Nintendo Left Gamers Vulnerable Long Before Shocking Data Breach – CCN.com
Nintendo Left Gamers Vulnerable Long Before Shocking Data Breach CCN.com
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Tag Archive for: Before
Clearview Was A Toy For Billionaires Before It Became A Toy For Cops
Clearview’s claims that its controversial facial recognition program is only for use by law enforcement agencies continues to be exposed as a lie. Documents obtained by BuzzFeed showed the company has sold its tech to a variety of private companies, including major retailers like Kohl’s and Walmart.
It’s also expanding its reach across the globe, pitching its products to dozens of countries, including those known mostly for their human rights violations. Even when it limits itself to law enforcement agencies, it still can’t help lying — exaggerating its success and assistance in criminal investigations.
Before Clearview became a plaything for government agencies and private corporations, it was a toy for the rich and powerful. Kashmir Hill — who broke the first story about Clearview’s problematic image-scraping operation — has a followup in the New York Times detailing the company’s unpleasant origin story.
One Tuesday night in October 2018, John Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes grocery store chain, was having dinner at Cipriani, an upscale Italian restaurant in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, when his daughter, Andrea, walked in. She was on a date with a man Mr. Catsimatidis didn’t recognize. After the couple sat down at another table, Mr. Catsimatidis asked a waiter to go over and take a photo.
Mr. Catsimatidis then uploaded the picture to a facial recognition app, Clearview AI, on his phone. The start-up behind the app has a database of billions of photos, scraped from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Within seconds, Mr. Catsimatidis was viewing a collection of photos of the mystery man, along with the web addresses where they appeared: His daughter’s date was a venture capitalist from San Francisco.
“I wanted to make sure he wasn’t a charlatan,” said Mr. Catsimatidis, who then texted the man’s bio to his daughter.
That’s just one anecdote. There are others. Investors approached by Clearview, like venture capitalist Hal Lambert, explored the power of Clearview’s app in pretty irresponsible ways. Lambert allowed his school-aged daughters access to the app. And it appears actor/investor Ashton Kutcher was given access to the app. He described an app that sounds exactly like Clearview when he appeared on the YouTube series “Hot Ones” last September.
“I have an app in my phone in my pocket right now. It’s like a beta app,” Mr. Kutcher said. “It’s a facial recognition app. I can hold it up to anybody’s face here and, like, find exactly who you are, what internet accounts you’re on, what they look like. It’s terrifying.”
It is terrifying. And far more people have had access to it than Clearview has admitted. Plenty of potential investors were given access to the app. It’s not clear how many still have access, but it appears their use of the app went unmonitored/uncontrolled by Clearview. Understandably, investors want to know if the thing they’re looking to invest in works, but Clearview did nothing to ensure this access was limited or used responsibly. That same attitude has carried over to its pitches to law enforcement, which encourages cops to use friends and family members as guinea pigs for tech it claims should only be used for legitimate law enforcement efforts.
Power and responsibility are supposed to go hand-in-hand. There’s none of that happening here. Clearview compiled a database by scraping images from hundreds of websites and is now selling this access to pretty much anyone willing to buy it.
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Why Is Fox News Acting As State Media, Announcing Trump’s Lawsuits Before They’re Filed And Failing To Point Out How Frivolous They Are?
As we’ve been pointing out, the Trump campaign, with the help of lawyer Charles Harder, has been suing a list of media enemies over the past week. There was the NY Times, followed by the Washington Post and (probably not) finally, CNN. We’ve detailed why each lawsuit is frivolous, and how they appear to be playing to Trump’s base in a performative manner, attacking the credibility of the media which has done critical reporting on his Presidency, and doing so in a manner that potentially serves two purposes: gets his fans riled up about the media while simultaneously creating a chilling effect on fairly typical journalistic analysis of the Trump administration and campaign.
But I wanted to focus in on a separate point: the effective “state media” of Fox News reporting on these lawsuits in absolutely ridiculous ways. Reporter Gregg Re wrote about the NY Times case, and at least included a link to the filing and noted that “lawsuits for libel against media organizations by public figures must clear a high bar.” But the reporting on the next two lawsuits, done by reporters Brian Flood and Brooke Singman, were terrible. Both of them claimed that reporting on the filing of a federal lawsuit was a Fox News “exclusive.” That’s not what exclusive means, guys.
Also, while Fox News eventually added a link to the filing in the story about the CNN lawsuit and the NY Times one, it initially did not link to the CNN one, and as of this writing has still not linked to the Washington Post filing. Indeed, as you can see above, the reporters almost gloat over the fact that Fox News “obtained” access to the lawsuit — and then failed to provide it to their readers. And with the CNN lawsuit, a search of PACER a couple of hours after the Fox News article went live showed no evidence that the case had actually been filed yet. In other words, it’s likely that someone associated with the campaign or the lawsuit handed the complaint over to Fox News to “break” the “exclusive” story.
And perhaps that explains why the reporting by Flood and Singman is so, so bad. Unlike the story by Re regarding the NY Times lawsuit, this one makes no effort to explain why this lawsuit faces a huge barrier (known as the 1st Amendment). Even worse, it repeats a blatantly false statement from the campaign’s “legal adviser” Jenna Ellis:
“False statements are not protected under the U.S. Constitution; therefore, these suits will have no chilling effect on freedom of the press. If journalists are more accurate in their statements and reporting, that would be a positive development, but not why these suits were filed,” Ellis added.
There is some irony in this statement about false statements being false, but it is. There’s plenty of precedent here, including (most clearly) the United States v. Alvarez (a case we’ve been pointing to a lot lately), which says:
The Court has never endorsed the categorical rule the Government advances: that false statements receive no First Amendment protection.
A good reporter would perhaps point that out in response to Ellis. But it appears that Fox News is less interested in employing good reporters, and more interested in acting as state media, and boosting the President it supports.
This is especially sickening, given that these are attacks on the very 1st Amendment that protects Fox News — and its long history of misleading, inaccurate, and occasionally false statements, that the network is somewhat infamous for. You would think, if it wasn’t subsumed in cultish adherence to the President, that it would recognize the importance of actually continuing to defend the part of the Constitution that allows them to exist. At the very least, you might hope that its reporters would be careful enough to accurately report the law. Apparently that is too much to ask.
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The hospital data breach playbook — What to do before, during and after – Becker’s Hospital Review
The hospital data breach playbook — What to do before, during and after Becker’s Hospital Review
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