Recent quotes:

Michigan College Will Digitally Track Students' Movements At All Times - Washington Free Beacon

"The school wants my daughter to sign a form consenting to specimen collection and lab testing," he told the Washington Free Beacon on condition of anonymity. "I have a ton of concern with that…. Why is the state of Michigan's contact tracing not enough?" Though students are required to remain on campus, professors and administrators are not. When asked about this potential loophole in its "COVID-bubble," the school declined to comment. Rising senior Andrew Arszulowicz said that he is upset with both the mandatory use of the app and the manner in which students are being treated. "I feel like I am being treated like a five-year-old that cannot be trusted to follow rules," Arszulowicz told the Free Beacon. "If the school believes masks work … why are we not allowed to leave if they work? It does not make sense to me."

Doc Searls Weblog · Zoom needs to clean up its privacy act

What they mean by that is adtech. What they’re also saying here is that Zoom is in the advertising business, and in the worst end of it: the one that lives off harvested personal data. What makes this extra creepy is that Zoom is in a position to gather plenty of personal data, some of it very intimate (for example with a shrink talking to a patient) without anyone in the conversation knowing about it. (Unless, of course, they see an ad somewhere that looks like it was informed by a private conversation on Zoom.) A person whose personal data is being shed on Zoom doesn’t know that’s happening because Zoom doesn’t tell them. There’s no red light, like the one you see when a session is being recorded. If you were in a browser instead of an app, an extension such as Privacy Badger could tell you there are trackers sniffing your ass. And, if your browser is one that cares about privacy, such as Brave, Firefox or Safari, there’s a good chance it would be blocking trackers as well. But in the Zoom app, you can’t tell if or how your personal data is being harvested.

23andMe vs. China's 23Mofang Review: What Do DNA Tests Tell You? - Bloomberg

When my reports came back, 23Mofang’s analysis was much more ambitious than its American peer. Its results gauged how long I will live, diagnosed a high propensity for saggy skin (recommending I use products including Olay and Estee Lauder creams) and gave me — an optimist not prone to mood swings — a higher-than-average risk of developing bipolar disorder. 23andMe doesn’t assess mental illness, which Gil McVean, a geneticist at Oxford University, says is highly influenced by both environmental and genetic factors.

will.i.am on personal data ownership

Personal data needs to be regarded as a human right, just as access to water is a human right. The ability for people to own and control their data should be considered a central human value. The data itself should be treated like property and people should be fairly compensated for it.

WillIAm-on-consumer-health-data-services

Today, my gadgets may count my steps, but they aren’t seeing the big picture: what I ate, how I felt, what my blood pressure is. New services, built from the point of view of the consumer, will benefit me by sharing and interconnecting my own data, rather than selling it on. When more trust is established, my personal “agent” or “assistant” should merge relevant things together that are currently just disconnected data points.

BARBARIANS AT THE GATE: CONSUMER-DRIVEN HEALTH DATA COMMONS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF CITIZEN SCIENCE

Data resources are a central currency of twenty-first-century science, and the question is, “Who will control them?”

Privacy in the age of medical big data | Nature Medicine

For instance, once a patient requests their own health data—which HIPAA gives them the right to do, and some concerted efforts encourage patients to do35,36—if the patient then gives those data to another individual, HIPAA does not restrict use or disclosure of those data (unless the recipient is another covered entity or a business associate)24. But the more fundamental problem is that the majority of health data is not covered by HIPAA at all (Fig. 2).

Privacy in the age of medical big data | Nature Medicine

Big data is often defined by ‘three Vs’: volume (large amounts of data), velocity (high speed of access and analysis), and variety (substantial data heterogeneity across individuals and data types), all of which appear in medical data2.

Hillary Clinton’s e-mails: a timeline of actions and regulations - The Washington Post

June 29, 2011: A State Department cable to employees is issued under Clinton’s signature (as are all cables) after Google revealed that hackers were targeting the personal e-mail accounts of U.S. government employees. The cable warns: “Avoid conducting official Department business from your personal e-mail accounts.”

Apple to Spend $1.9 Billion Building Two Europe Data Centers

Apple Inc. plans to spend 1.7 billion euros ($1.9 billion) building data centers in Ireland and Denmark in its biggest-ever European investment[…] The centers, located in Athenry, Ireland, and Viborg, Denmark, will be powered by renewable energy[…] The project lets Apple address European requests for data to be stored closer to local users and authorities, while also allowing it to benefit from a chilly climate that helps save on equipment-cooling costs.

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You don't think there was a kind of peasant realism? You hear these stories about a small town, seemingly conservative, and actually there's a surprising amount of tolerance. "So-and-so's a good guy. Who cares if he's a pig fucker? His wife brought a really lovely pie over when Mama was sick."
I’ve reported on jurisdictions where all felony search warrants are now served with a SWAT team. At least one federal appeals court has now ruled that under the Fourth Amendment, there’s nothing unreasonable about using a SWAT team to perform regulatory inspections.
The totalitarian state watches everyone, but keeps its own plans secret. Privacy is seen as dangerous because it enhances resistance. Constantly spying and then confronting people with what are often petty transgressions is a way of maintaining social control and unnerving and disempowering opposition.... And even when one shakes real pursuers, it is often hard to rid oneself of the feeling of being watched -- which is why surveillance is an extremely powerful way to control people. The mind's tendency to still feel observed when alone... can be inhibiting. ... Feeling watched, but not knowing for sure, nor knowing if, when, or how the hostile surveyor may strike, people often become fearful, constricted, and distracted.