Cybersecurity: Your Voting decisions might not be so secret anymore.

Your Voting decisions might not be so secret anymore. A database of information on 191 million voters including names, addresses, and party affiliations was exposed on the internet due to a data leak. Cybersecurity Reporter Dustin Volz explains the threat to your voter privacy.

Police Drawing Blood on Traffic Stops?

Social media users don't like discussing Snowden and surveillance online

Love him or hate him, Edward Snowden has had a profound effect on the way many people view their government, the internet and the topic of surveillance.
Snowden’s revelations about surveillance have also affected the way people discuss the topic of government snooping, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center.
Pew Research polled 1,801 American adults, and found that people were far less likely to discuss the Snowden leaks online than in person.
Just 42% of those surveyed said they were willing to air their views or enter a discussion on Facebook or Twitter but 86% said they would be happy to discuss the NSA surveillance program in a face-to-face setting.
The researchers also discovered that people's willingness to talk about Snowden and surveillance was greatly affected by their perception of how their audience would react to their point of view.
The study revealed that workplace discussions were 3 times more likely to occur when it was believed that co-workers were like-minded. In a family setting, a conversation about surveillance was 1.9 times as likely if a consensus of opinion was anticipated and an open conversation with friends was 1.42 times as likely if they were thought to be in agreement.
The Pew Research Center examined other reasons why people may choose to stay quiet on the topic of surveillance and discovered that a low level of confidence in personal knowledge on the topic, strength of feelings and interest level were all key factors.
Given the wide range of factors that could affect a person’s willingness to discuss surveillance issues in a number of settings, the authors of the study concluded that their findings pointed to a 'spiral of silence' in which people who believe they hold a minority view will keep it to themselves for fear of social exclusion:

It might be the case that people do not want to disclose their minority views for fear of disappointing their friends, getting into fruitless arguments, or losing them entirely. Some people may prefer not to share their views on social media because their posts persist and can be found later - perhaps by prospective employers or others with high status. As to why the absence of agreement on social media platforms spills over into a spiral of silence in physical settings, we speculate that social media users may have witnessed those with minority opinions experiencing ostracism, ridicule or bullying online, and that this might increase the perceived risk of opinion sharing in other settings.

The topic of Edward Snowden, surveillance and the NSA is of course not the only example of like-minded people coming together to voice their opinions on a topic.
Earlier this month Vox’s Zack Beauchamp looked into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how it was being reported and discussed, especially on social media.
Beauchamp discovered that the vast majority of tweets about the conflict came together in clusters that were largely either pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian.
The two clusters almost exclusively kept discussions among themselves, possibly indicating that social media users on both sides of the conflict were getting their information from sources that held their own viewpoint.
What we can learn from these two studies is that like-minded people seem to stick together, and those with less-strong or vocal opinions tend to plant themselves firmly on the fence of silence.
Humans, by our nature, like to be accepted by our peers and associate with those who share our views. The self-confirming viewpoints of friends, family and associates reinforce and validate our own beliefs but that need for acceptance also acts as a type of social censorship.
The Pew researchers point out that the Snowden-NSA story is individual given its context, even though the survey took place in September 2013 - before a lot of the surveillance revelations had surfaced.

The context of the Snowden-NSA story may also have made it somewhat different from other kinds of public debates. At the time of this study, the material leaked by Edward Snowden related to NSA monitoring of communications dealt specifically with "meta-data" collected on people’s phone and internet communications. For a phone call, the meta-data collected by the NSA was described as including the duration of the call, when it happened, the numbers the call was between, but not a recording of the call. For email, meta-data would have included the sender and recipient’s email addresses and when it was sent, but not the subject or text of the email.

Given what we now know, the researchers admit things might be even more different:

In reaction to these additional revelations, people may have adjusted their use of social media and their willingness to discuss a range of topics, including public issues such as government surveillance.

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Facebook lets you opt-out of targeted ads but it will still collect your data

Facebook knows a lot about you. If you were honest when you first signed up, it knows your real name, age, gender, location and interests - as well as what you have done on-site ever since - valuable data indeed when it comes to delivering relevant advertisements to your browser.
But ad companies want more, and last year, the social network agreed to give it to them in the form of data collected from outside of the site.
Now, the company is to let advertisers use browsing data obtained when its users click on Like and Share buttons that have existed on external sites since they first launched in 2010.
Beginning next month, Facebook will add that data, along with information pulled from other social widgets, into its ad targeting systems, including those used on Instagram and the company's mobile apps.
Such a change is obviously a boon for advertisers as well as Facebook, which thinks its users will be delighted, as explained in a blog post by its global deputy chief privacy officer, Stephen Deadman:

We hope that the ads people see will continue to become more useful and relevant and that this new control will make it easier for people to have the ads experience they want.

Whether its user base agrees is up for discussion, but Facebook is certainly aware that the change may not be universally accepted. In fact, Deadman used the same post to introduce a new way for people to turn off such targeting of ads:

Today, we're introducing an additional way for people to turn off this kind of advertising from the ad settings page right on Facebook. If you choose to use this tool, it will become the master control for online interest-based advertising across all of your devices and browsers where you use Facebook.

Of course, that's not the only way to opt-out of having ever more data collected by the company - you can also visit the Digital Advertising Alliance website and make use of its own opt-out, which should not only stop Facebook in its tracks, but dozens of other companies too.
And anyone using a mobile device can access the advertising controls within their Android or iOS device to limit such data collection.
Of course what you shouldn't forget is that opting out will simply prevent Facebook from sharing your data with advertisers - it won't block the company from collecting it in the first place.
Speaking to the Guardian, privacy expert Brendan Van Alsenoy, co-author of a Belgian Privacy Commission report into Facebook and a legal researcher, said the new setting was a welcome but very limited step. He highlighted how behavioural targeting was an opt-out process rather than an opt-in one, which is a great point - how many people forget to turn off settings that are enabled by default, or never get to learn of them in the first place?
The Belgian report, released at the end of March, suggested the firm was using long-term cookies to track both users and non-users of its network. Facebook responded by claiming the report was wrong, and that any cookie setting was simply a bug that needed ironing out.
Such a response did not resonate well with the Belgian data protection authority which subsequently took the company to court over its alleged "trampling" of Belgian and European privacy laws.
It will be interesting to see how that case pans out, as well as what Facebook has in store next, given the ability to install mobile ad blockers in the recently-released iOS 9.
Apple's users responded in dramatic fashion, pushing several such apps to the top of the App Store charts, generating such good sales that the developer of popular app Peace suddenly pulled his app completely, saying:

Ad blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don't deserve the hit.

I'll leave you to decide what sort of sites would suffer and deserve sympathy if they were to lose their advertising income, but one thing that's for sure is that Facebook itself is far too big to survive without some type of revenue stream. Whether its income should be based around the collection of its users' data is, of course, the billion dollar question.

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