privacy

86 Articles

The Pound ( Or Euro, Or Dollar ) Can Still Be In Your Pocket

October 27, 2024 by 85 Comments

A British journalistic trope involves the phrase “The pound in your pocket”, a derisory reference to the 1960s Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s use of it to try to persuade the public that a proposed currency devaluation wouldn’t affect them. Nearly six decades later not so many Brits carry physical pounds in their pockets as electronic transfers have become more prevalent, but the currency remains. So much so that the governor of the Bank of England has had to reassure the world that the pound won’t be replaced by a proposed “Britcoin” cryptocurrency should that be introduced.

Normally matters of monetary policy aren’t within Hackaday’s remit, but since the UK is not the only country to mull over the idea of a tightly regulated cryptocurrency tied to their existing one, there’s a privacy angle to be considered while still steering clear of the fog of cryptocurrency enthusiasts. The problem is that reading the justification for the new digital pound from the Bank of England, it’s very difficult to see much it offers which isn’t already offered by existing cashless payment systems. Meanwhile it offers to them a blank regulatory sheet upon which they can write any new rules they want, and since that inevitably means some of those rules will affect digital privacy in a negative manner, it should be a worry to anyone whose government has considered the idea. Being at pains to tell us that we’ll still be able to see a picture of the King (or a dead President, or a set of bridges) on a bit of paper thus feels like an irrelevance as increasingly few of us handle banknotes much anyway these days. Perhaps that act in itself will now become more of an act of protest. And just when we’d persuaded our hackerspaces to go cashless, too.

Header: Wikitropia, CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Hackaday Links: September 8, 2024

September 8, 2024 by 13 Comments

OK, sit down, everyone — we don’t want you falling over and hurting yourself when you learn the news that actually yes, your phone has been listening to your conversations all along. Shocking, we know, but that certainly seems to be what an outfit called Cox Media Group (CMG) does with its “Active Listening” software, according to a leaked slide deck that was used to pitch potential investors. The gist is that the software uses a smartphone’s microphone to listen to conversations and pick out keywords that it feeds to its partners, namely Google, Facebook, and Amazon so that they can target you with directed advertisements. Ever have an IRL conversation about something totally random only to start seeing references to that subject pop up where they never did before? We sure have, and while “relationship mining” seemed like a more parsimonious explanation back in 2017, the state of tech makes eavesdropping far more plausible today. Then there’s the whole thing of basically being caught red-handed. The Big Three all huffed and puffed about how they were shocked, SHOCKED to learn that this was going on, with reactions ranging from outright denial of ever partnering with CMG to quietly severing their relationship with the company. So much for years of gaslighting on this.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: September 8, 2024” →

How About Privacy and Hackability?

August 3, 2024 by 32 Comments

Many smart electric meters in the US use the 900 MHz band to broadcast their usage out to meter readers as they walk the neighborhood. [Jeff Sandberg] used an RTL-SDR dongle and some software to integrate this data into his own home automation system, which lets him keep track of his home’s power usage.

Half of the comment section was appalled that the meters broadcast this data in the clear, and these readers thought this data should be encrypted even if the reach is limited to the home-owner’s front yard. But that would have stopped [Jeff] from accessing his own data as well, and that would be a shame. So there’s clearly a tradeoff in play here.

We see this tradeoff in a lot of hardware devices as well – we want to be able to run our firmware on them, but we don’t want criminals to do the same. We want the smart device to work with the cloud service, but to also work with our own home automation system if we have one. And we want to be able to listen in to our smart meters, but don’t necessarily want others to do so.

The solution here is as easy as it is implausible that it will get implemented. If the smart meters transmitted encrypted, each with their own individual password, then everyone would win. The meter reader would have a database of passwords linked to meter serial numbers or addresses, and the home owner could just read it off of a sticker, optimally placed on each unit. Privacy and usability would be preserved.

This issue isn’t just limited to electric meters. Indeed, think of all of the data that is being sent out from or about you, and what percentage of it is not encrypted and should be, but also about what data is sent out encrypted that you could use access to. The solution is to put you in control of the encryption, by selecting a password or having access to one that’s set for you. Because after all, if it’s your data, it should be your data: private and usable.

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Ask Hackaday: Has Firefox Finally Gone Too Far?

July 14, 2024 by 122 Comments

In a world where so much of our lives depend on the use of online services, the web browser used to access those services becomes of crucial importance. It becomes a question of whether we trust the huge corporate interests which control this software with such access to our daily lives, and it is vital that the browser world remains a playing field with many players in the game.

The mantle has traditionally fallen upon Mozilla’s Firefox browser to represent freedom from corporate ownership, but over the last couple of years even they have edged away from their open source ethos and morphed into an advertising company that happens to have a browser. We’re asking you: can we still trust Mozilla’s Firefox, when the latest version turns on ad measurement by default?

Such has been the dominance of Google’s Chromium in the browser world, that it becomes difficult to find alternatives which aren’t based on it. We can see the attraction for developers, instead of pursuing the extremely hard task of developing a new browser engine, just use one off-the-shelf upon which someone else has already done the work. As a result, once you have discounted browsers such as the venerable Netsurf or Dillo which are cool as heck but relatively useless for modern websites, the choices quickly descend into the esoteric. There are Ladybird and Servo which are both promising but still too rough around the edges for everyday use, so what’s left? Probably LibreWolf represents the best option, a version of Firefox with a focus on privacy and security.

We’re interested in your views on this topic, because we know you’ll have a lot to say about it. Meanwhile if you’re a Firefox user who’s upgraded to version 128 and you’re not sure what to do, don’t panic. Find the settings page, go to “Privacy and Security”, and un-check the “Website Advertising Preferences” checkbox.

A pair of hands holds a digital camera. "NUCA" is written in the hood above the lens and a black grip is on the right hand side of the device (left side of image). The camera body is off-white 3D printed plastic. The background is a pastel yellow.

AI Camera Only Takes Nudes

April 22, 2024 by 52 Comments

One of the cringier aspects of AI as we know it today has been the proliferation of deepfake technology to make nude photos of anyone you want. What if you took away the abstraction and put the faker and subject in the same space? That’s the question the NUCA camera was designed to explore. [via 404 Media]

[Mathias Vef] and [Benedikt Groß] designed the NUCA camera “with the intention of critiquing the current trajectory of AI image generation.” The camera itself is a fairly unassuming device, a 3D-printed digital camera (19.5 × 6 × 1.5 cm) with a 37 mm lens. When the camera shutter button is pressed, a nude image is generated of the subject.

The final image is generated using a mixture of the picture taken of the subject, pose data, and facial landmarks. The photo is run through a classifier which identifies features such as age, gender, body type, etc. and then uses those to generate a text prompt for Stable Diffusion. The original face of the subject is then stitched onto the nude image and aligned with the estimated pose. Many of the sample images on the project’s website show the bias toward certain beauty ideals from AI datasets.

Looking for more ways to use AI with cameras? How about this one that uses GPS to imagine a scene instead. Prefer to keep AI out of your endeavors to invade personal space? How about building your own TSA body scanner?

 

The Most Annoying Thing On The Internet Isn’t Really Necessary

March 29, 2024 by 31 Comments

We’re sure you’ll agree that there are many annoying things on the Web. Which of them we rate as most annoying depends on personal view, but we’re guessing that quite a few of you will join us in naming the ubiquitous cookie pop-up at the top of the list. It’s the pesky EU demanding consent for tracking cookies, we’re told, nothing to do with whoever is demanding you click through screens and screens of slider switches to turn everything off before you can view their website.

Now [Bite Code] is here to remind us that it’s not necessary. Not in America for the somewhat obvious reason that it’s not part of the EU, and perhaps surprisingly, not even in the EU itself.

The EU does have a consent requirement, but the point made in the article is that its requirements are satisfied by the Do Not Track header standard, an HTTP feature that’s been with us since 2009 but which almost nobody implemented so is now deprecated. This allowed a user to reject tracking at the browser level, making all the cookie popups irrelevant. That popups were chosen instead, the article concludes, is due to large websites preferring to make the process annoying enough that users simply click on the consent button to make it go away, making tracking much more likely. We suspect that the plethora of cookie popups also has something to do with FUD among owners of smaller websites, that somehow they don’t comply with the law if they don’t have one.

So as we’d probably all agree, the tracking cookie situation is a mess. This post is being written of Firefox which now silos cookies to only the site which delivered them, but there seems to be little for the average user stuck with either of the big browsers. Perhaps we should all hope for a bit more competition in the future.

Cookies header: Lisa Fotios, CC0.

Big Candy Is Watching You: Facial Recognition In Vending Machines Upsets University

February 27, 2024 by 50 Comments

Most people don’t think too much of vending machines. They’re just those hulking machines that lurk around on train stations, airports and in the bowels of school and office buildings, where you can exchange far too much money for a drink or a snack. What few people are aware of is just how these vending machines have changed over the decades, to the point where they’re now collecting any shred of information on who interacts with them, down to their age and gender.

How do we know this? We have a few enterprising students at the University of Waterloo to thank. After [SquidKid47] posted a troubling error message displayed by a campus M&M vending machine on Reddit, [River Stanley] decided to investigate the situation. The resulting article was published in the February 16th edition of the university’s digital newspaper, mathNEWS.

In a bout of what the publication refers to as “Actual Journalism”, [Stanley] found that the machine in question was produced by Invenda, who in their brochure (PDF) excitedly note the many ways in which statistics like age, gender, foot traffic, session time and product demographics can be collected. This data, which includes the feed from an always-on camera, is then processed and ‘anonymized statistics’ are sent to central servers for perusal by the vending machine owner.

The good news is that this probably doesn’t mean that facial recognition and similar personalized information is stored (or sent to the big vaporous mainframe) as this would violate the GDPR  and similar data privacy laws, but there is precedence of information kiosks at a mall operator taking more liberties. Although the University of Waterloo has said that these particular vending machines will be removed, there’s something uncomfortable about knowing that those previously benign vending machines are now increasingly more like the telescreens in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Perhaps we’re already at the point in this timeline were it’s best to assume that even vending machines are always watching and listening, to learn our most intimate snacking and drinking habits.

Thanks to [Albert Hall] for the tip.