I'm a father of 14 pursuing a high quality of life for my family.
The FTC’s action “signals to companies you really have to do some due diligence when you’re adopting an AI system,” said Ben Winters, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group.
… Issuing the order is just another way that the FTC is lapping Congress on AI regulatory issues, said Winters.
“But they can only do so much,” he said. “They can only take it case by case. Legislation is what’s needed to codify some of these things.”
Read more here.
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It is funny to write something like that. For that matter, it is funny to write at all. On one of Dad’s scavenger trips, he came across a stack of composition books, pens, and pencils in a dumpster. He brought them all home and told me to start a diary. Back in normal times, seven months ago before the power quit, I would have just looked up on my phone ‘What is a diary?’
With the power gone, so too went the internet. So I asked him, ‘What is a Diary?’ He gave me a funny look, blinked a few times, shook his head, and said it was a journal to keep track of daily things, important events, and my thoughts and feelings at the time. I should write it as if I was writing a dear friend.
So, here I am, Diary. Sitting in my cold bedroom with my stuffed bear, wearing socks, slippers, sweatpants, a winter hat, and a heavy sweater.
Probably should back up and explain the reason for all that.
Let me start over.
It’s me, Jessica.
Seeing as how this is the first time I am writing you, I will let you know what has happened over the past seven months and even some things before.
About this time last year, Dad got what he called a great Christmas surprise gift: a promotion to management. I know what a promotion is, but I was not too sure about the ‘management’ part as he was describing it. Sounded like more of a headache ‘managing’ that many people, meetings both in person and on Zoom.
But it came with a big pay raise. Two months later, we moved from our tiny, crappy apartment across from the subway tracks to a small but very nice house in the ‘sub-burbs.’ Mom and Dad were very excited about it. I guess it is nice but older. Dad said it was a 1950s-era starter home. My room is bigger. We have a lawn and backyard with woods behind it. But it took me about a month to get used to the . . . quiet. It is deafening! No subway trains running till late at night. No police sirens. No trucks or cars driving by. No gunshots from time to time. I mean, I can hear the wind outside my window right now.
School was different, too. It was much nicer and clean, and everything seemed new. Wearing a uniform was different. I actually kinda liked it. No thinking of what I wanted to wear to school. …
In comments to the Federal Trade Commission, EPIC commended the FTC for taking enforcement action against prison communications company Global Tel*Link (GTL, now known as ViaPath) for unfair and deceptive trade practices related to a 2020 data breach exposing the personal information of hundreds of thousands of incarcerated persons and their families, friends, lawyers, and other contacts, as well as to the company’s subsequent further misconduct.
GTL put more than 600,000 unique individuals’ personally identifiable information, including such sensitive information as usernames or email addresses in combination with passwords, home addresses, driver’s license numbers, passport numbers, location information, and information about race, religion and whether the individual is transgender. It also included tens of thousands of grievances sent by incarcerated consumers to facilities, as well as tens of thousands of messages exchanged between incarcerated and non-incarcerated users, which sometimes contained financial information and Social Security numbers. Numerous consumers reported fraudulent transactions on their credit card after the breach.
Despite this, after the incident GTL continued to represent that it had never experienced a breach, including in its Request for Proposal (RFP) responses to contract opportunities with other facilities. GTL did not provide notice of the breach to consumers for approximately nine months and when it did, it notified fewer than eight percent of impacted consumers. GTL additionally represented that consumer payment and medical information was not affected when it knew that to be false.
EPIC encouraged the FTC to approve the proposed consent order, praised the Commission for its attention to harms to incarcerated persons and their families, and encouraged the FTC “to work with the FCC to rein in the litany of harmful data practices in the prison telecommunications industry and reduce costs for consumers forced to use companies like GTL to communicate with their loved ones.”
Additionally and specifically, EPIC praised the FTC’s imposition of technical controls and data retention limits, but noted that GTL should not be permitted to retain data for its intelligence services offerings. EPIC also praised the proposed consent order’s requirement that GTL facilitate communications between incarcerated persons and credit monitoring services, but EPIC urged the FTC to further tailor its remedies to include assistance with resolving credit report disputes and providing support in multiple languages.
EPIC regularly files comments in response to proposed FTC consent orders and complaints regarding business practices that violate privacy rights. Additionally, EPIC advocates for stronger consumer protection safeguards in the prison communications context.
“As we watch TV, our TVs watch us,” said Sara Geoghegan, a consumer privacy advocate and legal counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Smart TVs collect tons of information.”
Geoghegan said the amount of data each TV manufacturer collects can often be opaque, but once a customer sets up their smart TV, viewing habits, location, and potentially more personal data are collected and shared — unless that customer adjusts the device’s security settings.
…Not everyone is happy with the idea that the device mounted on your wall can gather intel.
Geoghegan argued that many people may be uncomfortable learning that a spying tool was one of the primary reasons their new flatscreen was on sale for $70.
“I think when you’re browsing your television, you don’t expect that these kinds of intimate things that are just happening inside your home will be used in this way to profile you, and sell you things,” Geoghegan said.
“The monetization of our personal information is a problem that we should be concerned about.”
Read more here.
Whether the ban will go into effect will depend on determinations over the FTC’s authority. Meta responded to the proposal by calling the move a “political stunt” that usurps the authority of Congress. However, a coalition including the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy later sent a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan outlining the ways the Commission is able to modify its 2020 privacy order with Meta. “The FTC’s impetus to secure limitations on minors’ data reflects minor’s unique vulnerability to Meta’s repeated violations of the law, and is well-founded under the Commission’s authority,” the statement read.
Meta and Google have also been accused of COPPA violations by outside groups. In 2019, a coalition including Common Sense Media and the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the FTC using information revealed by a class action lawsuit. The suit, which was settled in 2016, alleged that Meta created a system that “encouraged children to make unknowing and unauthorized credit card purchases” for games and “set up a labyrinthine complaint system to deter refund requests.” And as recently as August, a coalition of parental rights groups urged the FTC to look into YouTube for allegedly still serving up personalized ads on its “made for kids” videos. The FTC has not officially investigated either matter.
Read more here.
The Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with Rite Aid today over the pharmacy’s discriminatory use of facial recognition technology in its stores. Between 2012 and 2020, Rite Aid deployed facial recognition surveillance systems to identify individuals who may be shoplifting—yet did so without assessing the accuracy or bias of the technology. Rite Aid also used facial recognition technology disproportionately in stores in plurality non-white neighborhoods.
While the use of facial recognition surveillance can be harmful in any context, Rite Aid failed to implement even the most basic safeguards, validation studies, or trainings for employees required to “enforce” the match alerts issued by the system. As a result, “Rite Aid employees recorded thousands of false positive match alerts between December 2019 and July 2020,” the FTC explained.
In addition to placing a 5-year ban on Rite Aid’s use of facial recognition, the settlement requires the company to delete any images of consumers collected with the technology and any algorithms developed using such images. Rite Aid must notify consumers when their biometric information is processed by a surveillance system in the future or any action is taken affecting them because of such a system. The company is also required to implement strong data security and provenance practices.
“This is a groundbreaking case, a major stride for privacy and civil rights, and hopefully just the beginning of a trend,” EPIC Director of Litigation John Davison said. “Rite Aid engaged in an appalling program of surveillance, deploying an untested and discriminatory facial recognition system against its own customers. The result was sadly predictable: thousands of misidentifications that disproportionately affected Black, Asian, and Latino customers, some of which led to humiliating searches and store ejections. But it’s important to note that Rite Aid isn’t alone. Businesses routinely use unproven algorithms and snake oil surveillance tools to screen consumers, often in secret. The FTC is right to crack down on these practices, and businesses would be wise to take note. Algorithmic lawlessness is not an option anymore.”
“Companies should not be able to collect data, break the law, and continue to profit from it. Deletion of both all data collected as part of this illegal operation as well as any algorithms created using that data is the right decision by the Commission and should create a warning to companies considering irresponsible use. This enforcement order institutes essential practices such as meaningful notice, independent third-party assessments, and commonsense data deletion practices,” EPIC Senior Counsel Ben Winters said.
Facial recognition systems have been shown to produce biased and inaccurate results that disproportionately affect non-white populations, particularly Black people. Although the FTC did not disclose the particular vendors used by Rite Aid, a 2019 National Institute of Standards and Technology study analyzing a majority of industry models found the highest rates of false positives were for Black women.
Due to this disparate impact and the inherent threats the technology poses to privacy and autonomy, EPIC has consistently advocated to ban facial recognition.
Senior Counsel…
“It makes perfect sense for California to be taking that next step and requiring browsers to include this by default,” said John Davisson, director of litigation and senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, adding that the strongest privacy protections would target businesses, instead of placing the responsibility on consumers to protect their own data.
“It’s really making good on the promise of the CPPA to provide this universal mechanism [to opt-out]. While the legislation has only just been proposed, if it continues to advance, there is a good possibility companies will fight it. But, Davisson said, companies like Google and Microsoft and others with ad exchanges claim that consumers really want targeted advertising, so, by their own logic, the opt-out should not be a threat to their business model.
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When it comes to preparation and self-sufficiency, the pinnacle for some folks is living off-grid. “Off-grid” meaning off the societal grid and all of its attendant utilities.
a barn with eroded ground in front during winter
You won’t be dependent on anyone else to supply you with electricity, water, sanitation, and in some cases even food. It can be intimidating, that’s for sure, but living this sort of radically self-reliant lifestyle was the norm for much of human history around the globe.
But today, most preppers are saving up for a sort of off-grid retirement; they have a monetary figure in mind that will allow them to extricate themselves from society and start over anew living off-grid more or less as they always have.
But do you really need that much money to go off-grid? Heck, do you need money at all if you can provide everything you need to live? Is it out of the question to suggest that it might be possible to live off-grid without needing any money at all?
Believe it or not, it is. Often very difficult and highly laborious, yes, but still genuinely possible, even today. I’ll tell you how in the rest of this article…
First, we’ve got to get down to brass tacks. Is it even possible to survive in the modern world without money? The old cliché says that money makes the world go round, and I don’t know about you, but I can say with some certainty that that has never felt more true for me.
From mortgage payments and rent to ever-skyrocketing grocery bills, fuel costs, fees, taxes and all the rest. Seems like if you stop paying for one thing or another your life starts to fall apart, or even get tossed in jail!
We don’t need to go into all that; those are subjects for other articles, including some that I’ve already covered. The point is that you truly don’t need money to live. You need survival necessities to live.
Understanding this fundamental shift in thinking is essential if you’re going to make the transition to living off-grid at all, and especially if you’re going to do it without spending any money whatsoever.
Now, it might be more gratifying to get straight to a list of things that can help you live free or dirt cheap.
Not only is that not going to set you up for success, but that doesn’t even come close to preparing you for the totality of the lifestyle change you are about to undergo. But I can fix that.
Indulge me, keep reading, and I promise we’ll get down to the nuts and bolts of actually living a moneyless off-grid life soon enough.
When I talk about the necessities, or fundamentals, of survival what am I talking about? I’m talking about the things you need to keep…
But others are still skeptical. Sara Geoghegan, counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said she thinks the changes Google outlined were “long overdue.” She remains wary of Google’s commitment to keeping people’s sensitive location data safe.
“The devil is in the details, and it remains to be seen whether Google’s implementation stands up to the commitments,” she said. “Unfortunately, Google has repeatedly shown that we can’t trust the company’s pinkie promises to protect privacy when it comes to their invasive data practices.”
Read more here.
On December 14, EPIC, Public Knowledge, Consumer Federation of America, and Demand Progress Education Fund submitted comments to the Federal Communications Commission applauding the agency’s proposal to reclassify broadband providers as common carriers subject to Title II of the Communications Act. The coalition emphasized the current harms and persistent risks suffered by consumers at the hands of their internet service providers (ISPs), and outlined three avenues of enforcement and rulemaking authority that would be available to the FCC if the agency moves forward with its proposal to apply Title II to broadband providers. The groups also urged the Commission to explicitly state that its Title II authority would not preempt state privacy and consumer protection laws, called on the FCC to immediately commence a consumer privacy and data security rulemaking, and suggested updates to the Commission’s transparency rule in line with EPIC’s comments about broadband nutrition labels and cybersecurity IoT labels.
EPIC has long advocated for consumer privacy protections in broadband services and regularly files comments with the FCC.
