Author: bobvee

I'm an old retired guy, modestly disabled (not modest at all)considering running away from home, if I get the right assistance (assistants?).

Amazon Explains How It Uses Data on Sellers for Its Own Products:

Source: https://www.theinformation.com/

In response to questions from U.S. lawmakers, Amazon said that while it does not use data on individual merchants’ sales, it looks at total sales within categories and search volume on its website to figure out which products are high in demand.

Amazon said in a letter that such practices are not uncommon among retailers that offer their own private label products. The company added that its private label sales only account for about 1% of Amazon’s total sales. Amazon also said certain data on sales rankings of its products are public.

It’s worth highlighting Amazon’s defense on the topic of its private label sales because regulators in Europe are looking into whether Amazon uses data about its sellers to undermine competition.

Renewables Can’t Power Modern Civilization Because They Were Never Meant Too…

Over the last decade, journalists have held up Germany’s renewables energy transition, the Energiewende, as an environmental model for the world.

“Many poor countries, once intent on building coal-fired power plants to bring electricity to their people, are discussing whether they might leapfrog the fossil age and build clean grids from the outset,” thanks to the Energiewende, wrote a New York Times reporter in 2014.

Continue reading “Renewables Can’t Power Modern Civilization Because They Were Never Meant Too…”

Google admits ‘language experts’ listen to ‘some’ assistant recordings

Outsourced spying: Google admits ‘language experts’ listen to ‘some’ assistant recordings

Google’s smart speakers are recording users when they least expect it, according to temp worker language experts hired by the company to listen to the snippets – which include some of users’ most private moments.

Google is able to claim it does not listen to the recordings Google Home devices are constantly generating only because it contracts the job out to temp workers. These “language experts,” as they are called, use a collaborative system built by the company to share and analyze sound snippets, assisting Google’s AI assistant in deciphering the nuances of human speech.

While Google emphasizes that it anonymizes the snippets, replacing the user’s name with a serial number, Belgian broadcaster VRT found that matching a voice snippet with its owner was not very difficult, given the ample supply of addresses and sensitive information found on the recordings they were given. They listened to over 1,000 excerpts supplied by a Dutch contractor and discovered that more than 15 percent of them – 153 recordings in all – were recorded without the user’s knowledge.

Full story: https://www.rt.com/news/463970-google-home-assistant-eavesdropping/

Facebook to be fined $US5 billion for privacy violations…

The US Federal Trade Commission has approved a roughly $US5 billion ($7.1 billion) settlement with Facebook over its investigation into the social media company’s handling of user data, a source familiar with the situation has told Reuters.

Key points:

  • Penalty criticised as “a Christmas present five months early” for Facebook
  • The settlement would be the largest civil penalty ever paid to the agency
  • Source tells Reuters a final announcement on the settlement could come as early as next week

The FTC has been investigating allegations Facebook inappropriately shared information belonging to 87 million users with the now-defunct British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

The probe had focused on whether the data sharing violated a 2011 consent agreement between Facebook and the regulator.

Investors cheered news of the deal and pushed Facebook shares up 1.8 per cent, while several powerful Democratic politicians in Washington condemned the proposed penalty as inadequate.

The FTC is expected to include in the settlement other restrictions on how Facebook treats user privacy, according to the Wall Street Journal, which also said that the agency vote was along party lines, with three Republicans voting to approve it and two Democrats opposed.

Full story: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-13/facebook-5-billion-dollar-fine-cambridge-analytica-privacy/11306324