Kashmir Hill at the New York Times: “In what may be the first known case of its kind, a faulty facial recognition match led to a Michigan man’s arrest for a crime he did not commit…. The Shinola shoplifting occurred in October 2018. Katherine Johnston, an investigator at Mackinac Partners, a loss prevention firm, reviewed the store’s surveillance video and sent a copy to the Detroit police, according to their report. Five months later, in March 2019, Jennifer Coulson, a digital image examiner for the Michigan State Police, uploaded a “probe image” — a still from the video, showing... (More >)
Best Practices to Cover Ad Information Used for Research, Public Health, Law Enforcement & Other Uses
Press Release: “The Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) released privacy Best Practices for its members to follow if they use data collected for Tailored Advertising or Ad Delivery and Reporting for non-marketing purposes, such as sharing with research institutions, public health agencies, or law enforcement entities. “Ad tech companies have data that can be a powerful resource for the public good if they follow this set of best practices for consumer privacy,” said Leigh Freund, NAI President and CEO. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen the opportunity for substantial public health benefits from sharing aggregate and de-identified location data.” The... (More >)
IRS Used Cellphone Location Data to Try to Find Suspects
Byron Tau at the Wall Street Journal: “The Internal Revenue Service attempted to identify and track potential criminal suspects by purchasing access to a commercial database that records the locations of millions of American cellphones. The IRS Criminal Investigation unit, or IRS CI, had a subscription to access the data in 2017 and 2018, and the way it used the data was revealed last week in a briefing by IRS CI officials to Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D., Ore.) office. The briefing was described to The Wall Street Journal by an aide to the senator. IRS CI officials told Mr.... (More >)
Defining a ‘new normal’ for data privacy in the wake of COVID-19
Jack Dunn at IAPP: “…It is revealing that our relationship with privacy is amorphous and requires additional context in light of transformative technologies, new economic realities and public health emergencies. How can we reasonably evaluate the costs and benefits of Google or Facebook sharing location data with the federal government when it has been perfectly legal for Walgreen’s to share access to customer data with pharmaceutical advertisers? How does aggregating and anonymizing data safeguard privacy when a user’s personal data can be revealed through other data points? The pandemic is only revealing that we’ve yet to reach a consensus... (More >)
Tech Firms Are Spying on You. In a Pandemic, Governments Say That’s OK.
Sam Schechner, Kirsten Grind and Patience Haggin at the Wall Street Journal: “While an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Joshua Anton created an app to prevent users from drunk dialing, which he called Drunk Mode. He later began harvesting huge amounts of user data from smartphones to resell to advertisers. Now Mr. Anton’s company, called X-Mode Social Inc., is one of a number of little-known location-tracking companies that are being deployed in the effort to reopen the country. State and local authorities wielding the power to decide when and how to reopen are leaning on these vendors for... (More >)
IoT Security Is a Mess. Privacy ‘Nutrition’ Labels Could Help
Lily Hay Newman at Wired: “…Given that IoT security seems unlikely to magically improve anytime soon, researchers and regulators are rallying behind a new approach to managing IoT risk. Think of it as nutrition labels for embedded devices. At the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy last month, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University presented a prototype security and privacy label they created based on interviews and surveys of people who own IoT devices, as well as privacy and security experts. They also published a tool for generating their labels. The idea is to shed light on a device’s security... (More >)
Sharing Health Data and Biospecimens with Industry — A Principle-Driven, Practical Approach
Kayte Spector-Bagdady et al at the New England Journal of Medicine: “The advent of standardized electronic health records, sustainable biobanks, consumer-wellness applications, and advanced diagnostics has resulted in new health information repositories. As highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic, these repositories create an opportunity for advancing health research by means of secondary use of data and biospecimens. Current regulations in this space give substantial discretion to individual organizations when it comes to sharing deidentified data and specimens. But some recent examples of health care institutions sharing individual-level data and specimens with companies have generated controversy. Academic medical centers are therefore... (More >)
Digital contact tracing and surveillance during COVID-19
Report on General and Child-specific Ethical Issues by Gabrielle Berman, Karen Carter, Manuel García-Herranz and Vedran Sekara: “The last few years have seen a proliferation of means and approaches being used to collect sensitive or identifiable data on children. Technologies such as facial recognition and other biometrics, increased processing capacity for ‘big data’ analysis and data linkage, and the roll-out of mobile and internet services and access have substantially changed the nature of data collection, analysis, and use. Real-time data are essential to support decision-makers in government, development and humanitarian agencies such as UNICEF to better understand the issues... (More >)
Using Data for COVID-19 Requires New and Innovative Governance Approaches
Stefaan G. Verhulst and Andrew Zahuranec at Data & Policy blog: “There has been a rapid increase in the number of data-driven projects and tools released to contain the spread of COVID-19. Over the last three months, governments, tech companies, civic groups, and international agencies have launched hundreds of initiatives. These efforts range from simple visualizations of public health data to complex analyses of travel patterns. When designed responsibly, data-driven initiatives could provide the public and their leaders the ability to be more effective in addressing the virus. The Atlantic andNew York Times have both published work that relies... (More >)
Removing the pump handle: Stewarding data at times of public health emergency
Reema Patel at Significance: “There is a saying, incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain, that states: “History never repeat itself but it rhymes”. Seeking to understand the implications of the current crisis for the effective use of data, I’ve drawn on the nineteenth-century cholera outbreak in London’s Soho to identify some “rhyming patterns” that might inform our approaches to data use and governance at this time of public health crisis. Where better to begin than with the work of Victorian pioneer John Snow? In 1854, Snow’s use of a dot map to illustrate clusters of cholera cases around public water... (More >)
