Mobile messaging app Snapchat, which promised its users ephemeral, disappearing picture and video messages, has settled FTC charges that pics and videos sent through its app weren’t as ephemeral as the company promised. According to the FTC, Snapchat transmitted users’ location data, and collected users’ address books without notice or consent. Also, the snaps weren’t protected from disappearing as fully as the company had promised. The FTC complaint also discussed a Snapchat security breach that allowed an attacker to compile a database of 4.6 million Snapchat usernames and phone numbers.

As Amazon.com Inc. builds out its advertising services and sales team, it increasingly impinges on the turf of two other tech titans, Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

Dans le premier cas, ce qui suscite l'attention est l'influence du domaine de messagerie du client sur le prix de son assurance. Celui qui fournit une adresse Hotmail (mr.x@hotmail.com) paye en effet son contrat jusqu'à 30 livres sterling plus cher que celui qui possède un compte GMail (mr.y@gmail.com). Les responsables d'Admiral n'hésitent pas à confirmer cette différence, qui concerne d'ailleurs d'autres fournisseurs que Hotmail, en indiquant que leurs recherches établissent un risque plus élevé pour ces personnes.

Le deuxième exemple est potentiellement plus polémique puisqu'il semblerait qu'une même police puisse être proposée avec un écart de tarif de presque 1 000 livres, selon que le souscripteur s'appelle John Smith ou Mohammed Ali (les pseudonymes utilisés par les journalistes). Là également, bien qu'aucune réaction officielle ne soit mentionnée, il est probable que c'est une analyse statistique qui conduit à cette différence, repérée aussi, quoique dans des proportions plus modérées, chez d'autres assureurs.

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En prolongeant encore la réflexion, arrive inévitablement le sujet de la nature même du produit d'assurance : que devient son principe originel de mutualisation des risques si, au fil de l'application d'algorithmes de plus en plus pointus sur une masse de plus en plus importante d'information, le prix payé par chaque client est ajusté à son risque individuel ? Cette perspective est-elle acceptable ? Ou faut-il prendre les mesures pour éviter d'en arriver là ? Dans ce dernier cas, le cas d'Admiral signale une urgence…

If you are a Facebook user, unless you have actively opted out of the Nielsen tracking, Nielsen can track your clicks and views for its online measurement research. Nielsen/Facebook have already been tracking online advertising that people see, beginning in 2009/2010. Going forward, the Facebook/Nielsen tracking will also measure your TV viewing on mobiles and tablets. The Nielsen/Facebook tracking occurs while you are logged in to Facebook.

Few consumers have ever heard of Acxiom. But analysts say it has amassed the world’s largest commercial database on consumers — and that it wants to know much, much more. Its servers process more than 50 trillion data “transactions” a year. Company executives have said its database contains information about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. That includes a majority of adults in the United States.

An information broker collects information about individuals from public records and private sources including census and change of address records, motor vehicle and driving records, user-contributed material to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, media and court reports, voter registration lists, consumer purchase histories, most-wanted lists and terrorist watch lists, bank card transaction records, health care authorities, and web browsing histories.

The data are aggregated to create individual profiles, often made up of thousands of individual pieces of information such as a person's age, race, gender, height, weight, marital status, religious affiliation, political affiliation, occupation, household income, net worth, home ownership status, investment habits, product preferences and health-related interests. Brokers then sell the profiles to other organizations that use them mainly to target advertising and marketing towards specific groups, to verify a person's identity including for purposes of fraud detection, and to sell to individuals and organizations so they can research people for various reasons. Data brokers also often sell the profiles to government agencies, such as the FBI, thus allowing law enforcement agencies to circumvent laws that protect privacy.

Le 23 août 2017 paraît l'article de Numerama "Enquête : comment les apps Figaro, L’Équipe ou Closer participent au pistage de 10 millions de Français". C'est à partir de cette date que tout commence. L'article confirme mes suppositions du moment. Le tracking sur mobile collecte une quantité démentielle de données, données qui seront ensuite partagées/achetées/vendues à d'autres sociétés. Par exemple, la société AppsFlyer, éditant le tracker du même nom, est partenaire de la société chinoise MobVista. Plus généralement, les sociétés éditrices de trackers, comme Teemo ou Ad4Screen, ont des partenariats avec des sociétés d'ampleur supérieure.

Instead of reading stories that get to you because they're popular, or just happen to be in your feed at that moment, you'll read stories that get to you because you chose to go to them. Sounds simple, and insignificant, and almost too easy, right?

It's only easy, and simple to do. As for why you should do it: It's definitely not simple, nor insignificant. By choosing to be a reader of websites whose voices and ideas you're fundamentally interested in and care about, you're taking control.

And by doing that, you'll chip away at the incentive publishers have to create headlines and stories weaponized for the purpose of sharing on social media. You'll be stripping away at the motivation for websites everywhere (including this one) to make dumb hollow mindgarbage. At the same time, you'll increase the incentive for these websites to be (if nothing else) more consistent and less desperate for your attention.

We blame Walmart for decimating small businesses, but ultimately, small town shoppers chose convenience and lower prices over the more local and diverse offerings from their neighbors. And for the past several years, readers have been doing the same thing in favoring Facebook. What Kamer is arguing is that readers who value good journalism, good writing, and diverse viewpoints need to push back against the likes of the increasingly powerful and monolithic Facebook…and visiting individual websites is one way to do that.

Even some devices with patches available are connected to the naked Internet.