Tracking not allowed (unless you’re Google)



As more of our lives take place online, privacy has become a huge national concern: one survey last year found that more than 90 percent of Americans feel they’ve lost control over how their personal information is collected and used on the Internet. And a sizeable majority wants government to help them get control back by regulating what online companies are doing with their data.

Though most people don’t realize it, such an effort is already underway. Largely behind the scenes, a small group at the Internet’s main standards body has been asked by the Federal Trade Commission to craft a new “Do Not Track” policy for online data, similar to the “Do Not Call” registry that helped reduce the nuisance of telemarketers.

Since 2011, the group has been working on recommendations for a simple mechanism for consumers to express their privacy preferences to the broad range of companies that now get access to their data. But what started as a group effort by technology companies and privacy experts to craft a new type of consumer protection has quietly changed, and today has morphed into a committee where a few of the most powerful Internet firms are deciding on the rules of the game.

In July the group finally posted a draft of their proposed Do Not Track standard; the public comment period ends next Wednesday, Oct. 7. A look at the details of the draft reveals that the proposed rule will apply to everyone—everyone, that is, except the companies that already collect most of the personal data on the Internet, and which helped write the rule.

Clearly, that’s not a bad outcome for the Internet giants like Google and Facebook: exempt themselves, and cement their status as the world’s largest collectors of user information online. But this is a far cry from what the FTC intended the process to do. What started as a tool intended to increase consumer protection now looks more like a way for the big players to limit competition. But the rule still isn’t final, and a closer look at what’s actually happening with the standard gives us a chance to fix it—and even imagine a fairer new version that would protect both consumers and competition.

THE “DO NOT TRACK” program started with a good idea. In 2007, several consumer advocacy groups approached the FTC and asked it to create a national Do Not Track list. Done right, the thinking went, Do Not Track could be simple: once you added yourself to the list, Internet companies would have to abide by your data preferences. The consumer advocates started with the premise that, in the words of a former FTC leader, “Internet businesses are not free to help themselves to the resources of a consumer’s computer.”

In 2010, the FTC issued a staff report endorsing a mechanism to give consumers choice in online tracking.  The FTC’s goal, then and later, was to allow consumers to decide “whether to allow the collection and use of data regarding their online searching and browsing activities.”  The FTC decided that the most practical method would likely involve the placement of a persistent setting, similar to a cookie, on the consumer’s browser. The setting was nicknamed “Do Not Track.”   

How would it work in practice? It seemed to make sense to have industry help figure it out: technological change happens quickly, and there was no sense in the FTC creating a Do Not Track requirement that would be obsolete by the time it was announced. The FTC endorsed the notion of having industry create a new Do Not Track standard, and the World-Wide Web Consortium—the influential standards body at the heart of the Web—set up a working group to get it done.

Unfortunately, the W3C’s effort quickly degenerated. A string of high-profile privacy experts and other participants stepped back from the working group. The group established and then ignored countless deadlines, with one key figure describing the mess as an agonizing series of fruitless meetings and emails: “We first met to discuss Do Not Track over 2 years ago.  We have now held 10 in-person meetings and 78 conference calls. We have exchanged 7,148 emails.  And those boggling figures reflect just the official fora. The group remains at an impasse.” By October 2013, prominent privacy and consumer advocates had lost confidence in the process and suggested that the working group be disbanded.

Most industry watchers wrote it off as a failure and walked away. But not everyone. The Internet giants with the largest stake in the final outcome—including companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Comcast, which collect the vast majority of user data—stayed in the meetings, and pushed ahead. They positioned their own representatives in leadership roles.

Now the process is finally reaching its conclusion. In July, the Tracking Protection Working Group quietly posted a statement on its website announcing that it had reached “Last Call,” triggering a comment period before the standard’s major features will be finalized. There was good reason for them to bury the news: Under the proposed standard, some of the Internet’s largest purveyors of personal data would be granted wide latitude to ignore any “Do Not Track” signal on their own sites and across the Internet.

Here’s how the rule would work. The proposed Do Not Track standard distinguishes between “first parties,” companies with a consumer-facing online presence, and “third parties,” companies that facilitate online ads displayed on other companies’ websites and online applications.  If a user navigates to a website, the site itself is a first party; given the broad definition of first party, so is the user’s Internet browser and even the users’ ISP. If a user has activated “Do Not Track,” the proposed rule would allow first parties to continue tracking their online activity and other personal data, but would ban third parties from doing the same.

This distinction makes sense in the world of telemarketing; it means that the phone company can use your information to help deliver service, but blocks marketers from using it to sell you things. The problem is that the Internet is different: many of the largest Internet giants are both first and third parties, collecting the data on the technological front end, and then using it for their own business purposes later. And the proposed rule would exempt their entire operations from “Do Not Track.” So, when a user activates the Do Not Track signal, if he or she enters a query into the Google search engine, signs onto to Gmail, or uses Google Chrome or Android, he or she will still be allowing Google to gather information and use it to deliver targeted ads.

From the perspective of the world’s largest Internet companies (and advertising companies), the main function of the new standard won’t be to limit data collection: it will be to limit the ability of any potential rivals to collect comparable data. What started as consumer protection has ended up a barrier to competition—a moat protecting the very companies that gather the most user data on the Internet.

THE ALTERNATIVE IS to take another road. The FTC originally issued the call for a Do Not Track regime, and it now needs to reassert itself in the process to ensure the project it started does not end up undermining both consumer privacy and the online advertising competition that is critical to the health of the Internet.

Thankfully, there are a few promising signs that this rethink may be happening. Just this week, speaking to the online advertising community, FTC Commissioner Julie Brill criticized the process for languishing, and called for “robust and innovative tools to address this demand in a sophisticated way. Not to find ways around consumer choice, but to provide consumers with something they clearly want: to see advertising that respects their privacy and that they can trust."

A bigger step would be for Congress to pass a bill that would bridge the gap between the privacy community and the legitimate concerns of advertisers who keep the Internet humming. In her speech, the FTC commissioner pointed to the rise of ad blockers—which prevent many advertisers from collecting data, but in an ad-hoc way—as a powerful incentive to craft such a standard that is simple and comprehensive.

There are important interests to balance here. On one side, consumers deserve protection and more transparency about how their data is being used; at the same time, data-fueled advertising is a big part of the model that keeps the economic engine of the Internet humming, and allows all of us to access free content and tools.

What we can’t do is let the biggest players write the rules alone. Google and Facebook are among the largest vacuum cleaners of data (Google has more data than the NSA) and, through acquisitions, are also the largest pipelines for online advertising.  Their gatekeeper status makes the issue of a fair and independent Do Not Track even more critical. 

It’s easy to see this as a choice between consumer protection and competition, but that’s a false divide. Giving consumers more choice about their privacy could actually help a new kind of “privacy competition” develop.  And a standard that doesn’t unfairly close the gates on smaller competitors would also help advertising competition increase. A decisive and evenhanded new standard would help catalyze this revolution, not limit it.



http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/10/tracking-not-allowed-unless-youre-google-000261

FULL INTERVIEW [HD]: Donald Trump at Hannity; May 31, 2016; Liberal Media Attack, VP Pickup & More









 

Katie Couric: On second thought, I can see why that highly deceptive edit in our gun-control movie might be misleading










Last week, when gun-rights advocates first cried foul, she sniffed that she was “very proud” of the film. Now, in a statement posted this morning, she’s claiming the edit bothered her too the first time she watched it. What happened?

Here’s a safe bet. So long as it was only activists on the right who were criticizing her, Couric and her team could shrug it off and refuse to address the edit. They’ll wear the attacks from “gun nuts” like a badge of honor, no matter how meritorious they are; it’s good PR for a movie about gun control. Once “respectable” media echoed the criticism, though, it risked undermining the moral authority of the film, which is the whole point of gun-control propaganda. A critique of the media-political class from the right isn’t credible until someone from the class itself validates it. The same dynamic explains why the New York Times’s story last week about the controversy ran under the headline, “Audio of Katie Couric Interview Shows Editing Slant in Gun Documentary, Site Claims.” There was no need for that last bit. The Times could have checked the work of Stephen Gutowski and the Washington Free Beacon in five minutes and declared as a matter of plain fact that the footage had been edited deceptively. They felt obliged to hedge by noting that this is merely what the Free Beacon “claims” only because the Beacon is a right-wing site and thus is presumed untrustworthy until someone not of the right has vouched for it.

    As Executive Producer of “Under the Gun,” a documentary film that explores the epidemic of gun violence, I take responsibility for a decision that misrepresented an exchange I had with members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL). My question to the VCDL regarding the ability of convicted felons and those on the terror watch list to legally obtain a gun, was followed by an extended pause, making the participants appear to be speechless.

    When I screened an early version of the film with the director, Stephanie Soechtig, I questioned her and the editor about the pause and was told that a “beat” was added for, as she described it, “dramatic effect,” to give the audience a moment to consider the question. When VCDL members recently pointed out that they had in fact immediately answered this question, I went back and reviewed it and agree that those eight seconds do not accurately represent their response.

    VCDL members have a right for their answers to be shared and so we have posted a transcript of their responses here. I regret that those eight seconds were misleading and that I did not raise my initial concerns more vigorously.

“Dramatic effect,” huh? I didn’t realize it until I read this Examiner post but it turns out other Couric productions have also allegedly used creative editing to falsely suggest that Katie stumped an interviewee who was on the wrong side of an issue. From an account of Couric’s 2004 production “Fed Up”:

    “I am told from others who have seen the film that a clip is shown in which I am asked a question about how one would ideally test whether sugar sweetened beverages contribute to obesity, and that I ask for a few moments to collect my thoughts; after showing me think for about 10 seconds, the camera cuts away before I give my answer,” says Allison, who hasn’t seen the film. “If this is the case, the film-makers’ behavior seems counter to thoughtful dialogue. To ask me a question and edit out the answer, and I did answer every question, shows a lack of interest in a discussion of the evidence.”

Precisely. The “stump the chump” edit is what you do when you want to make the subject look like an imbecile for opposing the conventional liberal position, not when you’re interested in a discussion. (That’s why “The Daily Show” loves it.) I was curious about Couric’s “dramatic pause” defense, though, so I asked Gutowski, who’s seen the entire film, whether the full exchange with the VCDL members appears at any point. After all, a “dramatic pause” between question and answer would involve extra time being added between the two to create the illusion that the question was difficult for the subject. If the answer is never shown, however, that’s not a pause. That’s a full redaction, implying that the subject was unable to answer the question at all. According to Gutowski, the film never returns to the exchange with the VCDL members to show their responses. Which means, even in damage-control mode, Couric’s being misleading about what the editors actually did and why.

Her best defense, frankly, may be that this is SOP by filmmakers who favor gun control when interviewing subjects who don’t. Via Becket Adams, here’s a few minutes of footage from the segment in “Under the Gun” that features the VCDL members. Note the bombastic operatic music at the beginning designed to mock their enjoyment of shooting at the range.




http://hotair.com/archives/2016/05/31/katie-couric-on-second-thought-i-can-see-why-that-highly-deceptive-edit-in-our-gun-control-movie-might-be-misleading/

The issue I have is how is this "information" has been released, by whom and why.

The serpent is biting its own tail.

Need to see it.

[...]
Imperial Japan approached its Chinese foes with the same strategy ISIS uses against its enemies today: maximum carnage and savagery, to terrorize the foe into submission. They used some of the exact same methods ISIS does, including burning captives alive, beheading them, and burying them alive in slaughter pits.

Also like ISIS, the Japanese occupiers were fond of taking triumphant photos of their atrocities, which is the only reason we know about many of them. They didn’t have Twitter or YouTube, of course, but Chinese working in photo shops smuggled out copies of photographs the Japanese government later attempted to destroy.

International visitors to Nanking tried to establish a safe zone for Chinese civilians, but it didn’t hold the Japanese at bay for long. One important chronicle of the occupation was the diary of an American woman named Minnie Vautrin, who wrote of girls as young as 12 being dragged away for rape, and piles of corpses burned to erase evidence of Japan’s crimes. Vautrin was one of the last victims of the Rape of Nanking. She killed herself in 1941.

Also horrified by what he saw was the man who wound up leading the unsuccessful effort to maintain an international safe zone in Nanking, John Rabe. He was the head of the local Nazi Party.

Unsurprisingly, China’s state-run media is very upset that Barack Obama didn’t mention Nanking, or other Japanese offenses against China, during his Hiroshima speech. “The death of Japanese civilians in the Hiroshima atomic bomb attack deserves global sympathy, but the tragedy was of Japan’s own making. Its then militarist government turned the city into the site of military headquarters, arsenals and camps and a vital part of its war machine that killed tens of millions in other countries,” writes Xinhua in a fiery editorial.

The Empire’s war on women was not limited to Nanking. For decades afterward, Japan has dealt with the legacy of the “comfort women,” girls forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Army. Only last year, Japan and South Korea reached an agreement for roughly $8 million dollars in reparations to South Korean victims.


http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/05/27/war-crimes-imperial-japan-lesson-moral-equivalence-mr-obama/

A classic.

Thank you.

 

What circles? The new cotton plantation owner's club? Because their ancestors were treated worse than dirt, facebook like businesses feel entitled to exploit new lives, for their own benefit and for the memory of their ceo ancestors, new lives ready to abuse the social system created and put in place for poor American citizens already suffering..? Like the "Cheap Labour Express" did back then maybe?

The feminist hotline.

World Famous Racist, Xenophobic, Islamophobic, Sexist, 1989 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Adolf Lover says "Too many refugees in Europe. Germany cannot become an Arab country. Germany is Germany."



BERLIN: The Dalai Lama said in an interview published Thursday that Europe has accepted “too many” refugees, and that they should eventually return to help rebuild their home countries.

“When we look into the face of every single refugee, especially the children and women, we can feel their suffering,” said the Tibetan spiritual leader, who has himself lived in exile for over half a century.

“A human being who is a bit more fortunate has the duty to help them. On the other hand, there are too many now,” he said, according to the German translation of the interview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.


“Europe, for example Germany, cannot become an Arab country,” he added with a laugh, the daily reported. “Germany is Germany.

“There are so many that in practice it becomes difficult.”

The Dalai Lama added that “from a moral point of view too, I think that the refugees should only be admitted temporarily”.

“The goal should be that they return and help rebuild their countries.”

Germany last year took in 1.1 million people fleeing war and misery in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries, but the flow was reduced sharply by the decision of Balkan countries to close their borders to people travelling through Turkey and into northern Europe.

The Dalai Lama also said in the interview, conducted in Dharamsala, seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile in northern India, that he hopes to one day return to Tibet.

“Maybe in a few years,” said the 80-year-old. “If an opportunity for my return arises, or at least for a short visit, that would be a source of great joy.”

Thousands of Tibetans have fled their Himalayan homeland since China sent in troops in 1951, and many have settled in India.


http://tribune.com.pk/story/1113521/dalai-lama-says-many-refugees-europe/

Ask yourself who will be the supreme justice warriors...

The word "weirdo" is in the title. Most open death threats against TRUMP are from berniebots. It fits perfectly.

Yes.

UN Report Claims Moles Could Topple Stonehenge Unless We Stop Global Warming…










    Stonehenge could be toppled by moles if the climate change continues apace, a United Nations report claimed yesterday.

    The world heritage site is one of many that is under threat, with other famous sites facing oblivion including the Statue of Liberty, Venice, Easter Island and the Galapagos Islands.

    The report was produced by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the UN Heritage body Unesco and the United Nations Environment Programme who warned that warmer winters in the UK are likely to boost populations of moles, rabbits and badgers. As a result of their increased burrowing, they could disturb the prehistoric monuments in Wiltshire, some of which weigh more than 40 tonnes.

    Stonehenge was one of 31 natural and cultural World Heritage sites in 29 countries in the report that are said to be vulnerable to increasing temperatures, melting glaciers, rising seas, more intense weather, worsening droughts and longer wildfire seasons.

    Mechtild Rossler, director of Unesco’s World Heritage Centre, said: ‘Globally, we need to better understand, monitor and address climate change threats to World Heritage sites.’



http://www.iol.co.za/scitech/science/environment/stonehenge-under-threat-from-moles-2027053

I didn't think about that. True indeed.

Did he ever try to answer?

We know lots of projects are in labs all over the world for the next decentralized social network. Lots of very, very smart folks are surfing on bitcointalk. I hope the bitcointalk.org gods are working hard on 2.0 right now because things will change for the worse for freedom of speech.


Isn't time the ones with a forward vision start looking for a backup instead of waiting for them to come after us?


http://www.worthofweb.com/website-value/bitcointalk.org/