Daily Archives: October 24, 2022

Google’s Privacy Settings Finally Won’t Break It’s Apps Anymore, require using My Ad Center

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[…] It used to be that the only way to prevent Google from using your data for targeted ads was turning off personalized ads across your whole account, or disabling specific kinds of data using a couple of settings, including Web & App Activity and YouTube History. Those two settings control whether Google collects certain details about what you do on its platform (you can see some of that data here). Turning off the controls meant Google wouldn’t use the data for ads, but it disabled some of the most useful features on services such as Maps, Search, and Google Assistant.

Thanks to a new set of controls, that’s no longer true. You can now leave Web & App Activity and YouTube History on, but drill into to adjust more specific settings to tell Google you don’t want the related data used for targeted ads.

The detail is tucked into an announcement about the rollout of a new hub for Google’s advertising settings called My Ad Center. “You can decide what types of your Google activity are used to show you ads, without impacting your experience with the utility of the product,” Jerry Dischler, vice president of ads at Google, wrote in a blog post.

That’s a major step in the direction of what experts call “usable privacy,” or data protection that’s easy to manage without breaking other parts of the internet.

[…]

You’ll find the new controls in My Ad Center, which starts rolling out to users this week. It primarily serves as a hub for Google’s existing ad controls, but you’ll find some expanded options, new tools, and a number of other updates.

When you open My Ad Center, you’ll be able to fine tune whether you see ads related to certain subjects or advertisers. […] You’ll also be able to view ads and advertisers that you’ve seen recently, and see all the ads that specific advertisers have run over the last thirty days.

Google also includes a way to toggle off ads on sensitive subjects such as alcohol, parenting, and weight loss. Unlike similar settings on Facebook and Instagram, though, you can’t tell Google you don’t want to see ads about politics.

Source: Google’s Privacy Settings Finally Won’t Break It’s Apps Anymore

So you probably need to spend quite some time configuring this – we will see, but most importantly you are now directly telling Google what you do and don’t like (and what you don’t like tells them about what you do like) without them having to feed your search behaviour through an algorithm and making them guess at how to best /– mind control –/ sell ads to you

Texas sues Google for allegedly capturing biometric data of millions without consent

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Texas has filed a lawsuit against Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google for allegedly collecting biometric data of millions of Texans without obtaining proper consent, the attorney general’s office said in a statement on Thursday.

The complaint says that companies operating in Texas have been barred for more than a decade from collecting people’s faces, voices or other biometric data without advanced, informed consent.

“In blatant defiance of that law, Google has, since at least 2015, collected biometric data from innumerable Texans and used their faces and their voices to serve Google’s commercial ends,” the complaint said. “Indeed, all across the state, everyday Texans have become unwitting cash cows being milked by Google for profits.”

The collection occurred through products like Google Photos, Google Assistant, and Nest Hub Max, the statement said.

[…]

Source: Texas sues Google for allegedly capturing biometric data of millions without consent | Reuters

Advocate Aurora Health leaks 3 million patient’s data to big tech through webtracker installation

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A hospital network in Wisconsin and Illinois fears visitor tracking code on its websites may have transmitted personal information on as many as 3 million patients to Meta, Google, and other third parties.

Advocate Aurora Health (AAH) reported the potential breach to the US government’s Health and Human Services. As well as millions of patients, AAH has 27 hospitals and 32,000 doctors and nurses on its books.

[…]

Essentially, AAH is saying that it placed analytics code on its online portals to get an idea of how many people visit and login to their accounts, what they use, and so on. It’s now determined that code – known also as trackers or pixels because they may be loaded onto pages as invisible single pixels – may have sent personal info from the pages patients had open to those providing the trackers, such as Facebook or Google.

You might imagine these trackers simply transmit a unique identifier and IP address for the visitor and some details about their actions on the site for subsequent analysis and record keeping. But it turns out these pixels can send back all sorts of things like search terms, your doctor’s name, and the illnesses you’re suffering from.

[…]

The data that may have been sent, though, is extensive: IP addresses, appointment information including scheduling and type, proximity to an AAH facility, provider information, digital messages, first and last name, insurance data, and MyChart account information may all have been exposed. AAH said financial and Social Security information was not compromised.

[…]

Earlier this year, it was shown that Meta’s pixels could collect a lot more than basic usage metrics, transmitting personal data to Zuckercorp even for people who didn’t have Facebook accounts. The same is true of other trackers, such as TikTok’s, which can gather personal data regardless of whether a website’s visitor has ever set a digital foot on the China-owned social network.

Generally speaking, site and app owners have control over how much or how little is collected by the trackers they place on their pages. You can configure which activities trigger a ping back to the pixel provider, such as Meta, which you can then review from a backend dashboard.

While the info exposed by AAH was not grabbed by hackers, it is now in the hands of Big Tech, which is a privacy concern no matter what those technology companies say.

AAH said it – like so many other organizations, government and private – was using the trackers to aggregate user data for analysis, and it only seems to have just occurred to the nonprofit that this data is private health information and shouldn’t really be fed into Meta or Google.

[…]

Source: Advocate Aurora Health in potential 3 million patient leak • The Register

India fines Google ₹1,337.76 crore ($162 million) for Android monopoly abuse

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India’s Competition Commission has announced it will fine Google ₹1,337.76 crore (₹13,377,600,000 or $161.5 million) for abusing its dominant position in multiple markets in the Android Mobile device ecosystem and ordered the company to open the Android ecosystem to competition

[…]

The Commission found Google was dominant in all five markets and worked to preserve that position with instruments such as the Mobile Application Distribution Agreement (MADA) that required Android licensees to include Google’s apps.

“MADA assured that the most prominent search entry points – i.e., search app, widget and Chrome browser – are pre-installed on Android devices, which accorded significant competitive edge to Google’s search services over its competitors,” the CIC found. Google’s policies also gave the company “significant competitive edge over its competitors” for its own apps such as YouTube on Android devices.

The CIC offered the following assessment of how Google’s actions impacted the market:

The competitors of these services could never avail the same level of market access which Google secured and embedded for itself through MADA. Network effects, coupled with status quo bias, create significant entry barriers for competitors of Google to enter or operate in the concerned markets.

[…]

For those and many other reasons, the CIC decided Google was on the wrong side of India’s Competition Act. In addition to the abovementioned fine, it imposed a cease and desist order on Google that requires it to change some of its business practices to do things such as:

  • Allowing third—party app stores to be sold on Google Play;
  • Allowing side-loading of apps;
  • Giving users choice of default search engine other than Google when setting up a device;
  • Ceasing payments to handset makers to secure search exclusivity;
  • Not denying access to Android APIs to developers who build apps that run on Android forks.

Some of the above are measures that other competition regulators around the world have contemplated, but not implemented.

So while India’s fine is a quarter of a day worth of Google’s $256 billion annual revenue and therefore a pin-prick, the tiny wound could become infected if other regulators decide to poke around.

[…]

Source: India fines Google $162 million for Android monopoly abuse • The Register

The size of the fine was probably pretty well thought out too 🙂

Ring Cameras Are Being Used To Control and Surveil Overworked Delivery Workers

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Networked doorbell surveillance cameras like Amazon’s Ring are everywhere, and have changed the nature of delivery work by letting customers take on the role of bosses to monitor, control, and discipline workers, according to a recent report (PDF) by the Data & Society tech research institute. “The growing popularity of Ring and other networked doorbell cameras has normalized home and neighborhood surveillance in the name of safety and security,” Data & Society’s Labor Futures program director Aiha Nguyen and research analyst Eve Zelickson write. “But for delivery drivers, this has meant their work is increasingly surveilled by the doorbell cameras and supervised by customers. The result is a collision between the American ideas of private property and the business imperatives of doing a job.”

Thanks to interviews with surveillance camera users and delivery drivers, the researchers are able to dive into a few major developments interacting here to bring this to a head. Obviously, the first one is the widespread adoption of doorbell surveillance cameras like Ring. Just as important as the adoption of these cameras, however, is the rise of delivery work and its transformation into gig labor. […] As the report lays out, Ring cameras allow customers to surveil delivery workers and discipline their labor by, for example, sharing shaming footage online. This dovetails with the “gigification” of Amazon’s delivery workers in two ways: labor dynamics and customer behavior.

“Gig workers, including Flex drivers, are sold on the promise of flexibility, independence and freedom. Amazon tells Flex drivers that they have complete control over their schedule, and can work on their terms and in their space,” Nguyen and Zelickson write. “Through interviews with Flex drivers, it became apparent that these marketed perks have hidden costs: drivers often have to compete for shifts, spend hours trying to get reimbursed for lost wages, pay for wear and tear on their vehicle, and have no control over where they work.” That competition between workers manifests in other ways too, namely acquiescing to and complying with customer demands when delivering purchases to their homes. Even without cameras, customers have made onerous demands of Flex drivers even as the drivers are pressed to meet unrealistic and dangerous routes alongside unsafe and demanding productivity quotas. The introduction of surveillance cameras at the delivery destination, however, adds another level of surveillance to the gigification. […] The report’s conclusion is clear: Amazon has deputized its customers and made them partners in a scheme that encourages antagonistic social relations, undermines labor rights, and provides cover for a march towards increasingly ambitious monopolistic exploits. As Nguyen and Zelickson point out, it is ingenious how Amazon has “managed to transform what was once a labor cost (i.e., supervising work and asset protection) into a revenue stream through the sale of doorbell cameras and subscription services to residents who then perform the labor of securing their own doorstep.”

Source: Ring Cameras Are Being Used To Control and Surveil Overworked Delivery Workers – Slashdot