Washington Might Crack Down On Mobile Bidstream Data
November 4, 2020
Mobile devices siphon data from users and sell the data to third parties, mostly ad companies, to make a profit. The bidstream is mobile’s dirty secret that everyone knows about and the federal government might finally do something to protect consumers’ privacy says The Drum: “Mobile’s Dirty Little Data Secret Under Washington’s Microscope.”
“Bidstream” is the mobile industry jargon used for data mobile services collect from users then sell. The data is sold to advertisers who bid on ad space in real time exchange for targeted ads. Bidstream data could include demographics, personal hobbies and (even more alarmingly) real time coordinates for consumers’ current location.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) executive vice president Dave Grimaldi stated that his organization has recently communicated a hundred times more with the federal government about the bidstream than the past two months. There are politicians worried that the bidstream could not only violated privacy, but could lead to deceptive business tactics (and maybe violent actions). There are currently no industry standards or rules from the IAB or the Mobile Marketing Association against bidstreams.
In June 2020, Mobilewalla released demographic information about BLM protestors under the guise of data analysis, while politicians called in surveillance. They want to know if Mobilewalla’s analysis along with the midstream violate the FTC act:
“The FTC won’t say whether it is probing bidstream data gathering, but its chairman did respond to lawmakers. ‘In order to fully address the concerns mentioned in your letter,’ wrote FTC Chairman Joseph Simons in a letter to Wyden obtained by The Drum, ‘we need a new federal privacy law, enforceable by the FTC, that gives us authority to seek civil penalties for first-time violations and jurisdiction over non-profits and common carriers.’… In questions sent separately to Mobilewalla, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and other legislators asked the company to provide details of its “disturbing” use of bidstream data.‘Mobilewalla has and will respond to any request received from Congress or the FTC,’ a Mobilewalla spokesperson tells The Drum, declining to provide further detail.”
Those mobile phones are handy dandy gizmos, aren’t they?
Whitney Grace, November 4, 2020
The Amazon Digital Zeus: One Bezosverse with Many Clouds
November 3, 2020
I read “AWS Hearts Multi-Cloud? It’s Gonna Happen” because of the words “hearts” and “gonna.” Interesting. The main point of the write up is that Amazon has a digital planet. There will be one sky over the planet, and Amazon will provide the air conditioning and heating to make life comfortable.
The write up includes some nifty lingo; for example:
- Any cloud
- Cross cloud
- Multi cloud
- Poly cloud.
Consultants repurposing themselves from failed Covid and pandemic gigs are in business. The opportunities for analyses, studies, and reports are plentiful.
The write up contains an interesting factoid, which I have not been able to verify. Here it is in its naked glory:
In fact, when we [Cloud Irregular] surveyed 26,000 cloud builders this summer at A Cloud Guru, about 75% of them identified AWS as their company’s primary cloud. But basically the same number said they also have some workloads running on Azure or GCP. Again, nobody is doing this as a strategic choice, it’s just reality. 3 out of 4 cloud shops are cheating on AWS.
That is a heck of a sample: 26,000 developers!
Amazon wants to be the center of the Bezosverse, which makes sense from Mr. Bezos’ point of view I assume. The write up notes:
They are the velociraptors of cloud, and as long as they are willing to cannibalize their own offerings in the pursuit of customer value, they will remain hard to beat.
But is the future secure for the Bezosverse? The write up concludes with this Delphic observation:
“Multi-cloud is the killer value prop AWS just can’t compete with” is no longer the only safe bet in startup land. Every dinosaur in the virtual re:Invent expo hall is just asking to get hit with an asteroid. Brace for impact.
I am braced.
Stephen E Arnold, November 3, 2020
The European Competition Commission Goes for the Throat
November 3, 2020
I wanted to note the October 30, 3030, Reuters’ story “Online Giants Will Have to Open Ad Archives to EU Antitrust Regulators.” At last regulators are taking steps to gain access to the systems and methods used by Google and other online ad giants. The news story helps cement Margrethe Vestager as someone who uses her position to do more than posture. Also, the news story points out that there is a research agency called Algorithm Watch.
The problem is that the companies asked to provide information have legal options. The delays are likely to slow the regulators’ quest for data. If sufficient time goes by, the landscape can be reworked. Internet time is different from regulators’ time.
There is a counter point. Navigate to “Monopoly Power Is Less Dangerous Today Than in Past.” The argument set forth in this Telegraph Herald write up is unlikely to have a significant impact on the good ship SS Margrethe.
Stephen E Arnold, November 3, 2020
Germany Raids Spyware Firm FinFisher
November 3, 2020
Authorities in Germany have acted on suspicions that spyware firm FinFisher, based in Munich, illegally sold its software to the Turkish government. It is believed that regime used the tools to spy on anti-government protesters in 2017. The independent Turkish news site Ahval summarizes the raid and the accusations in, “Spyware Company that Allegedly Sold Spyware to Turkey Raided by German Police.” We’re told:
“Germany’s Customs Investigation Bureau (ZKA) searched 15 properties last week, both in Germany and other countries. Public prosecutors told German media that directors and employees of FinFisher and other companies were being investigated. The investigation follows complaints filed by NGOs Reporters Without Borders, Netzpolitik.org, the Society for Civil Rights (Gesellschafft für Freiheitsrechte, GFF) and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. The NGOs believe that a spyware product used in 2017 to target anti-government protesters in Turkey was FinFisher’s FinSpy. Germany’s Economy Ministry has issued no new permits for spyware since 2015, while the software in question was written in 2016, meaning that if it was used, it must have been exported in violation of government license restrictions.”
Activist group CitizenLab asserts the Turkish government spread the spyware to protesters through Twitter accounts. These accounts, we’re told, masqueraded as sources of information about upcoming protests. As far back as 2011, FinFisher was suspected of supplying regimes in the Middle East with spyware to track Arab Spring protestors. The software has since been found in use by several authoritarian governments, including Bahrain, Ethiopia, and he UAE. Just this September, Amnesty International reported FinFisher’s spyware was being used by Egypt. For its part, of course, the company denies making any sales to countries not approved by German law. We shall see what the investigation turns up.
Cynthia Murrell, November 3, 2020
Confidence in US Education: 46 Companies Have Doubts
November 3, 2020
I read “Top 48 US Companies Files Legal Challenge to Block H-1B Visa Changes.” The write up states:
Nearly 46 leading US companies and business organizations, including tech giants Apple, Google, Twitter and Facebook, representing and working with key sectors of the US economy, have filed an amicus brief that supports a legal challenge to block upcoming rule changes to H-1B visa eligibility.
Another interesting factoid:
The companies said that the new DHS rules will dramatically reduce US businesses’ ability to hire these skilled foreign workers—one senior DHS official estimated that they will render ineligible more than one-third of petitions for H-1B visas.
What does this suggest about the flow of talent from the US education system? How are those online classes working out?
Stephen E Arnold, November 3, 2020
DarkCyber for November 3, 2020, Now Available
November 3, 2020
The November 3, 2020, DarkCyber video news program contains five stories. You are able to view the program at this YouTube location. The first is a report about the FinFisher raids conducted by German and other European enforcement officials. FinFisher allegedly produces and sells policeware to government agencies. An alleged failure in following German government procedures contributed to the multi-country action. The second story describes the free services of Social Search. This online service allows a user to obtain information gleaned from a number of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Test queries run by the DarkCyber research team revealed that interesting information can be obtained from this free service. Also referenced is a consumer mobile phone surveillance tool. Used together, the type of insights available from specialized services developers becomes evident. The third story points to a new book by a Harvard professor. The book reveals the origin of the concept of investigative software, what DarkCyber calls policeware. The fourth story provides additional information about the diffusion of digital currencies into the “regular” Web. What was just two years ago a specialized payment mechanism has moved into the mainstream. No Tor or other obfuscation software required. The final story mentions a Chinese innovation. The truck-mounted tube launcher can release a swarm of drones simultaneously. How does one deal with a swarm of drones? DarkCyber answers this question with information about the Drone Bullet. DarkCyber is produced by Stephen E Arnold, publisher of Beyond Search, a free Web log, and the author of Dark Web Notebook and CyberOSINT.
Kenny Toth, November 3, 2020
BERT: It Lives
November 2, 2020
I wrote about good old BERT before.
I was impressed with the indexing and context cues in BERT. The acronym does not refer to the interesting cartoon character. This BERT is Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. If you want more information about this approach to making sense of text, just navigate to the somewhat turtle like Stanford University site and retrieve the 35 page PDF.
BERT popped up again in a somewhat unusual search engine optimization context (obviously recognized by Google’s system at least seven percent of the time): “Could Google Passage Indexing Be Leveraging BERT?”
I worked through the write up twice. It was, one might say, somewhat challenging to understand. I think I figured it out:
Google is trying to index the context in which an “answer” to a user’s query resides. Via Google parsing magic, the answer may be presented to the lucky user.
I pulled out several gems from the article which is designed to be converted into manipulations to fool Google’s indexing system. SEO is focused on eroding relevance to make a page appear in a Google search result list whether the content answers the user’s query or not.
The gems:
- BERT does not always mean the ‘BERT’. Ah, ha. A paradox. That’s helpful.
- Former Verity and Yahoo search wizard Prabhakar Raghavan allegedly said: “Today we’re excited to share that BERT is now used in almost every query in English, helping you get higher quality results for your questions.” And what percentage of Google queries is “almost every”? And what percentage of Google queries are in English? Neither the Googler nor the author of the article answer these questions.
- It’s called passage indexing, but not as we know it. The “passage indexing” announcement caused some confusion in the SEO community with several interpreting the change initially as an “indexing” one. Confusion. No kidding?
- And how about this statement about “almost every”? “Whilst only 7% of queries will be impacted in initial roll-out, further expansion of this new passage indexing system could have much bigger connotations than one might first suspect. Without exaggeration, once you begin to explore the literature from the past year in natural language research, you become aware this change, whilst relatively insignificant at first (because it will only impact 7% of queries after all), could have potential to actually change how search ranking works overall going forward.”
That’s about it because the contradictions and fascinating logic of the article have stressed my 76 year old brain’s remaining neurons. The write up concludes with this statement:
Whilst there are currently limitations for BERT in long documents, passages seem an ideal place to start toward a new ‘intent-detection’ led search. This is particularly so, when search engines begin to ‘Augment Knowledge’ from queries and connections to knowledge bases and repositories outside of standard search, and there is much work in this space ongoing currently. But that is for another article.
Plus, there’s a list of references. Oh, did I mention that this essay/article in its baffling wonderfulness is only 15,000 words long. Another article? Super.
Stephen E Arnold, November 2, 2020
What Does Disappearing Mean?
November 2, 2020
Do messages disappear? A user may not be able to view them, but is it possible that those messages reside in a server, indexed, and ready to analyze? “WhatsApp Disappearing Messages Coming Soon: Everything Explained” does not pursue this line of thinking. The write up states:
You should use disappearing messages only with trusted individuals and groups because the recipient can still take screenshots, forward, or copy disappearing messages before they disappear. Also, if you share a photo, video, or document using disappearing messages, it’ll get deleted from the chat window; if the receiver has auto-download turned on, it’ll be saved to their device.
The article points out: “It’s not a foolproof solution for sharing secrets over the instant messaging platform.”
What if Facebook retains these data? What if these disappearing chats include details about digital currency transactions? How likely is it that certain governments will curtail Facebook’s most recent initiative? Some regulators and enforcement authorities may find value in Facebook’s allegedly deleted messages. With enough value, Facebook is unlikely to explain what “disappearing” means.
What is the solution? Stop using Facebook? No problem.
Stephen E Arnold, November 2, 2020
The Beeb and Misinformation: But Not Today. Of Course Not
November 2, 2020
With the chatter about misinformation buzzing about, I found “BBC Apologizes for Using Fake Bank Statements to Land Famous Princess Diana Interview” interesting. If the story is accurate (but who knows these days) a “real” journalist jimmied some documents and was able to speak directly with Princess Diana. The story included this comment:
“Suggesting that mocked-up documents were genuine was wrong then and it’s wrong now; the BBC of today is happy to apologise for this. The BBC’s editorial processes are now even tougher and this would not happen today,” a statement from a BBC spokesperson sent to The Post said.
Righto. Such an incident “would not happen today.” That’s good to know. The only hitch is that the allegation of fancy dancing exists.
Stephen E Arnold, November 2, 2020
India Asks an Existential Question about Google
November 2, 2020
I noted an article on the India TV News called “Isn’t Google Violating Users’ Fundamental Rights by Controlling Choices? Parliamentary Panel Asks.” The write up states:
A parliamentary panel on Thursday [October 29, 2020] questioned the “neutrality” of Google when it is engaged in both advertising and content, and asked was it not violating the fundamental rights of users by “controlling” their choices. Top executives of the search engine appeared before the Joint Committee of Parliament on the Personal Data Protection Bill and responded to queries related to data security.
The article continued:
During the meeting, MPs cutting across party lines asked how can Google be a “neutral platform” when it is engaged in both advertising and content, and how is it possible that it does not give “preferential treatment” to some advertisers in search results, sources said. Some members also posed questions about whether data being processed and stored in the country of origin or somewhere outside, sources said. Noting that Google has a wider presence and available on different forms on the web, some members said it “has the power to affect the choices of its users” and that needs to be checked.
The story did not speculate about the answer to this question. I am not sure if students of Søren Kierkegaard will be enlisted to assist in determining the answer about fundamental rights, the violation thereof, and related issues.
Stephen E Arnold, November 3, 2020
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