The Global War over Data Privacy

Data privacy issues are global because the internet itself is global. Actually, it's becoming less so as China builds its own version and the EU implements privacy laws that build a wall around its own citizens. At some time in the fairly near future, it may effectively become three separate versions of the internet. There's more in the Freedom on the Net 2018 report and it's fascinating reading. There's a section on China that is particularly interesting.

The report says straightforwardly that we are losing the battle for data privacy and presents this graphic to illustrate its point. The data breaches it pictures, many of them familiar to us, keep growing in size. Just today Marriott announced that the records of 500 million of its customers all over the world had been breached.

One that may not be familiar is a lesson in what is going on in one democratic nation. Aadhaar is the national identity card of India that contains demographic and biometric data on over 1 billion Indian citizens. It provides identification and access to financial and government services. It has a history of data breaches of various sizes and severity, and it seems that virtually all data has been accessed at one time or another. The Aadhaar system collects a significant amount of biometric data about each subject, something not universally done in the US. Could that be in our future?

If you are interested in the issues surrounding the internet in China, here is an interesting article on Google's controversial development project in China. It comes from a site called Global Voices that publishes articles by writers from many different countries. I recommend the site and their newsletter for interesting reading on many subjects.

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Related Updates
Developments in Russia 

Toys That 'Do No Harm' - Holiday Gifts 2018

When my children were growing up we accessed a report on dangerous toys that had mechanical or usage issues that could cause unexpected harm. Now the scene has shifted. The question is, "Do the toys listen in on family conversations or otherwise invade privacy?"

It's an important question and maybe even harder to evaluate than the mechanical issues I was hopeless at. Mozilla is the non-profit developer of the open-source browser Firefox, which many of use in preference to a commercial browser. Their second annual report on connected toys that do not have serious privacy issues is a welcome addition to the 2018 holiday season.

Here's a link to the report. Note that users can include their own ratings to further increase the quality of the recommendations.

Most of us will include some connected electronics products on our gifts lists, so this should be required reading for all!

Stay Safe this holiday season!

The Future of Fake News

We have seen the future of fake news and it's Artificial Intelligence. MIT Technology Review did a series on AI and disinformation and here's a quote from their newsletter:

The big change: AI now makes it possible for anyone with a decent computer and a few hours to spare to do what only used to be possible at a big-budget movie studio: create believable, but totally fake video footage. Further machine-learning advances will make even more complex deception possible--and make fakery harder to spot.
Deep fakes and politics: Convincing AI enabled face swaps—called deepfakes—that threaten to further blur the line between truth and fiction in politics. “Deepfakes have the potential to derail political discourse,” says Charles Seife, a professor at NYU. “Technology is altering our perception of reality at an alarming rate.”
Easy to fake: Tools for creating these false videos are becoming increasing easy to use. Our own Will Knight easily stitched Ted Cruz's face onto Paul Rudd. As he writes, perhaps the greatest risk is that the technology will further undermine truth and objectivity. It’s not that the truth won’t still be out there—it’s that we might not know it when we see it. 
            
Here are a couple of videos that illustrate the issues.



The first one allows any klutz to superimpose cool dance moves onto his or her frame. That's fun! And the authors explain how they did it.


This presents an unsettling view of the future. Is there anything that can be done? Or more specifically, can technology rescue us from the danger it has created?

There is a possibility that technology can come to the rescue. Wired describes a Darpa program called MediFor—Media Forensics. Remember, the Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency (DARPA) gave us the initial structure of the internet. The program is a national security effort, so that suggests it is well funded. 

The DARPA effort includes many complex technologies like facial recognition, but the Wired article is easily comprehensible to the layperson. I urge you to read it in its entirety--it has good news as well as bad.

That's a fitting note on which to end my #CyberAware posts. But I'll be following up on many of these topics in the very near future.

I hope you've enjoyed this month of posts and

Stay Safe!

Related Content:
Deep fake of Mark Zuckerberg 

Tools For Identifying Fake News

It's important to remember that the internet/social media did not invent fake news. It's been around forever. However, it is equally true that the internet distributes fake news at an incredible speed and social media is the main, but not the only, culprit. Hence, yesterday's post about how to identify fake news in social media.

If you found that a bit disappointing--the advice is not terribly different from that for identifying fake news in any context--you are exactly right. It's reasonable to ask whether there are any tools that could be helpful.

Before a brief listing of tools, a word about fake news itself. Most of us have read ad nauseum about foreign interference. A lot of it is alarmist and lacking in factual data. I've found two thoughtful reports if you want to review them to be sure what you're looking for. A recent report that is detailed and factual comes from Ars Technica. I took the graphic from there; it was the least repugnant one in that set; you are welcome to look further. The other is a brief post from Axios about uses of social media by various governments.

Now on to tools The best known is one called Botcheck.me. Just a visit there is interesting because it shows the trending hashtags and most active Twitter accounts for the past 24 hours. It's easy to put your Twitter account name in and find out if you have suspicious patterns suggesting the presence of fake news sites. Mine didn't show any, which is not surprising, because I follow mostly business news sites. There are a few more but most, like Botcheck.me which only works on Twitter, are somewhat specialized.

Facebook also has a tool that let you see whether you've followed or liked any suspicious pages. 

The most used tools are probably the fact-checking sites.These have been around for awhile. I've used them all and find them to be reliable:

• FactCheck.org
• Snopes
• Politifact
• Fact Check by the Washington Post

They all have interesting posts about the stories they research. It's worth following one or two of them just to keep up with what's out there.

Tomorrow is the last #CyberAware day. The month has flown by!

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Updated 10/25, 11:45 am

How to Identify Fake News in Social Media

Identifying fake news on social media platforms is difficult for the individual user, primarily because it comes from trusted friends. It is also particularly dangerous for the same reason; the trusted source makes it more likely to be believable.

Analytics site Statista has an interesting page that highlights numerous pieces of data about fake news. The data in this first chart should surprise no one. As a single site Facebook is still king of the hill when it comes to fake news, although Twitter is not that far behind.

If you too feel surrounded by fake news, the second chart will be interesting. It shows the U.S. to be considerably behind three other countries in terms of exposure to fake news. There may be reasons why various countries have different levels of exposure to fake news, but they are not evident upon simple inspection.





NBC news explains a bit how bots work to distribute fake news and gives some tips for recognizing a fake news post when you see it. The advice may seem a bit familiar, but it is good. Remember that the source of fake news is something fake. Their recommendations have some good commentary:

• "Question the source. If a story comes from a newspaper, is it from a reputable site? The Denver Guardian, cited often in 2016, never existed and listed an empty car park as its address.
• Look for confirmation. If you don’t see a story across mainstream media, there’s probably a good reason why. “Mainstream media is motivated by getting an audience.” Huxley* says.
• Check the facts with third-party sites like Snopes and Politifact. Admittedly, though, fact checking has its limits. By the time a claim is researched and proven false, it may have already reached millions of accounts.
• Call out fake news you see in your network — but do it privately. “What polarizes people further is calling them out publicly. Then people get defensive because it makes them look stupid or gullible for posting it in the first place.” Huxley says." 

*Sam Huxley. practice chair of risk and business strategy, for the communications firm LEVICK.

 
Those are good suggestions, and we should all be following them. The article has another good idea, though, "Burst your own bubble." We all live in self-created bubbles these days. In following content we enjoy we have surrounded ourselves with content we agree with. Subscribe to some feeds that provide alternative points of view. Your own perspectives will be stronger after some reflection.

There are other sites and a few tools that can help in this challenging endeavor. I'll discuss some of those tomorrow.

Stay safe!

How Can You Tell It's Fake News?

Fake news is not new. Apparently the Ancient Greeks were masters of it. However, the Ancient Greeks didn't have the internet. We all know that fake news flourishes there. Problem is, how do we spot it.

Here's an infographic from the IFLA with 8 good tips. And the infographic itself provides several good lessons.

https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11174

Lesson 1. It's from the International Federation of Library Institutions and Associations. That's a mouthful, so the acronym is much appreciated. But it's easy to look up (search for) with almost 3 million results. The first ten, at least, look entirely reputable.

Lesson 2. The infographic has the name of the organization as part of the graphic. That's not a solid clue because some fake news organizations like to promote their names and make it easy to find their content also. However, checking on the origin of the publication is important if you have any doubt at all, and making it easy is good.

Lesson 3. I've put the URL for the link in the caption anyway. It's a .org, not some kind of flaky URL. That's super important. That's the key issue, but the name of the organization in the link is also correct and straightforward. No deception here.

Lesson 4.  The website itself is solid, not a thrown-together mishmash. It has a really interesting set of pages on their vision for the future of libraries. More relevant to the current issue, the article has a link to FactCheck.org, which is a well-known fact-checking group.

Lesson 5.  Finally, I'll give the advice I've been giving my students for years. Use the golden rule of journalism. Two sources are necessary. Three is the gold standard. If three reputable publishers agree on the facts, there's a good chance they are true.

If there are opposing arguments, keep on reading. That's one thing we do too little of these days--listening to arguments from opposing sides. 

Hint: it gets more difficult from here on in. Tomorrow I'm going to tackle how to identify fake news on social media feeds.

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Related Updates
Good example of fake news targeting the Red Cross
How fake news happens 

Last Week of NCSAM - Protect Our Infrastructure

Week 4 of #CyberAware week has an important theme -- protecting the nation's critical cyber infrastructure. I'm devoting the week's first post to that subject, but then I'm going to move on to a subject more appropriate to the target audience of this blog.

Recognizing fake news is a topic on which I've been collecting information since I started this blog. The subject just continues to get more complex. I'll never wrap my arms around it in a single post, so I've decided to do a week's worth of smaller, more focused posts on the topic. Perhaps after that some sort of a summary of the current situation will emerge.

The subject of our nation's critical infrastructure should be of importance to every one of us and all of us should be pressuring governments at all levels to strengthen and protect cyber infrastructure. Today I'm going to just deal with two aspects, business cybersecurity and our voting network.

Like other issues of strategic importance the security of the business's communications infrastructure should be a concern of the CEO and all other executives. Vigilance must start at the top. One CEO magazine says, “It all starts with acknowledging the problem is real – and that the threat is increasing.” CEOs must:

1. Improve Visibility: You can’t protect what you can’t see.
2. Incorporate Modern Cyber Defenses: AI and machine learning take center stage. See an earlier post on one AI approach.
3. Ensure Preparedness by treating cybersecurity as a strategic priority in terms of both organization and resources.

The infrastructure issue of overriding importance to all of us is the security of our voting infrastructure. Some towns, cities and states have worked hard on it. Others are using questionable tech or insufficient backup. We are more aware but probably little better protected than we were in 2016. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an objective perspective on the subject. The National Academies have prepared a report that looks ahead to 2020. Among its recommendations:

All U.S. Elections Should Use Paper Ballots by 2020 Presidential Election; 

Internet Voting Should Not Be Used at This Time 

This page has links to several presentations of the findings including an interesting infographic. 

 

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