Privacy

Dated Mar 21, 2020; last modified on Sun, 14 Mar 2021

What is privacy, exactly? Users being in control of their data? I remember a time when data was the new oil.

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Oct 4, 2021	»	Journal Reviews on Fairness 8 min; updated Jun 7, 2026 Meta Instead of changing the data or learners in multiple ways and then see if fairness improves, postulate that the root causes of bias are the prior decisions that generated the training data. These affect (a) what data was selected, and (b) the labels assigned to the examples. They propose the \(\text{Fair-SMOTE}\) (Fair Synthetic Minority Over Sampling Technique) algorithm which (1) removes biased labels (via situation testing: if the model’s prediction for a data point changes once all of the data points' protected attributes are flipped, then that label is biased and the data point is discarded), and (2) rebalances internal distributions such that based on a protected attribute, examples are equal in both positive and negative classes. The method is just as effective in reducing bias as prior approaches, and its models achieve higher recall and F1 performance. Furthermore, \(\text{Fair-SMOTE}\) can simultaneously reduce bias for more than one protected attribute. ...
Feb 14, 2020	»	Signal Is Finally Bringing Its Secure Messaging To the Masses 3 min; updated May 31, 2026 Signal Is Finally Bringing Its Secure Messaging To the Masses. Andy Greenberg. www.wired.com . it.slashdot.org . news.ycombinator.com . Feb 14, 2020. Attracting the Masses Brian Acton (WhatsApp cofounder) injected $50m into the Signal Foundation, allowing them to grow from 3 to 50 full-timers. You’d think that at Signal’s dominance, getting $$$ shouldn’t be a problem. But VCs expect a multiple return and Signal doesn’t look like it will monetize soon. ...
Apr 10, 2019	»	Online Advertising 5 min; updated May 8, 2026 Market Snapshot In 2025, the online advertising marketing size was ~500B. Notables: North America has the largest revenue share of over 34%. By platform, mobile leads at 59% of revenue share. The top 3 are: Google ($214B), Meta ($196B), and Amazon ($68B) eMarket’s digital ads projection for 2026. Meta is expected to surpass Google for the first time. Didn’t expect to see MSFT so low, and even even, signficantly buoyed by LinkedIn. Also, Pinterest over Reddit is surprising. ...
Apr 16, 2018	»	An Apology for the Internet - How It Went Wrong [Intelligencer] 2 min; updated Sep 5, 2022 An Apology for the Internet - How It Went Wrong. Noah Kulwin. nymag.com . Apr 16, 2018. Start with hippie good intentions. A generation embracing new technology as a tool to transform the world for good. Can Duruk: You were going to Facebook not to work but to make the world more open and connected. Mix in capitalism on steroids. To save the world, you first need to take it over. Turns out the scale and power was also good for making money. ...
Sep 18, 2018	»	On DNA Testing 3 min; updated Sep 5, 2022 The human genome has sequences of nucleotide base pairs that are repeated over and over again. At each locus of interest, a person has two sets of repeats inherited from each parent. Each possible difference at a locus is an allele. The combinations of the possible differences at multiple loci form a DNA profile that can be used to tie suspects to a crime scene. The Accuracy of DNA Testing is Wanting 74/108 crime labs erroneously incriminated a suspect during a mock study. The reported match statistic for whether the match was coincidental varied over 100 trillion-fold. ...
Jan 25, 2019	»	Facebook Monetizing Encrypted Messaging by Analyzing Metadata [Twitter] 1 min; updated Sep 5, 2022 Facebook Monetizing Encrypted Messaging by Analyzing Metadata. @SarahJamieLewis. twitter.com . Jan 25, 2019. Claim: FB will track relationships and social groups and make that information accessible to law enforcement. FB is a corporation that needs to make money; surveillance makes them money. Contention: Actual privacy and security must protect metadata as well as content. Cwtch by OpenPrivacy aims to minimize metadata exposed by apps used. It’s built on Tor. Challenges: message latency, server reliability & discovery, (online) first contact problem for key exchange.
Jan 29, 2020	»	Facebook to Pay $550 Million to Settle Facial Recognition Suit 1 min; updated Sep 5, 2022 Facebook to Pay $550 Million to Settle Facial Recognition Suit. Natasha Singer; Mike Isaac. www.nytimes.com . Jan 29, 2020. Illinois’ biometric privacy law requires companies to obtain written permission before collecting a person’s biometrics. Residents have the right to sue for up to $5,000 per violation. Facebook’s Tag Suggestions harvested facial data without getting written consent nor telling Illinois users for how long the data would be kept. ...
Apr 29, 2020	»	Free Speech in Cyberspace 6 min; updated Sep 5, 2022 Should Platforms Be Neutral? Facebook banned praise, support and representation of white nationalism and separatism, because the two concepts cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups. Furthermore, people that search for related terms will have “Life After Hate” suggested to them. Part of me is uncomfortable. Sure, Facebook is trying to do the right thing here. What if Facebook was replaced by some tyrannical government that censors opposition? ...
May 6, 2020	»	COVID-19 3 min; updated Sep 5, 2022 Contact Tracing “Apps” in this context means contact tracing apps released by public health authorities to do contact tracing. The APIs are limited to them. Big Picture Release APIs to enable apps to interoperate between Android and iOS devices. Bluetooth-based contact tracing baked into Android and iOS, such that no app is needed for broadcasting/listening. This ensures broad adoption, but will be on an opt-in basis. Interesting debate for privacy, ethics and public health. Public health officials have a duty to warn, but patients risk stigma. ...
Jan 4, 2021	»	Privacy on the Web 2 min; updated Sep 5, 2022 One can use `curl -v <url>` to see all of the redirections and cookies set. found that generating a tiny URL for Zoom links gives a URL that first goes to redirect.viglink.com. I tried this on https://tinyurl.com/yyte6pqv , which points to https://www.c13u.com/socioeconomics/2020-11-21-experiments-in-social-economics/ , but didn’t observe any 3rd party cookies. `tinyurl.com` did set a cookie, but that’s probably expected. proposes Federated Learning of Cohorts, which aims to enable ad-targeting based on people’s general browsing interest without exposing the exact browsing history. ...
Jun 1, 2010	»	Myths and Fallacies of 'Personally Identifiable Information' 3 min; updated Sep 5, 2022 Myths and Fallacies of 'Personally Identifiable Information'. Narayanan, Arvind; Shmatikov, Vitaly. dl.acm.org . Jun 1, 2010. What is PII? From Breach Notification Laws: For example, California Senate Bill 1386: SSNs, driver’s license numbers, financial accounts. The list can never be exhaustive, e.g. email addresses and telephone numbers are not mentioned in Bill 1386. Focuses on data that are commonly used for authenticating an individual. Ignores data that reveals some sensitive information about an individual ...
Sep 28, 2021	»	05. What Is Your Privacy Worth? 5 min; updated Sep 28, 2021 Pre-read thoughts. I think for the general population, the value of privacy is not worth the inconvenience associated with securing it, in the cases where it’s not readily availed by Big Tech. For example, one wouldn’t go out of their way to not have passwords and 2FA. However, when it comes to matters like online privacy, most folks are willing to allow surveillance in exchange for free services like web search, social media, etc. ...
Jan 22, 2019	»	14. Privacy (8 items) Privacy in CS and in the Law; Tracking and Data Collection; Secure Multiparty Computation; Privacy [COS 432]; Signal Is Finally Bringing Its Secure Messaging To the Masses; Research on Privacy Enhancing Techniques; Applications for DP; Building Intuition About DP;