remixtures

"If you want a job at McDonald’s today, there’s a good chance you'll have to talk to Olivia. Olivia is not, in fact, a human being, but instead an AI chatbot that screens applicants, asks for their contact information and résumé, directs them to a personality test, and occasionally makes them “go insane” by repeatedly misunderstanding their most basic questions.

Until last week, the platform that runs the Olivia chatbot, built by artificial intelligence software firm Paradox.ai, also suffered from absurdly basic security flaws. As a result, virtually any hacker could have accessed the records of every chat Olivia had ever had with McDonald's applicants—including all the personal information they shared in those conversations—with tricks as straightforward as guessing that an administrator account's username and password was “123456."

On Wednesday, security researchers Ian Carroll and Sam Curry revealed that they found simple methods to hack into the backend of the AI chatbot platform on McHire.com, McDonald's website that many of its franchisees use to handle job applications. Carroll and Curry, hackers with a long track record of independent security testing, discovered that simple web-based vulnerabilities—including guessing one laughably weak password—allowed them to access a Paradox.ai account and query the company's databases that held every McHire user's chats with Olivia. The data appears to include as many as 64 million records, including applicants' names, email addresses, and phone numbers."

https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-ai-hiring-chat-bot-paradoxai/?amp%3Bmc_eid=ceff4c8226

#CyberSecurity #AI #GenerativeAI #Chatbots #DataProtection

"The future of TikTok matters more than you might think. TikTok itself reports that more than 170 million Americans and 7.5 million U.S. businesses use the app. Pew Research Center estimates that nearly 60 percent of adults under 30 are on TikTok, and more than 50 percent of those users consider it their primary source for news.

Beyond the sheer reach of its userbase, an Oxford Economics report commissioned by TikTok found that in 2023, the app generated more than $24 billion in gross domestic product (GDP) and created more than 224,000 jobs in the U.S. alone.

In a recent interview with content creator Jessica Hawk, we spoke about her strategy for transitioning to other platforms, the ripple effects of a potential TikTok ban on brand partnerships and income streams, and how the creator economy might shift. While the fate of an app many young people use to share videos of themselves dancing may seem trivial, for the millions of people and businesses across the U.S. relying on the platform to make a living, the stakes are incalculable.

Outside of the detrimental impact that a TikTok ban would have on the livelihoods of its users, there is also much to be said about how PAFACA’s ultimatum perpetuates the global shift away from an open internet. As recent New America Technology and Democracy Fellow Tianyu Fang observed in New America’s The Thread, the internet has become “less open globally” in recent years due to the actions of both authoritarian governments and democracies.

Just as the Founding Fathers emphasized the importance of a separation of church and state, ensuring a separation between our government and Big Tech will be crucial to defending democracy—both nationally and globally—for years to come. TikTok is only the beginning."

https://www.newamerica.org/oti/blog/the-tiktok-ban-was-never-just-about-tiktok/

#SocialMedia #USA #TikTok #Censorship #DataProtection #Privacy

"DeepSeek could soon disappear from Apple and Google's official app stores in Germany as data protection officials accuse the Chinese chatbot of alleged privacy violations.

"DeepSeek's transfer of user data to China is unlawful," said Berlin Data Protection Commissioner Meike Kamp, in an official announcement dated June 27, 2025. Kamp has called on the Big Tech giant to consider blocking the app in the country.

Another EU member, Italy, already banned Deepseek from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store in January 2025 over similar grounds. The block was enforced about a week after the release of the ChatGPT rival.

According to German authorities, the company behind DeepSeek AI (Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Co., Ltd) violates Art. 46 (1) of the GDPR, which rules the need for "appropriate safeguards" when transferring EU citizens' personal data to a third country.

According to Kamp, DeepSeek failed to convince German officials that users' data is protected when these details are transferred to China, as expected by EU laws."

https://www.techradar.com/computing/cyber-security/deepseek-faces-ban-in-germany-as-privacy-watchdog-reports-the-app-to-google-and-apple-as-illegal-content

#EU #Germany #AI #GenerativeAI #DeepSeek #DataProtection #GDPR #Privacy #China

"In selling law enforcement agencies bulk access to such sensitive information, these airlines—through their data broker—are putting their own profits over travelers' privacy. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently detailed its own purchase of personal data from ARC. In the current climate, this can have a detrimental impact on people’s lives.

Movement unrestricted by governments is a hallmark of a free society. In our current moment, when the federal government is threatening legal consequences based on people’s national, religious, and political affiliations, having air travel in and out of the United States tracked by any ARC customer is a recipe for state retribution.

Sadly, data brokers are doing even broader harm to our privacy. Sensitive location data is harvested from smartphones and sold to cops, internet backbone data is sold to federal counterintelligence agencies, and utility databases containing phone, water, and electricity records are shared with ICE officers."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/data-brokers-are-selling-your-flight-information-cbp-and-ice

#USA #Surveillance #PoliceState #ICE #CBP #DataBrokers #Privacy

"The urban terrain, the resilience of Hamas and the people of Gaza, the balance of forces in the region and new warfare technologies posed distinct challenges for the Israeli Defence Forces, who were now fighting on multiple fronts with more ambitious goals than just recovering the hostages: destroying Hamas and then Hezbollah, controlling Southern Lebanon—in addition to making life unbearable for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. It was the continuation of the Nakba—an uncivil war of land expropriation.

In those early days, watching with mounting anxiety the indiscriminate bombing of a defenceless population, I wondered why such an eruption of violence had not occurred in apartheid South Africa. Many had anticipated a similar Armageddon. The States of Emergency between 1984 and 1994 saw the militarization of townships, death squads, chemical warfare, assassinations, torture and detention without trial. During this period, an estimated 20,000 were killed in South Africa, the vast majority black; another 1.5 million died in South Africa’s ‘destabilization’ of neighbouring countries. How, after ten years of civil war, did this culminate in a negotiated settlement, the dismantling of the major planks of the apartheid order, and the first elections based on majority rule? Why does such an outcome—with all its problems—seem so remote when we turn to the plight of the Palestinians and the spiralling violence, internal and external, of the Israeli state? How was it that the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 intensified confrontations rather than making progress towards a two-state solution? Why did Israel abandon the Abraham Accords, which outlined collaboration with Arab states, preferring the disproportionate massacre of Palestinians after Hamas’s incursion?"

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii153/articles/michael-burawoy-palestine-through-a-south-african-lens

#SouthAfrica #Apartheid #Israel #Colonialism #LandTheft #Palestine #Gaza #SettlerColonialism #Afrikaner #Zionism

#history

"History teaches us that economic interests have been key drivers and enablers of colonial enterprises and often of the genocides they perpetrated. The corporate sector has been intrinsic to colonialism since its inception, with corporations historically contributing to the violence against, the exploitation, and ultimately the dispossession, of Indigenous people and lands, a mode of domination known as racial colonial capitalism. Israel’s colonisation of the occupied Palestinian territories is no exception.

The recent report by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, constitutes a major contribution to understanding the political economy of Israel’s Apartheid state, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and, now, their genocide. As such, we believe, it must be studied and debated widely and freely.

In view of the virulently hostile and indeed intimidating letter from the US government to the UN Secretary General demanding the dismissal of Ms Albanese and the quashing of her excellent report, we felt the need to express our strong support for Ms Albanese and to encourage the UN to dismiss the shrill demands of the US and Israeli governments."

https://zeteo.com/p/exclusive-top-economists-back-francesca

#Israel #Palestine #Genocide #Colonialism #Economics #Imperialism

#history

"“I’m here to tell you if you’ve ever been on a dating app that wanted your location, or if you ever granted a weather app permission to know where you are 24/7, there’s a good chance a detailed log of your precise movement patterns has been vacuumed up and saved in some data bank somewhere that tens of thousands of total strangers have access to,” writes Tau.

Unraveling the story of how these strangers—everyone from government intelligence agents and local law enforcement officers to private investigators and employees of ad tech companies—gained access to our personal information is the ambitious task Tau sets for himself, and he begins where you might expect: the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

At no other point in US history was the government’s appetite for data more voracious than in the days after the attacks, says Tau. It was a hunger that just so happened to coincide with the advent of new technologies, devices, and platforms that excelled at harvesting and serving up personal information that had zero legal privacy protections.

Over the course of 22 chapters, Tau gives readers a rare glimpse inside the shadowy industry, “built by corporate America and blessed by government lawyers,” that emerged in the years and decades following the 9/11 attacks. In the hands of a less skilled reporter, this labyrinthine world of shell companies, data vendors, and intelligence agencies could easily become overwhelming or incomprehensible. But Tau goes to great lengths to connect dots and plots, explaining how a perfect storm of business motivations, technological breakthroughs, government paranoia, and lax or nonexistent privacy laws combined to produce the “digital panopticon” we are all now living in."

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/23/1118401/privacy-book-reviews-surveillance-higher-education/

#Surveillance #Privacy #DataProtection SurveillanceCapitalism #AdTech #DataBrokers

"There is no “cloud,” just someone else's computer—and when the cops come knocking on their door, these hosts need to be willing to stand up for privacy, and know how to do so to the fullest extent under the law. These legal limits are also important for users to know, not only to mitigate risks in their security plan when choosing where to share data, but to understand whether these hosts are going to bat for them. Taking action together, service hosts and users can curb law enforcement getting more data than they’re allowed, protecting not just themselves but targeted populations, present and future.

This is distinct from law enforcement’s methods of collecting public data, such as the information now being collected on student visa applicants. Cops may use social media monitoring tools and sock puppet accounts to collect what you share publicly, or even within “private” communities. Police may also obtain the contents of communication in other ways that do not require court authorization, such as monitoring network traffic passively to catch metadata and possibly using advanced tools to partially reveal encrypted information. They can even outright buy information from online data brokers. Unfortunately there are few restrictions or oversight for these practices—something EFF is fighting to change.

Below however is a general breakdown of the legal processes used by US law enforcement for accessing private data, and what categories of private data these processes can disclose. Because this is a generalized summary, it is neither exhaustive nor should be considered legal advice. Please seek legal help if you have specific data privacy and security needs."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/how-cops-can-get-your-private-online-data

#USA #CyberSecurity #PoliceState #Surveillance #Privacy #Encryption #E2E #DataBrokers

"Also at odds with the G7 statement is Canada’s own proposed border-security bill (C-2), which has been widely condemned by this author and numerous other rights groups for the ways it may open up transborder surveillance by foreign governments into Canada. As written, the bill might actually facilitate further transnational repression.

As my Citizen Lab colleague Kate Robertson noted in a recent analysis, Bill C-2 “contains several areas where proposed powers appear designed to roll out a welcome mat for expanded data-sharing treaties or agreements with the United States, and other foreign law-enforcement authorities.” In light of the authoritarian train wreck unfolding in the U.S., and the prospect of high-risk individuals fleeing that country for Canada, such data-sharing could conceivably become a tool of transnational repression used by our closest neighbour, not to mention other repressive regimes.

Pledges are important and the Canadian-backed G7 statement on countering transnational repression and abuse of spyware is certainly a very welcome one. But for Canada to actually translate those pledges into meaningful laws and policies will require some serious self-reckoning about how our own past and current practices are actually implicated in the very acts we have once again condemned."

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-g7-transnational-repression-bill-c-2-carney/

#Canada #G7 #CyberSecurity #DigitalRights #Privacy #Spyware #DataProtection #PoliceState #USA

"EU law enforcement bodies could be capable of decrypting your private data by 2030.

This is one of the ambitious goals the EU Commission presented in its Roadmap on June 24, 2025. A plan on how the bloc intends to ensure police officers' "lawful and effective" access to citizens' data.

The Roadmap is the first step forward in the ProtectEU strategy, first unveiled in April 2025 – but privacy experts have already begun raising the alarm."

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/the-eu-wants-to-decrypt-your-private-data-by-2030

#EU #Privacy #DataProtection #Encryption #Backdoors #Surveillance #CyberSecurity

"We should study the British Empire today because its history demonstrates human beings’ fantastic capacity for self-delusion. Noam Chomsky notes that John Stuart Mill, having written powerful tracts on both logic and liberty, was one of the most rational and freedom-loving intellectuals of his day. Yet even Mill, who had worked in the East India Company, was entirely hypocritical when it came to applying his libertarian principles to India, claiming that British rule was “angelic” and lamenting the “obloquy” heaped upon Britain by those who didn’t understand that it tyrannized over Indians for their own good. If even Mill, whose writings were elsewhere filled with humane and thoughtful paeans to human freedom, could justify something so horrendous as the empire, we should all be wary of the possibility that we may be unwittingly siding with an oppressive government or rationalizing indefensible acts.

The excuses for the British Empire, such as the claim that Britain built wonderful railroads and freed the enslaved, are feeble, and writers like Tharoor and Sanghera make short work of them. They are clung to in part because it is difficult to admit that one’s country was on the “wrong side of history” and that what was felt to be an act of charity and benevolence was in fact a terrible crime. I am struck, looking back on Zulu, by how easy it was for me as a child to accept without question the idea that my people must be the heroes of the situation simply because they were the heroes of the film. Was Michael Caine not dashing? Were the British not outnumbered?

The British Empire is dead. The sun finally set on it. Britain’s monarchy is decrepit, and it will never again “rule the waves.” (...) But a large percentage of the British population still believes that there was something good, rather than shameful, about tyrannizing over a huge percentage of the world’s population."

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-imperial-mentality

#Empires #Imperialism #BritishEmpire #Colonialism

#history

"Despite the often-poor quality of the content, she says clients are becoming used to the speed of AI and that is creating unrealistic expectations.

"AI really makes everyone think it's a few minutes work," says Ms Barot, who says clients are using Open AI's ChatGPT.

"However good copyediting, like writing, takes time because you need to think and not curate like AI, which also doesn't understand nuance well because it's curating the data."

The hype around AI has prompted many companies to experiment without clear goals, adequate infrastructure, or a realistic understanding of what the technology can deliver, says Prof Li.

"For example, companies must assess whether they have the right data infrastructure, governance processes, and in-house capabilities to support AI use. Relying on off-the-shelf tools without understanding their limitations can lead to poor outcomes," he says."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyvm1dyp9v2o

#AI #GenerativeAI #Marketing #Copywriting #Writing #Programming