techniques. Unfortunately, according to a paper, successfully anonymising data is practically impossible for any complex dataset. An anonymised dataset is supposed to have had all personally identifiable information removed from it, while retaining a core of useful…
Credit…Illustration by Derek Brahney May 9, 2017 Recently I handed over the keys to my email account to a service that promised to turn my spam-bloated inbox into a sparkling model of efficiency in just a few clicks. Unroll.me’s method of instant unsubscribing from newsletters and junk mail was “trusted by millions of happy users,”…
Americans at the lower end of the economic ladder suffer from an ever-growing privacy divide, impacting more than just their personal dignity and autonomy. In 1969, a woman named Barbara James walked into a neighborhood legal services office in New York City in search of help to fight the city’s home visit policy. Her case…
The United States has no national privacy law. What it has instead is a laissez-faire policy that allows businesses and governments to harvest all manner of data and use it in any way they choose. While many Americans are aware of the harm caused by social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, they are generally…
How Shady Companies Guess Your Religion, Sexual Orientation, and Mental Health And sell that data to the highest bidder. Photo illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo/Slate. Photo by ISerg/Getty Images Plus. Millions of Americans were using telehealth company and prescription drug provider GoodRx—yet probably didn’t know that it was sharing their prescription medications and health conditions with…
A lot of the—and I can’t believe I need to use this term, but there really is no other way to phrase it—critics of privacy have this tendency to see privacy only through the lens of ‘threat’. As the threat has built and they can’t reconcile their self-image with popular and consistent interest in privacy…
The subject of online anonymity came up at a house party a few weeks back. One of the people there—a friend I’d known for years—said he couldn’t get over the fact that a privacy reporter like me would use their full name on any social site. I told him that hiding behind an online…
The Standards Council of Canada has approved an IT-related standard which would eliminate new data silos and copies when organizations adopt or build new applications, thus apparently preventing any data copies being made with new applications. However, last-time integration could bring in legacy data via copies. The CAN/CIOSC 100-9, Data governance – Part 9: Zero-Copy…
from the “anonymized”-doesn’t-mean-anonymous dept We’ve noted for a very long while how most of the explanations that corporations use to insist that your privacy is protected are effectively worthless. For example, corporations will routinely inform you that it’s no big deal that they’re over-collecting and selling access to your browsing or location data to any…