Tag Archive for: handing

How security pros use TikTok without handing over personal data to China

/in


I’ve been saying it for months: Get TikTok off your phone.

It’s not the only China-based app you need to worry about. Temu, the app that lets you “shop like a billionaire,” isn’t worth the deals. Here’s why — and what to do if you’ve been using it.

That’s not all. Here’s a list of dangerous apps you need to delete ASAP.

If you still want to use TikTok, you can without handing over all your information to communist China.

Why not just use the app?

Plain and simple, TikTok is a national security threat. The Chinese-owned social media platform’s parent company ByteDance is based in Beijing and is required by Chinese law to give the government access to collected data. 

TikTok collects data that includes search and browsing history, facial ID, voice prints, texts, location, and photos. 

Though government agencies and even the entire state of Montana have banned the social media app, it’s still incredibly popular — used by about two-thirds of teens in the U.S.

TikTok

A TikTok logo is displayed on a smartphone in this illustration taken on Jan. 6, 2020.  (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic)

Want my tech smarts straight to your inbox? Less than 5 minutes a day and loved by 400K readers. Sign up for free.

What are your options?

Browsing TikTok on the web won’t cut it. There’s still a significant amount of tracking. 

Your best buy is buying a low-cost smartphone, sometimes called a burner phone. You don’t need anything fancy since this is just for social media. A super basic cheap Android phone works just fine.

Turn on the phone and set it up, but here’s the trick: Don’t link it to any of your primary accounts. 

Start fresh

Do not log into your Google account, Apple ID, company email, personal email, or anything else. Certainly, don’t give it access to any sensitive personal or financial information.

Create a new email account just for this phone — and your TikTok account. That way, even if TikTok (or any other app) collects data from your device, it won’t be tied to your actual personal information.

Of course, this phone still has a connection to you. Be careful what you share with the app or in your posts.

You can connect the burner phone to your home’s Wi-Fi, so you don’t need to…

Source…

California Police Officers Are Handing Out Free Doorbell Cameras In Exchange For Testimony In Court

/in

Snitches no longer get stitches. In the year of our lord two-thousand-nineteen, snitches get street surveillance gear from Amazon.

Amazon’s Ring doorbell — which sports a handy camera to catch all those package thieves — has swallowed up more than 200 police departments with its charm offensive. Cops get doorbell cams at a discount and hand them out for free to locals with the assumption residents will repay the favor by granting officers warrant-free access to footage any time they ask.

To decrease friction, Ring — which has final edit approval on police publicity efforts — nudges people towards its snitch app, Neighbors, which encourages users to post any suspicious footage they capture. Ring also nudges law enforcement towards more social media interaction with Ring users to blur the line between sharing with neighbors and sharing with government employees.

The push continues. Amazon sees a market worth cornering and cops see a handy way to turn multiple doorsteps into extensions of their existing surveillance network. Win-win for all involved, I guess, except those who want to secure their homes without feeling obligated to hand over footage whenever the government thinks it might be helpful.

The advantages for law enforcement are obvious. And that has led to more… um… proactive efforts by law enforcement to spread the good word about these doorbell cameras. Louise Matsakis reports for Wired that a California law enforcement agency recently offered Ring doorbells to citizens in exchange for some help with their cop work.

On June 21, Chris Williams, the captain of the El Monte Police Department in California, sent an email to staff reminding them about a new incentive for crime witnesses to share information with law enforcement. Rather than the cash reward used by some programs, El Monte gave out camera-equipped doorbells made by the home security company Ring, which retail starting at $ 99.

The asking price for a “free” $ 99 camera seems to be a bit steep. According to documents obtained by Caroline Haskins of Motherboard, the El Monte PD isn’t interested in vague tips about somebody seeing somebody do something. This may be acceptable for confidential informants, but potential camera “winners” have a higher bar to hurdle. The tips must be specific, result in a prosecution, and — here’s the big one — potential camera recipients must be willing to testify in court.

Since the PD is also sort of getting a free camera — what with Ring’s online portal that allows cops to locate any Ring owner and ask them directly for footage sans warrant — this seems like a raw deal for the general public. While most people do want to help law enforcement put criminals behind bars, a decent percentage of those probably aren’t willing to go so far as to get on the stand during a trial.

Ring says it doesn’t encourage this sort of thing, nor does it craft scripts or write PR pitches suggesting cops offer free cameras in exchange for testimony. But Ring definitely encourages this sort of thing with its unending push to deploy more cameras and get more people using its Neighbors app.

A few weeks after Williams sent out a reminder about the rewards program, a Ring employee emailed him with a congratulatory note: “Since EMPD first onboarded on 5/1, you have all increased your Neighbors app users (El Monte residents) by 1,058 users! Great job!”

And there’s even more encouragement where that came from.

Ring nominated the El Monte Police Department for Ring’s “Agency of the Year Award,” according to new emails obtained by Motherboard. One email from a Ring representative, dated July 2019, asks the police department to submit “a success story” that resulted from using the Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal.

There’s really no downside to the El Monte PD’s exchange program, other than some negative press. If someone is willing to do all of this for a $ 99 camera, it’s unlikely they’ll push back at all when the PD starts asking for their doorbell footage.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Techdirt.

ACLU Obtains Documents Showing Amazon Is Handing Out Cheap Facial Recognition Tech To Law Enforcement

/in

More bad news on the privacy front, thanks to one of America’s largest corporations. Documents obtained by the ACLU show Amazon is arming law enforcement agencies with cheap facial recognition tech, allowing them to compare any footage obtained from a variety of sources to uploaded mugshot databases.

The company has developed a powerful and dangerous new facial recognition system and is actively helping governments deploy it. Amazon calls the service “Rekognition.”

Marketing materials and documents obtained by ACLU affiliates in three states reveal a product that can be readily used to violate civil liberties and civil rights. Powered by artificial intelligence, Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces, according to Amazon.

It’s already been deployed to several areas around the country, with Amazon acting as the government’s best friend a la AT&T historic proactive cooperation with NSA surveillance efforts. The documents [PDF] obtained by the ACLU show Amazon has been congratulated by local law enforcement officials for a “first-of-its-kind public-private partnership,” thanks to its deployment efforts. On top of providing deployment assistance, Amazon also offers troubleshooting and “best practices” for officers using the tech. It has even offered free consulting to agencies expressing an interest in Rekognition.

These efforts aren’t surprising in and of themselves, although Amazon’s complicity in erecting a law enforcement surveillance structure certainly is. Amazon is looking to capture an underserved market, and the more proactive it is, the more market it will secure before competitors arrive. To further cement its position in the marketplace, Amazon is limiting what law enforcement agencies can say about these public-private partnerships.

In the records, Amazon also solicits feedback and ideas for “potential enhancements” to Rekognition’s capabilities for governments. Washington County even signed a non-disclosure agreement created by Amazon to get “insight into the Rekognition roadmap” and provide additional feedback about the product. The county later cited this NDA to justify withholding documents in response to the ACLU’s public records request.

Documents also suggest Amazon is looking to partner with body camera manufacturers to add its facial recognition tech. This is something body camera manufacturers are already considering, and licensing an established product is far easier than building one from the ground up.

The system is powerful and can apparently pull faces from real-time footage to compare to databases. It also allows agencies to track individuals. It puts passive cameras on surveillance steroids, giving any person who strolls past a government camera a chance to be mistaken for a wanted suspect. To date, facial recognition software has managed to generate high numbers of false positives, while only producing a handful of valid arrests.

These efforts have been deployed with zero input from the largest stakeholder in any government operation: the general public.

Because of Rekognition’s capacity for abuse, we asked Washington County and Orlando for any records showing that their communities had been provided an opportunity to discuss the service before its acquisition. We also asked them about rules governing how the powerful surveillance system could be used and ensuring rights would be protected. Neither locality identified such records.

It may be the NDAs discourage public discussion, but more likely the agencies acquiring the tech knew the public wouldn’t be pleased with having their faces photographed, tracked, stored indefinitely, and compared to pictures stored in law enforcement databases. And if public agencies are unwilling to discuss these programs with the public, they’re far less likely to create internal policies governing use of the tech. Amazon’s push to secure a sizable portion of this market is only making things worse, and its use of NDAs is going to further distance these public agencies from being accountable to the people they serve.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Techdirt.

Facebook, the early years: handing out a master password like candy

/in

Former “voice of the boy king” – aka ghostwriter to Mark Zuckerberg – Katherine Losse says she was stunned when they handed over a password that could get her into any account, all sans background check to ascertain whether or not she was a “crazed stalker”.
Naked Security – Sophos