🕵️‍♂️ Nowhere to Hide

Big Tech is getting your data whether you like it or not

Sep 23, 2024

🤜 Welcome to Dog Jail Tech Beat, where we pummel fresh, dripping insights out of the week’s biggest tech news.

In today’s edition: the social media surveillance regime, spam from Iran, and the gen AI defense for being a horny Nazi.

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When you ask a social media company to delete your data, they actually, like, erase it, right? Well… funny you should ask. According to a new Federal Trade Commission report detailing the “vast surveillance” social media and streaming companies conduct on users with “lax privacy controls,” that’s not exactly how it works—at all.

Four years ago, the FTC ordered nine of the world’s largest data harvesters, including Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok, to answer questions about their collection of our personal information and how they use it to make a buck. The agency’s findings, released last week, were bleak:

Many Companies collected and could indefinitely retain troves of data from and about users and non-users, and they did so in ways consumers might not expect. This included information about activities both on and off of the [platforms], and included things such as personal information, demographic information, interests, behaviors, and activities elsewhere on the Internet. The collection included information input by users themselves, information gathered passively or inferred, and information that some Companies purchased about users from data brokers and others, including data relating to things such as household income, location, and interests. Moreover, many Companies’ data practices posed risks to users’ and non-users’ data privacy, and their data collection, minimization, and retention practices were woefully inadequate.

According to the FTC, some companies didn’t actually delete users’ data when asked. They merely “de-identified” it, retaining the data while removing “personally identifiable information.” And those that did actually erase some of users’ data upon request never deleted it all.

Throughout, the report emphasizes the failure of self-regulation by social media companies and the current futility of individuals trying to control how their data is used. Instead, the FTC recommends policymakers adopt and enforce measures like federal privacy legislation to disrupt the core business model of “harvesting data for targeted advertising, algorithm design, and sales to third parties.”

You, clever muffin that you are, might think that you can avoid all of these threats to your privacy by simply not using these websites or their services. According to the FTC, however, LOL and, in addition, LMAO. As the agency’s report notes, these companies generally “collected enormous amounts of data about users and non-users alike.”

Arrest Report

💀 DEATH ROW: The Ayatollah’s email marketers. This summer, Iranian hackers with information stolen from the Trump campaign sent “unsolicited emails to individuals then associated with President Biden’s campaign,” according to the FBI. However, a Harris campaign spokesperson claimed the messages were mistaken for “a spam or phishing attempt” and authorities said there is no evidence the hackers ever received a response.
🚔 IN CUSTODY: Elon Musk’s appetite for Brazilian beef. On Friday, X’s lawyers said that the company had complied with a variety of demands by Brazil’s Supreme Court. The weeks-long standoff that led to Musk’s social network being blocked in the country, it seems, will end with the billionaire’s total capitulation.
🐑 AT LARGE: Pedestrian-pounding food delivery robots. Last year, a takeout delivery robot operated by the company Starship rammed into an employee at Arizona State University, knocking her to the ground, 404 Media reports. It’s not all bad news, though: In addition to their insurance information, Starship reportedly offered the victim “promo codes,” presumably to make up for the 4-inch gash that was autonomously delivered to her arm.

Deep Thoughts

“The things that people can do with the Internet now is incredible.”

North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, suggesting that a series of shockingly bigoted (and less-shockingly horny) comments he reportedly made on the porn website “Nude Africa” between 2008 and 2012 were AI-generated.

Robinson’s own PR agency seemed to struggle with the sheer scale of the newly unearthed comments. Speaking to a reporter, a Robinson campaign consultant said that the “the main ones I remember” were allegations that Robinson “made some extremely racist comments about Martin Luther King, referred to himself as a Black Nazi and used antisemitic language referring to Jews.”

Action Center

🔔 Alert 🔔

⚠️ Warning ⚠️

‼️ Jesus Christ ‼️

Parting Shot

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