Tag: terms

Public Service Internet monthly newsletter (Dec 2024)

White older woman looks into the camera while holding a landline phone.

We live in incredible times with such possibilities that is clear. Although its easily dismissed while reading through the UK online safety draft statement of priorities, reading the Tiktok teen addiction documents and understanding the mass use of open washing throughout the tech corps.

To quote Buckminster Fuller “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.“

You are seeing aspects of this with home workers getting more sleep,
A number of newspapers leaving X citing disturbing content and future smartwatches powered by your skin.

The story behind Silicon valleys pronatalism drive

Ian thinks: There has been much talk about the birth rate but some of Silicon valley billionaires seem to have a certain view which feeds into the religious conservatives and immigration fear narratives. This video starts to explain and hints at the overthrow of roe vs wade in America.

EU AI code of practice

Ian thinks:I know many who will cringe at the very notion of the EU wading into the space of AI. However this is a first draft and sets the direction, which is hard to disagree with. I personally welcome some level headed and thoughtful direction from a large entity underlining the efforts of many smaller organisations.

Interesting times at Mozilla?

Ian thinks: With many service and job cuts, its a tricky time ahead. However with the discussion of Chrome being sliced away from Google, it potentially comes with a huge drop in revenue but also potentially for a more balanced and ethical browser ecosystem?

Scam baiting with Daisy

Ian thinks: Although a bit of promo for O2 in the UK, the very notion of Daisy the AI granny. Is a great feature which we all wish we had. Will it help, is a larger question, but thoughts of how to scale scam-baiting (messing with scammers) has been imagined for years. This might just answer that question.

Another view on AI should do dishes and laundry

Ian thinks: The semi-famous post saying I want AI to do my laundry and dishes not art and writing. Is a interesting one but Runnels, writes a compelling reason why AI shouldn’t do this too. Its written in good spirit and thoughtful in nature.

How to review a privacy policy

Ian thinks: Privacy policies are long, complex and deliberately made for lawyers not people. But without getting into the argument of reforming them. Caltrider’s guide to reviewing them, is ideal ground and uses a lot of the tricks I personally use.

Things to do when facing the political nightmare?

Ian thinks: You can’t fail to notice the impact of the American election on people not only in America. White wrote a very good list of positive things to do now. I wish I had seen this just after the Brexit vote.

The final end of Twitter?

Ian thinks: The final death blow of x/twitter is on a lot of peoples lists right now. This thoughtful overview from a previous staff member is worth reading. I have personally moved on from another twitter. I’m backing the fediverse for many reasons including the portability, ownership and diversity of platforms. Maybe AT Proto will get there but till then, its not a consideration. Also worth reading Cory’s thoughts on Bluesky currently.

Surveilled documentary

Ian thinks: This documentary relooks at the NSO group’s Pegasus. Ideally it would be wider focused than Pegasus but it is timely reminder of the incredible surveillance devices we carry around with us all.

Find the archive here

In the EU or UK? Opt out of Meta using data to train AI

Facebook form for opting out of data being used to train Meta AI

I heard Meta were planning to change their EULA/Terms of use and planned to opt out in anyway possible. But I was nicely surprised to see not only the EU but UK can opt out using the short form above. Although I think it is cheeky to require a reason…

I assumed the EU would be covered but the UK would be left out. Thank goodness for GDPR

You can learn a lot more by reading this how to guide or watching this video.

Update just 55mins later

I got this email from Facebook/Meda

Hi Ian,

We’ve reviewed your request and will honor your objection. This means your request will be applied going forward.

If you want to learn more about generative AI, and our privacy work in this new space, please review the information we have in Privacy Center.

facebook.com/privacy/genai

This inbox cannot accept incoming messages. If you send us a reply, it won’t be received.
Thanks,
Privacy Operations

Do I agree to Google’s new privacy terms?

Google's new privacy termsGoogle is making some changes to its privacy terms and is urging us to read them.

We know it’s tempting to skip these Terms of Service, but it’s important to establish what you can expect from us as you use Google services, and what we expect from you.

I’m slowly making my way through the terms but one thing I’m certainly going to do is related to the location of my data in googles data centres.

I’m not down with this part… I understand why they would do it but in the same way I voted to stay within a block of countries with harden data privacy laws. I need to personally do something.

Because of this I’m switching away from Gmail and deleting lots of archived emails. I’m also going to start using encryption more with google drive. I have been a bit lazy with this all, weighing up the balance of convenience and effort. Google provide a lot of useful things to me, but I think its time to move some more critical parts way, starting with email.

So I’m torn between Protonmail and Tutanota but also been looking at others.

User permission opt in or out? Time for HDI!

3 mobiles optin privacy
Is grey opt in or opt out?

I’m one of those people who look at terms when using services or purchasing IOT devices. I also dont accept the cookie warnings unless I’m actually happy to use the service. This does make looking at any Oath/Yahoo site a pain for a while, as they use to have accept or nothing else (this changed).

Very sure a lot of the companies deliberately put up painful cookie notices to mislead their users. If this isn’t a dark pattern it should be?

Recently I noticed this cheeky one from the three mobile app. You can assume the sliders when grey are not active and the purple one on? But there’s no actual clear sign to say what is active/on and whats inactive/not. Its also interesting that the grey ones are the default, which you would assume are active/on in every other example you have experienced of this.

Another clear call for Human Data Interaction (HDI).

Better to know or to live in blissful ignorance?

23andme box

Following my brush with death I have taken a much deeper look at my family genes.

But one of the ultimate ways to know more is by signing up to 23 and me.

Although the idea freaks most people out, when you’ve been so close to death theres really little which can freak you out. So I have been considering the process quite a lot and looking through there material and some of the backstory of 23 and me.

Besides my thoughts of a world like Gattaca, I’m wondering if its better to know or live in a world of blissful ignorance? Although I do have to say blissful ignorance is part of the reason why I ended up in hospital. I do however wonder about 23 and me’s terms of conditions. There privacy statement is interesting too…

You may learn information about yourself that you do not anticipate. This information may evoke strong emotions and has the potential to alter your life and worldview. You may discover things about yourself that trouble you and that you may not have the ability to control or change (e.g., your father is not genetically your father, surprising facts related to your ancestry, or that someone with your genotype may have a higher than average chance of developing a specific condition or disease). These outcomes could have social, legal, or economic implications.

Genetic Information that you choose to share with your physician or other health care provider may become part of your medical record and through that route be accessible to other health care providers and/or insurance companies in the future. Genetic Information that you share with family, friends or employers may be used against your interests. Even if you share Genetic Information that has no or limited meaning today, that information could have greater meaning in the future as new discoveries are made. If you are asked by an insurance company whether you have learned Genetic Information about health conditions and you do not disclose this to them, this may be considered to be fraud.

We do not sell, lease, or rent your individual-level Personal Information without your explicit consent. As a general rule, 23andMe will not disclose your individual-level Personal Information to any third party, except under the following circumstances:

  • Partners or service providers (e.g. credit card processors or our contracted genotyping laboratory) process and/or store the information in order to help us provide, understand or improve 23andMe’s Services.
  • If you have consented for research, research contractors may access your individual-level Genetic and Self-Reported Information onsite at 23andMe’s offices for the purpose of scientific research, provided that all such research contractors will be supervised by 23andMe and subject to 23andMe’s access rules and guidelines.
  • If you have consented to use of your individual-level data in the Research Portal feature, qualified researchers (who must comply with certain requirements) may access your individual-level Genetic and/or Self-Reported Information for the purpose of scientific research, which could lead to commercial use.
  • We are required to do so by law or we do so in coordination with regulatory authorities (see the section below titled “Information Disclosure Required By Law”).
  • You have provided explicit consent for us to do so.

On a whole I don’t quite feel at ease with there terms of conditions or privacy statements. 23andme is a company and that worries me. If they were a charity or something like that, I would feel a slight bit better. How long will it be till they sell out on there users? You only have to look at what’s happened with Flickr to see the bizarre things that can happen.

So its not the information I’m worried about, its the way its stored and disclosed, now and into the future…

 

 

Terms and Cons

 

Not written about TOS DR or Terms of Service Didn’t read.

“I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web.  We aim to fix that.

ToS;DR aims at creating a transparent and peer-reviewed process to rate and analyse Terms of Service and Privacy Policies in order to create a rating from Class A to Class E.

A long time ago while the Data Portability group was in full swing, we talked about doing something very much like TOS DR but the issues of trying to get a unified system across all End User Licence Agreements (EULA’s) seemed like a total nightmare. The suggestion was to use a traffic light system to alert people of the bogus stuff ahead of time. This also meant it wouldn’t replace the EULA, it would just highlight some of the questionable stuff.

In the end it was far enough off the main focus of the group to make it a that would be nice rather than essential. Its a shame but it was the right decision for the time.

Hope the TOSDR guys get as popular as Creative Commons and team up with the likes of the plain english campaign.

To be honest if I had more time and wasn’t already doing lots of other stuff, I might be tempted to join in and help where I can.