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Abbreviation System for Terms: Human and Legal Implementations, Visualization of Implementation

1. Human Readable Implementation [TBD]

2. Legal Implementation

Legal Language (Appendix)

The choices that ordinary individuals make about disclosing their data are used to construct a contract between discloser and disclosee. The contract consists of some universal boilerplate, a few clauses that are selected from a standard set in order to match discloser choices, and several pieces of text that the discloser supplies as input. The resulting contract can be visualized like this:

1. Preamble

The preamble never changes:

This Agreement governs a specific Disclosure of Personal 
Information by Discloser to Disclosee, as defined and 
described hereafter. Discloser makes the Disclosure on the 
condition that Disclosee agrees to be bound by the terms and 
conditions herein.

2. Definitions

The agreement tries to incorporate terms by reference rather than redefining them.

Terms that begin with the prefix "dpv:" in this Agreement are defined in 
v1 of the Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV; dated 5 Dec 2022; see 
https://w3c.github.io/dpv/dpv). Other terms are defined here.

The Agreement is this document, including inputs supplied by the parties, 
along with any definitions and explanatory material that it incorporates 
by reference.

The Discloser is the party to this Agreement that is the 
dpv:DataController of the Personal Information, that offers to disclose 
said information per the specified terms and conditions.

The Disclosed is a dpv:NaturalPerson dpv:DataSubject described by the 
Personal Information. The Disclosed may be the Discloser, or may be some 
other dpv:NaturalPerson (e.g., a dpv:Child or 
dpv:VulnerableNaturalPerson) for whom the Discloser has a 
dpv:DataController role (e.g., because the Discloser is a 
dpv:Representative).

After defining the Discloser and Disclosed, the agreement identifies the Disclosed in a way that is already meaningful to the Disclosee — for example, by a DID, a public key, a username, an email address, a social media handle, a phone number, an account number, or similar. Either the Discloser or the Disclosee can supply these two inputs, but both parties must agree that they characterize the Disclosed.

In this Agreement, the Discloser is the party known to the Disclosee, 
prior to the Disclosure, by the identifier ________________, which is of 
type _________________.


Personal Information is information about a natural person, as defined in 
regulatory frameworks such as GDPR, the UK's Data Protection Act 2018, 
Australia's Privacy Act 1988, PIPEDA, HIPAA, CCPA, COPPA, HIPAA, and so 
forth. This definition matches the meaning of dpv:PersonalInformation, 
but the list of referenced regulations here is broader, and the intent is 
that the list be illustrative, not exhaustive.

The Disclosee is the dpv:LegalEntity party to this Agreement that receives 
the Personal Information through its automated and/or human processes as 
a direct result of the Disclosure, and that processes that information. 
The Disclosee thus becoming a dpv:Recipient and dpv:DataProcessor of data 
about Disclosed. When the Discloser reasonably perceives the interaction 
governed by this Agreement to be with a Disclosee that is a 
dpv:Organisation, any dpv:NaturalPersons who serve as dpv:Representatives 
of said organization may acquire duties and responsibilities related to 
this agreement indirectly, via general legal constructs; however, it is 
the dpv:Organisation as a dpv:LegalEntity that is bound directly by the 
agreement.

After defining the Disclosee, the agreement identifies the Disclosee in a way that is already meaningful to the Discloser — for example, by a website, an SSL cert, a public key, a brand name, a street address, a phone number, or similar. Either the Discloser or the Disclosee can supply these two inputs, but both parties must agree that they characterize the Disclosee.

In this agreement, the Disclosee is the party known to the Discloser by 
the identifier ________________, which is of type _________________.

The Disclosure is the act undertaken by the Discloser that communicates 
the Personal Information to the Disclosee under the governance of this 
Agreement. Disclosure may change how much the Disclosee knows about the 
Disclosed, either by providing new information or by changing the 
Disclosee's certainty about information that it may already know or infer. 
Any changes in the quality or quantity of information that Disclosee 
possesses about Disclosed, or about the relationship between Discloser 
and Disclosed, as a result of Disclosure, are known as the Disclosed 
Delta. This Agreement places the processing of the Disclosed Delta under 
the dpv:Consent basis.

3. Recitals

The recitals document the context in which the Disclosure interaction is occurring. The begin with the following standard paragraph:

This Agreement focuses only on the narrow question of how to 
govern the Disclosure and subsequent usage of the enumerated 
Personal Information in the specified context. It 
supplements rather than replaces any fabric of larger and 
more general legal and regulatory frameworks that may exist 
at the time the Disclosure occurs. It must also be 
interpreted within the context of human rights that are 
stable across time and that cannot be contracted away.

The next piece of context is an enumeration of what specific pieces of data the Discloser is willing to disclose. These pieces of data must be described in terms that are meaningful to the Disclosee. If disclosure takes place via an HTML form, for example, the pieces of data must be described in terms of the arguments to the HTML form (effectively, the Discloser is saying, “I propose to give you data in your first_name, last_name, and zip_code fields”). If disclosure takes place with verifiable credentials, the pieces of data must be described in terms of a credential schema / credential manifest.

The Discloser proposes to disclose the following pieces of 
Personal Information about the Disclosed, in a structure 
known to the Disclosee, as follows (field names, schema, or 
similar): 

_______________________________________________________.

We also need a timestamp is to map the contract to larger context such as when a regulation or when a privacy policy went into effect.

The Discloser proposes to disclose this information at 
approximately this UTC timestamp: _____________________.

We also need some kind of documentation of what the Discloser perceives to be the context for the request. In most web-based interactions, this is communicated by a URL and possibly a cookie value for the session. If the Discloser is purchasing something, the URL should show a shopping cart checkout action, and the cookie would capture the state of the cart. This context serves as a constraint on how later provisos are interpreted.

The Discloser proposes to disclose the Personal Information 
in the following process context (URL plus cookie value, or 
similar): _____________________ .

We also need to stipulate some things about how the following provisos should be interpreted.

The following section of the Agreement imposes constraints 
on how Disclosee processes Personal Information. Disclosee 
agrees to be bound by these constraints: all uses of the 
data that are not granted by these provisos are prohibited. 
Disclosee further agrees that the Discloser retains all 
rights to privacy and constrained data processing that are 
established or upheld by applicable regulatory regimes, that 
are not explicitly limited by this Agreement. 

4. Provisos

This section of the contract is where the Discloser selects whichever clauses correspond to the choices that they make about the four central questions of P7012.

Possible Usage Provisos

The TXN, REL, and N provisos are mutually exclusive. The ENU proviso can stand on its own or can be combined with TXN or REL. If it is combined, it must follow the other proviso

TXN

TXN Usage: The Disclosee agrees that the Primary Use of the 
Disclosed Delta will be to deliver the specific good(s) or 
service(s) that the Discloser has already identified and 
that directly associate with the aforementioned process 
context (e.g., to deliver a nearly completed purchase). Data 
processing purposes that are compatible with this constraint 
include dpv:CustomerManagement, dpv:LegalCompliance, 
dpv:EnforceSecurity, dpv:OrganisationGovernance and 
dpv:RecordManagement. The dpv:ServiceProvision purpose is 
also compatible, except that processing for future 
dpv:SellProducts purposes is explicitly prohibited. 
Processing for purposes such as dpv:Marketing and 
dpv:Personalisation is explicitly prohibited.

REL

REL Usage: The Disclosee agrees that the Primary Use of the 
Disclosed Delta will be to facilitate an ongoing 
relationship in which the Disclosee delivers good(s) or 
service(s) to the Discloser and/or Disclosed. Data 
processing purposes that are compatible with this constraint 
include dpv:CustomerManagement, dpv:LegalCompliance, 
dpv:EnforceSecurity, dpv:OrganisationGovernance, 
dpv:ServiceProvision, dpv:Marketing and dpv:Personalisation.

ENU

ENU Usage: The Discloser allows the Disclosee to use the 
Personal Information for the following DPV processing 
purposes: 
_______________________________________________________. If 
a Primary Use is not defined elsewhere, the first item in 
this list is the Primary Use.

N

N Usage: Via this Agreement, the Discloser imposes no new 
constraints on how Personal Information is used. Data 
processing may still be governed by ambient regulation, 
policies of the Disclosee, and choices negotiated between 
the two parties elsewhere.

Possible Sharing Provisos

A given contract must contain exactly one of the following sharing provisos.

X

X Sharing: The Disclosee may share the Disclosed Delta with
any party that is a dpv:LegalEntity in one of these
jurisdictions: _________________, if that entity is a
dpv:Representative of Disclosee. Disclose must not share the
Disclosed Delta with any other party.

2

2 Sharing: The Disclosee may share the Disclosed Delta with
any party that is a dpv:LegalEntity in one of these
jurisdiction(s): _________________, if that entity is a
dpv:Representative of Disclosee. Disclosee may also share
the Disclosed Delta with other dpv:LegalEntitys in those
same jurisdictions, referred to as Collaborators, if and
only if the following conditions are met: 1) the
Collaborator's help is required for Disclosee to accomplish
approved data processing purposes; 2) the Collaborator
enters into a copy of this Agreement (hereafter "Chained
Agreement"), with all of its associated terms, conditions,
and provisos, directly with Discloser. Collaborator may
execute the Chained Agreement in a direct interaction with
Discloser. Alternatively, Collaborator may initially record
the Chained Agreement only with Disclosee. However,
Disclosee must retain records of all such Chained
Agreements, and must produce them upon demand from
Discloser. All Chained Agreements must be between
Collaborator and Discloser, not between Collaborator and
Disclosee, and must leave Discloser with direct legal remedy
vis-a-vis the Collaborator.

3

3 Sharing: The Disclosee may share the Disclosed Delta with
any party that is a dpv:LegalEntity in one of these
jurisdiction(s): _________________, referred to as a Third
Party, if and only if the Third Party enters into a copy of
this Agreement (hereafter "Chained Agreement"), with all of
its associated terms, conditions, and provisos, directly
with Discloser. Third Party may execute the Chained
Agreement in a direct interaction with Discloser.
Alternatively, Third Party may initially record the Chained
Agreement only with Disclosee. However, Disclosee must
retain records of all such Chained Agreements, and must
produce them upon demand from Discloser. All Chained
Agreements must be between Third Party and Discloser, not
between Collaborator and Disclosee, and must leave Discloser
with direct legal remedy vis-a-vis the Third Party.

N

N Sharing: Via this Agreement, the Discloser imposes no new
constraints on how Personal Information is shared. Data
sharing may still be governed by ambient regulation,
policies of the Disclosee, and choices negotiated between
the two parties elsewhere.

Possible Erasure Provisos

A given contract must contain exactly one of the following erasure provisos.

X

X Erasure: The process of erasing the Disclosed Delta from
Disclosee records is intended to begin as soon as the
Primary Use is accomplished. The Disclosee is required to
implement this erasure policy, with the following caveat. If
the regulatory context includes legal requirements about
data retention that conflict with the previous rule,
Disclosee must notify Discloser as soon as Disclosee is
aware of the conflict, must comply with the data retention
requirements, and must erase the data as soon after the
Primary use is accomplished as the those retention
requirements are satisfied.

T

T Erasure: The process of erasing Disclosed Delta from
Disclosee records is intended to begin within this time
interval after the Primary Use is accomplished:
__________________. If the Agreement includes REL Usage,
this countdown must begin from the time that Discloser last
took an affirmative action that proves they were deriving
concrete, demonstrable benefit from the relationship; the
Disclosee may not assume that the relationship is providing
value simply because the relationship exists. The intent is
to require erasure if the Discloser is passive and
essentially idle. The Disclosee is required to implement
this erasure policy, with the following caveat. If the
regulatory context includes legal requirements about data
retention that conflict with the preceding rules, Disclosee
must notify Discloser as soon as Disclosee is aware of the
conflict, must comply with the data retention requirements,
and must erase the data as soon after the time interval has
elapsed as those retention requirements are satisfied.

D

D Erasure: The process of erasing Disclosed Delta from
Disclosee records must begin upon demand by the Discloser,
with the following caveat. If the regulatory context
includes legal requirements about data retention that
conflict with the timing of the erasure demand, Disclosee
must notify Discloser as soon as Disclosee is aware of the
conflict, must comply with the data retention requirements,
and must erase the data as soon after the erasure demand as
those retention requirements are satisfied.

N

N Erasure: Via this Agreement, the Discloser imposes no new
constraints on how or when Personal Information is erased.
Data erasure may still be governed by ambient regulation,
policies of the Disclosee, and choices negotiated between
the two parties elsewhere.

Possible Correlation Provisos

The X, S, and P provisos are mutually exclusive. The A proviso can stand on its own or can be combined with X or S. If it is combined, it must follow the other proviso.

X

X Correlation: The Personal Information must not be
correlated with any other personal data about Discloser or
Disclosed that is now known or that will become known to the
Disclosee or to any third parties, unless that other data
was or will be disclosed for an overlapping Primary Use and
according to compatible sharing and erasure constraints, or
unless the additional "A Correlation" use is specifically
allowed below. The intent is that correlation only happens
to facilitate the specific shared purpose governed by this
Agreement. In all other contexts, the Disclosed and the
Discloser as revealed by the Personal Information remains
exactly as pseudonymous or as identified as they would be
without the Disclosure.

S

S Correlation: The Personal Information must not be
correlated with any other personal data about Discloser or
Disclosed that is now known or that will become known to the
Disclosee or to any third parties, unless that other data
was or will be disclosed according to compatible sharing,
correlation, and erasure constraints,  or unless the
additional "A Correlation" use is specifically allowed
below.

A

Correlation: Independent of any other constraints on the
usage of Personal Information, the Disclosure may be used to
facilitate a correlation by Disclosee or by another party
that correctly ties multiple pieces of data to the Discloser
or Disclosed (the Correlated Party), preventing the
Corelated Party from being erroneously counted more than
once in a large corpus. However, once the correlation has
accomplished this purpose, the data must be pseudonymized so
the temporarily correlated, now pseudonymized Correlated
Party cannot be easily correlated to additional external
data sets. Furthermore, the party that performs correlation
must agree not to de-pseudonymize the Correlated Party, and
must place all consumers of the aggregate data set under an
identical agreement, with the Correlated Party having legal
remedy directly with those who violate this constraint.

P

P Correlation: Via this Agreement, the Discloser imposes no
new constraints on how or when Personal Information is
correlated. The Discloser encourages correlation because the
intent is to build public reputation.

5. Agreement

This section finishes the contract. It clarifies what evidence constitutes proof that the Discloser and Disclosee have both agreed to be bound by the contract. It always begins like this:

The Discloser is deemed to accept the terms and conditions
set forth in this Agreement if they complete the Disclosure
process. They may prove that they are responsible for a
Disclosure under the terms of this Agreement by signing
(electronically, digitally, and/or cryptographically) the
Disclosure together with this Agreement.

Disclosee Commitment Options

The Disclosee also needs to be committed in a non-repudiable way. There are two options for this.

Contract of Adhesion

This option simply says that if the Disclosee uses the data, and cannot prove that they received it in any other way, they are deemed to have accepted the Agreement.

The Disclosee is deemed to accept the terms and conditions
set forth in this agreement if, after seeing the Agreement,
they give no overt signal to the Discloser that they have
rejected it, and if they then process the Disclosed Delta in
any way other than deleting it immediately.

Explicit Acceptance

The Disclosee accepts the terms and conditions set forth in
this Agreement, as witnessed by the associated signature
(electronic, digital, and/or cryptographic) over the
Agreement.

Glenn Fleishman has a lucid and helpful introduction to Mastodon in TidBITS that opens with this:

Cast your mind back to the first time you experienced joy and wonder on the Internet. Do you worry you’ll never be able to capture that sense again? If so, it’s worth wading gently into the world of Mastodon microblogging to see if it offers something fresh and delightful. It might remind you—as it does me, at least for now—of the days when you didn’t view online interactions with some level of dread.

Mastodon isn’t a service but a network of consensually affiliated, independently operated servers running the Mastodon software. It’s the best-known example of the so-called Fediverse…

Then, a few paragraphs later, he provides the best metaphor I’ve yet seen for what Mastodon is and how it works:

You can think of Mastodon as a flotilla of boats of vastly different sizes, whereas Twitter is like being on a cruise ship the size of a continent. Some Mastodon boats might be cruise liners with as many as 50,000 passengers; others are just dinghies with a single occupant! The admin of each instance—the captain of your particular boat—might make arbitrary decisions you disagree with as heartily as with any commercial operator’s tacks and turns. But you’re not stuck on your boat, with abandoning ship as the only alternative. Instead, you can hop from one boat to another without losing your place in the flotilla community. Parts of a flotilla can also splinter off and form their own disconnected groups, but no boat, however large, is in charge of the community.

Since my day job is working as a visiting scholar in the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, and Customer Commons has been imagined from its start as a potential commons for customers (or as many commons, flotilla style), I find myself wondering if each of Mastodon’s boats is itself a commons. Or if some of them could be, or already are.

My first experience with Mastodon came early on, in a boat that sank. But now that Mastodon is hot again, I’ve jumped into two boats: twit.social and journa.host. (Find me there and there, respectively.) TWiT.social’s community is gathered around the many shows, hosts, co-hosts, and participants in the TWiT network. Journa.host’s is a collection of journalists. They are very different, though not entirely: journalists abound in both of them.

The question for me here is if any of these boats are a commons. Or if Mastodon itself is one.

To qualify as a commons, a canonical list to check off is provided by Elinor Ostrom. In Governing the Commons (Cambridge, 1990), she outlined eight “design principles” for stable local common pool resource (CPR) management. I’ll make notes following each in italics:

1. Clearly defining the group boundaries (and effective exclusion of external un-entitled parties) and the contents of the common pool resource. Mastodon is designed to support that.
2. The appropriation and provision of common resources that are adapted to local conditions. If we’re talking about code, yes. Maybe more. Gotta think about that.
3. Collective-choice arrangements that allow most resource appropriators to participate in the decision-making process. Depends on the instance, I suppose. 
4. Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators. Not sure about that one. 
5. A scale of graduated sanctions for resource appropriators who violate community rules. Up to the person or people running each boat.
6. Mechanisms of conflict resolution that are cheap and of easy access. I think these range from informal to formal, and draw from rules developed for mailing lists and other fora. But, not sure.
7. Self-determination of the community recognized by higher-level authorities. At the top level, it’s othe Mastodon dev community. At the boat (instance) level, it’s the captain(s) of each.
8. In the case of larger common-pool resources, organization in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small local CPRs (common pool resources) at the base level. A thought: the common pool resource is the authors of posts (aka toots) and the posts themselves.

Ostrom and others have also gone deeper and wider than that, for example by examining socio-ecological systems (SESes), defined here in 2004. I’ll leave digging into that up to scholars more schooled than I (or to a later post, after I finish schooling myself). Meanwhile, I think it’s important, given the sudden growth of Mastodon and other federated systems with flotilla-ish qualities, to examine how deep research and writing on commons apply.

This work does matter: Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for it, and it may matter more now than ever.

And help is welcome.

About the photo up top: Lacking a royalty-free visual for a flotilla of boats, I settled on the collections of people you see through bubbles in the photo above, which I shot on the grounds of Versailles. Kinda works, methinks.

Poly is a game. Or will be. We’re working on it.

It’s a multi-player game. As are markets. Although Poly does not need to be a game about business (though it could be), the idea is to explore how markets work when customers bring abilities to the market’s table that defaulted business practices prevent.

Examples of abilities are: to express loyalty, to provide market intelligence, to give rich feedback on products and services, how customers actually use those products and services, and what personal boundaries are around their private spaces—on their terms and not just the companies’.

While companies get information about those things today, every company gets that information separately, through its own closed and proprietary loyalty, service, data gathering, and “customer experience” (CX) systems, rather than through personal systems customers can use globally and at scale, exercising their own engagement abilities.  Think, for example, about how customers scale market engagement with many different stores by using their cars, mobile phones, browsers, and cash. (For more on that last example, see The cash model of “customer experience.”) All of those are abilities.

Now think about additional abilities, all personal ones: to be savvy, smart, loyal, informative, equipped with extant personal property and accumulated rights and obligations which only they know best, and well-prepared. Think also about how all these abilities vary from person to person yet for each person apply globally. All those abilities are similar to, for example, the strength, dexterity, constitution (or endurance), intelligence, wisdom, and charisma in Dungeons & Dragons. And, from other games, there are abilities for clairvoyance, bullshit detection (or immunity), mathematics, electronic mastery, forseeing, ability to hide, evasion, negation, mirroring, empathy, experience, tracking (e.g. of prices or warranty changes) and others that can also apply to how a good customer deals with businesses.

How might those abilities apply globally to engaging good businesses? Meaning ones that value treating customers smartly and well, and gain from customers exercising the same abilities with many companies?

Modeling how customers and companies can grow markets together is—among other fun things—how Poly can prove or disprove the founding thesis of both Customer Commons and ProjectVRM: that free customers are more valuable than captive ones—to themselves, to the companies they engage, and to markets. There is no way to test this theory inside any one company’s separate closed system.

Note that both customers and companies can still win at Poly, just as both can win in markets. The key with both Poly and markets is that nobody has to lose, even though many do. That’s because, as any economist will tell you, markets create value and wealth in places there is none without them. Start a nail salon or repair shop, and as soon as customers start paying for your goods and services, you’ve created value where before there was none. Get a bunch of sellers a territory, or competitors in a category, and you have a market. What makes a market grow best, however, is not just that customers are paying money for goods and services. It’s that they are bringing that more to the companies they engage: loyalty, feedback, good information, and enjoyable experiences.

While it might not be obvious, markets are self-governing, meaning they make their own rules. And the same goes for Poly, which will be a game of self-governance in which the participants in markets work out their rules.

Yes, there will be winners. But there don’t have to be losers. Markets don’t work that way. Or at least they don’t have to. They can be cooperative (especially between customers and companies) and not just competitive. The same will go for Poly.

Another way to look at markets is as commons. Commons have ways of working that Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues figured out a while ago. They are these:

1. Define clear group boundaries.
2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.
3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4. Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.
5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior.
6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.
7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.
8. Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.

Poly will explore and expand on each of these.

At this early stage we are looking at all the variables involved in designing a game: ludology, ludonarrartive consonance/dissonance, game mechanics, core loop, win conditions, game management, uncertainty modeling, Game A vs. Game B, collective vs. personal outcomes, and so on.

We also welcome help. Watch this space for more on that.

The image on top is from Paul Baran’s original 1962 design for the Internet. The dots and lines are his, but without connections between the separate (poly) centers. This is a small hack on what he called a “decentralized” network. The separate groups, with no central direction, are assembled around connected common interests, and form commons of their own as independent actors. I explain independence in Escaping the black holes of centralization.

It’s here, and it’s new.

We’ll soon have an email address to which you can send questions. Stay tuned for that.

It’s been awhile since hackers broke into Home Depot’s servers and stole 56 million customers’ credit card information back in 2014. But recently, a tipster pointed business watchdog site Consumerist to a web address under the HomeDepot.com domain. The unprotected page stored photos of various home improvement projects…and 13 Excel spreadsheets filled with customer data.
Read more: https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/28/home-depot-left-customers-unprotected-personal-data-online/
Posted by Dont Mine on Me

This laptop contains Trump Tower floor plans and ‘national security information!

An encrypted Secret Service agency laptop was stolen from an agent’s vehicle recently, it has been revealed, potentially giving the thief access to classified data located on agency servers. According to one source speaking about the theft, this laptop contains Trump Tower floor plans and ‘national security information,’ though the Secret Service stresses that its laptop has ‘multiple layers of security.’
Read more: https://www.slashgear.com/secret-service-loses-encrypted-laptop-with-possible-access-to-classified-data-17479005/

Posted by Dont Mine on Me

From 1999 on — Germany’s foreign intelligence agency (BND) has used its powers to snoop on journalists and their sources.

The tools are there to be abused. Anyone who doubts this aspect of intrusive surveillance programs is either a supporter or a beneficiary. Oversight might be in place and various checks and balances instituted, but the scope and breadth of these programs ensures — at minimum — collection of communications and data government surveillance agencies have no business looking at.
Read more:  https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170227/07572936794/leaked-documents-show-german-intelligence-agency-spent-years-spying-foreign-domestic-journalists.shtml
Posted by Dont Mine on Me

The company is warning customers not to speak about personal information while near the TV sets!

Samsung has confirmed that its “smart TV” sets are listening to customers’ every word, and the company is warning customers not to speak about personal information while near the TV sets.
Read more: https://theweek.com/speedreads/538379/samsung-warns-customers-not-discuss-personal-information-front-smart-tvs
Posted by Dont Mine on Me

This raises some chilling questions about the possibility for a “Big Brother” future where our innermost thoughts can be routinely monitored. 

Are you lying? Do you have a racial bias? Is your moral compass intact?
To find out what you think or feel, we usually have to take your word for it. But questionnaires and other explicit measures to reveal what’s on your mind are imperfect: you may choose to hide your true beliefs or you may not even be aware of them.
Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/brain-scanners-allow-scientists-to-read-minds-could-they-now-enable-a-big-brother-future/
Posted by Dont Mine on Me

WhatsApp said it would modify its privacy policy to allow it to share lists of users’ contacts with Facebook!

WhatsApp’s privacy policy change allowing Facebook to target advertising at its users has landed the company in a German court.

The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZBZ) has filed suit against WhatsApp in the Berlin regional court… Read more: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3163027/private-cloud/german-consumer-groups-sue-whatsapp-over-privacy-policy-changes.html
Posted by Dont Mine on Me