Daily Archives: April 13, 2020

Suspicious senate stock sale spurt spurs scrutiny scheme: This website tracks which shares US senators are unloading mid-pandemic

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In the wake of reports last month that four US senators sold stocks shortly after a classified briefing on January 24 about the risk posed by the novel coronavirus, Timothy Carambat, a mechanical and software engineer, created a website to make stock sales by every senator more visible.

In an email to The Register, Carambat, who runs a design firm based in Covington, Louisiana, called Industrial Object, explained he was motivated to create Senate Stock Watcher after news broke that Senators Richard Burr (R-NC), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), James Inhofe (R-OK), and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) had dumped stocks before most people in America understood the implications of the outbreak. It is illegal for senators to buy and sell shares using non-public information.

Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been sued for alleged securities fraud, a charge he has denied. It is said he unloaded up to $1.7m in stocks in mid-February, particularly in hotel groups that would be later hit hard by the virus pandemic, all while receiving daily confidential briefings about the impact of the bio-nasty – and reassuring the public everything would be fine.

“As public servants, there are some senators making alarmingly large money movements at what would seem to be very fortunate timing in the market,” Carambat said.

“I understand some senators were previously very accomplished businesspeople, but in my opinion, the level of access they have to information currently is highly privileged and it would only make sense to keep their own financial best interests at heart.”

Details about the stock sales in news reports prompted Carambat to look into the source of the data, which turned out to be the US Senate Financial Disclosures website.

Source: Suspicious senate stock sale spurt spurs scrutiny scheme: This website tracks which shares US senators are unloading mid-pandemic • The Register

Twitter Obliterates Its Users’ Privacy Choices

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The EFF’s staff technologist — also an engineer on Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere, writes: Twitter greeted its users with a confusing notification this week. “The control you have over what information Twitter shares with its business partners has changed,” it said. The changes will “help Twitter continue operating as a free service,” it assured. But at what cost?

Twitter has changed what happens when users opt out of the “Allow additional information sharing with business partners” setting in the “Personalization and Data” part of its site. The changes affect two types of data sharing that Twitter does… Previously, anyone in the world could opt out of Twitter’s conversion tracking (type 1), and people in GDPR-compliant regions had to opt in. Now, people outside of Europe have lost that option. Instead, users in the U.S. and most of the rest of the world can only opt out of Twitter sharing data with Google and Facebook (type 2).
The article explains how last August Twitter discovered that its option for opting out of device-level targeting and conversion tracking “did not actually opt users out.” But after fixing that bug, “advertisers were unhappy. And Twitter announced a substantial hit to its revenue… Now, Twitter has removed the ability to opt out of conversion tracking altogether.”

While users in Europe are protected by GDPR, “users in the United States and everywhere else, who don’t have the protection of a comprehensive privacy law, are only protected by companies’ self-interest…” BoingBoing argues that Twitter “has just unilaterally obliterated all its users’ privacy choices, announcing the change with a dialog box whose only button is ‘OK.’

Source: Twitter Accused of Obliterating Its Users’ Privacy Choices – Slashdot