Ring Says Customer Heat Map Used By Authorities No Longer Exists
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| Ring Says Customer Heat Map Used By Authorities No Longer Exists | |
| Number | 1011 |
| Broadcast Date | DECEMBER 3, 2019 |
| Episode Length | 4:29 |
| Hosts | Sarah Lane |
Cyber Monday sets new spending record, Google Photos gets more social, DNA phenotyping raises concerns.
Headlines
- CNET reports that for more than a year, police departments had access to a heat map of Amazon Ring customers showing where their video doorbells were installed, down to the street but not actual addresses. The feature was removed in July. Public documents from the Rolling Meadows Police Department in Illinois were obtained by privacy researcher Shreyas Gandlur, In a statement, Ring stressed that its heat map tool didn't offer exact locations of its users, but that the technology can help reduce crime in neighborhoods, such as package theft or finding fugitives.
- UBS and Fomalhaut Techno Solutions estimate that the Huawei Mate 30 handsets are made without any US parts. Huawei cybersecurity official John Suffolk told the Wall Street Journal that all of Huawei's 5G hardware is now "America-free" as well.
- A programmer created an open-source algorithm to randomly generate secure passphrases in Welsh, which has the distinction of only being about 700,000 speakers strong. According to HowSecureIsMyPassword.net and My1Login.net, it would take 11 quattuordecillion years or 1 trillion trillion trillion years for a computer to crack various Welsh phrases. The programmer Alice warns thought: "It's probably not a good idea to actually use this, since the wordlist is freely available along with the algorithm being used."
- The New York Times reports that Chinese authorities are using the process of DNA phenotyping to create images of human faces and are collecting blood samples from hundreds of Uighurs. Critics say there are issues involving consent and how the data will be used, and the technology could track dissidents and protesters as well as criminals. Scientists can analyze genes for traits like skin color, eye color and ancestry. Companies and scientists are trying to perfect the science to create facial images sharp and accurate enough to identify criminals and victims, which The Maryland police used it last year to identify a murder victim. In 2015, police in North Carolina arrested a man on two counts of murder based on crime scene DNA, and he pleaded guilty. However, DNA can't indicate certain factors like age or weight, and currently produces images that are too smooth to accurately replicate a face.
- Amazon announced DeepComposer, a a 32-key, 2-octave keyboard for developers to learn Generative Adversarial Networks or GANs. It comes with pretrained models or you can develop your own. GANs use two different neural networks to produce new and original digital works based on sample inputs. Developers create music based on a model, tweak it in the DeepComposer console in the AWS cloud, then generate music. Compositions can be shared on SoundCloud. This joins the DeepLens and Deepracer machine learning teaching devices. Developers interested in DeepComposer can sign up for a preview when its available.
- After settling a case with the ACLU and other civil rights groups earlier this year, Facebook says ads in the United States that involve housing, employment or credit can no longer be targeted based on age, gender, ZIP code or multicultural affinity. The ads also can't use more detailed targeting that would connect to these categories. VP of Ads Product Marketing Graham Mudd says the rules will expand beyond Facebook Ad Manager to the Ads Manager app, Instagram Promote, the ad creation tools on Facebook Pages and the Facebook Marketing API. The company is also expanding its searchable ad library to include housing ads targeted at the U.S. audience, with employment and credit ads to follow.
- According to figures from Adobe, Cyber Monday set a new record with US shoppers spending $9.2 billion in online sales.It was the first day to see sales from smartphones break the $3 billion mark; and overall $1.3 billion more than shoppers spent on Cyber Monday a year ago. However, Adobe had expected $9.4 billion and an increase of nearly 19%; instead of the actual 16.5%.
- Google has revamped its share option within Google Photos that includes a private messaging feature built into its iOS, Android, and website app. Instead of having to create an album to share a photo with someone else, users can send a message to a friend who's also using Google Photos, which creates a thread that can expand into a conversation, creating a more social experience.
Links
| Preceded by: "Facebook Testing Tool to Transfer Images to Google Photos" |
Ring Says Customer Heat Map Used By Authorities No Longer Exists |
Followed by: "Larry and Sergei Step Down from Alphabet Roles" |