1. Technology
25. Apple contractors ‘regularly
hear confidential details’ on Siri recordings
Apple contractors regularly hear confidential medical information, drug
deals and recordings of couples having conversations as part of their job
providing quality control, or ‘grading’, to the company’s Siri voice assistant.
Although Apple does not explicitly disclose it in its consumer-facing
privacy documentation, a small proportion of Siri recordings are passed on to
contractors working for the company around the world. They are tasked with
grading the responses on a variety of factors, including whether the activation
of the voice assistant was deliberate or accidental, whether the query was
something Siri could be expected to help with and whether Siri’s response was
appropriate.
Apple says the data ‘is used to help Siri and dictation… understand you
better and recognise what you say’. But the company does not explicitly state
that that work is undertaken by humans who listen to the ‘pseudonymoused’
recordings.
Apple told the Guardian: ‘A small portion of Siri requests are
analysed to improve Siri and dictation. User requests are not associated with
the user’s Apple ID. Siri responses are analysed in secure facilities and all
reviewers are under the obligation to adhere to Apple’s strict confidentiality
requirements.’ The company added that a very small random subset, less than 1%
of daily Siri activations, are used for grading and those used are typically
only a few seconds long.
A whistleblower working for the firm, who asked to remain anonymous due
to fears over his job, expressed concern about this lack of disclosure,
particularly given the frequency with which accidental activations pick up extremely
sensitive personal information.
The whistleblower said: ‘There have been countless instances of
recordings featuring private discussions between doctors and patients, business
deals, seemingly criminal dealings, sexual encounters and so on. These recordings
are accompanied by user data showing location, contact details and app data.’
Apple is not alone in employing human oversight of its automatic voice
assistants. In April, Amazon was revealed to employ staff to listen to some
Alexa recordings and earlier this month Google workers were found to be doing
the same with Google Assistant.
(Source: www.theguardian.com)
26. I found your data. It’s for
sale
I’ve watched you check in for a flight and seen your doctor refilling a
prescription.
I’ve peeked inside corporate networks at reports on faulty rockets. If I
wanted, I could’ve even opened a tax return you only shared with your
accountant.
I found your data because it’s for sale online. Even more terrifying:
It’s happening because of software you probably installed yourself.
My latest investigation into the secret life of our data is not a fire
drill. Working with an independent security researcher, I found as many as four
million people have been leaking personal and corporate secrets through Chrome
and Firefox. Even a colleague in The Washington Post’s newsroom got
caught up. When we told browser makers Google and Mozilla, they shut these
leaks immediately – but we probably identified only a fraction of the problem.
The root of this privacy train wreck is browser extensions. Also known
as add-ons and plug-ins, they’re little programmes used by nearly half of all
desktop web surfers to make browsing better, such as finding coupons or
remembering passwords. People install them assuming that any software offered
in a store run by Chrome or Firefox has got to be legitimate.
Not. At. All. Some extensions have a side hustle in spying. From a
privileged perch in your browser, they pass information about where you surf
and what you view into a murky data economy. Think about everything you do in
your browser at work and home – it’s a digital proxy for your brain. Now
imagine those clicks beaming out of your computer to be harvested for
marketers, data brokers or hackers.
Some extensions make surveillance sound like a sweet deal: Amazon was
offering people $10 to install its Assistant extension. In the fine print,
Amazon said the extension collects your browsing history and what’s on the
pages you view, though all that data stays inside the giant company. (Amazon
CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Academic researchers say there
are thousands of extensions that gather browsing data – many with loose or
downright deceptive data practices – lurking in the online stores of Google and
even the more privacy-friendly Mozilla.
The extensions we found selling your data show just how dangerous
browser surveillance can be. What’s unusual about this leak is that we got to
watch it taking place. Large swathes of the tech industry treat tracking as an
acceptable way to make money, whether (or not) most of us realise what’s really
going on. Amazon will give you a $10 coupon for it. Google tracks your searches
and even your activity in Chrome to build out a lucrative dossier on you. Facebook
does the same with your activity in its apps and off.
Of course, those companies don’t usually leave your personal information
hanging out on the open internet for sale. But just because it’s hidden doesn’t
make it any less scary.
(Source: www.washingtonpost.com)
27. UPI is world class and it’s
time to take it international
Cryptocurrencies are peer-to-peer electronic cash systems that are
governed not by the authority of a central bank but by digital code.
Transactions are only added to the common distributed ledger if they can be
validated in accordance with the rules stipulated by the code, ensuring that
digital currency once spent cannot be re-spent. For everyone who uses the same
blockchain, its distributed ledger becomes a common source of truth that allows
them to carry out peer-to-peer transactions without the need for validation by
a central entity.
Bitcoin is one such cryptocurrency. It uses a decentralised,
permissionless system that allows anyone to validate a transaction, so long as
they meet the technical requirements for operating a node. However, Bitcoin
prioritises decentralisation over speed and scalability. As a result, it is
incapable of processing transactions at the velocity or volume that modern
financial systems demand. As there is a finite limit to the total number of
Bitcoins that will ever be minted, its value fluctuates wildly, resulting in
the sort of volatility that is undesirable in a currency.
Facebook recently announced the launch of a new cryptocurrency called
Libra which, it claims, will address the many failings of Bitcoin. Libra has
been designed to operate on a bespoke blockchain running on at least 29 nodes
and backed by a basket of bank deposits and government securities to ensure low
volatility. For the foreseeable future, Libra will function as a permissioned
cryptocurrency to achieve the high transaction throughput and low latency
functionality expected of a global
payment system.
Libra will be most useful for underdeveloped countries that lack a
digital financial infrastructure. It will offer them a safe and cost-effective
mechanism for making payments that will scale effortlessly in places where the
use of Facebook and WhatsApp is already widespread. When combined with social
media data, it will allow developers to come up with innovative new products
that incumbent financial sector players will be hard-pressed to match. As the
value of a Libra today is designed to always be close to its value tomorrow and
in the future, it will operate as a currency hedge in countries where exchange
fluctuations are high.
I read the Libra White Paper with interest, keen to understand how this
new cryptocurrency would change things for us in India. We are Facebook’s
second largest market outside the US and any financial product it launches is
bound to have an impact on us. However, the more I read, the less convinced I
was that Libra was going to give India anything that it did not already have.
In Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India has a robust digital payments
infrastructure that, within just three years of its launch, already
effortlessly processes more than 750 million transactions a month. We have a
network of business correspondents throughout the country who integrate our
online and offline payment systems by converting digital payments into cash and
vice versa. While we may not yet have the data advantage that Libra promises to
bring, once the Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture is fully
implemented, it will give us an entirely new way to build financial products
using its digital consent infrastructure. Admittedly, UPI isn’t decentralised,
but given how difficult it is going to be to migrate away from a permissioned
architecture, it’s not as if Libra really offers much better.
That said, there is at least one thing Libra has going for it that UPI
does not – the ability to radically transform how cross-border transfers are
effected. India receives more inward remittances from its diaspora than any
other country in the world ($79 billion in 2018). At present, all the
mechanisms for international transfer of funds are costly, cumbersome and
highly inefficient. A digital currency like Libra, pegged as it is to a basket
of stable currencies, and transferable anywhere in the world, will offer overseas
Indians a cheap, digital way to move money to relatives back home at a fraction
of the cost that they currently spend.
In its report on deepening digital payments, the Nandan Nilekani
Committee has recommended that it is time to take UPI global. Several different
options have been proposed, including amending UPI protocols to include
currency conversion support and directly connecting UPI to global payments
systems to allow immediate, low-cost remittances to take place over the UPI
system. There was also a suggestion that UPI specifications and technologies
should be licensed to operators around the world to allow the protocol to
spread outside India. This must be accompanied by amendments in Indian
regulations, so that Indians can use UPI from abroad in much the same way as
Chinese citizens use WeChat from wherever they are in the world.
Cryptocurrency-based payment systems are slow and computationally
intensive. While the technology can be optimised, we will keep running up against
its inherent limitations that make it hard to scale to population size. UPI may
not be decentralised, but we know it works well at scale even over the
sometimes patchy mobile networks in India.
There is no need to optimise blockchain technologies to meet the needs
of developing markets when we already have a proven, world-class digital
payments protocol in India that can easily be internationalised. Let’s back
ourselves and just do it.
(Source: www.livemint.com)
2. Health
28. ‘My Guru told me that as long
as I have good health, I should continue to serve society’, says Metro Man
Sreedharan
E. Sreedharan, who is revered as the ‘Metro Man’ of India, shared that
his Guru, Poojya Shri Swami BhoomanandaTirthaji, told him that as long as he
has good health he should continue to serve the society with the attitude that
it is an offering to God.
A recipient of the prestigious Padma Vibhushan in 2008,
Sreedharan also said, ‘When the assignment is for the good of society, I don’t
pull back. It is job satisfaction which excites me.’
Answering what keeps him going at 88, he said, ‘I
was very religious in my early years – shaped by my parents that way. And I
moved to spirituality particularly after the association with my guru. I like austerity
and simplicity.’ His habit of waking up and sleeping on time and a disciplined
life kept him fit. ‘I am fastidious about exercise, be it in the open air or
regular yoga. I was a sportsman in my young days, was captain of the college
football team. This addiction to regular exercise has remained with me,’ he
said.
At present Sreedharan is directly in charge of the Kochi Metro, while he
is also serving the Jammu and Kashmir government for light metro projects to be
implemented in Jammu and Srinagar cities.
He is also serving as a consultant to the Uttar Pradesh government for
the Lucknow, Kanpur and Meerut metro projects. Though he had tendered his
resignation from the post last month because of time constraints, it was not
accepted by the State Government led by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.
(Source: www.swarajyamag.com)
29. Passive use of social media
may increase depression
Great holiday, fantastic party and incredible food, everyone shows their
life in the best light on social networking apps like Facebook and Twitter, but
researchers have found that people who use these apps passively are in danger
of developing depressive symptoms.
‘Being confronted by social information on the Internet – which is
selective and only positive and favourable – leads to lower self-esteem,’ says
study lead author Phillip Ozimek from the Ruhr University Bochum.
As low self-esteem is closely related to depressive symptoms,
researchers consider this short-term effect to be a potential source of danger.
For the study, published in the journal Behaviour and Information
Technology, the researchers interviewed over 800 people about their use of
Facebook, their tendency to compare themselves with others, their level of
self-esteem and the occurrence of depressive symptoms.
They found a positive correlation between passive Facebook use – not
posting pictures – and depressive symptoms when subjects have an increased need
to make social comparisons of their abilities.
‘So, when I have a strong need to compare and keep seeing in my News
Feed that other people are having great holidays, making great deals and buying
great, expensive things while everything I see out of my office window is grey
and overcast, it lowers my self-esteem,’ Ozimek said.
(Source:
www.gadgetsnow.com)
