Tesla chief executive Elon Musk calls this function Sentry Mode. I also call it Chaperone Mode and Snitch Mode. I’ve been writing recently about how we don’t drive cars, we drive computers. But this experience opened my eyes.

I love that my car recorded a hit-and-run on my behalf. Yet I’m scared we’re not ready for the ways cameras pointed inside and outside vehicles will change the open road — just like the cameras we’re adding to doorbells are changing our neighborhoods.

It’s not just crashes that will be different. Once governments, companies and parents get their hands on car video, it could become evidence, an insurance liability and even a form of control. Just imagine how it will change teenage romance. It could be the end of the idea that cars are private spaces to peace out and get away — an American symbol of independence.

“You are not alone in your car anymore,” says Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a visiting professor at the American University Washington College of Law and the author of “The Rise of Big Data Policing.”

The moment my car was struck, it sent an alert to my phone and the car speakers began blaring ghoulish classical music, a touch of Musk’s famous bravado. The car saved four videos of the incident, each from a different angle, to a memory stick I installed near the cup holder. (Sentry Mode is an opt-in feature.) You can watch my car lurch when the bus strikes it, spot the ID number on the bus and see its driver’s face passing by moments before.

This isn’t just a Tesla phenomenon. Since 2016, some Cadillacs have let you store recordings from four outward-facing cameras, both as the car is moving and when it’s parked. Chevrolet offers a so-called Valet Mode to record potentially naughty parking attendants. Sold with Corvettes, they call this camera feature a “baby monitor for your baby.”

Now there are even face-monitoring cameras in certain General Motors, BMW and Volvo vehicles to make sure you’re not drowsy, drunk or distracted. Most keep a running log of where you’re looking.

Your older car’s camera may not be saving hours of footage, but chances are it keeps at least a few seconds of camera, speed, steering and other data on a hidden “black box” that activates in a crash. And I’m pretty sure your next car would make even 007 jealous; I’ve already seen automakers brag about adding 16 cameras and sensors to 2020 models.

The benefits of this technology are clear. The video clips from my car made a pretty compelling case for the city to pay for my repairs without even getting my insurance involved. Lots of Tesla owners proudly share crazy footage on YouTube. It’s been successfully used to put criminals behind bars.

But it’s not just the bad guys my car records. I’ve got clips of countless people’s behinds scooching by in tight parking lots, because Sentry Mode activates any time something gets close. It’s also recording my family: With another function called Dash Cam that records the road, Tesla has saved hours and hours of my travels — the good driving and the not-so-good alike.

We’ve been down this road before with connected cameras. Amazon’s Ring doorbells and Nest cams also seemed like a good idea, until hackers, stalkers and police tried to get their hands on the video feed. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Applied to a car, the questions multiply: Can you just peer in on your teen driver — or spouse? Do I have to share my footage with the authorities? Should my car be allowed to kick me off the road if it thinks I’m sleepy? How long until insurance companies offer “discounts” for direct video access? And is any of this actually making cars safer or less expensive to own?

Your data can and will be used against you. Can we do anything to make our cars remain private spaces?

[…]

design choices may well determine our future privacy. It’s important to remember: Automakers can change how their cameras work with as little as a software update. Sentry mode arrived out of thin air last year on cars made as early as 2017.

We can learn from smart doorbells and home security devices where surveillance goes wrong.

The problems start with what gets recorded. Home security cameras have so normalized surveillance that they let people watch and listen in on family and neighbors. Today, Tesla’s Sentry Mode and Dash Cam only record video, not audio. The cars have microphones inside, but right now they seem to just be used for voice commands and other car functions — avoiding eavesdropping on potentially intimate car conversations.

Tesla also hasn’t activated a potentially invasive source of video: a camera pointed inside the car, right next to the rear view mirror. But, again, it’s not entirely clear why. CEO Musk tweeted it’s there to be used as part of a future ride-sharing program, implying it’s not used in other ways. Already some Tesla owners are champing at the bit to have it activated for Sentry Mode to see, for example, what a burglar is stealing. I could imagine others demanding live access for a “teen driving” mode.

(Tesla has shied away from perhaps the most sensible use for that inner camera: activating it to monitor whether drivers are paying attention while using its Autopilot driver assistance system, something GM does with its so-called SuperCruise system.)

In other ways, Tesla is already recording gobs. Living in a dense city, my Sentry Mode starts recording between five and seven times per day — capturing lots of people, the vast majority of whom are not committing any crime. (This actually drains the car’s precious battery; some owners estimate it sips about a mile’s worth of the car’s 322 mile potential range for every hour it runs.) Same with the Dash Cam that runs while I’m on the road: it’s recording not just my driving but all the other cars and people on the road, too.

The recordings stick around on a memory card until you delete them or the card fills up, and it writes over the old footage.

[…]

Chevrolet potentially ran afoul of eavesdropping laws when it debuted Valet Mode in 2015, because it was recording audio inside the cabin of the car without disclosure. (Now they’ve cut the audio and added a warning message to the infotainment system.) When it’s on, Tesla’s Sentry Mode activates a warning sign on its large dashboard screen with a pulsing version of the red circle some might remember from the evil HAL-9000 computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

My biggest concern is who can access all that video footage. Connected security cameras let anybody with your password peer in from afar, through an app or the Web.

[…]

Teslas, like most new cars, come with their own independent cellular connections. And Tesla, by default, uploads clips from its customer cars’ external cameras. A privacy control in the car menus says Tesla uses the footage “to learn how to recognize things like lane lines, street signs and traffic light positions.”

[…]

Video from security cameras is already routine in criminal prosecutions. In the case of Ring cameras, the police can make a request of a homeowner, who is free to say no. But courts have also issued warrants to Amazon to hand over the video data it stores on its computers, and it had to comply.

It’s an open question whether police could just seize the video recordings saved on a drive in your car, says Ferguson, the law professor.

“They could probably go through a judge and get a probable cause warrant, if they believe there was a crime,” he says. “It’s a barrier, but is not that high of a barrier. Your car is going to snitch on you.”

Source: My car was in a hit-and-run. Then I learned it recorded the whole thing.

The shift, prompted by Britain’s exit from the EU, will leave the sensitive personal information of tens of millions with less protection and within easier reach of British law enforcement.

The change was described to Reuters by three people familiar with its plans. Google intends to require its British users to acknowledge new terms of service including the new jurisdiction.

Ireland, where Google and other U.S. tech companies have their European headquarters, is staying in the EU, which has one of the world’s most aggressive data protection rules, the General Data Protection Regulation.

Google has decided to move its British users out of Irish jurisdiction because it is unclear whether Britain will follow GDPR or adopt other rules that could affect the handling of user data, the people said.

If British Google users have their data kept in Ireland, it would be more difficult for British authorities to recover it in criminal investigations.

The recent Cloud Act in the United States, however, is expected to make it easier for British authorities to obtain data from U.S. companies. Britain and the United States are also on track to negotiate a broader trade agreement.

Beyond that, the United States has among the weakest privacy protections of any major economy, with no broad law despite years of advocacy by consumer protection groups.

A Google spokesman declined to comment ahead of a public announcement.

Source: Exclusive: Google users in UK to lose EU data protection – sources – Reuters

The nation’s largest financial data broker, Yodlee, holds extensive and supposedly anonymized banking and credit card transaction histories on millions of Americans. Internal documents obtained by Motherboard, however, appear to indicate that Yodlee clients could potentially de-anonymize those records by simply downloading a giant text file and poking around in it for a while.

According to Motherboard, the 2019 document explains how Yodlee obtains transaction data from partners like banks and credit card companies and what data is collected. That includes a unique identifier associated with the bank or credit card holder, amounts of transactions, dates of sale, which business the transaction was processed at, and bits of metadata, Motherboard wrote; it also includes data relating to purchases involving multiple retailers, such as a restaurant order through a delivery app. The document states that Yodlee is giving clients access to this data in the form of a large text file rather than a Yodlee-run interface.

The document also shows how Yodlee performs “data cleaning” on that text file, which means obfuscating patterns like “account numbers, phone numbers, and SSNs by redacting them with the letters “XXX,” Motherboard wrote. It also scrubs some payroll and financial transfer data, as well as the names of the banking and credit card companies involved.

But this process leaves the unique identifiers, which are shared across each entry associated with a particular account, intact. Research has repeatedly shown that taking supposedly anonymized data and reverse-engineering it to identify individuals within can be a trivial undertaking, even when no information is shared across records.

Experts told Motherboard that anyone with malicious intent would just need to verify a purchase was made by a specific individual and they might gain access to all other transactions using the same identifier.

With location and time data on just three to four purchases, an “attacker can unmask the person with a very high probability,” Rutgers University associate professor Vivek Singh told the site. “With this unmasking, the attacker would have access to all the other transactions made by that individual.”

Imperial College of London assistant professor Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, who worked with Singh on a 2015 study that identified shoppers from metadata, wrote to Motherboard this process appeared to leave the data only “pseudonymized” and that “someone with access to the dataset and some information about you, e.g. shops you’ve been buying from and when, might be able to identify you.”

Yodlee and its owner, Envestnet, is facing serious heat from Congress. Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Sherrod Brown, as well as Representative Anna Eshoo, recently sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission asking for it to investigate whether the sale of this kind of financial data violates federal law.

“Envestnet claims that consumers’ privacy is protected because it anonymizes their personal financial data,” the congresspeople wrote. “But for years researchers have been able to re-identify the individuals to whom the purportedly anonymized data belongs with just three or four pieces of information.”

Source: Report: Firm Tracking Purchase, Transaction Histories of Millions Maybe Not Really Anonymizing Them

It’s very hard to get anonymity right.

The US state of Maine is violating internet broadband providers’ free speech by forcing them to ask for their customers’ permission to sell their browser history, according to a new lawsuit.

The case was brought this month by four telco industry groups in response to a new state-level law aimed at providing Maine residents with privacy protections killed at the federal level by the FCC just days before they were due to take effect.

ACA Connects, CTIA, NCTA and USTelecom are collectively suing [PDF] Maine’s attorney general Aaron Frey, and the chair and commissioners of Maine’s Public Utilities Commission claiming that the statute, passed in June 2019, “imposes unprecedented and unduly burdensome restrictions on ISPs’, and only ISPs’, protected speech.”

How so? Because it includes “restrictions on how ISPs communicate with their own customers that are not remotely tailored to protecting consumer privacy.” The lawsuit even explains that there is a “proper way to protect consumer privacy” – and that’s the way the FCC does it, through “technology-neutral, uniform regulation.” Although that regulation is actually the lack of regulation.

If you’re still having a hard time understanding how requiring companies to get their customers’ permission before they sell their personal data infringes the First Amendment, the lawsuit has more details.

It “(1) requires ISPs to secure ‘opt-in’ consent from their customers before using information that is not sensitive in nature or even personally identifying; (2) imposes an opt-out consent obligation on using data that are by definition not customer personal information; (3) limits ISPs from advertising or marketing non-communications-related services to their customers; and (4) prohibits ISPs from offering price discounts, rewards in loyalty programs, or other cost saving benefits in exchange for a customer’s consent to use their personal information.”

All of this results in an “excessive burden” on ISPs, they claim, especially because not everyone else had to do the same. The new statute includes “no restrictions at all on the use, disclosure, or sale of customer personal information, whether sensitive or not, by the many other entities in the Internet ecosystem or traditional brick-and-mortar retailers,” the lawsuit complains.

Discrimination!

This is discrimination, they argue. “Maine cannot discriminate against a subset of companies that collect and use consumer data by attempting to regulate just that subset and not others, especially given the absence of any legislative findings or other evidentiary support that would justify targeting ISPs alone.”

We’ll leave the idea that customers are suffering by not receiving marketing materials from companies that ISPs sell their data to alone for now and focus on the core issue: that if Google and Facebook are allowed to sell their users’ personal data then ISPs feel they should be allowed to as well.

Which is a fair point, although profoundly depressing in a broader context. The basic argument appears to be that we should only provide the minimum protections that are available. Nothing above minimum is legal.

If you look at what the statute actually does, it was clearly written in users’ own interests. It prevents companies from refusing to serve customers that do not agree to allow it to collect and sell their personal data and it requires ISPs to take “reasonable measures” to protect that data. Those companies are still allowed to use the data to market their own products; just not to sell it to others to sell theirs.

But because the ISPs successfully managed to get the FCC to kill off its own rules on similar protections, it argues that the scrapping of rules is the legal precedent here. “The Statute is preempted by federal law because it directly conflicts with and deliberately thwarts federal determinations about the proper way to protect consumer privacy,” the lawsuit argues.

The solution of course is federal privacy protections. But despite overwhelming public support for just such a law, the same ISPs and telcos fighting this law in Maine, have flooded Washington DC with lobbying money and campaign contributions to make sure that it doesn’t progress through Congress. And if this Maine challenge is successful, next in the ISPs’ sites will be California’s new privacy laws.

Source: Forcing us to get consent before selling browser histories violates our free speech, US ISPs claim • The Register

Seeking to improve its pisspoor customer service rating, UK telecoms giant Vodafone has clarified just how much information it slurps from customer networks. You might want to rename those servers, m’kay?

The updates are rather extensive and were noted by customers after a headsup-type email arrived from the telco.

One offending paragraph gives Vodafone an awful lot of information about what a customer might be running on their own network:

For providing end user support and optimizing your WiFi experience we are collecting information about connected devices (MAC address, Serial Number, user given host names and WiFi connection quality) as well as information about the the WiFi networks (MAC addresses and identifiers, radio statistics).

More accurately, it gives a third party that information. Airties A.S. is the company responsible for hosting information that Vodafone’s support drones might use for diagnostics.

With Vodafone topping the broadband and landline complaint tables, according to the most recent Ofcom data (PDF), the company would naturally want to increase the chances of successfully resolving a customer’s problem. However, there is no way to opt out.

Source: Vodafone: Yes, we slurp data on customers’ network setups, but we do it for their own good • The Register

You probably don’t realize just how many devices in your home or workplace are not only capable of eavesdropping on all your conversations but are specifically designed to. Smartphones, tablets, computers, smartwatches, smart speakers, even voice-activated appliances that have access to smart assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant feature built-in microphones that are constantly monitoring conversations for specific activation words to bring them to life. But accurate voice recognition often requires processing recordings in the cloud on faraway servers, and despite what giant companies keep assuring us, there are obvious and warranted concerns about privacy.

You could simply find yourself a lovely cave deep in the woods and hide out the rest of your days away from technology if you don’t want to be the victim of endless eavesdropping, but this wearable jammer, created by researchers from the University of Chicago, is a (slightly) less drastic alternative. It’s chunky, there’s no denying it, but surrounding an inner core of electronics and batteries are a series of ultrasonic transducers blasting sound waves in all directions. While inaudible to human ears, the ultrasonic signals take advantage of a flaw found in sensitive microphone hardware that results in these signals being captured and interfering with the recordings of lower parts of the audio spectrum where the frequencies of human voices fall.

The results are recordings that are nearly incomprehensible to both human ears and the artificial intelligence-powered voice recognition software that smart assistants and other voice-activated devices rely on.

But why pack the technology into a wearable bracelet instead of creating a stationary device you could set up in the middle of a room for complete privacy? An array of transducers pointing in all directions are needed to properly blanket a room in ultrasonic sound waves, but thanks to science, wherever the signals from two neighboring transducers overlap, they cancel each other out, creating dead zones where microphones could continue to effectively operate.

By incorporating the jamming hardware into a wearable device, the natural and subconscious movements of the wearer’s arms and hands while they speak keep the transducers in motion. This effectively eliminates the risk of dead zones being created long enough to allow entire words or sentences to be detected by a smart device’s microphone. For those who are truly worried about their privacy, the research team has shared their source code for the signal generator as well as 3D models for the bracelet on GitHub for anyone to download and build themselves. You’ll need to supply your own electronics, and if you’re going to all the trouble, you might as well build one for each wrist, all but ensuring there’s never a dead zone in your silencing shield.

Source: This Punk Bracelet Prevents Smart Speakers From Hearing You

This is nice  because Project Alias / Parasite is aimed at a very specific machine, whereas this will protect you wherever you go. It’s just a bit clunky.

The popular Edison email app, which is in the top 100 productivity apps on the Apple app store, scrapes users’ email inboxes and sells products based off that information to clients in the finance, travel, and e-Commerce sectors. The contents of Edison users’ inboxes are of particular interest to companies who can buy the data to make better investment decisions, according to a J.P. Morgan document obtained by Motherboard.

On its website Edison says that it does “process” users’ emails, but some users did not know that when using the Edison app the company scrapes their inbox for profit. Motherboard has also obtained documentation that provides more specifics about how two other popular apps—Cleanfox and Slice—sell products based on users’ emails to corporate clients.

Source: How Big Companies Spy on Your Emails – VICE

Based on the findings, more than 20 consumer and civil society organisations in Europe and from different parts of the world are urging their authorities to investigate the practices of the online advertising industry.

The report uncovers how every time we use apps, hundreds of shadowy entities are receiving personal data about our interests, habits, and behaviour. This information is used to profile consumers, which can be used for targeted advertising, but may also lead to discrimination, manipulation and exploitation.

– These practices are out of control and in breach of European data protection legislation. The extent of tracking makes it impossible for us to make informed choices about how our personal data is collected, shared and used, says Finn Myrstad, director of digital policy in the Norwegian Consumer Council.

The Norwegian Consumer Council is now filing formal complaints against Grindr, a dating app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people and companies that were receiving personal data through the app;  Twitter`s MoPub, AT&T’s AppNexus, OpenX, AdColony and Smaato. The complaints are directed to the Norwegian Data Protection Authority for breaches of the General Data Protection Regulation.

[…]

Every time you open an app like Grindr advertisement networks get your GPS location, device identifiers and even the fact that you use a gay dating app. This is an insane violation of users’ EU privacy rights, says Max Schrems, founder of the European privacy non-profit NGO noyb.

The harmful effects of profiling

Many actors in the online advertising industry collect information about us from a variety of places, including web browsing, connected devices, and social media. When combined, this data provides a complex picture of individuals, revealing what we do in our daily lives, our secret desires, and our most vulnerable moments.

–  This massive commercial surveillance is systematically at odds with our fundamental rights  and can be used to discriminate, manipulate and exploit us. The widespread tracking also has the potential to seriously degrade consumer trust in digital services, says Myrstad.

– Furthermore, in a recent Amnesty International report, Amnesty showed how these data-driven business models are a serious threat to human rights such as freedom of opinion and expression, freedom of thought, and the right to equality and non-discrimination.

[…]

– The situation is completely out of control. In order to shift the significant power imbalance between consumers and third party companies, the current practices of extensive tracking and profiling have to end, says Myrstad.

– There are very few actions consumers can take to limit or prevent the massive tracking and data sharing that is happening all across the internet. Authorities must take active enforcement measures to protect consumers against the illegal exploitation of personal data.

Source: New study: The advertising industry is systematically breaking the law : Forbrukerrådet