Tootfinder

Today, #DuckDuckGo is launching a new browser-based tool that
🌟automatically scans data broker websites for your name and address
🌟and requests that they be removed.
Gabriel Weinberg, the company’s founder and CEO, says the personal-information-removal product is the first of its kind where users don’t have to submit any of their details to the tool’s owners.
The service will ma…

DuckDuckGo Is Taking Its Privacy Fight to Data Brokers
Privacy-focused company DuckDuckGo is launching a tool to remove data from people-search websites, a VPN, and an identity theft restoration service.

96% of US Hospital Websites Share Visitor Info With Meta, Google, Data Brokers - Slashdot
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/04/12/2046230/96-of-us-hospital-websites-share-visitor-info-with-meta-google-data-…

96% of US Hospital Websites Share Visitor Info With Meta, Google, Data Brokers - Slashdot
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Hospitals -- despite being places where people implicitly expect to have their personal details kept private -- frequently use tracking technologies on their websites to share user information with Google, Meta, data brokers, and other third par...

96% of US hospital websites share visitor info with Meta, Google, data brokers
Could have been worse – last time researchers checked it was 98.6%
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/11/hospital_website_data_sharing/

DuckDuckGo launches Privacy Pro, a new $9.99 per month service with a VPN, personal information removal, and identity theft restoration, available in the US (Matt Burgess/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/duckduckgo-vpn-data-removal-tool-privacy-pro/

DuckDuckGo Is Taking Its Privacy Fight to Data Brokers
Privacy-focused company DuckDuckGo is launching a tool to remove data from people-search websites, a VPN, and an identity theft restoration service.

96% of US Hospital Websites Share Visitor Info With Meta, Google, Data Brokers - Slashdot
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/04/12/2046230/96-of-us-hospital-websites-share-visitor-info-with-meta-google-data-…

96% of US Hospital Websites Share Visitor Info With Meta, Google, Data Brokers - Slashdot
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Hospitals -- despite being places where people implicitly expect to have their personal details kept private -- frequently use tracking technologies on their websites to share user information with Google, Meta, data brokers, and other third par...

New @… on the privacy nightmare that is your car; if only we had some kind of data protection here in the US to get a handle on the wild west of data brokers like LexisNexus who supply insurers with our driving telematics. #GiftLink

Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies
LexisNexis, which generates consumer risk profiles for the insurers, knew about every trip G.M. drivers had taken in their cars, including when they sped, braked too hard or accelerated rapidly.

Does anyone have tips & tricks for "poisoning the well" and making sure data brokers regurgitate a fake phone number when someone tries to buy my info?
I'm running the numbers on my fake phone number and it's not getting called/texted enough for me to continue spending money on it, especially now that I have to pay fees for some additional anti-spam compliance paperwork.
I've had the fake number on my website, LinkedIn, and Twitter for years - and it'…

Transient Classifiers for Fink: Benchmarks for LSST
B. M. O. Fraga, C. R. Bom, A. Santos, E. Russeil, M. Leoni, J. Peloton, E. E. O. Ishida, A. M\"oller, S. Blondin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.08798

Transient Classifiers for Fink: Benchmarks for LSST
The upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) at the Vera Rubin Observatory is expected to detect a few million transients per night, which will generate a live alert stream during the entire 10 years of the survey. This will be distributed via community brokers whose task is to select subsets of the stream and direct them to scientific communities. Given the volume and complexity of data, machine learning (ML) algorithms will be paramount for this task. We present the infrastructure test…

Biden to issue executive order aimed at protecting Americans’ sensitive data from China and other ‘hostile countries’
President Joe Biden will issue an executive order Wednesday intended to safeguard the personal data of American citizens from countries deemed hostile.
The executive order centers on the business of selling people’s personal information, in which companies and so-called data brokers collect and trade data.
The Biden Administration is worried that data broke…

Biden to issue executive order aimed at protecting Americans’ sensitive data from China and other ‘hostile countries’
President Joe Biden will issue an executive order Wednesday intended to safeguard the personal data of American citizens from countries deemed hostile.

GM says it has stopped sharing driving data with two data brokers, after a report showed GM and others collecting and sharing data without clear consent (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/technology/gm-onstar-driver-data.html<…

General Motors Quits Sharing Driving Behavior With Data Brokers
G.M. had provided information about braking, acceleration and speed to LexisNexis Risk Solution and Verisk, firms that generated driver risk profiles for insurers.

"Congress could soon mirror an effort already underway in California designed to give consumers more control over their personal information and the ability to have it deleted by data brokers."
National DELETE Act included in privacy discussions - Route Fifty
https:/…

National DELETE Act included in privacy discussions
California already has a law that gives consumers more control over the data held on them by data brokers. A federal effort would give Americans a central place to request it be deleted by all brokers.

There's an #enshittification adjacent trend where a service provider has the data to improve the quality of a service, but chooses not to.
DirecTV collects a tremendous amount of viewing data on its customers. It uses this information to sell ads. It sells it on to data brokers. They know the only sports I watch are soccer and NFL football. Instead of tailoring the suggested sport…

General Motors Quits Sharing Driving Behavior With Data Brokers
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/technology/gm-onstar-driver-data.html?unlocked_article_code=1.e00.VrsZ.qin8M6fUUyk-&smid=url-share

FCC fines carriers $196 million for selling customer location data https://therecord.media/fcc-fines-carriers-selling-customer-data

FCC fines carriers $196 million for selling customer location data
T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T and Sprint were caught peddling customers’ location data to so-called aggregators who then resold the information to third-party data brokers, the FCC said.

GM, Honda, Kia, Hyundai, and others added optional features in their apps to rate people's driving in recent years, offering the data to brokers like LexisNexis (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)
https://www.n…

Automakers Are Sharing Consumers’ Driving Behavior With Insurance Companies
LexisNexis, which generates consumer risk profiles for the insurers, knew about every trip G.M. drivers had taken in their cars, including when they sped, braked too hard or accelerated rapidly.

“Customer trust is a priority for (our PR office) and we are actively evaluating our privacy processes and (how we don’t get caught doing this again in the future).” - General Motors*
*And, soon, every other automaker when similarly confronted.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/…

General Motors Quits Sharing Driving Behavior With Data Brokers
G.M. had provided information about braking, acceleration and speed to LexisNexis Risk Solution and Verisk, firms that generated driver risk profiles for insurers.

Cool but how about just banning the sale of personal data in the first place?
https://techhub.social/@Techmeme/112130145636903967

There's an #enshittification adjacent trend where a service provider has the data to improve the quality of a service, but chooses not to.
DirecTV collects a tremendous amount of viewing data on its customers. It uses this information to sell ads. It sells it on to data brokers. They know the only sports I watch are soccer and NFL football. Instead of tailoring the suggested sport…

General Motors Quits Sharing Driving Behavior With Data Brokers
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/22/technology/gm-onstar-driver-data.html?unlocked_article_code=1.e00.VrsZ.qin8M6fUUyk-&smid=url-share

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14647 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csDC_…

Towards Message Brokers for Generative AI: Survey, Challenges, and Opportunities
In today's digital world, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) such as Large Language Models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly prevalent, extending its reach across diverse applications. This surge in adoption has sparked a significant increase in demand for data-centric GenAI models, highlighting the necessity for robust data communication infrastructures. Central to this need are message brokers, which serve as essential channels for data transfer within various system components. This su…

Californians can scrub personal info sold to advertisers with first-in-US law
In a victory for privacy advocates and consumers, the California governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that would enable residents to request that their personal information be deleted from the coffers of all the data brokers in the state.
The bill, SB 362, otherwise known as the Delete Act, was introduced in April 2023 by the state senator Josh Becker in an attempt to give Californians more control over…

ATAT: Astronomical Transformer for time series And Tabular data
G. Cabrera-Vives, D. Moreno-Cartagena, N. Astorga, I. Reyes-Jainaga, F. F\"orster, P. Huijse, J. Arredondo, A. M. Mu\~noz Arancibia, A. Bayo, M. Catelan, P. A. Est\'evez, P. S\'anchez-S\'aez, A. \'Alvarez, P. Castellanos, P. Gallardo, A. Moya, D. Rodriguez-Mancini
ht…

ATAT: Astronomical Transformer for time series And Tabular data
The advent of next-generation survey instruments, such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), is opening a window for new research in time-domain astronomy. The Extended LSST Astronomical Time-Series Classification Challenge (ELAsTiCC) was created to test the capacity of brokers to deal with a simulated LSST stream. We describe ATAT, the Astronomical Transformer for time series And Tabular data, a classification model conceived by the ALeRCE alert broke…

Check out today's Metacurity for the most important infosec developments you should know, including
--Anonymous claims theft, erasure of documents from Israeli nuclear reactor
--Treasury sanctions Russian nationals for disinformation campaign,
--Congress passes bill banning data brokers from selling data to adversaries,
--Apex Legends tournament hacker claims he did it for fun,
--Canada narrows Flipper Zero ban,
--Footwear maker Vans hacked,
--GitHub code auto-fix feature released,
--much more
https://www.metacurity.com/p/anonymous-claims-theft-erasure-documents-israeli-nuclear-reactor

The US House passes a bill to prevent data brokers from selling personal data to China, Russia or other "foreign adversaries"; the bill now heads to the Senate (Alfred Ng/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/20/lawmakers-privacy…

Check out today's Metacurity for the most important infosec developments you might have missed over the weekend, including
--Russia's Cozy Bear targeted German political parties with a party invitation
--German authorities took down Nemesis Market,
--China was behind theft of UK voter rolls,
--GM to stop sharing drivers' details with data brokers,
--Mozilla jettisons Onerep people search service,
--MuddyWater uses fake compensation lures,
--Cops bust notorious rug puller,
--much more
p.s. Metacurity will be on a break starting tomorrow through April 2. We resume publication on April 3. May the force be with you.
https://www.metacurity.com/p/russias-cozy-bear-targeted-german-political-parties-party-invitation

Since Wednesday, “OnStar Smart Driver #customer #data is no longer being shared with #LexisNexis or #Verisk,” a G.M. spokeswoman, Malorie Lucich, sa…

General Motors Quits Sharing Driving Behavior With Data Brokers
G.M. had provided information about braking, acceleration and speed to LexisNexis Risk Solution and Verisk, firms that generated driver risk profiles for insurers.