Daily Archives: March 29, 2020

Someone Convinced Google To Delist Our Entire Right To Be Forgotten Tag In The EU For Searches On Their Name, which means we can’t tell if they are abusing the system

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The very fact that the tag being delisted when searching for this unnamed individual is the “right to be forgotten” tag shows that whoever this person is, they recognize that they are not trying to cover up the record of, say, an FTC case against them from… oh, let’s just say 2003… but rather are now trying to cover up their current effort to abuse the right to be forgotten process.

Anyway, in theory (purely in theory, of course) if someone in the EU searched for the name of anyone, it might be helpful to know if the Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection once called him a “spam scammer” who “conned consumers in two ways.” But, apparently, in the EU, that sort of information is no longer useful. And you also can’t find out that he’s been using the right to be forgotten process to further cover his tracks. That seems unfortunate, and entirely against the supposed principle behind the “right to be forgotten.” No one is trying to violate anyone’s “privacy” here. We’re talking about public court records, and an FTC complaint and later settlement on a fairly serious crime that took place not all that long ago. That ain’t private information. And, even more to the point, the much more recent efforts by that individual to then hide all the details of this public record.

Source: Someone Convinced Google To Delist Our Entire Right To Be Forgotten Tag In The EU For Searches On Their Name | Techdirt

A Woman Who Can Smell Parkinson’s, Alzheimers, Cancer, TBC, Is Inspiring New Research Into Diagnosis

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For most of her life, Joy Milne had a superpower that she was totally oblivious to. She simply had no idea she possessed an utterly amazing, slightly terrifying biological gift that scientists would itch to study.

In fact, Joy probably would have stayed oblivious if it hadn’t been for her husband, Les Milne.

[…]

But then one day, about 10 years into the marriage, when Les was 31, he came home, and strangely, Joy says, he smelled different. “His lovely male musk smell had got this overpowering sort of nasty yeast smell,” she says.

[…]

Joy says that over the next 20 years she and Les tried to make the best of things, but it was difficult: the loss of movement, the loss of work, the slow narrowing of their world. Still, they struggled through. Then about seven years ago, they decided to attend a support group for people suffering from Parkinson’s.

“We were late. … A lot of people were there. And I walked into the room and I thought, ‘SMELL!’ ” she says.

Joy realized that the other people in the room had the same greasy, musty smell that Les had — the smell that Joy had first noticed when Les was just 31. “And then I realized for some people it smelled stronger and for other people it didn’t smell so strong,” she says.

Could it be, Joy wondered, that Parkinson’s has a smell?

As they drove home from the meeting, Joy kept puzzling it over in her head, and by the time they arrived, she’d decided she would tell her husband.

She says once she made her discovery clear, his eyes widened: “He’s a doctor — we both understood the significance. Immediately.”

To begin, this was a new scientific discovery, but also, Joy had smelled the disease on Les more than a decade before his symptoms got severe enough for them to seek medical help. If Joy could predict Parkinson’s before its well-known symptoms, such as shaking and sleep disruption, even started to appear, maybe she could work with researchers. It might lead to a breakthrough.

[…]

Kunath asked one group of people who had Parkinson’s and another group of people who didn’t have Parkinson’s to take home white T-shirts, wear them overnight and then return them.

Then Kunath gave the T-shirts to Joy to smell. “They were all given randomized numbers and put in a box, and then she was asked to take each one out and give it a score,” he says.

Was the person who wore this shirt at an early stage of Parkinson’s? In a late stage of Parkinson’s? Something in between? Or maybe the person didn’t have the disease at all.

“And she was incredibly accurate,” Kunath says.

In fact, out of all the samples, Joy made only one mistake. She identified a man in the control group, the group without Parkinson’s, as having the disease. But many months later, Kunath says, that man actually approached him at an event and said, “Tilo, you’re going to have to put me in the Parkinson’s pile because I’ve just been diagnosed.”

It was incontrovertible: Joy not only could smell Parkinson’s but could smell it even in the absence of its typical medical presentation.

Kunath and fellow scientists published their work in ACS Central Science in March 2019, listing Joy as a co-author. Their research identified certain specific compounds that may contribute to the smell that Joy noticed on her husband and other Parkinson’s patients.

[…]

Joy and her super smelling abilities have opened up a whole new realm of research, Kunath says. Researchers, including Perdita Barran at the University of Manchester, led a second, larger study and have recently found 10 compounds linked to Parkinson’s by using mass spectrometry and other techniques to analyze samples from 274 people. They’re hoping to find a way to diagnose Parkinson’s from skin-based biomarkers, according to Barran. More work is soon to come, she adds.

[…]

Joy’s superpower is so unusual that researchers all over the world have started working with her and have discovered that she can identify several kinds of illnesses — tuberculosis, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer and diabetes.

Source: A Woman Who Can Smell Parkinson’s Is Inspiring New Research Into Diagnosis : Shots – Health News : NPR

US Officials Use Mobile Ad Location Data to Study How COVID-19 Spreads, not cellphone tower data

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Government officials across the U.S. are using location data from millions of cellphones in a bid to better understand the movements of Americans during the coronavirus pandemic and how they may be affecting the spread of the disease…

The data comes from the mobile advertising industry rather than cellphone carriers. The aim is to create a portal for federal, state and local officials that contains geolocation data in what could be as many as 500 cities across the U.S., one of the people said, to help plan the epidemic response… It shows which retail establishments, parks and other public spaces are still drawing crowds that could risk accelerating the transmission of the virus, according to people familiar with the matter… The data can also reveal general levels of compliance with stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders, according to experts inside and outside government, and help measure the pandemic’s economic impact by revealing the drop-off in retail customers at stores, decreases in automobile miles driven and other economic metrics.

The CDC has started to get analyses based on location data through through an ad hoc coalition of tech companies and data providers — all working in conjunction with the White House and others in government, people said.

The CDC and the White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.
It’s the cellphone carriers turning over pandemic-fighting data in Germany, Austria, Spain, Belgium, the U.K., according to the article, while Israel mapped infections using its intelligence agencies’ antiterrorism phone-tracking. But so far in the U.S., “the data being used has largely been drawn from the advertising industry.

“The mobile marketing industry has billions of geographic data points on hundreds of millions of U.S. cell mobile devices…”

Source: US Officials Use Mobile Ad Location Data to Study How COVID-19 Spreads – Slashdot

I am unsure if this says more about the legality of the move or the technical decentralisation of cell phone tower data making it technically difficult to track the whole population

Israel uses anti-terrorist tech to monitor phones of virus patients

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Israel has long been known for its use of technology to track the movements of Palestinian militants. Now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to use similar technology to stop the movement of the coronavirus.

Netanyahu’s Cabinet on Sunday authorized the Shin Bet security agency to use its phone-snooping tactics on coronavirus patients, an official confirmed, despite concerns from civil-liberties advocates that the practice would raise serious privacy issues. The official spoke on condition of anonymity pending an official announcement.

Netanyahu announced his plan in a televised address late Saturday, telling the nation that the drastic steps would protect the public’s health, though it would also “entail a certain degree of violation of privacy.”

Israel has identified more than 200 cases of the coronavirus. Based on interviews with these patients about their movements, health officials have put out public advisories ordering tens of thousands of people who may have come into contact with them into protective home quarantine.

The new plan would use mobile-phone tracking technology to give a far more precise history of an infected person’s movements before they were diagnosed and identify people who might have been exposed.

In his address, Netanyahu acknowledged the technology had never been used on civilians. But he said the unprecedented health threat posed by the virus justified its use. For most people, the coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms. But for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness.

“They are not minor measures. They entail a certain degree of violation of the privacy of those same people, who we will check to see whom they came into contact with while sick and what preceded that. This is an effective tool for locating the virus,” Netanyahu said.

The proposal sparked a heated debate over the use of sensitive security technology, who would have access to the information and what exactly would be done with it.

Nitzan Horowitz, leader of the liberal opposition party Meretz, said that tracking citizens “using databases and sophisticated technological means are liable to result in a severe violation of privacy and basic civil liberties.” He said any use of the technology must be supervised, with “clear rules” for the use of the information.

Netanyahu led a series of discussions Sunday with security and health officials to discuss the matter. Responding to privacy concerns, he said late Sunday he had ordered a number of changes in the plan, including reducing the scope of data that would be gathered and limiting the number of people who could see the information, to protect against misuse.

Source: Israel takes step toward monitoring phones of virus patients – ABC News

What I’m missing is a maximum duration for these powers to be used.

Astronomers have found the edge of the Milky Way at last

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Our galaxy is a whole lot bigger than it looks. New work finds that the Milky Way stretches nearly 2 million light-years across, more than 15 times wider than its luminous spiral disk. The number could lead to a better estimate of how massive the galaxy is and how many other galaxies orbit it.

Astronomers have long known that the brightest part of the Milky Way, the pancake-shaped disk of stars that houses the sun, is some 120,000 light-years across (SN: 8/1/19). Beyond this stellar disk is a disk of gas. A vast halo of dark matter, presumably full of invisible particles, engulfs both disks and stretches far beyond them (SN: 10/25/16). But because the dark halo emits no light, its diameter is hard to measure.

Now, Alis Deason, an astrophysicist at Durham University in England, and her colleagues have used nearby galaxies to locate the Milky Way’s edge. The precise diameter is 1.9 million light-years, give or take 0.4 million light-years, the team reports February 21 in a paper posted at arXiv.org.

To put that size into perspective, imagine a map in which the distance between the sun and the Earth is just one inch. If the Milky Way’s heart were at the center of the Earth, the galaxy’s edge would be four times farther away than the moon actually is.

To find the Milky Way’s edge, Deason’s team conducted computer simulations of how giant galaxies like the Milky Way form. In particular, the scientists sought cases where two giant galaxies arose side by side, like the Milky Way and Andromeda, our nearest giant neighbor, because each galaxy’s gravity tugs on the other (SN: 5/12/15). The simulations showed that just beyond the edge of a giant galaxy’s dark halo, the velocities of small nearby galaxies drop sharply (SN: 3/11/15).

Using existing telescope observations, Deason and her colleagues found a similar plunge in the speeds of small galaxies near the Milky Way. This occurred at a distance of about 950,000 light-years from the Milky Way’s center, marking the galaxy’s edge, the scientists say. The edge is 35 times farther from the galactic center than the sun is.

Although dark matter makes up most of the Milky Way’s mass, the simulations reveal that stars should also exist at these far-out distances. “Both have a well-defined edge,” Deason says. “The edge of the stars is very sharp, almost like the stars just stop at a particular radius.”

Source: Astronomers have found the edge of the Milky Way at last | Science News

Zoom Removes Code That Sends Data to Facebook – but there is still plenty of nasty stuff in there

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On Friday video-conferencing software Zoom issued an update to its iOS app which stops it sending certain pieces of data to Facebook. The move comes after a Motherboard analysis of the app found it sent information such as when a user opened the app, their timezone, city, and device details to the social network giant.

When Motherboard analyzed the app, Zoom’s privacy policy did not make the data transfer to Facebook clear.

“Zoom takes its users’ privacy extremely seriously. We originally implemented the ‘Login with Facebook’ feature using the Facebook SDK in order to provide our users with another convenient way to access our platform. However, we were recently made aware that the Facebook SDK was collecting unnecessary device data,” Zoom told Motherboard in a statement on Friday.

Source: Zoom Removes Code That Sends Data to Facebook – VICE

But there is still pleny of data being hoovered up by Zoom:
Yeah, that Zoom app you’re trusting with work chatter? It lives with ‘vampires feeding on the blood of human data’