Search
Content type: Examples
5th May 2018
In 2014, DataKind sent two volunteers to work with GiveDirectly, an organisation that makes cash donations to poor households in Kenya and Uganda. In order to better identify villages with households that are in need, the volunteers developed an algorithm that classified village roofs in satellite images as iron or thatch - because there is a strong correlation between the number of roofs in a village that are iron and the village's relative wealth.
http://www.datakind.org/blog/using-satellite…
Content type: Examples
30th April 2019
During the primary elections in November 2016, the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, reportedly used an app, called Knockin, that made it possible to identify and geolocate supporters for door-to-door campaigning. Based on a report by the French Radio RMC, the app would harvest public data about anyone that liked a page or a post that the candidate put on his campaign page in order to find the supporter's address. Door-to-door volunteers were then able to see on the app the address and…
Content type: Examples
5th May 2018
In 2014, the UK suicide prevention group The Samaritans launched Radar, a Twitter-based service intended to leverage the social graph to identify people showing signs of suicidal intent on social media and alert their friends to reach out to offer them help. The app was quickly taken offline after widespread criticism and an online petition asking them to delete the app. Among the complaints: the high error rate, intrusiveness, and the Samaritans' response, which was to suggest that people…
Content type: Examples
20th December 2018
Facebook ads purchased in May 2016 by the Internet Research Agency, a notorious Russian troll farm, urged users to install the FaceMusic app. When installed, this Chrome extension gained wide access to the users' Facebook accounts and web browsing behaviour; in some cases it messaged all the user's Facebook Friends. The most successful of these ads specifically targeted American girls aged 14 to 17 and said the app would let them play their favourite music on Facebook for free and share it with…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
In 2016, 21-year-old Russian photographer Egor Tsvetkov launched the "Your Face is Big Data" project. He created the project by semi-secretly photographing passengers seated across from him on the St. Petersburg metro, then uploading the images to an online service called FindFace. FindFace's service, which is intended to facilitate checking out potential dates met through online sites, takes uploaded random photographs and searches for matches on Russia's most popular social network, Vkontakte…
Content type: Examples
13th August 2019
In February 2019, after investigative journalists used social media posts to investigate the country's hidden role in conflicts such as those in Ukraine and Syria, Russia began moving to ban its soldiers from posting any information that would expose their whereabouts or their role in the military. The ban would include photographs, video, geolocation data, and other information, and prohibit soldiers from sharing information about other soldiers and their relatives.
https://www.reuters.com/…
Content type: Examples
4th May 2018
In 2015, the Royal Parks conducted a covert study of visitors to London's Hyde Park using anonymised mobile phone signals provided by the network operator EE to analyse footfall. During the study, which was conducted via government-funded Future Cities Catapult, the Royal Parks also had access to aggregated age and gender data, creating a detailed picture of how different people used the park over the period of about a year. The study also showed the percentage of EE subscribers who visited…
Content type: Examples
19th December 2018
In 2018, documents filed in a court case showed that a few days before the 2017 inauguration of US president Donald Trump - timing that may have been a coincidence - two Romanian hackers took over 123 of the police department's 187 surveillance cameras in Washington, DC with the intention of using police computers to email ransomware to more than 179,000 accounts. The prosecution also said the alleged hackers had stolen banking credentials and passwords and could have used police computers to…
Content type: Examples
13th August 2019
In February 2019, the city of Rio de Janeiro announced that its police security operation for the annual five-day Carnival would include facial recognition and vehicle license plate cameras to identify wanted individuals and cars. Municipal officials said the system would help reduce thefts and robberies; critics dissented on the basis that a period when people are wearing masks, heavy makeup, glitter, and costumes is a bad time to test the technology.
https://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/…
Content type: Examples
9th February 2019
In July 2018 the three-year-old payment system Revolut notified the UK's National Crime Agency and the Financial Conduct Authority that it had found evidence of money laundering on its system. From its beginnings as a prepaid credit card operator, Revolut had branched out into small business services and cryptocurrencies. Former employees suggest that although the company recently participated in an industry-wide review of money laundering checks and was in compliance with the EU's PSD2, its…
Content type: Examples
7th May 2019
In this review of Virginia Eubanks's book Automating Inequality, the author of the review looks at the three main case studies Eubanks explores in her book: the attempt to automate and privatise the welfare system elligibility management in the state of Indiana in 2006, the use of a coordinated entry system in Los Angeles County to address homelessness and the Allegheny Family Screening Tool that attempts to predict child abuse in Pennsylvania. He focuses in particular on Indiana, a state that…
Content type: Examples
26th October 2018
In 2010, customers of the online shoe retailer Zappos, which was acquired by Amazon in 2009, began noticing that recommendations for products they had viewed on the site were following them around the web. The culprit was a then-new practice known as "retargeting", which uses cookies to identify users as they move around the web. The source was quickly - via links on the ads themselves - identified as the French company Criteo, which tells retailers its personalised banners will help them "…
Content type: Examples
8th December 2018
In 2018, a group of researchers from the Campaign for Accountability posed as Russian trolls and were able to purchase divisive online ads and target them at Americans using Google's advertising platform. The researchers constructed fake profiles using the name and identifying details of the Internet Research Agency, a known Kremlin-linked troll farm; the ads appeared on the YouTube channels and websites belonging to CNN, CBS, Huffington Post, and the Daily Beast. The ads were approved in less…
Content type: Examples
14th April 2019
In December 2018, the Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (ELSAM) warned that data misuse and voter behavioural targeting and micro-targeting could prove factors in the 2019 Indonesian general elections. Researcher Wahyudi Djafar cited examples from Kenya, where Cambridge Analytica had sent tailored personal text messages to voters in order to promote ethnic division. Djafar thought the risk in Indonesia was particularly intense because 130 million of the country's 132 million internet…
Content type: Examples
5th May 2018
In a presentation given at the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining conference in 2016, researchers discussed a method of using the data generated by smart card public transport tickets to catch pickpockets. In a study of 6 million passenger movements in Beijing, the researchers used a classifier to pick out anomalous journeys - sudden variations in the patterns of ordinary travellers or routes that made no sense. A second classifier primed with information derived from police reports and social…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2019
In August 2017, it was reported that a researcher scraped videos of transgender Youtubers documenting their transition process without informing them or asking their permission, as part of an attempt to train artificial intelligence facial recognition software to be able to identify transgender people after they have transitioned.
These videos were primarily of transgender people sharing the progress and results of hormone replacement therapy, including video diaries and time-lapse videos. The…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
In 2016, Danish researchers Emil Kirkegaard and Julius Daugbjerg Bjerrekær released a dataset onto the Open Science Framework that included details of almost 70,000 users of the online dating site OkCupid. The researchers created the dataset themselves by using software to scrape information from OkCupid's site including user names (though not real names), ages, gender, religion, and personality traits, along with the answer to the questions the sites asks new users in order to help identify…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
In a presentation at London's 2016 Black Hat cybersecurity conference, researchers from UCL showed that it was possible to use ultrasound to track consumers across multiple devices. Marketers were already using beacons inaudible to the human ear to activate functions on devices via their microphones, and retailers were using shopping reward apps such as Shopkick to push department or aisle-specific ads while customers were in their stores. The UCL researchers noted, however, the inherent…
Content type: Examples
5th May 2018
At the 2016 Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies, researchers from the University of Michigan presented the results of tests that showed that industrial vehicles - a 2006 semi-trailer and a 2001 school bus - were subject to the same security flaws as had already been found in domestic cars. Via digital signals sent within a big truck's internal network, the researchers were able to change the truck's instrument panel readout, trigger unintended acceleration, and even disable part of the…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
In 2016, researchers affiliated with Verto Analytics and the Qatar Computing Research Institute published work in which they analysed the app usage and demographics of more than 3,700 people in order to find correlations. Based on the models they developed, they found they could predict a user's gender, age, marital status, and income with between 61% and 82% accuracy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/03/03/quiz-can-we-guess-your-age-and-income-based-solely-on-the-…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
In 2016, researchers at Dalhousie University in Canada and the Weizman Institute of Science in Israel developed a proof-of-concept attack that allowed them to take control of LED light bulbs from a distance of up to 400 metres by exploiting a flaw in the Zigbee protocol implementation used in the Philips Hue system. Because the same key was used in every bulb, once it had been extracted from one bulb it could be reused on all of them. Writing a new operating system to one of the bulbs enabled…
Content type: Examples
9th February 2019
In October 2018, researcher Johannes Eichstaedt led a project to study how the words people use on social media reflect their underlying psychological state. Working with 1,200 patients at a Philadelphia emergency department, 114 of whom had a depression diagnosis, Eichstaedt's group studied their EMRs and up to seven years of their Facebook posts. Matching every person with a depressive diagnosis with five who did not, to mimic the distribution of depression in the population at large, from…
Content type: Examples
5th May 2018
In 2016, security expert Ken Munro discovered security bugs in the onboard wifi in Mitsubishi's Outlander hybrid car that could be exploited to turn off the car's alarm. Some aspects of the Outlander can be controlled by a smartphone app that talks to the car via the onboard wifi. Security flaws in the way the wifi is set up include using a distinctive format for the cars' access points, enabling outsiders to track these cars. Munro also found the car was vulnerable to replay attacks; he was…
Content type: Examples
4th May 2018
A 2016 study from the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation found that in 95% of cases it takes as few as four of the apps users have installed on their smartphones to reidentify them within a dataset. Based on a study of 54,893 Android users over seven months, the researchers found that just two apps were sufficient to reidentify users about 75% of the time. However, the list of apps an individual uses is more revealing than that: it can predict traits like religion…
Content type: Explainer
19th September 2019
Abstract
Over the past few years, smart phones have become incredibly inexpensive, connecting millions of people to the internet for the first time. While growing connectivity is undeniably positive, some device vendors have recently come under scrutiny for harvesting user data and invasive private data collection practices.
Due to the open-source nature of the Android operating system vendors can add pre-installed apps (often called “bundled apps” or "bloatware") to mobile phones. In 2019, …
Content type: Examples
21st May 2019
Simultaneous complaints have been filed with European data protection authorities against Google and other ad tech firms. The complainants are being made by Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave, the private web browser, Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, and Michael Veale of University College London. The complaint notifies European regulators of a massive and ongoing data breach that affects virtually every user on the web.
Content type: Examples
16th July 2018
In July 2011, the established writer GrrlScientist tried to log into her Google account and found that it was suspended, barring her access to Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Google Reader, and the newly launched social network Google+. It turned out that the reason was then when Google launched its Google+ social network in June 2011, it included among its terms and conditions a requirement to use "the name your friends, family, or co-workers call you". In July 2011, Google began suspending the…
Content type: Long Read
1st May 2020
Photo by Cade Roberts on Unsplash
For those of you who don't spend the most productive part of your day scanning the news for developments about data and competition, here's what has been going on in the UK since summer 2019.
Basically, the UK competition authority started an investigation into online platforms and digital advertising last summer, and issued their preliminary findings in December 2019, concluding that Facebook and Google are very powerful in the search engine and social media…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
In 2016, Spanish Jose Carlos Norte, the chief technology officer at Telefonica subsidiary EyeOS, used the scanning software Shodan to find thousands of publicly exposed telematics gateway units. TGUs are small radio-enabled devices that are attached to industrial vehicles so their owners can track their location, petrol usage, and other parameters. At least one of these TGUs, made by the French company Mobile Devices, had no password protection. Norte was able to look up the location of…
Content type: Examples
5th May 2018
In 2017, a study claimed to have shown that artificial intelligence can infer sexual orientation from facial images, reviving the kinds of claims made in the 19th century about inferring character from outer appearance. Despite widespread complaints and criticisms, the study, by Michal Kosinski and Yilun Wang, is scheduled for publication in the respected Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. A reanalysis of the study's methodology and findings shows that the answers to a handful of yes…