NYTimes Editorial Tries Victim Blaming As Consumer Protection Strategy

Dear Editors,


This NYTimes ’Opinion Editorial sends an error signal.

It's not voiced enough: as data generation is a natural byproduct of technical use, no company CEO would die if [they] did not sell consumer surveillance. That inverted power differential comes from another area of our society: government, specifically, first funders at DARPA and the Department of Defense who put onereous weaponization uses on any technology they create, fund or license. Facial Recognition is one BIMA licensed technology.

The Army and it's First Party contractors, Microsoft and possibly Amazon, suggest such sweeping public capture is for your benefit and your personal security. Nevermind the pesky fact, that the government literally violates its reason for being by asking corporations to do their job for them and then sell the data to them. It does not make us more secure when China, and other rogue nation states can steal our technology from the private sector, derived from US military patents, break our technical layers of security and then park an advanced persistent threat AI in the networks to just hoover up as much individual intelligence they can on our citizens- because we decided to do it first!!

If they can't protect it, they shouldn't collect it.

The other point, past it's not legal for the federal government to commit mass surveillance, is the consumer owns themselves and any data which comes from marketing their likeness. Companies don't like it when I assert this, but it's totally true.

As I own myself, as property owner, there is something fundamentally flawed in asking me to submit to a digital contract that states: I shall rent data peep shows to [unknowable faceless 3rd party] through the phone I own, not see the rental price or price of admission to the peep show because,"It's proprietary". It sounds like larceny and a recipe for a human trafficking scam. In fact, it sounds like the reasoning of someone in the throes of psychological projection.

I am not in any way consenting to mass surveillance by using a mobile phone. The unethical engineers ordered to weaponize ordinary means of communication and its byproduct data into a mass surveillance aperture according to spec are only partially at fault. The order was given by policy administrators to use economic lawfare as coercion (as social engineering, suitcases of cash to Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon - whatever works) for foreign intelligence gathering on the American people. If you believe the contrary, you're a simpleton for sending your taxes to pay to undermine your rights without contest.

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In other news, Dustin Volz.

Feeding the Beast: Facebook and Its Government Trade Partners should conform transparently to common US consent law

By Sheila Dean

Consumer facing consent UI/UX and transparent third party data inventory could remedy the social network’s global fall from grace.  Far more work is ahead to produce a legitimate privacy enforcement environment.

Facebook’s neglect of third party vendor Cambridge Analytica crossed the line for its users. Unfortunately, social networks with poor third party operations security are everywhere. It was Facebook today, but it could be any number of poorly secured vendors tomorrow. Prior to this event, users and developers alike refused to face the nature of beast they are feeding.

Some form of regulatory intervention is in the offing. The US government is already deep in the core of Facebook’s operations for regulatory enforcement of an FTC consent decree. Facebook, like Palantir and others, also worked for the US government as big data analytics contractors in 2013’s PRISM scandal. Facebook has licensed deep profile information to the US government and any foreign government who would pay, including Russian social media operations. Special counsel Robert Mueller could easily ask FBI staffers embedded at Facebook’s HQ, if this was the collusion they were looking for. If the US government and its regulators are already so involved, regulation may be the lighter hand of justice. Users may need a criminal investigation into US government abuses of power, conflicts of interest, embezzlement or related crimes involving foreign entities. The more likely crime is one of banal disinterest in privacy law enforcement.

Facebook is the beast US corporatism built. The US government, afterall, is still an investor in Facebook. How do we get shareholders, like the CIA, to conform to American privacy law provisions and boundaries? As partial owner, the US government may have access to any of its information assets. What does it mean if a US agency profited from data services rendered to Russia for psychological operations? The potential for abuse is now material fact, if it is not the scene of a crime of opportunity.

Facebook’s policy problem lies in a one-size-fits-all EULA contract allowing complete opacity of its vendors. The blanket consent from one Terms of Service contract hardly covers the third party range where personal data was processed by Cambridge for resale to political operatives. The average consumer does not know who has their data once it goes into a social network. If Facebook showed consumers the edge advertising market for their data as notification, they would be legally required to provide means of express consent to license their personal data.

Facebook, like many online services, needs to get out of partisan and government information business lines or the elections intrigues will continue. It’s time to ask US government agencies, like the DoD and CIA, to surrender their shares in public ISP companies back to the free market. Their co-ownership in private data conflicts with public interest.  Public trade transfer deals featuring government licensed technologies should not be opaque to the US consumer when their personal information is involved in a trade.

Third party risk and liability will still be a problem for society online. Legal enforcement is needed to limit the scope of exchange and sale of personal data based on legitimately sourced and applied US consumer consent. Facebook, and those emulating its brazen business model, should now comply to better defined, transparent data inventory mapping for users to knowingly permit, or more likely deny, unwanted third party exchanges.

We can forgive Facebook as an institution for being led down the wrong path, endorsed and coddled by government insiders. Some later revealed themselves in full view of the public as disgraceful sycophants, soliciting Mark Zuckerberg's permissions and favors, during Congressional disciplinary hearings. Government beneficiaries managed to evade legal consent notice requirements which do, in fact, apply to any information they collect on US Citizens. Board members from the most celebrated privacy non-profits, think tanks, and policy advisors with doctorates from the best universities in the United States have consulted Facebook. Who can help Facebook if their elite battery of advisors endorsed the fantasy they can break US common consent law with no consequences? 

GET LITTLE CAESAR A TOWEL, PLEASE.

It does seem everyone around Facebook is telling them they are so useful and exceptional they don’t have to conform to the law. That line of doctrine misled Facebook to be used as a powerful social tool to connect the world with corruption. They broke laws. Unfortunately, they didn’t do it by themselves. They had lots of enablers and government partners urging them on.

Information security and integrity audits will send any phony fixer lawyers and their marketing apologist firms packing.  One could speculate Facebook's cyber-insurance rates are expected to skyrocket. As we wait on the results of Facebook’s audit, they will confront fines, more civil suits, possible company insolvency and criminal due process for its lack of restraint. Regulatory law enforcement should work to close privacy law enforcement gaps. Their current presence inside Facebook failed to enforce fair, lawful security of private data. 

Even if the government reforms the enforcement conventions for impacted privacy, will fair trade practices emerge from the ashes to cover global data brokerage exchanges? Non-profit interest groups and companies cannot just scuttle away a people's inherent data ownership rights because these rights didn't originate with their nation state or they seem inconvenient to consider. Identity sovereignty is natural and inherent to our humanity. Administrators are talking over each other instead of to each other across the globe and then stony radio silence follows. This conflict is based on differences over the origin of rights in personal data governance. There is very little real debate or statesmanship on this idea.

So here is a working 5 point public policy fix to confront international data exchange stakeholders, as well as US agencies, not playing fair with data owners.

  • Close enforcement gaps and actively enforce existing privacy law concerning notice & consent.
  • Require government partners and non-profits (partisans, research firms) to self-identify to consumers in UX/UI transactions; which legally require notice and consent (like trade transfer deals).
  • Adopt or enact Right To Be Forgotten policy in the US.
  • Recognize the rights of the individual Data Owner in business reporting with monthly exchange statements as an audit requirement as a matter of human rights and fair trade.  If you can’t manage to bring in the data owner as part of your business, consulting them on how much to sell their data for, who to authorize as a  seller and reseller to and how to sell it, you’re in the wrong business.
  • Recognize essential individual data ownership is paramount to rights of government transfer entitlement and/or embargo thereof. For the US, that is conformance to Privacy Act of 1974 provisions to actively procure and heed individual consent preferences in most cases. For other governments, that means they need to get express consent to profit from personal data of a US citizen using public platform services.

Individual data ownership rights are not in conflict with other rights and can stand with other recognized rights. Particularly, that of self-defense, protection from theft of labor and the diverse perils of slavery, human trafficking and unfair trade practices. We are not the middle man to be cut from the exchanges. Data owners are in fact used and spent as the monetary currency itself. Current exchanges brokering personal data are in an adverse power differential contrary to Principle One of Fair Trade Practices. They are more on par with serfdom. Facebook’s serfs are Exhibit A of a raw deal. Now the world needs a fair trade upgrade.

General Announcements for February

ANNOUNCEMENTS

I was proud to join the Personal Data Ethics Committee on Artificial Intelligence at IEEE as a contributor on the topic of consent this week.  It is a great honor and opportunity to provide content and insights on consent as an individual rights assertion. Especially with all of the risks consumers are absorbing from online contracts and publicly governed data holdings.

Also I would like to add an open invitation to my upcoming event this month for those who are interested. Details are featured at the newly produced EVENTS page on this site.

For more information please visit the Events page. 

For more information please visit the Events page. 

The State of Identified America

Observations and statements for this time of transition

 

By Sheila Dean 

 

Let me begin with a sober exhortation: stop taking things so personally. Thin-skinned people are volatile and dangerous no matter their race or economic status. If you have borderline personality disorder, PTSD symptoms due to war involvements, abuse or shootings please get some help as soon as you can. Everyone else needs to realize that anger is common. It is not really a precious commodity by itself.

It is a time for adults.  

The truth makes a wonderful gift.  You can use it to welcome someone in or see a President off.  So speak your truth.

Identity ecologies for most Americans are more galvanized and less civil since Obama took office.  Identity groups needed to reconnect, understand and accept issues impacting their lives together.  However, wise, ethical and diplomatic leadership should be staffed in immediately.  Any group or political action committee stands to attract narcissistic opportunists who want power for power’s sake. Civility is what makes reform broad-based, lawful and acceptable. 

I think militarizing the police was a poor decision on Obama’s part; which played into low bearing reactions of both police and Americans. To increase military means due to fears of racial violence was an overreaction; which became a self-fulfilling prophecy, in the instance of Ferguson, MO and following events.  We should address authority identity abuses and correct the mission to one of complete focus on the law. 

Contrary to the insistence of the corrupt, authority is not the law.  The law is the law.

The upshot of escalating visual acknowledgment of police violence against minority publics is the air space it gave for all victims of American police violence from all strata. They are now believed and validated. While no one should ever have to endure the losses sustained from wrongful death, so many people now have the chance to find a healing community of survivors.  We gain wisdom from our trials and support to become better people.  Justice still needs to be served.  If you call a homicide, a homicide and prosecute accordingly that serves the interest of public safety best.

So what has become of all of America’s identified people since Obama’s administration?

Obama enabled an unlawful surveillance microscope into the lives of a free people. Not to protect them, but to terrorize them, to disempower them and to allow government actors to profit from it.  The result of this misappropriation of power is the compromise of U.S. civilian government offices by foreign governments.  The ODNI and DoD had one job and they failed. They took ill-advised orders; which defied legal and constitutional propriety from Obama while China and Russia targeted to success America’s information centers.

It is not the role of the U.S. President to allow hackers-with-a-badge to invade to micromanage the affairs of every single American.  That is the very definition of an abuse of power.

Hubris has a very high price tag.  Due to overbudgeting and overprioritizing ‘national security’ interests it nearly guaranteed all federal hires are now identity theft victims. That includes the identity of the US President, who didn’t protect himself in his quest to enable for-profit datalust. The Department of State now has to handle the identity theft claims of federal workers as victims at the hands of Chinese hackers.  Remember China? The nation state who loaned us a lot of money fueling the federal defecit? China, whose only government collateral now is the IP they can steal from the United States’ economically productive sectors and any intelligence they can gather.  There has been little remuneration or economic or legal enforcement for these thefts to US businesses for this.

It’s been played down.  Just like what I’m about to tell you.

The prioritization of mass surveillance of all identified Americans is now our biggest cyber vulnerability.  Obama did not protect America’s identified people.  He was not alone in this.  He had many Yes-men, lobbyists and contractor enablers, but he is at fault.

We learned that 3-Letter agencies, like the CIA, become profitable from business surveillance and foreign and domestic investments in businesses like Palantir and Facebook.  Not only are they collecting intelligence on all of their voluntary users, they are illegally selling public consumer information for profit against the knowledge and consent of the public. It is a violation of the Privacy Act of 1974 and a host of other laws.

Now municipal governments are emulating their corruption.  ALPR and other data surveillance contractors are in this game. Many companies are also profiting from trade of consumer information to and from the US government. It is a massive conflict-of-interest.  It is a corrupt confiscation of American property, identity and domestic interests.  It is asset-forfeiture at its worst.  The robbery committed by these national security agencies is worse than some of the banks! 

If I had my wish tomorrow, any US agency who is profitable above their staffing and overhead needs would turn over their surplus immediately to pay down America’s budget deficit, subsidize the easing of colossal US student loan debt and pad America’s Medicare-Medicaid budgets. They would stop all warrantless surveillance of US people and innocent foreign persons. They would dispose of all the information they have collected, because they sell it illegally now for agency profit and because they can’t protect they information they have from foreign enemies. The profiteers would not evade prosecution for their crimes. 

If the President wants more personal privacy, he or she will have the power to legislate it in.  We now have the burden of explaining to the next President, why it’s worse for personal and national security to have digital eyes on everyone at all times for any reason whatsoever. The intelligence will be abused, not just by the President or his men, but by terrorists and the very people we intended to defeat in our foreign policy agenda.  It now enables corrupt self-defeating infrastructure.

 

10 Reasons Why Your Digital Life Is Not Private

In 2015, the UN recognizes the world's online users face enormous barriers to digital privacy against continuous storms of government mass surveillance, market dataveillance and data breaches. It all seems like an impossible fight to win, until you realize just how responsible you are for how things are actually going with your digital privacy.

Read more