Privacy & Security

February 28, 2020 NY Times article  relaying that the FCC is finally imposing a fine since the first complaint about the practice of selling private information was filed two years ago.  The agency is making the move after repeated public reports about data abuse — and after several companies continued to sell access to troves of personal information for months despite saying they were sharply limiting the practice. The information is valuable to marketers, police departments and even investment firms because it can provide revealing details about people’s daily lives, such as where they live, what shops they frequent and what doctors they visit.   

The California Consumer Privacy Act is the strictest privacy law in the Country, but it is largely toothless and under threat by corporate lobbyists. 

Illegal Cell phone tracking is just one way this technology is being used. Most of us think this wouldn't happen to us, but the reality is; it already is.

 Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive responsible for growing the social network’s user base, recently argued that Silicon Valley had “created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” He cited the role of mobile messaging service WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) in the killings of seven innocent men in India after hoax messages about strangers abducting children were shared.  “Imagine taking that to the extreme, where bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It’s just a really, really bad state of affairs.” He said he tries to use Facebook as little as possible, and that his children “aren’t allowed to use that s---.” 

  Robert Spalding, the senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council, relays that  Ransomware, malware, crypto-jacking, identity theft, and data breaches have become so common that more Americans are afraid of cybercrime than they are of becoming a victim of violent crime. Adding more devices to the online universe is destined to create more opportunities for disruption. “5G is not just for refrigerators,” Spalding said. “It’s farm implements, it’s airplanes, it’s all kinds of different things that can actually kill people or that allow someone to reach into the network and direct those things to do what they want them to do. It’s a completely different threat that we’ve never experienced before.” , Spaulding's solution he told me, was to build the 5G network from scratch, incorporating cyber defenses into its design. Because this would be a massive undertaking, he initially suggested that one option would be for the federal government to pay for it and, essentially, rent it out to the telecom companies. But he had scrapped that idea.