onfocus

Data brokers are selling the ability to track phones that visit abortion clinics and follow them back across state lines, all the way to their owners’ homes. All it takes for this kind of 24-hour surveillance is a credit card. Given the creepy enthusiasm with which MAGA government officials are inserting themselves into women’s health choices, these tracking tools present a pressing danger for women across the country.

The deck does not say where CMG allegedly sources this voice data, be that a particular brand of smart TV, a smart speaker, or smartphone loaded with a particular app. It says that once it has used the voice data to identify an audience that is “ready-to-buy,” CMG builds a list of those audience members and uploads it to ad platforms to then target advertisements.

Hagenah⁩ says that in cases of employers with “bring your own devices” policies, there’s a risk of someone leaving with huge volumes of company data saved on their laptops. That’s a particular risk if they’re disgruntled or leave on bad terms, he says.

Wyden suggested that the intelligence community might be helping data brokers violate an FTC order requiring that Americans are provided "clear and conspicuous" disclosures and give informed consent before their data can be sold to third parties. In the seven years that Wyden has been investigating data brokers, he said that he has not been made "aware of any company that provides such a warning to users before collecting their data."

In a press release, the FTC said that "Ring deceived its customers by failing to restrict employees' and contractors' access to its customers' videos, using customer videos to train algorithms, among other purposes, without consent, and failing to implement security safeguards." In one case, an employee "viewed thousands of video recordings belonging to female users of Ring cameras that surveilled intimate spaces in their homes such as their bathrooms or bedrooms," the FTC said.

A controversial facial recognition database, used by police departments across the nation, was built in part with 30 billion photos the company scraped from Facebook and other social media users without their permission, the company's CEO recently admitted, creating what critics called a "perpetual police line-up," even for people who haven't done anything wrong.