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TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. If you ever get the creepy feeling you're being monitored when you use your computer, smartphone or smart speaker, our guest Geoffrey Fowler is here to tell you you are. Fowler writes a consumer-oriented technology column for The Washington Post. He's been investigating the ways our browsers and phone apps harvest personal information about us even while we're sleeping. And he discovered that Amazon had kept four years' worth of recorded audio from his home, captured by his Alexa smart speaker, including family conversations about medications and a friend doing a business transaction.

Geoffrey Fowler joined the Post in 2017 after 16 years with the Wall Street Journal, writing about consumer technology, Silicon Valley, national affairs and China. He writes his technology column from San Francisco. He spoke with FRESH AIR's Dave Davies.

DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Well, Geoffrey Fowler, welcome to FRESH AIR. You have a recent column. The headline is "I Found Your Data. It's For Sale." What kind of personal data did you find available for sale on the Internet?

GEOFFREY FOWLER: I found all kinds of things that normal people would consider secrets and that corporations spend a lot of money - millions and millions of dollars - to try to keep out of the hands of their competitors and criminals. I found people's flight records. I found people's records from their doctors prescribing them medications. I found people's tax documents that they were - thought they were only sharing with their tax preparer. And they were available with one click. I could have opened them up and downloaded them.

DAVIES: Right. And where did this data come from?

FOWLER: It came from their Web browsers. And what we discovered along the way is that there is a giant hole in people's Web browsers that we're installing ourselves, and they're called extensions. These are these little apps, these little programs that you add into Chrome or into Firefox that are supposed to help you do things on the Web more easily, like keep track of your passwords or, you know, maybe get discounts on certain websites.

A lot of them do that, but it turns out a surprisingly large number of them have a side hustle in your data. And they were in the business of watching everything you did on the Web, sending it out somewhere else and then that site was sending it on to someone else, who then made it available for sale.

DAVIES: So when we click on the I agree box after not reading all - the long thing, what does that allow the add-on to harvest from us?

FOWLER: It allows the add-on to look at every webpage you go to. They can read the contents of the page. They can also look at the exact address at the top of the page. That's all the letters that appear after - through the HTTP that you see. And that actually contains a lot more secrets than you might realize. For example, it might contain your username or your password or, in the case of some pages that we saw in this system for sale from doctor's offices, contain the name of the doctor and even medication that was being renewed.

I have to say - I, as a technology journalist, knew that extensions were a risk, but I had no idea how much of a risk they were until I heard from an independent researcher - a guy named Sam Jadali, who runs his own Web hosting service and found some of his customers' data for sale and kind of became a half-a-year-long investigation for him to figure out how this happened. What he showed me, actually, was data coming from the Washington Post's own newsroom for sale on the Internet.

DAVIES: Wow. Before we get to how this ends up for sale, let's get to the mechanism of how it gets into the wrong hands. So we install an extension on our browser. It's by some company, whatever. They then harvest the data. Then what do they do with it?

FOWLER: They either use it for themselves - there's actually a lot of companies that are in the business of - like, sometimes they call it marketing analytics - of trying to figure out what people are doing on the Internet. Amazon has a very large business doing this with a company called Alexa. In Amazon's case, though, they only keep it for themselves. They don't sell that and share it to other people. And they anonymize that data so that people who might tap into it can't see the exact page that you, Dave, were - was looking at.

But not everybody in this sort of shadowy business is so ethical. And so we found this data through the research of that independent researcher I mentioned, Sam Jadali. We found it for sale on a site called Nacho Analytics. It was buying it from perhaps some other party who perhaps was getting it from some other party. It's really hard to connect these dots because the companies won't talk about who they are getting their data from - and then, you know, putting it all for sale, down to the individual pages that people were clicking on, on a site called Nacho Analytics.

DAVIES: Right. So you went on to Nacho Analytics. And what did you find?

FOWLER: On Nacho Analytics, you could pay, starting at about 40 bucks per month, to look at the webpages that people were surfing on individual domains - so places like NPR.org or even onedrive.com, which is Microsoft's cloud storage service. And when you pulled up those pages, you could see the exact URLs of pages. So - and then search through them and search through the metadata. So that's things like the titles and the address of the computer that they were using to surf there. You could see all of this information and search through it.

DAVIES: And in some cases, things that appeared to be tax returns or medical records, right?

FOWLER: Yeah. For example - so we went to onedrive.com and typed in tax, and that pulled up a bunch of documents based on the title of the page that appeared to be tax returns. Now, I did not want to further dig into anybody's privacy, so we did not actually click on those links, but we could have to see them.

DAVIES: So if you wanted to look for a specific person on Nacho Analytics, you could find them.

FOWLER: Well, I'll take the case of what we found from the Post newsroom. So I asked this researcher, Sam Jadali, to see if he could find any data from the Post's internal network. That's washpost.com. So he pulled up the pages he could see being surfed there. And there we saw someone logging into our internal networks - so not even something that's public to the world. And it turned out to be one of my colleagues, Nick. And we saw his username.

So then I quickly called up Nick, and I said, hey, Nick, did you know that your data is for sale on the Internet? And he was like, what? And I said, well, I think the problem is an extension that you've got running on your computer. And we looked through them together. And sure enough, there was an extension there that looked really innocent but was sending out every page that he was visiting.

DAVIES: Now, Nacho Analytics that provided all this information for a fee - you talked to them, I assume. What did they say?

FOWLER: They said that they didn't do anything wrong. And they may have a point - that their business is not necessarily illegal. And I think it's really telling about sort of the state of the economy - of the Internet economy that what they're doing is actually considered pretty common. So they said that before they put data up for sale on Nacho Analytics, they would scrub it for personally identifiable information. But as we saw when we looked through the data together, clearly, they were not doing a very good job at doing that 'cause we found lots and lots and lots of secrets that were still available in the data.

When I also - as well as this researcher, Sam Jadali - contacted Google and Firefox, they immediately shut down some of the extensions that were doing this leaking. So that, I believe, cut off some of the data supply for Nacho Analytics because a few days later, Nacho said it was essentially pausing its business. It would no longer take new customers, and it had suffered a data outage. And so it couldn't even provide data for people who'd already paid for it.

DAVIES: Right. But again, I'm just a little puzzled by what kinds of extensions - like, for example, when I checked - after I read your story - on my Google Chrome browser, I had several extensions that allowed me to access Google Documents. Those are OK?

FOWLER: Those are made by Google itself. So you know, I think with each of these cases, you have to ask, do I trust this company? We should have a conversation about whether you should trust Google. That's a whole other topic. But with a lot of other people, there are many other kinds of extensions in there. I'll take the example of the one that my colleague at the Post was using. It was called Hover Zoom. He had read about it on the website Reddit. And it's for people who use Reddit a lot and want to quickly be able to enlarge the photos on the Reddit website. He installed it, didn't think twice about it, and it was just sitting there running. And when you press certain keys, it would automatically enlarge the photos on any page. Turns out, they had a side business in taking every webpage he was going to and selling it on the Internet.

DAVIES: Are ad-blocking extensions a good idea? Do they track you?

FOWLER: They can be good or they can be bad. And this is one of the problems with these extension and add-on stores. It's really hard to know what these guys are up to. I have seen evidence of some that are really, really good and some that are just collecting your data.

And, you know, you can't really tell just from the reviews or from sort of the presence in those stores what they're up to. You know what other kinds of software is frequently in the business of tracking you is actually VPN and other kinds of security software; sometimes antivirus software even. You'll think these are the companies that I trust to protect my privacy and security, but they may be paying for it by taking data about what you're doing on your computer and selling it.

DAVIES: Including the big, well-known names in security?

FOWLER: Yes. Some very big names in the antivirus and VPN world may be providing the services that they offer but may also be in the business of collecting data about what you're doing on your computer.

DAVIES: Geoffrey Fowler writes a consumer-oriented technology column for The Washington Post. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ALEXANDRE DESPLAT'S "SPY MEETING")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Washington Post columnist Geoffrey Fowler. He writes consumer-oriented columns about navigating the confusing world of personal technology, including computers, smartphones, smart speakers and so on.

So you wrote in June that you looked under the hood of the Chrome web browser, which is commonly used, and found it had brought along a few thousand friends. Who were the friends?

FOWLER: They were lots and lots of companies that are in the business of tracking everything that you do on the Internet. Some of them are advertising companies. Some of them are analytics companies that help, you know, figure out how to make websites run better. Some of them were tech giants - Google and Facebook. Others were data brokers that are just in the business of trying to connect the dots in your digital life to build out a profile of you so that they can sell it.

DAVIES: Right. Now, these are not the browser extensions - right? - that are specifically - you download. These are cookies, right? What exactly are cookies?

FOWLER: Yeah. Cookies are baked in - pardon the pun - baked into the way that the Web works these days. So they're tiny little files that basically tag your browser and say, yep, Geoff was here. And then when you pull up another site, they'll check, oh, I see this cookie from before. So now we can - they can connect the dots. Think of them as little breadcrumbs that follow you around on the Internet.

Turns out, the biggest maker of cookies on the Internet is Google itself. That's one of the ways that they help track you down and build out a profile and help advertisers target you with advertising. So Google also makes the most popular web browser, Chrome. So Chrome does not do very much to stop this cookie behavior from happening. In fact, they quite actively encourage it.

DAVIES: Now, you've written about how these browser extensions that we get on, we at least agree to download them. Do we agree to accept cookies in some way? How does that happen? Are we informed? Or is our consent sought however passively?

FOWLER: This is a really good question, and this goes right to the heart of a big conversation we're having about technology right now. What is consent? What is being informed? Yes, lots of websites now, because of a European data law, put up a little notice on the bottom that says, oh, by the way, we use cookies. Are you cool with that? And you either ignore it or you click OK, and you don't really think about it. But does that mean that we really understand that, you know, in the course of a week that over 11,000 times - at least for me - that companies are going to be able to be pushing out these requests to track and follow you around? I don't really think it does.

I think, in fact, that we rely on the company that makes the web browser software, Chrome or Firefox, to have our interests at heart, right? And our interests would be to not be tracked. And yet Chrome is not doing that for us. That's in pretty big contrast to its much smaller rival, Firefox, which is made by a nonprofit called Mozilla.

Now, as of a couple of weeks ago, it changed its default settings so that when you install it, it blocks those cookies by default, the ones that are involved in tracking. So in the case of my week of web surfing, the 11,000 cookies that Chrome would've let through, Mozilla let through none.

DAVIES: Wow. And is there an option to opt out of cookies on Google Chrome?

FOWLER: There are options to say block all cookies in Google Chrome, but that would then break some things about the way websites work. Not all cookies are bad. Some help remember, for example, your login to the Washington Post website. So if you turn those on, it really kind of tends to sort of break your web experience. One of the things that Mozilla figured out how to do was block just the ones that are sort of naughty, that are in the business of tracking you for advertising or for marketing, and allow through the ones that you want. So it's about sort of seeking that balance.

Now, for me, this experience made me realize that Chrome has essentially become surveillance software. It's surveillance software for the advertising industry and for Google itself. So I made a switch to Mozilla, and I'm very happy I did.

DAVIES: You recently did a report on what your iPhone was doing while you were sleeping. What did you find?

FOWLER: I found that my iPhone is very busy while I'm sleeping, talking to lots of companies that I've never heard of and sharing with it lots of personal details, things like my exact address and my email address and my name. And that really, really surprised me.

DAVIES: So what's happening here?

FOWLER: We fill up our phones with apps. And when we do that, we presume that because they came from Apple's app store that they've been vetted and they're not - you know, they're respecting all of the privacy practices that we have come to expect from Apple because of its marketing. But it turns out, apps use something that are called trackers. They're a little bit like cookies that you get on the Web, but they're just embedded inside the apps themselves. And these trackers do lots of different things. Some of them help app-makers just figure out how people are using the apps so that they can make them work better.

Others belong to data companies and advertising companies. Google makes trackers. Facebook makes trackers. Some are in there to gather data about people that are using apps so that they can sell it. And that's one way app-makers can make money. And these trackers inside the apps, as long as they're on your phone, they have the ability to essentially run whenever they want to, including while you're sleeping at night and not even using your phone.

DAVIES: Wow. Can you shut them down at night? Should you - if you power your phone off, does it inhibit this?

FOWLER: If you power off your phone, nothing will be coming out of your phone, either from trackers or from calls that might come in or go out of your phone. But that doesn't really stop the problem. Because as soon as you power your phone back up, the apps will wake back up, and they'll get back in touch with their trackers. The problem is really at the core of how apps are made and the kinds of requirements that Apple and Google and other phone, you know, store, app store-makers place on them.

DAVIES: What kinds of requirements they place or fail to place - what do you mean?

FOWLER: Indeed. Right now, you know, to get into the Apple app store or the Google Play store, you have to have your app reviewed by one of those companies. They do look to make sure that, you know, they are - that they have a privacy policy, that they are generally abiding by, you know, the rules that they set out in their app store guidelines. But they don't really look under the hood to understand, who are these other companies that they might be talking to, these tracker companies? And what sorts of data are they sending to them?

They don't do that vetting for us. And unfortunately, we as consumers can't really see that, either. To figure out what my phone was doing while I slept at night and also during the day, I had to hack my phone. I went to a guy who used to work for the NSA. His name is Patrick Jackson. He now works for a technology company called Disconnect. And he showed me how to do something called a man-in-the-middle attack on my iPhone that basically, you know, kept a copy of all of the data going in and out of my phone while I slept at night so that we could look through it together.

That's the level I had to go through to figure out what kind of data was flowing out of my phone and what trackers were running. I couldn't learn any of that from - either from Apple's software or from reading the privacy policies of these companies.

DAVIES: So I understand this - so when an app is permitted to be sold in the iPhone store, does Apple require them not to use trackers and some people just aren't honest about it, or do Apple's rules permit them to include trackers in the apps that you download?

FOWLER: Until very recently, Apple's rules permitted them to use whatever trackers they wanted. If you had given an app permission to collect your location - and it does pop up a thing saying, can we collect your location? - if you'd given it that then it could share that with whatever trackers it wanted. About two weeks after my story came out in The Washington Post about what my iPhone did while I was sleeping, Apple announced that it was going to now ban trackers in children's apps. So ones that were, you know, targeting, you know, people under the age of 13, they said they would no longer allow them to use third-party trackers. That is an admirable move in many ways. But then my question is, why is it OK in adult apps but not in kids' apps?

DAVIES: And what kinds of information is the tracker transmitting about us?

FOWLER: It could really be a wide range of things. You know, when I looked, you know, underneath the hood, just while I was sleeping, apps that I saw were using trackers included things like weather.com or - The Washington Post website had trackers. There was another one that's a popular app for kind of, like, checking with the police scanners, called Citizen. It was sending its trackers a lot of information, including my exact GPS coordinates and my email. And in that case, that violated its own privacy policy, and it later changed that after I called them. But still, it was happening.

GROSS: We're listening to the interview FRESH AIR's Dave Davies recorded with Geoffrey Fowler, who writes a consumer-oriented technology column for The Washington Post. They'll pick up where they left off after a break, and critic Soraya Nadia McDonald will review the final season of the Netflix series "Orange Is The New Black." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview FRESH AIR's Dave Davies recorded with Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey Fowler. Fowler has been investigating ways our computers, smartphones and smart speakers collect our personal information and what they do with it. Fowler has covered digital technology and Silicon Valley for years.

When we left off, Fowler was describing how some phone apps have trackers that collect our data, which is often then sold to marketing and advertising companies. One example Fowler found was food delivery apps like Grubhub, Caviar and DoorDash.

DAVIES: You found one food delivery app called DoorDash sends data to nine different trackers.

FOWLER: Yeah, this one was pretty shocking to me. Again, think about this from the perspective of all of us. You know, you put an app on your phone like DoorDash. And you think, OK, DoorDash is here. When I open DoorDash, I have a relationship with DoorDash, with this company that's going to have someone bring food to my house. You don't think that you're going to have a relationship with nine other companies, including Facebook and Google, who get to know now and keep a log of every time you're hungry (laughter) and open this app and, you know, want to order some pizza. None of that is disclosed to us. This is all lost in this murky world of data.

And that's sort of been the impetus behind a whole series of stories I've been doing for the Post. I kind of call it the secret life of your data, just kind of looking under the hood at all the things, all the data about us that's being passed around and traded and sold that we don't normally have a way to understand or see. Because if we don't know where our data is going, how can we even begin to hope to protect our privacy?

DAVIES: And just so I understand the relationships, a food delivery app would would give data to nine trackers because each of them pays them a couple of fractions of pennies for it, or - why?

FOWLER: There might be a variety of reasons. So for example, one tracker might be in the business of just giving data back to DoorDash to say, like, this is how your app functions. This is the areas of the app that people spend the most time on. These are the areas where people swipe around the most.

It might also help them combat fraud. I guess there's a problem with people setting up fake phones to put in fake orders. So they say they want to be able to tell whether your phone is literally physically moving using the gyroscope in it to see if it's a real human on the other end of it. That's another kind of tracker.

There's also trackers in there for advertising companies. So Google and Facebook are in there. And DoorDash says, oh, well, they put them in there just so that they could see whether their advertising was working because DoorDash does a lot of advertising with Google and Facebook. But the cost of all of this is that all of these different kinds of companies get to know every time you're opening DoorDash.

And any time a company has data about you, who's really making sure that they're using it appropriately? Who's making sure that they're going to delete it soon enough? Who's making sure that they're - they have good security, and it's not going to get stolen and sold off somewhere?

DAVIES: And do these trackers slow the apps down or cause further battery drain, or do they impose data charges on us?

FOWLER: That's the other piece of app trackers, is that they do a whole bunch of bad things for our phone. Over the course of a week, I found 5,400 different trackers activated on my iPhone. Yours might be different. I may have more apps than you. But that's still quite a lot. If you multiplied that out by an entire month, it would have taken up 1.5 gigabytes of data just going to trackers from my phone. To put that in some context, the basic data plan from AT&T is only 3 gigabytes.

So imagine (laughter), half of your data plan is just eaten up by tracker companies who you don't want running anyway. So it's not only eating up your data. But then, every time it pings the network, that's another hit on your battery life too. So it's - this stuff really isn't in our interest, either from our privacy or from just keeping our phones running.

DAVIES: You know, and sometimes when we're browsing, and we want to go to a site or fire up an application, we get a screen that says, do you want to sign in using Facebook? What happens?

FOWLER: No, you don't.

DAVIES: OK.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVIES: Why?

FOWLER: Because you're giving Facebook the ability to then track every time you're using that website or every time you're using that app. And I'm sure that that website and app then have lots of other tracker pixels or cookies or software baked into them that send other information to Facebook about what you're up to. Google does the same thing. You'll sometimes get a button - do you want a sign in with Google? Same problem.

These companies are in the business of data. They might tell everybody that they don't sell our data, but it is certainly very valuable to them. Actually, that's why they don't sell it because they want to keep it for themselves because they then use all this information about what apps you're using, what you're doing in them, what websites you go to, where you are physically with your phone - like, where you are in the world according to your GPS coordinates. They put all of that into their dossiers on each of us to - so that companies can target us with advertising.

DAVIES: So if I'm going to sign into a music service like Spotify, and I sign in with Facebook, does that mean Spotify then has access to all of my Facebook data and my friends' data?

FOWLER: Not necessarily. It used to be that Facebook was a lot more open about sharing your Facebook data and your friends' data with apps. They shut down a lot of that a couple of years ago. And that's the problem they got into with Cambridge Analytica as well, that they were allowing apps to collect data about your friends and then pass that along. So Facebook has gotten a lot more controlling with its data. Again, they'll say that's for privacy, but it's really because they realize that data is too valuable. They want to keep it for themselves so they can charge companies to market to you through them.

DAVIES: You know, you have some columns that are on very specific topics that are really interesting. And one of them - you write about how to handle robocallers on your cellphones, and you mention getting the Do Not Call list. But there are some fight-back apps that people pay for that really get aggressive on this. You want to explain this?

FOWLER: Yeah. There are some apps out there that - beyond just blocking bad calls, that they actually will try to torture robocallers. So they intercept the calls, and they listen briefly to see if they detect it as being a robocaller. And if they do, instead of passing the phone call on to you, they'll stay on the line. And they use artificial intelligence to try to keep the - either the person or the robot on the other end on the line by sort of teasing them. Sometimes they'll have, like, a Donald Trump impersonator voice that talks to them or somebody snoring or somebody just talking a lot. And then, for kicks, they will send you - they'll send you a recording of what happened afterwards.

DAVIES: All right. So if you're really into it (laughter).

FOWLER: If you're really into it.

DAVIES: You write about smart speakers like Alexa and their potential to be conducting surveillance. And I guess it's worth noting that Alexa's owned by Amazon, whose chair, Jeff Bezos, is the owner of the paper that you work for, the Washington Post. How much is - are Alexa smart speakers recording of our lives?

FOWLER: First, I'll note, yes, the Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, but I'm happy to report that I am at liberty to criticize Amazon as much as I'd like, including by digging into what Alexa is really getting up to.

So I think one thing that a lot of folks do not realize about smart speakers with Alexa or with Google's Assistant or Siri is that, by default, they're keeping the recordings of everything that you say. So that means that you sort of think like, OK, well, but it only records when you call out the name, when you call out Alexa or call out Siri. Well, actually that's not the case. It records whenever it thinks it hears one of those calls to action.

So I did an experiment where I went back to four years of recordings that Alexa has made of me and my family at home because, again, they're all kept there by default. And I spent a couple of days listening to all of them. And when I did that, I found, you know, all of these strange fragments of my life. So things you would expect, like setting the spaghetti timer or, you know, asking to hear a song, that was in there. But there were also lots of times, dozens of occasions, where Alexa was recording snippets of conversation or television just kind of randomly on its own. For example, it seemed to kind of go off a lot on its own whenever I was watching "Downton Abbey."

DAVIES: (Laughter).

FOWLER: I had a lot of people with that particular posh British accent in the collection. It also went off when my family members were talking about medication. It went off when a friend was doing a business transaction. And listening to this archive, which any of the listeners can do themselves - if you go to amazon.com/alexaprivacy, you'll be able to dig into your collection as well - listening to this really made me think differently about what Alexa has become in our lives.

It's - it is, yes, an assistant, but it is also an eavesdropper. And it is collecting this information and not giving us the power to tell it to stop. Now, Amazon does give you an option that you can go in and delete past recordings. But you can't tell it just don't keep the recording in the first place.

DAVIES: And they keep everything forever?

FOWLER: They keep everything forever. What's interesting is we were talking before about how these tech companies sometimes give us false choices. And this is, again, one of these false choices. Amazon says it needs all of this data to make Alexa smarter, to improve its artificial intelligence. And yet, archrival Google actually now by default does not do this. It does not keep the recordings from Google Assistant or its smart speakers or its phone-based assistant. It does not keep those by default. It deletes. You have - you'd have to go in and tell it that you want it to keep those.

So here, you know, who's right? Do you really have to keep it, Amazon? I think not. And the reason they're doing it is because they can get away with it because most of us haven't noticed and haven't sort of spent the time to kind of dig into the details.

DAVIES: We're speaking with Geoffrey Fowler. He writes a consumer-oriented technology column for the Washington Post. We will take a short break here, then we will talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with Washington Post columnist Geoffrey Fowler. He writes consumer-oriented columns about navigating the confusing world of personal technology, including computers, smartphones and smart speakers. Alexa seems to listen to an awful lot. Does Siri do the same thing on our iPhones?

FOWLER: Siri does do the same thing on our iPhones and on the HomePod, which is their home speaker. So I have a corner of my living room where all of the virtual assistants live together. I have all of the connected speakers. I'm sure someday they'll start talking to each other. But I watch to see which ones go off at random times.

I have to say, the Apple one goes off quite frequently, maybe even more than the others. Apple's policy is it keeps the recordings of everything that it hears, and it does not give you the option to tell it not to keep the recordings. But they anonymize it, so they don't associate it with your individual account in your name. Amazon still associates it with who you are.

DAVIES: So you - when you say that the Apple device goes off more frequently, it starts recording more frequently, or seems to.

FOWLER: That's right. Last night, I was watching a TV show. And in the middle of it, Siri, on the HomePod, perked up and said, sorry, I can't answer that question. And no one had asked Siri a question.

DAVIES: (Laughter) Does this make you want to disconnect Alexa?

FOWLER: I have to say, after doing this reporting, I now keep my Alexa speaker on permanent mute. There is a button on the top, that physical button you can press, that says, don't record and don't activate when you hear the name Alexa. But that, of course, sort of defeats the purpose of the device. So again, I just think this is really bad product design on the part of Amazon. They shouldn't put us in a situation where, again, the choice is don't use the technology or give into this kind of surveillance.

Thing I would add is that this project of listening to my Alexa recordings made me wonder - I wonder what all the other ways are that Amazon is eavesdropping on my home because anybody with one of these smart speakers probably knows that, like, oh, you can hook them up to connected devices in your home, right? You can connect it up to light bulbs and thermostats and doorbells and all sorts of things. And I had certainly done that. I'm a technology journalist, and I review all this stuff. And my house is filled with gadgets.

And so I went down the path of trying to figure out, OK, well, what other data from my home other than just me and my family's voices is it keeping? And I found, I mean, enough that would make the - you know, the East German police blush to see this kind of data. For example, my Nest thermostat was collecting in 15-minute increments over the last six or seven years not only the temperature in my home, but also whether there had been a person that passed in front of it. So there was this perfect record of every time there had been someone in my hallway for years and years and years that was being sent both to Google and to Amazon - because Amazon's requirement is if your gadget connects in with Alexa that they get to keep a copy of all this data, too.

And then it started multiplying. So yeah, there was the thermostat, but there's also my garage door. It was doing the same thing. Then there was my connected lights. Literally, Amazon was getting a record of every time a light switched on and off in my house.

DAVIES: And how did you discover that Amazon had these records of your thermostat changes and when people were walking down the hallway?

FOWLER: I started asking. So I went to the companies that make these devices, and I said, hey, can you tell me what data you're collecting and who you're sharing it with? Some of them would not answer that question. And that - my frustration with that really animated what's become a yearlong project by me to sort of see if I can look under the hood and figure out what data is being collected and who it's being shared with. I've been looking at that and all sorts of things - connected devices in our home, our Web browser. And I've got even more - more and more projects coming down the pike.

But some companies did answer. Some just pointed me to their privacy policies, which didn't really specify what they were up to. So it's really quite difficult for us as consumers to understand the secret life of these devices and the data they're collecting and who they're sharing it with. And I think that's a big problem.

DAVIES: There's a lot of talk of congressional regulation of digital media. Are you seeing things that encourage you?

FOWLER: There's a lot of talk in Congress, but not a lot of action when it comes to data and privacy. You know, we see a lot of individual members of Congress, you know, writing letters or holding hearings. But there's been little effort to really turn that into legislation that could even get to the point of being voted on.

Right now, we see Congress also interested in these big questions about whether these tech companies are too big - right? - and that they need to be broken up for antitrust reasons, which, at the end of the day, is also about data because the reason why they're so big and so powerful and have made billions of dollars is because they have control over so much data about our lives.

The thing that actually gives me the most hope is what I see happening in the states. So California passed the California Consumer Privacy Act, which is going to take effect in January. And it is, I think, going to become the closest thing that we have to an American privacy law. Of course, it only applies to the residents of California, but there are so many residents of California that a lot of companies are going to have to sort of essentially comply with it for everyone.

And it really - it's about disclosure, which is, I think, where this all needs to start - you know, when this law takes effect, that these companies - even if they're not tech companies - any company that collects data about you is going to have to be able to say - you know, answer the question that I - some of the questions I posed before. What's being collected? Who is it being shared with? Tell me if it's being sold. Give me the chance to say, no, you're not allowed to sell it.

I'm actually super excited when this law kicks in. I already have plans for January 1, 2020, to send out lots of request letters to companies as a California resident to tell me what data they're collecting and what they're doing with it.

DAVIES: Well, Geoffrey Fowler, thanks so much for speaking with us.

FOWLER: My pleasure.

GROSS: Geoffrey Fowler writes a consumer-oriented technology column for The Washington Post. He spoke to FRESH AIR's Dave Davies.

Coming up, Soraya Nadia McDonald reviews the final season of "Orange Is The New Black." This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF GILAD HEKSELMAN'S "DO RE MI FA SOL")

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How Tech Companies Track Your Every Move And Put Your Data Up For Sale

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TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. If you ever get the creepy feeling you're being monitored when you use your computer, smartphone or smart speaker, our guest Geoffrey Fowler is here to tell you you are. Fowler writes a consumer-oriented technology column for The Washington Post.

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Nicole Garcia-I believe that there are things that are mentioned in the book 1984 that are still present today. North Korea is a country who is in a very controlled state. There are propaganda posters from North Korea thta depict South Koreans getting crushed by a tank and many posters saying to destroy U.S. imperialism. This reminds me of the propaganda from the book saying War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.

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As North Korea's supreme leader makes a show of abandoning all efforts at a formal detente with Seoul, state media in Pyongyang this week published a series of patriotic posters targeting the United States and its treaty ally South Korea.

The government-sanctioned artwork-a callback to America's own wartime propaganda work-was produced to "powerfully arouse all officials, party members and working people to carrying out the important tasks set forth at the historic policy speech made by the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un," the official Korean Central News Agency said on Sunday.

Long-time observers say 2024 could be a dangerous year for peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula, with Kim's isolated regime in the North repeatedly launching ballistic missiles and experimenting with new military technologies in moves that appeared to test American resolve in the region.

Last week, the reclusive country's rubber-stamp congress announced it was abolishing three agencies related to inter-Korean cooperation, all but ending any possibility of reconciliation with the South Korea in the process.

The format of North Korea's new posters was reminiscent of early Soviet and some present-day Chinese socialist propaganda. The vibrant images and hyper-nationalistic themes have remained largely unchanged in Pyongyang since the 1953 armistice put a halt to-but did not officially end-the Korean War that split the peninsula along the 38th parallel north.

In the artworks, citizens were encouraged to assist in the country's economic development and to remain faithful to the state and its defense. A recurring theme is also the U.S. and South Korea's shared role as the regime's enemies.

"Let us destroy the U.S. imperialists and the clan of the Republic of Korea without mercy!" said one especially jingoistic poster, which depicted a tank carrying the North Korean flag plowing over its enemies and warplanes flying into battle overhead.

Another poster displayed the message: "Great spurs to making full preparations for all-people resistance!" and showed a soldier joined by what appeared to be a student, an engineer, a laborer, a revolutionary partisan and a farmer in a whole-of-society war effort.

A third propaganda artwork declared: "National defense is the greatest patriotism!" and depicted saluting uniformed service members.

In a fourth, an army officer was shown next to soldiers wielding automatic rifles and a rocket launcher. "For the prosperity and development of our Republic and the promotion of the wellbeing of our people!" its text read.

A message of economic dynamism, which belied the destitution faced by most North Koreans, said: "Let us give further momentum to the trend of development of the national economy!"

"Let us strongly promote the 'regional development 20×10 policy!'" proclaimd one poster, a reference to Kim's plan, announced by state media last week, to build industrial centers in 200 cities and counties within a decade in order to stimulate the country's aid-dependent command economy.

The North Korean embassy in Beijing did not immediately return Newsweek's request for comment before publication.

North-South relations have deteriorated since the fragile peace of the late 2010s, when the countries engaged in limited dialogue, agreed to host a joint future Olympics and signed a key military agreement to reduce tensions along the military demarcation line.

The situation today is at its most unstable in decades, according to analysts at 38 North, part of the Stimson Center think tank, who concluded in a report earlier this month that Kim had " made a strategic decision to go to war."

Their alarm came from the Pyongyang's repeated launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles in 2023-and its threats to lob nuclear-armed warheads at America. Late last year, the pivotal 2018 military pact to deescalate tensions was left in tatters after the North and the South both launched their first spy satellite into Earth orbit.

This month, the North fired live artillery shells near its maritime border with the South, and Seoul conducted joint military drills with Washington and Tokyo.

Last week, while threatening to end all probability of unification on the peninsula, Kim called for a modification of the North Korean constitution to label the South its "principal enemy."

Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

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North Korea releases war propaganda art: "destroy the US imperialists"

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New propaganda posters urge North Korean citizens to prepare for a whole-of-society war effort to destroy the American "imperialists."

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Natalie Hernandez-With the concept of social media, could cause us to live in a similar world as 1984. Once someone starts a rumor and puts it on the internet, everyone is gonna see it and it can cause danger to anyone. Life now is still similar to 1984, when someone is trying to control a certain thing, they are gonna do anything in theyre power to get people to follow ad do the samething as everyone else. Social Media can cause major issues.

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1984 Social Media Analysis - 926 Words | Bartleby

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Free Essay: The novel 1984 by George Orwell shows similarities to today’s world because in it telescreens and microphones, like social media in our world,…

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Today, I believe we are living in a world where we are being spied on. Just like the novel 1984. Our phones are listening to us most of the time. They are programmed to hear our conversation to relate our conversation to some type of advertisement to get us to believe that or buy something. Often search engines like Siri or Google are programmed to listen to our conversations, and they also track our activities. This can make us feel violated our privacy. On page 6 of 1984 Winston says "The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that would be picked up by it." - Mariana Fernandez

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Written by Clare Stouffer, a NortonLifeLock employee

Yes, your phone is listening to you - to an extent and namely through virtual assistant apps, that is.

First came Siri in 2011, then came Google Assistant, and then Alexa and Cortana all followed. Each with the intent to serve users by listening to their demands, whether it's making phone calls, sending texts, or adding items to a to-do list.

To this end, the question shouldn't just be "is my phone listening to me?" Rather, you should also be asking yourself, "How much does my phone listen to me?" and "What does it do with the conversations it collects?"

Here, we're addressing these queries and then some to get to the bottom of the are-our-phones-listening-to-us dilemma.

Why is my phone listening to me?

Foremost, our phones listen to us to virtually assist us. That's through voice assistant apps, like Siri and "Hey Google," but also through personalized advertisements that follow conversations had on them. See, it's no coincidence that you're sometimes served advertisements that directly relate to a phone conversation you just had.

It's similar to how search engines track our activity to ensure we're delivered the most relevant results and advertisements. In this respect, you might think of your smartphone as a verbal search engine. These devices and the applications on them are capable of internet tracking, too.

So, the next time you beckon "Hey Google" or Siri, know that it's just like opening a browser window. And your data can be collected, oftentimes for advertising or marketing purposes.

Is my phone listening to me legally?

Yes, it is legal for phones to listen to you. That's because we often give consent for phones to listen to us when we accept terms and conditions of software updates or app downloads. Those conditions are usually that we'll allow our data to be collected so that we can harness all the wonders and conveniences of voice-assisted programs and services.

Worth mentioning is that phones can also listen to us illegally. That's when users do not consent to be listened to and it's often by way of spyware or other malware infecting smartphones. For this reason, it's always wise to limit the permissions you provide to applications and review the terms and conditions of new programs that ask for microphone access.

Should I be concerned my phone is listening to me?

Generally, you shouldn't be too concerned about your phone listening to you. Hey, you might even appreciate the personalized advertisements that result from it. Of course, if you're uncomfortable with your data being collected - it's your data, after all - there are some ways to stop your phone from listening.

How to stop my phone from listening to me

Sure, just as you might cover your webcam, you can also cover your microphone with a piece of tape or purchase a special phone case to stop your phone from listening to you. But a more surefire approach is to review the microphone permissions granted across applications and also disable virtual assistants.

In short, turn off your microphone to stop your phone from listening to you.

How to turn off your microphone on iPhone

If you're questioning "is my iPhone recording me" or "is Siri always listening," you're best to at least know how to turn off your microphone on an iPhone.

1. Navigate to Settings > Siri & Search

2. Toggle off the following items:
○ "Listen for 'Hey Siri'"
○ "Press Side button for Siri"
○ "Allow Siri When Locked"

3. "Allow Siri When Locked"Finally, when a pop-up window appears, tap "Turn Off Siri"

And that's how you disable Siri.

How to turn off your microphone on Android

To turn off "Hey Google" or to stop "OK Google," follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Settings Select

2. Google > Account Services > Search, Assistant & Voice > Voice

3. Select Voice Match and, finally, toggle off "Hey Google"

And that's how to turn off "Hey Google" and disable "Hey Google."

How to disable microphone access across applications

In addition to turning off virtual assistant apps like Siri and "Hey Google," you might want to stop other applications like social media platforms from accessing your microphone, too.

To disable microphone access on iOS devices, navigate to Settings > [a specific application] > Settings, and then toggle off Microphone.

To disable microphone access on Android devices, navigate to Settings > Applications > Applications Manager > [a specific application] > Permissions, and then select "Turn Off the mic."

5 privacy tips for smartphones

Some might consider phones listening to them as a breach of privacy, while others might consider it convenient. No matter your stance, consider the following smartphone privacy protection tips.

1. Verify the apps you download and only download apps from official stores. This helps you avoid third-party applications that can contain malware.

2. Review app permissions to determine whether or not specific applications really need access to your microphone and, in turn, access to your conversations.

3. Delete your voice request history on Google Assistant to ensure that this no memory bank of your conversation and to ensure your potentially sensitive information is not at risk in the event of a cyberattack.

4. Consider using a VPN to encrypt your manual browsing activity, including your IP address, as an added layer of privacy protection.

5. Keep your software up to date to stay ahead of cybercriminals seeking to exploit security vulnerabilities, as software updates patch these holes.

If you're concerned about marketers tracking your online activity, it's smart to consider Norton AntiTrack, which helps keep your personal information and browsing activity private by blocking trackers and disguising your digital fingerprint. Knowing how to take control of your devices also means you know how to take control of your data. At the end of the day, it's up to you whether you want your phone to listen to you or not.

Cyber threats have evolved, and so have we.

Norton 360™ with LifeLock™, all-in-one, comprehensive protection against viruses, malware, identity theft, online tracking and much, much more.

Try Norton 360 with Lifelock.

Editorial note: Our articles provide educational information for you. NortonLifeLock offerings may not cover or protect against every type of crime, fraud, or threat we write about. Our goal is to increase awareness about cyber safety. Please review complete Terms during enrollment or setup. Remember that no one can prevent all identity theft or cybercrime, and that LifeLock does not monitor all transactions at all businesses.

Copyright © 2023 NortonLifeLock Inc. All rights reserved. NortonLifeLock, the NortonLifeLock Logo, the Checkmark Logo, Norton, LifeLock, and the LockMan Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of NortonLifeLock Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Firefox is a trademark of Mozilla Foundation. Android, Google Chrome, Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google, LLC. Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc. Alexa and all related logos are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Microsoft and the Window logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. The Android robot is reproduced or modified from work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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Is my phone listening to me? Yes, here's why and how to stop it

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Written by Clare Stouffer, a NortonLifeLock employee Yes, your phone is listening to you - to an extent and namely through virtual assistant apps, that is. First came Siri in 2011, then came Google Assistant, and then Alexa and Cortana all followed.

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Kirolos Tadros - a way we are living in a society like the one is 1984 is social media spying. You could be looking at something on one app and then switch apps, and the same thing will be shown to you. Sometimes, you could be talking about something in person and you open your phone to see an ad for the exact thing. This is even worse because that means they are actively listening through your phone. This is similar to how big brother spies on everyone in his society.

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Tue 13 Feb 2018 10.58 EST Last modified on Tue 13 Feb 2018 17.00 EST

ave you ever brought up an ex's Instagram profile in a moment of weakness, and pawed sadly though photos of them looking happy with someone else? How about meeting someone promising and then browsing their recent Facebook postings to get to know them better? Or, in the first weeks of a new relationship, have you found yourself scouring publicly posted words and photos for hidden meaning when they haven't texted back? I'll admit it: I have, in my early 20s, after three pints. I think anyone who has ever been caught in the web of social media would be lying if they said they had never indulged in a bit of harmless "research".

Is Twitter responsible for the use of its platform to harass? Is Instagram when someone uses it to stalk an ex?

Social media has normalised the kind of behaviour that would have been called stalking in any previous era. Think about the lengths you'd have to go to to stare at your ex with someone else in the 90s; you'd have to actually follow them around, perhaps disguised as a hedge, or break into their house to steal photographs in a Mission Impossible-style caper. It is easy to imagine how, for a dangerous minority of people, it could be an easy step from "normal" social media stalking to, say, downloading a covert phone app that listens to their conversations or tracks their movements. There has been a spike in technology-related stalking activities reported to the National Stalking Helpline, the Guardian reported on Tuesday - hardly surprising when it's so easy to buy and use the kind of technology that would previously have been confined to one of James Bond's cars.

Bugging and GPS-tracking used to be so expensive that they were only used by governments and private investigators, but a quick Amazon search offers up a hidden car-tracking device for US$27 (£19). In the related items: a spy cam disguised as a USB charger, $52. These items are marketed as a "real-time teen-driving coach", nanny cams or parental control software, but there is nothing to stop them being used for nefarious purposes. Meanwhile, law enforcement struggles to keep up: victims of stalking or online harassment are frequently told simply to stop going online, which for a 19-year-old in 2018 is like being told not to breathe air. As the National Stalking Helpline's manager, Clare Elcombe Webber, points out, it feels like there are near-infinite technologies to help stalkers but few to help victims.

It is comforting to suppose that there is a massive difference between harmless social media stalking and the kind that crosses over into criminal behaviour, but the gap between the two is not as big as we like to think. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have normalised the idea of having access to people whenever we want, and slowly eroded the concept of personal privacy. People have become comfortable with the idea of being tracked by governments and companies through their phones, only balking when they realise the full extent of the surveillance. In using these services, even if we lock down every privacy setting we're given (and many people don't), we give people unnatural access to our lives.

Social media companies don't tend to think too hard about what happens when things go bad. When Facebook unveiled its "timeline" feature in 2011, it cheerfully framed the idea of making your entire Facebook history browsable by any new acquaintance as "chronicling your life story", illustrating the concept with a video tracking a happy couple from meeting to marrying to procreating via Facebook photos and status updates. My immediate thought was: what happens if they get divorced? Facebook offered no solution for this besides painstakingly deleting or untagging old posts, one by one. It introduced a "take a break" function in 2015 to deal with the problem it had created around failed relationships. Similarly, it seems that social media companies somehow did not foresee that they were providing excellent tools for stalkers.

In accepting someone as a friend or follower, even on private profiles, you are usually giving them access to everything you've ever posted. What if that person later turns out to be dangerous? Even if we waited to approve Instagram followers until we felt we knew them well in real life, you can never be sure. Ask anyone who has ever dated someone who later went on to stalk them.

Is Twitter responsible for the use of its platform to harass? Is Instagram responsible when someone uses it to stalk an ex? Should the developers of spyware also be criminally liable when someone uses it to illegally monitor a spouse? These are all questions that need to be re-examined. Doubtless, governments, which are currently subjecting the tech companies to scrutiny, will pursue that. But they should be alive to the role they have played in bringing us to this point. The technologies now being used for private stalking - GPS tracking, keylogging, microphone-hijacking and spy cameras - were often themselves developed and deployed by governments for espionage or public surveillance.

Even if we are now attuned - perhaps resigned - to trading our privacy for the limited joys and usefulness of social media platforms and potentially nefarious toys such as drones, the platforms themselves must take responsibility. Since 2016, fuelled by the revelations about the spread of fake news and the disastrous effect social media is having on our politics and public discourse, a "techlash" has been building. The tech industry's short-sightedness when it comes to the social and moral implications of its products is largely behind it . To stem it, tech companies will have to incorporate more humanity and foresight into their visions for the future.

* Keza MacDonald is video games editor at the Guardian
Topics

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Social media spying is turning us into a stalking society | Keza MacDonald

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Tue 13 Feb 2018 10.58 EST Last modified on Tue 13 Feb 2018 17.00 EST ave you ever brought up an ex's Instagram profile in a moment of weakness, and pawed sadly though photos of them looking happy with someone else? How about meeting someone promising and then browsing their recent Facebook postings to get to know them better?

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No ,but yes this maybe a warning I think it getting there watching our every move,they watch everything we do.This can also relate to China,Russia, and North Korea.They are constantly being watched and observed with there every move and then they will get in trouble if they say anything about whats they know about what they can see. Recently, Tik Tok was going to get banned because the Japaneses were spying on us. s in them getting recorded and getting made fun of and things like that.

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Justin Perea- An example I can think of that we might be living in a similar world to 1984 is when google always makes ads targeted towards you but you never searched something and that they always have your data. This is like 1984 where they're always being monitored and everything you say is always being heard and they know everything about their lives.

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Data used for analytics: Location, contact info (physical and email address), contacts, audio data, search history, browsing history, user identifiers (user ID and device ID), usage data (including product interaction and advertising data), crash and performance data, and 'other data types'.

Data gathered for product personalisation: Location, contact info (physical and email address), photos or videos, search history, browsing history, user identifiers (user ID and device ID), usage data (including product interaction and advertising data), and advertising data.

Data collected for app functionality: Payment information, location, contact information (including physical address, email, name and phone number), contacts, user content (including photos or videos, audio data, customer support details), search history, browsing data, user identifiers (user ID and device ID), usage data (including product interaction and advertising data), diagnostics (crash data and performance data), plus other data types that aren't defined.

Gmail

Data that is sent to advertisers (who aren't Google): location, user IDs and advertising data.

Data used for analytics: purchase history, location, email address, user content (including photos or videos, audio data, customer support and 'other' content), search history, user identifiers (user ID and device ID), usage data (including product interaction and advertising data, crash data and performance data and 'other' data types.

Data used for product personalisation: email address, contacts, emails or text messages, audio data, search history, user identifiers (user ID and device ID), and usage data.

Data collected for app functionality: purchase history, location, email and name, contacts, emails or text messages, photos or videos, audio data, customer support and other user content, search history, user identifiers (user ID and device ID), product interaction, diagnostics (crash data and performance data), and other data types.

Chrome

Data used for analytics: location, audio data and customer support, browsing history, user identifiers (user ID and device ID), product interaction data, diagnostics (crash data and performance data) and other data types.

Data used for product personalisation: location, browsing history, user identifiers (user ID and device ID), and product interaction data.

Data collected for app functionality: payment information, location, audio data, customer support data, browsing history, user identifiers (user ID and device ID), product interaction, crash and performance data, and other data types.

What this data means and what you can do about it

While much of the data Google collects will be used to help the company personalise and target advertising towards you, particularly data that's linked to user IDs, there's also some data that will be used by Google for making sure its apps continue to work as intended. This can include diagnostics and crash data that will tell the company why the app stopped working at various times.

Google's rivals have been quick to point out that their apps - as shown through their own privacy labels in the App Store - don't collect anywhere near as much data. For instance, search engine and browser DuckDuckGo says it doesn't collect any data that can be linked to users. The app store shows its app collecting usage and diagnostics data but this is labelled as 'data not linked to you'.

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All the data Google's apps collect about you and how to stop it

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Google's business is built on data. But it doesn't have to be this way

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Some similarities between 1984 and our world is the banning of books, media surveillance, and propaganda to help the government look better. In the state of Florida, many LGBTQ+ books are being banned, and are restricting books that tend to go against what they want or believe. Like in 1984, books are banned and are removed from peoples homes entirely because the government doesn't want people reading them because they could form their own thoughts or go against the government because of what they read.

There is also the propaganda being put out to try and sway the person looking at it. In our world, if someone wants to put anything about the U.S. army in their work, they have to get approval from the U.S. army and they have to make them look good so people will love and trust the army and hate the other army. In 1984, the propaganda is from the government, and is used to make people love Big Brother and hate Goldstein. https://people.southwestern.edu/~bednarb/su_netWorks/projects/pollreisz/army.html

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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) - Top officials at a Florida school district ordered the removal of all books and material containing LBGTQ+ characters and themes from classrooms and campus libraries, saying that was needed to conform to a state law backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that critics have dubbed "Don't Say Gay."

Charlotte County Schools Superintendent Mark Vianello and the school board's attorney, Michael McKinley, were responding to questions from the district's librarians at a July meeting asking whether the bill, officially the "Florida Parental Rights in Education Act," required the removal of any books that simply had a gay character but no explicit sex scenes.

"Books with LBGTQ+ characters are not to be included in classroom libraries or school library media centers," the pair responded, according to a district memo obtained under a public information request by the Florida Freedom to Read Project. The nonprofit group, which opposes the law, provided the memo to The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The district later backed off a bit, allowing some exceptions for high school libraries. But Charlotte's policy remains one of the more stringent policies adopted by the state's 67 countywide school districts to enforce the bill.

The law was originally passed by the Legislature and signed by DeSantis in 2022 and strengthened last spring. The southwest Florida county between Fort Myers and Sarasota has about 17,000 students in its public schools. The Republican governor, who is running for his party's presidential nomination, won the county with 70% of the vote in 2022 as he cruised to reelection.

The school district did not respond to calls Wednesday from the AP seeking comment. The district told the news website Popular Information, which first reported the memo, that the document is not a verbatim transcript of the meeting, but it is an accurate reflection.

DeSantis and other Republicans have repeatedly said the measure is reasonable and that parents, not teachers, should be broaching subjects of sexual orientation and gender identity with their children. The governor has made cultural issues a major point of his presidential campaign, even taking on the Walt Disney Co. after it expressed opposition to the bill.

Florida Freedom to Read said Charlotte's policy is "evidence that fear over thoughtful decision making is winning the day." But the group says Florida Department of Education officials are to blame for any district confusion or overreach.

"Their failure to lead and use their power to benefit the future of Florida is a disservice to all Floridians, no matter their political leanings," the group said in a statement. "Parents want politics out of education. We want all students to feel safe and included, so they can focus on their education while in school. Removing all representation of LGBTQ+ people in literature goes against our very principles of living in a free and just, pluralistic society."

The department did not respond to a call and email Wednesday seeking comment.

At the July meeting, librarians were told by Vianello and McKinley that any mention of sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited from prekindergarten through middle school and in high school, "unless supported by the state academic standards."

The librarians asked if that meant they had to remove a book even if, for example, it includes a secondary character who is gay or a main character with two moms or a gay best friend. The pair responded, "Yes," and added that ban includes books children may bring to school themselves, even if they are not pornographic or explicit.

"These characters and themes cannot exist," they responded, according to the memo.

The school district issued a statement to Popular Information this week clarifying some of the superintendent and attorney's remarks, saying some material with LGBTQ+ themes or characters would still be available in high school libraries.

"Books featuring LGBTQ characters are accessible in the media center for grades 9-12. While they may not be utilized for classroom instruction, these books are available for individual study and can be borrowed by students," the statement said.

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Florida school district orders removal of all books with gay characters before slightly backing off

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A Florida school district has ordered the removal of almost all books with gay characters from classrooms and libraries.

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I believe that society is becoming similar to the dystopian world depicted in "1984". One of the main reasons is the increasing surveillance and control of information in today's world. In the novel, the Party in power watches every action of its citizens through "Big Brother", a symbol of constant surveillance. This is similar to the widespread use of surveillance technology and data collection in today's society. Another reason is the loss of individuality, which is portrayed in the novel through the Party's efforts to suppress independent thought and individual identity. This is mirrored in today's society through the dominance of social media and the pressure to conform to societal norms. Finally, the manipulation of language, or "newspeak", is another element of the novel that parallels today's society. The Party in "1984" uses Newspeak to control and manipulate the thoughts of its citizens, similar to how meaningless phrases like "War on Terror" are used in today's society to manipulate public opinion.

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Tue 13 Feb 2018 10.58 EST Last modified on Tue 13 Feb 2018 17.00 EST

ave you ever brought up an ex's Instagram profile in a moment of weakness, and pawed sadly though photos of them looking happy with someone else? How about meeting someone promising and then browsing their recent Facebook postings to get to know them better? Or, in the first weeks of a new relationship, have you found yourself scouring publicly posted words and photos for hidden meaning when they haven't texted back? I'll admit it: I have, in my early 20s, after three pints. I think anyone who has ever been caught in the web of social media would be lying if they said they had never indulged in a bit of harmless "research".

Is Twitter responsible for the use of its platform to harass? Is Instagram when someone uses it to stalk an ex?

Social media has normalised the kind of behaviour that would have been called stalking in any previous era. Think about the lengths you'd have to go to to stare at your ex with someone else in the 90s; you'd have to actually follow them around, perhaps disguised as a hedge, or break into their house to steal photographs in a Mission Impossible-style caper. It is easy to imagine how, for a dangerous minority of people, it could be an easy step from "normal" social media stalking to, say, downloading a covert phone app that listens to their conversations or tracks their movements. There has been a spike in technology-related stalking activities reported to the National Stalking Helpline, the Guardian reported on Tuesday - hardly surprising when it's so easy to buy and use the kind of technology that would previously have been confined to one of James Bond's cars.

Bugging and GPS-tracking used to be so expensive that they were only used by governments and private investigators, but a quick Amazon search offers up a hidden car-tracking device for US$27 (£19). In the related items: a spy cam disguised as a USB charger, $52. These items are marketed as a "real-time teen-driving coach", nanny cams or parental control software, but there is nothing to stop them being used for nefarious purposes. Meanwhile, law enforcement struggles to keep up: victims of stalking or online harassment are frequently told simply to stop going online, which for a 19-year-old in 2018 is like being told not to breathe air. As the National Stalking Helpline's manager, Clare Elcombe Webber, points out, it feels like there are near-infinite technologies to help stalkers but few to help victims.

It is comforting to suppose that there is a massive difference between harmless social media stalking and the kind that crosses over into criminal behaviour, but the gap between the two is not as big as we like to think. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have normalised the idea of having access to people whenever we want, and slowly eroded the concept of personal privacy. People have become comfortable with the idea of being tracked by governments and companies through their phones, only balking when they realise the full extent of the surveillance. In using these services, even if we lock down every privacy setting we're given (and many people don't), we give people unnatural access to our lives.

Social media companies don't tend to think too hard about what happens when things go bad. When Facebook unveiled its "timeline" feature in 2011, it cheerfully framed the idea of making your entire Facebook history browsable by any new acquaintance as "chronicling your life story", illustrating the concept with a video tracking a happy couple from meeting to marrying to procreating via Facebook photos and status updates. My immediate thought was: what happens if they get divorced? Facebook offered no solution for this besides painstakingly deleting or untagging old posts, one by one. It introduced a "take a break" function in 2015 to deal with the problem it had created around failed relationships. Similarly, it seems that social media companies somehow did not foresee that they were providing excellent tools for stalkers.

In accepting someone as a friend or follower, even on private profiles, you are usually giving them access to everything you've ever posted. What if that person later turns out to be dangerous? Even if we waited to approve Instagram followers until we felt we knew them well in real life, you can never be sure. Ask anyone who has ever dated someone who later went on to stalk them.

Is Twitter responsible for the use of its platform to harass? Is Instagram responsible when someone uses it to stalk an ex? Should the developers of spyware also be criminally liable when someone uses it to illegally monitor a spouse? These are all questions that need to be re-examined. Doubtless, governments, which are currently subjecting the tech companies to scrutiny, will pursue that. But they should be alive to the role they have played in bringing us to this point. The technologies now being used for private stalking - GPS tracking, keylogging, microphone-hijacking and spy cameras - were often themselves developed and deployed by governments for espionage or public surveillance.

Even if we are now attuned - perhaps resigned - to trading our privacy for the limited joys and usefulness of social media platforms and potentially nefarious toys such as drones, the platforms themselves must take responsibility. Since 2016, fuelled by the revelations about the spread of fake news and the disastrous effect social media is having on our politics and public discourse, a "techlash" has been building. The tech industry's short-sightedness when it comes to the social and moral implications of its products is largely behind it . To stem it, tech companies will have to incorporate more humanity and foresight into their visions for the future.

* Keza MacDonald is video games editor at the Guardian
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Social media spying is turning us into a stalking society | Keza MacDonald

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Tue 13 Feb 2018 10.58 EST Last modified on Tue 13 Feb 2018 17.00 EST ave you ever brought up an ex's Instagram profile in a moment of weakness, and pawed sadly though photos of them looking happy with someone else? How about meeting someone promising and then browsing their recent Facebook postings to get to know them better?

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I think that even though we aren't exactly living in 1984, other countries are. For instance North Korea has very strict laws. They are not allowed to show affection to anyone other than the president of the country, just like how the people in 1984 aren't allowed to. They also are not allowed to know any knowledge about the outside world, nor are they allowed to contact people from the outside world. If they are disloyal to their leader it is punishable by death. So even though we are not exactly living in the same world as 1984, there are a lot of similarities between the two. - Abdeep Deol

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Ashlee Garcia- With new advancements in technology we are losing our self identity without us knowing. Our data is getting collected every time we go on the internet. In the article it states, "The eerie loss of individuality is looming right before your screen every time you passively press “accept” on a new privacy policy and turn a blind eye to why your data is being collected." This proves we are in a dystopian society without us fully knowing.

"He did not know what had made him pour out this stream of rubbish." (Pg.8) When writing in his diary, Winston couldn't understand why he felt like this and had to write it down. He knew in a way that he couldn't have his own opinion.

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Though there may be tools that limit data tracking and mandatory disclosures for targeted ads, it's not as easy to spot filtered news that's customized to your data. The personalized news that you see has had persistent problems with algorithmic and confirmation bias, ultimately increasing disinformation and polarization because you're being exposed to news that's favorable to your beliefs rather than news that will expand your outlook.

Big tech companies are finally giving serious attention to these issues. Facebook, wary of government intervention, recently published a post about their privacy efforts and Twitter announced their plans to become a more credible news source, but individual users still bear the responsibility for seeking out authoritative and truthful news sources and diverse voices. But in the same way you have to be wary of fake news, you have to read in between the lines of corporate statements.

For example, Facebook's statement promises the company will protect user data, but nowhere does the company acknowledge why they're collecting data in the first place. Facebook is often quick to say they don't sell your information, but their only response to questions about why they collect it is in order to make their own services better-which is supposedly in your interest, but not explicitly in your control, even if you choose not to use it.

Rajul Punjabi, an educator and senior editor at Mic, a culture and politics outlet, advises that you can also see if these statements match the company's intentions by looking at what politicians and organizations they fund. Sites like OpenSecrets and Goods Unite Us often reveal that lawmakers are either on the payroll of, do consulting work for, or are politically supported by these same large companies. This frequently leads to ineffectual privacy legislation or well-meaning statements from political leaders that may not do much to address real privacy issues.

According to Mark Weinstein, the Founder of MeWe, a social platform that allows you to connect with others while still protecting your privacy, "a well-intentioned legislation is ineffective against these giants. People of the world will have to move away from these companies and support businesses that protect their privacy."

The news ecosystem has also changed. In order for publications to succeed, they often have to write dramatic headlines to compete with viral fake news. When it comes to vetting news sources, you can spot what's credible by verifying the topic across a variety of sources, researching the outlet's expertise, and checking the web address to make sure you're reading the site you think you're reading. Or, if you want to get news directly from the source, you can subscribe to the newsletters of noteworthy journalists if they have one, or follow them on social media for links to their stories and additional commentary.

From the subconscious impacts of fake news to the physical pressures of social media, you're not as in control of your thoughts as you might think. As the documentary The Social Dilemma pointed out, social apps are designed to keep you coming back, sharing content, and refreshing to see more, even when you think you want to put the phone down and ignore it. As you become more aware of how these platforms are designed to keep you locked in, you can have more control over the time you spend on them.

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Though there may be tools that limit data tracking and mandatory disclosures for targeted ads, it's not as easy to spot filtered news that's customized to your data. The personalized news that you see has had persistent problems with algorithmic and confirmation bias, ultimately increasing disinformation and polarization because you're being exposed to news that's favorable to your beliefs rather than news that will expand your outlook.

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(Anabell Sanford) Something that makes us similar to the dystopian world of 1984 is the technoligy spies. On social media, google, anything online or internet related is spying on us. Whether its to help sugest things for us or to gather information we are still being spied on. They can track your digital footprint and all your data, they can put anything on your social media feed, even things you wouldnt want to see. Theres now a bunch of death, activities, people or just things you dont want see being forced onto your social media or tv new channel.

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Our daily online activities produce a massive amount of data that reveals intimate details about our lives. Knowingly or unknowingly, what we do online can reveal whom we voted for, what we buy, who our friends are, where we work, and even if we still want to work there. A slew of private companies now systematically collect, aggregate, and analyze this data on an unprecedented scale, using it to create and test new, invasive surveillance tools to monitor what the American public is up to. Agencies across the federal government-and local law enforcement across the nation-are eagerly entering into expensive contracts to obtain these tools, which they appear to be using for purposes ranging from tracking weather events to tracking protesters. Because the proliferation of these new public-private surveillance partnerships threatens to undermine our freedom of speech and association online, as well as our privacy, today the Knight Institute filed two Freedom of Information Act requests to inform the public about the scope and the details of these partnerships.

The social media surveillance market is crowded with companies selling an array of tools. Clearview AI, for example, says it has aggregated over ten billion images from social media platforms and other websites, and used them to develop facial recognition software. This software purportedly enables users to identify a person based on a single photograph and provides links to other publicly available photographs of the person on the internet-including on social media websites, which often carry intimate details about those individuals. And then there's Dataminr, which sells tools and services that enable location tracking and keyword searches for the purported purpose of keeping government actors apprised of breaking events in real time. Its First Alert service is designed in particular to track the initial stages of emergencies, including natural disasters and the spread of COVID-19. Other major surveillance technology providers include Babel Street, ZeroFox, Geofeedia, Talkwalker, and Meltwater.

The social media surveillance market is equally crowded with federal agencies seeking to use those tools in a variety of contexts. Reports on the nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, for example, described federal law enforcement agencies' use of social media surveillance tools such as Dataminr to target protesters, and no fewer than six federal agencies conducted investigations with the help of facial-recognition software. More recently, the FBI and other agencies conducted social media surveillance following the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, with at least three agencies using facial-recognition software to support criminal investigations. Other agencies-including the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of the Treasury, and the Department of Commerce-also have sought to or currently use these surveillance tools, whether for one-time searches or to conduct ongoing surveillance of particular users or keywords. Government procurement requests suggest that various branches of the military, such as the Navy, also appear to be interested in social media monitoring technology to track coverage and commentary of their actions. While the use of such monitoring technology varies across agencies, the technology is often used for cybersecurity, rapid news alerting, communications and "brand management," threat intelligence, and law enforcement investigations of specific individuals or groups.

The FBI, for example, uses social media surveillance tools for investigative purposes, as it acknowledged following the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Yet the nature and extent of this surveillance is unclear. Statements by the FBI director suggest that its use of social media surveillance tools is limited, but internal documents indicate otherwise. What is clear is that the FBI has contracted with Dataminr since at least 2016 for its Twitter surveillance capabilities. Additionally, the FBI has recently contracted with ZeroFox after seeking a tool capable of "constant monitoring of publicly available data on social media platforms," and notifications based on keywords, location, or subject matter, among other things.

Similarly, in January 2020, the Criminal Investigation Division of the U.S. Army ("CID") began soliciting private companies for a tool with the ability to "search against all social media that allows public access, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram," and others, while also providing keyword searching, location-based searching, and face-matching capabilities. CID chose Clearview and contracted with the firm for multiple licenses. While available data suggest that CID has run over 1,300 searches with Clearview, the purposes or guidelines surrounding these searches remain unknown.

Despite the increasingly widespread use of these new surveillance tools, many have questioned their reliability, as well as their constitutionality. In particular, researchers have raised concerns that facial-recognition technology is biased against women and people of color. And even if improved accuracy reduces the risk of false identification, the government's use of such tools still threatens privacy and free expression. Social media contains massive amounts of sensitive information about individuals' beliefs and associations, as the earlier example regarding the 2020 social justice protests demonstrates. The collection, analysis, and marketing of this data by private companies to the government are likely to chill First Amendment rights, especially when so little is known about the nature and extent of such practices.

That's why we are submitting FOIA requests to CID and the FBI today. CID has contracted for Clearview AI and acknowledged its use publicly, but how and for what purpose remain unclear. Similarly, the precise nature of the services for which the FBI contracts with Dataminr and ZeroFox is still undisclosed. Learning the scope of the services provided under these contracts is necessary to inform the public of potential burdens to their First Amendment rights and to address concerns of bias built into the tools the government uses for social media surveillance.

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The Worrying Expansion of the Social Media Surveillance-Industrial Complex

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Our daily online activities produce a massive amount of data that reveals intimate details about our lives. Knowingly or unknowingly, what we do online can reveal whom we voted for, what we buy, who our friends are, where we work, and even if we still want to work there.

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Brittney V- I do think we live in a similar world. Though not as extreme, there's a lot of proof of social medias spying on us and being able to sell off our info without permission which reminds me a lot of the way Big Brother spies on his people. We are also expected to be okay with appearing in peoples posted videos or being recorded by others, for example I've seen numerous TikTok's of people considered being weird in public (when they are usually just being themselves) and I think its insane that we need to learn to be okay with it and normalize it.

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Social media has ushered in a new era of accountability in which ordinary people are emboldened by smartphones and social media to document the world around them, from the events they witness to the lived experiences that define their lives. At the same time, ubiquitous cameras and the pursuit of viral hits has normalized the idea of sharing not only our own lives with the world, but those of people around us who have no idea they are being recorded, let alone consent to having their experiences livestreamed to the entire planet. In some cases this sharing can actually endanger lives, such as when bystanders zoom in on the faces of anti-government protesters or those marching for LGBTQ or women's rights in countries in which such rights are greatly restricted. Should social media platforms institute new rules requiring model releases and proof of consent when it comes to sharing imagery, especially of non-news events?

The Web has profoundly upended myriad societal norms, including those around consent and sharing. In the gatekept era, publication and broadcast were controlled by professional organizations that adhered to legal standards and ethical norms. A newspaper would run an image only after assessing its provenance and legal status and obtaining rights from the photographer and potentially consent from those depicted, depending on circumstances. The decision to publish a given image was a balance between its newsworthiness and the harm such publication could do to those depicted in it, sometimes requiring blurring faces or cropping an image to remove identifying detail if such information could lead to harm against its subjects.

In the social era, all such considerations have gone out the window in pursuit of viral fame. The very concept of copyright and permission is antithetical to social platforms where memes routinely incorporate copyright content and sharing of copyrighted material is done without any consideration for rights or permissions. When it comes to citizen-produced imagery and video, model releases and even verbal permission are almost non-existent.

The end result is a world in which everyone carries what amounts to an internet-connected camera that can instantly share images with the entire planet.

The problem is that societal etiquette has not quite caught up with technology. Like young children that have not been taught how to behave, today's smartphone-equipped adults believe it is their right to photograph or record anyone anywhere and share that interaction with the world, regardless of whether it has anything to do with them or is newsworthy in any way.

See someone with an unusual outfit shopping at a discount store? Post a photo of them to social media for ridicule. See an elderly person trip and fall? Don't rush to help them, pull out your phone and broadcast their injuries to the world. See someone being assaulted right in front of you? Don't intervene to stop it, just livestream the assault to the entire world to ensure they are victimized forever. Sadly, these scenarios represent real life today.

We've stopped being fellow human beings going about our lives as part of a shared community. Instead we are all living a reality show, wary that at any moment a total stranger might choose to share our private life with the entire world in the pursuit of viral fame and possible fortune.

The idea that consent is no longer required when photographing or recording someone and broadcasting them to the world has unfortunately expanded from the public space to our private spaces behind closed doors.

Revenge pornography and other non-consensually shared imagery has become commonplace online in part because of this shift in societal views towards consent that view permission as no longer necessary.

Putting this all together, for some reason society increasingly views it as acceptable to snap a photograph of a stranger on the street without their knowledge and share with the world or capture intimate imagery of a partner without their knowledge or consent and share with the planet. Whereas in the past these kinds of actions were viewed as the actual criminal actions they may represent, today they are frighteningly viewed by a growing portion of the population as not only acceptable, but simply today's digital reality.

We desperately need new societal norms and standards around permission and consent when it comes to sharing imagery online before today's consent-free sharing becomes permanent.

In the end, the removal of consent from the digital world reminds us that not all of the changes wrought by the Web have been for good and that the burden of these changes often disproportionately fall upon society's most vulnerable.

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Social Media Has Normalized The Idea Of Sharing Without Consent

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We desperately need new societal norms and standards around permission and consent when it comes to sharing imagery online before today's consent-free sharing becomes permanent.

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Hailey Elrod-

A thing we see in life today is fabricated news. Many different news stations say different things and they can twist the story or even make something completely fake. Journalists twist things or dramatize them to make people want to read them aka propaganda. They dramatize what happened between Goldstein and big brother, they make it seem bad and they make everyone hate him so they dont realise the truth. The news can redirect your thoughts in the same way. People are followers and if you make one person hate something or believe its true others will join in. On page 16 he says, "The horrible thing about the two mins. hate was not obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in."

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Both the media and the government thrive on crises. When none exist, they create them.

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I feel as if we have some similarity's with 1984 with how we are being watched and our data are being sold by apps such as Instagram Tiktok and Facebook while in the novel 1984 there are cameras in his TV and could be on any wire. theirs also a lot of posters around saying "Big Brother is Watching" this is similar to "I want you" poster with uncle Sam on it

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JADA DAVIS- I feel like in the book 1984, there is still some of that type of stuff happening in the real world now. i feel like with social media, it's still the same way with social media controlling someone's life or someone believing what someone or what a post says. when it comes to anyone walking home or a minor walking home from school there are always cameras everywhere. anyone can get hurt just by looking something up or talking to someone online that you don't know.

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Social media has become a significant source of information for U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the State Department are among the many federal agencies that routinely monitor social platforms, for purposes ranging from conducting investigations to identifying threats to screening travelers and immigrants. This is not surprising; as the U.S. Supreme Court has said, social media platforms have become "for many . . . the principal sources for knowing current events, . . . speaking and listening in the modern public square, and otherwise exploring the vast realms of human thought and knowledge" - in other words, an essential means for participating in public life and communicating with others.

At the same time, this growing - and mostly unregulated - use of social media raises a host of civil rights and civil liberties concerns. Because social media can reveal a wealth of personal information - including about political and religious views, personal and professional connections, and health and sexuality - its use by the government is rife with risks for freedom of speech, assembly, and faith, particularly for the Black, Latino, and Muslim communities that are historically targeted by law enforcement and intelligence efforts. These risks are far from theoretical: many agencies have a track record of using these programs to target minority communities and social movements. For all that, there is little evidence that this type of monitoring advances security objectives; agencies rarely measure the usefulness of social media monitoring and DHS's own pilot programs showed that they were not helpful in identifying threats. Nevertheless, the use of social media for a range of purposes continues to grow.

In this Q&A, we survey the ways in which federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies use social media monitoring and the risks posed by its thinly regulated and growing use in various contexts.

Which federal agencies use social media monitoring?

Many federal agencies use social media, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of State (State Department), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), U.S. Postal Service (USPS), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), U.S. Marshals Service, and Social Security Administration (SSA). This document focuses primarily on the activities of DHS, FBI, and the State Department, as the agencies that make the most extensive use of social media for monitoring, targeting, and information collection.

Why do federal agencies monitor social media?

Publicly available information shows that federal agencies use social media for four main - and sometimes overlapping - purposes. The examples below are illustrative and do not capture the full spectrum of social media surveillance by federal agencies.

Investigations: Law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI and some components of DHS, use social media monitoring to assist with criminal and civil investigations. Some of these investigations may not even require a showing of criminal activity. For example, FBI agents can open an "assessment" simply on the basis of an "authorized purpose," such as preventing crime or terrorism, and without a factual basis. During assessments, FBI agents can carry out searches of publicly available online information. Subsequent investigative stages, which require some factual basis, open the door for more invasive surveillance tactics, such as the monitoring and recording of chats, direct messages, and other private online communications in real time.

At DHS, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) - which is part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) - is the Department's " principal investigative arm." HSI asserts in its training materials that it has the authority to enforce any federal law, and relies on social media when conducting investigations on matters ranging from civil immigration violations to terrorism. ICE agents can look at publicly available social media content for purposes ranging from finding fugitives to gathering evidence in support of investigations to probing "potential criminal activity," a "threat detection" function discussed below. Agents can also operate undercover online and monitor private online communications, but the circumstances under which they are permitted to do so are not publicly known.

Monitoring to detect threats: Even without opening an assessment or other investigation, FBI agents can monitor public social media postings. DHS components from ICE to its intelligence arm, the Office of Intelligence & Analysis, also monitor social media - including specific individuals - with the goal of identifying potential threats of violence or terrorism. In addition, the FBI and DHS both engage private companies to conduct online monitoring of this type on their behalf. One firm, for example, was awarded a contract with the FBI in December 2020 to scour social media to proactively identify "national security and public safety-related events" - including various unspecified threats, as well as crimes - which have not yet been reported to law enforcement.

Situational awareness: Social media may provide an "ear to the ground" to help the federal government coordinate a response to breaking events. For example, a range of DHS components - from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to the National Operations Center (NOC) to the Federal Emergency Management Agency ( FEMA) - monitor the internet, including by keeping tabs on a broad list of websites and keywords being discussed on social media platforms and tracking information from sources like news services and local government agencies. Privacy impact assessments suggest there are few limits on the content that can be reviewed - for instance, the PIAs list a sweeping range of keywords that are monitored (ranging, for example, from "attack," "public health," and "power outage," to "jihad"). The purposes of such monitoring include helping keep the public, private sector, and governmental partners informed about developments during a crisis such as a natural disaster or terrorist attack; identifying people needing help during an emergency; and knowing about " threats or dangers " to DHS facilities.

"Situational awareness" and "threat detection" overlap because they both involve broad monitoring of social media, but situational awareness has a wider focus and is generally not intended to monitor or preemptively identify specific people who are thought to pose a threat.

Immigration and travel screening: Social media is used to screen and vet travelers and immigrants coming into the United States and even to monitor them while they live here. People applying for a range of immigration benefits also undergo social media checks to verify information in their application and determine whether they pose a security risk.

How can the government's use of social media harm people?

Government monitoring of social media can work to people's detriment in at least four ways: (1) wrongly implicating an individual or group in criminal behavior based on their activity on social media; (2) misinterpreting the meaning of social media activity, sometimes with severe consequences; (3) suppressing people's willingness to talk or connect openly online; and (4) invading individuals' privacy. These are explained in further detail below.

Assumed criminality: The government may use information from social media to label an individual or group as a threat, including characterizing ordinary activity (like wearing a particular sneaker brand or making common hand signs) or social media connections as evidence of criminal or threatening behavior. This kind of assumption can have high-stakes consequences. For example, the NYPD wrongly arrested 19-year-old Jelani Henry for attempted murder, after which he was denied bail and jailed for over a year and a half, in large part because prosecutors thought his "likes" and photos on social media proved he was a member of a violent gang. In another case of guilt by association, DHS officials barred a Palestinian student arriving to study at Harvard from entering the country based on the content of his friends' social media posts. The student had neither written nor engaged with the posts, which were critical of the U.S. government. Black, Latino, and Muslim people are especially vulnerable to being falsely labeled threats based on social media activity, given that it is used to inform government decisions that are often already tainted by bias such as gang determinations and travel screening decisions.

Mistaken judgments: It can be difficult to accurately interpret online activity, and the repercussions can be severe. In 2020, police in Wichita, Kansas arrested a teenager on suspicion of inciting a riot based on a mistaken interpretation of his Snapchat post, in which he was actually denouncing violence. British travelers were interrogated at Los Angeles International Airport and sent back to the U.K. due to a border agent's misinterpretation of a joking tweet. And DHS and the FBI disseminated reports to a Maine-area intelligence-sharing hub warning of potential violence at anti-police brutality demonstrations based on fake social media posts by right-wing provocateurs, which were distributed as a warning to local police.

Chilling effects: People are highly likely to censor themselves when they think they are being watched by the government, and this undermines everything from political speech to creativity to other forms of self-expression. The Brennan Center's lawsuit against the State Department and DHS documents how the collection of social media identifiers on visa forms - which are then stored indefinitely and shared across the U.S. government, and sometimes with state, local, and foreign governments - led a number of international filmmakers to stop talking about politics and promoting their work on social media. They self-censored because they were concerned that what they said online would prevent them from getting a U.S. visa or be used to retaliate against them because it could be misinterpreted or reflect controversial viewpoints.

Loss of privacy: A person's social media presence - their posts, comments, photos, likes, group memberships, and so on - can collectively reveal their ethnicity, political views, religious practices, gender identity, sexual orientation, personality traits, and vices. Further, social media can reveal more about a person than they intend. Platforms' privacy settings frequently change and can be difficult to navigate, and even when individuals keep information private it can be disclosed through the activity or identity of their connections on social media. DHS at least has recognized this risk, categorizing social media handles as "sensitive personally identifiable information" that could "result in substantial harm, embarrassment, inconvenience, or unfairness to an individual." Yet the agency has failed to place robust safeguards on social media monitoring.

Who is harmed by social media monitoring?

While all Americans may be harmed by untrammeled social media monitoring, people from historically marginalized communities and those who protest government policies typically bear the brunt of suspicionless surveillance. Social media monitoring is no different.

Echoing the transgressions of the civil rights era, there are myriad examples of the FBI and DHS using social media to surveil people speaking out on issues from racial justice to the treatment of immigrants. Both agencies have monitored Black Lives Matter activists. In 2017, the FBI created a specious terrorism threat category called "Black Identity Extremism" (BIE), which can be read to include protests against police violence. This category has been used to rationalize continued surveillance of black activists, including monitoring of social media activity. In 2020, DHS's Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) used social media and other tools to target and monitor racial justice protestors in Portland, OR, justifying this surveillance by pointing to the threat of vandalism to Confederate monuments. I&A then disseminated intelligence reports on journalists reporting on this overreach.

DHS especially has focused social media surveillance on immigration activists, including those engaged in peaceful protests against the Trump administration's family separation policy and others characterized as "anti-Trump protests." From 2017 through 2020, ICE kept tabs on immigrant rights groups' social media activity, and in late 2018 and early 2019, CBP and HSI used information gleaned from social media in compiling dossiers and putting out travel alerts on advocates, journalists, and lawyers - including U.S. citizens - whom the government suspected of helping migrants south of the U.S. border.

Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities have often been particular targets of the U.S. government's discriminatory travel and immigration screening practices, including social media screening. The State Department's collection of social media identifiers on visa forms, for instance, came out of President Trump's Muslim ban, while earlier social media monitoring and collection programs focused disproportionately on people from predominantly Muslim countries and Arabic speakers.

Is social media surveillance an effective way of getting information about potential threats?

Not particularly. Broad social media monitoring for threat detection purposes untethered from suspicion of wrongdoing generates reams of useless information, crowding out information on - and resources for - real public safety concerns.

Social media conversations are difficult to interpret because they are often highly context-specific and can be riddled with slang, jokes, memes, sarcasm, and references to popular culture; heated rhetoric is also common. Government officials and assessments have repeatedly recognized that this dynamic makes it difficult to distinguish a sliver of genuine threats from the millions of everyday communications that do not warrant law enforcement attention. As the former acting chief of DHS I&A said, "actual intent to carry out violence can be difficult to discern from the angry, hyperbolic - and constitutionally protected - speech and information commonly found on social media." Likewise, a 2021 internal review of DHS's Office of Intelligence & Analysis noted: "[s]earching for true threats of violence before they happen is a difficult task filled with ambiguity." The review observed that personnel trying to anticipate future threats ended up collecting information on a "broad range of general threats that did not meet the threshold of intelligence collection" and provided I&A's law enforcement and intelligence customers with "information of limited value," including "memes, hyperbole, statements on political organizations and other protected First Amendment speech." Similar concerns cropped up with the DHS's pilot programs to use social media to vet refugees.

The result is a high volume of false alarms, distracting law enforcement from investigating and preparing for genuine threats: as the FBI bluntly put it, for example, I&A's reporting practices resulted in "crap" being sent through one of its threat notification systems.

What rules govern federal agencies' use of social media?

Some agencies, like the FBI, DHS, State Department and IRS, have released information on the rules governing their use of social media in certain contexts. Other agencies - such as the ATF, DEA, Postal Service, and Social Security Administration - have not made any information public; what is known about their use of social media has emerged from media coverage, some of which has attracted congressional scrutiny. Below we describe some of what is known about the rules governing the use of social media by the FBI, DHS, and State Department.

FBI: The main document governing the FBI's social media surveillance practices is its Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG), last made public in redacted form in 2016. Under the DIOG, FBI agents may review publicly available social media information prior to initiating any form of inquiry. During the lowest-level investigative stage, called an assessment (which requires an "authorized purpose" such as stopping terrorism, but no factual basis), agents may also log public, real-time communications (such as public chat room conversations) and work with informants to gain access to private online spaces, though they may not record private communications in real-time.

Beginning with "preliminary investigations" (which require that there be "information or an allegation" of wrongdoing but not that it be credible), FBI agents may monitor and record private online communications in real-time using informants and may even use false social media identities with the approval of a supervisor. While conducting full investigations (which require a reasonable indication of criminal activity), FBI agents may use all of these methods and can also get probable cause warrants to conduct wiretapping, including to collect private social media communications.

The DIOG does restrict the FBI from probing social media based solely on "an individual's legal exercise of his or her First Amendment rights," though such activity can be a substantial motivating factor. It also requires that the collection of online information about First Amendment-protected activity be connected to an "authorized investigative purpose" and be as minimally intrusive as reasonable under the circumstances, although it is not clear how adherence to these standards is evaluated.

DHS: DHS policies can be pieced together using a combination of legally mandated disclosures - such as privacy impact assessments and data mining reports - and publicly available policy guidelines, though the amount of information available varies. In 2012, DHS published a policy requiring that components collecting personally identifiable information from social media for "operational uses," such as investigations (but not intelligence functions), implement basic guidelines and training for employees engaged in such uses and ensure compliance with relevant laws and privacy rules. Whether this policy has been holistically implemented for "operational uses" of social media across DHS remains unclear. However, the Brennan Center has obtained a number of templates describing how DHS components use social media, created pursuant to the 2012 policy, through the Freedom of Information Act.

In practice, DHS policies are generally permissive. The examples below illustrate the ways in which various parts of the Department use social media.

ICE agents monitor social media for purposes ranging from situational awareness and criminal intelligence gathering to support for investigations. In addition to engaging private companies to monitor social media, ICE agents may collect public social media data whenever they determine it is "relevant for developing a viable case" and "supports the investigative process."

Parts of DHS, including the National Operations Center (NOC) (part of the Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS)), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), use social media monitoring for situational awareness. The goal is generally not to "seek or collect" personally identifiable information. DHS may do so in "in extremis situations," however, such as when serious harm to a person may be imminent or there is a "credible threat[] to [DHS] facilities or systems." NOC's situational awareness operations are not covered by the 2012 policy; other components carrying out situational awareness monitoring must create a but may receive an exception from the broader policy with the approval of DHS's Chief Privacy Officer.

DHS's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) uses social media to verify the accuracy of materials provided by applicants for immigration benefits (such as applications for refugee status or to become a U.S. citizen) and to identify fraud and threats to public safety. USCIS says it only looks at publicly available information and that it will respect account holders' privacy settings and refrain from direct dialogue with subjects, though staff may use fictitious accounts in certain cases, including when "overt research would compromise the integrity of an investigation."

DHS's Office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A), as a member of the Intelligence Community, is not covered by the 2012 policy. Instead it operates under a separate set of guidelines - pursuant to Executive Order 12,333, issued by the Secretary of Homeland Security and approved by the Attorney General - that govern its management of information collected about U.S. persons, including via social media. The office incorporates social media into the open-source intelligence reports it produces for federal, state, and local law enforcement; these reports provide threat warnings, investigative leads, and referrals. I&A personnel may collect and retain social media information on U.S. citizens and green card holders so long as they reasonably believe that doing so supports a national or departmental mission; these missions are broadly defined to include addressing homeland security concerns. And they may disseminate the information further if they believe it would help the recipient with "lawful intelligence, counterterrorism, law enforcement, or other homeland security-related functions."

State Department. The Department's policies covering social media monitoring for visa vetting purposes are not publicly available. However, public disclosures shed some light on the rules consular officers are supposed to follow when vetting visa applicants using social media. For example, consular officers are not supposed to interact with applicants on social media, request their passwords, or try to get around their privacy settings - and if they create an account to view social media information, they "must abide by the contractual rules of that service or platform provider," such as Facebook's real name policy. Further, information gleaned from social media must not be used to deny visas based on protected characteristics (i.e., race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, political views, gender or sexual orientation). It is supposed to be used only to confirm an applicant's identity and visa eligibility under criteria set forth in U.S. law.

Are there constitutional limits on social media surveillance?

Yes. Social media monitoring may violate the First or Fourteenth Amendments. It is well established that public posts receive constitutional protection: as the investigations guide of the Federal Bureau of Investigation recognizes, "[o]nline information, even if publicly available, may still be protected by the First Amendment. Surveillance is clearly unconstitutional when a person is specifically targeted for the exercise of constitutional rights protected by the First Amendment (speech, expression, association, religious practice) or on the basis of a characteristic protected by the Fourteenth Amendment (including race, ethnicity, and religion). Social media monitoring may also violate the First Amendment when it burdens constitutionally protected activity and does not contribute to a legitimate government objective. Our lawsuit against the State Department and DHS ( Doc Society v. Blinken), for instance, challenges the collection, retention, and dissemination of social media identifiers from millions of people - almost none of whom have engaged in any wrongdoing - because the government has not adequately justified the screening program and it imposes a substantial burden on speech for little demonstrated value. The White House office that reviews federal regulations noted the latter point - which a DHS Inspector General report and internal reviews have also underscored - when it rejected, in April 2021, DHS's proposal to collect social media identifiers on travel and immigration forms.

Additionally, the Fourth Amendment protects people from "unreasonable searches and seizures" by the government, including searches of data in which people have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." Judges have generally concluded that content posted publicly online cannot be reasonably expected to be private, and that police therefore do not need a warrant to view or collect it. Courts are increasingly recognizing, however, that when the government can collect far more information - especially information revealing sensitive or intimate details - at a far lower cost than traditional surveillance, the Fourth Amendment may protect that data. The same is true of social media monitoring and the use of powerful social media monitoring tools, even if they are employed to review publicly available information.

Are there statutory limits on social media surveillance?

Yes. Most notably, the Privacy Act limits the collection, storage, and sharing of personally identifiable information about U.S. citizens and permanent residents (green card holders), including social media data. It also bars, under most circumstances, maintaining records that describe the exercise of a person's First Amendment rights. However, the statute contains an exception for such records "within the scope of an authorized law enforcement activity." Its coverage is limited to databases from which personal information can be retrieved by an individual identifier like a name, social security address, or phone number.

Additionally, federal agencies' collection of social media handles must be authorized by law and, in some cases, be subject to public notice and comment and justified by a reasoned explanation that accounts for contrary evidence. Doc Society v. Blinken, for example, alleges that the State Department's collection of social media identifiers on visa forms violates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) because it exceeds the Secretary of State's statutory authority and did not consider that prior social media screening pilot programs had failed to demonstrate efficacy.

Is the government's use of social media consistent with platform rules?

Not always. Companies do not bar government officials from making accounts and looking at what is happening on their platforms. However, after the ACLU exposed in 2016 that third-party social media monitoring companies were pitching their services to California law enforcement agencies as a way to monitor protestors against racial injustice, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram changed or clarified their rules to prohibit the use of their data for surveillance (though the actual application of those rules can be murky).

Additionally, Facebook has a policy requiring users identify themselves by their "real names," with no exception for law enforcement. The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies permit their agents to use false identities notwithstanding this rule, and there have been documented instances of other law enforcement departments violating this policy as well.

How do federal agencies share information collected from social media, and why is it a problem?

Federal agencies may share information they collect from social media across all levels of government and the private sector and will sometimes even disclose data to foreign governments (for instance, identifiers on travel and immigration forms). In particular, information is shared domestically with state and local law enforcement, including through fusion centers, which are post-9/11 surveillance and intelligence hubs that were intended to facilitate coordination among federal, state, and local law enforcement and private industry. Such unfettered data sharing magnifies the risks of abusive practices.

Part of the risk stems from the dissemination of data to actors with a documented history of discriminatory surveillance, such as fusion centers. A 2012 bipartisan Senate investigation concluded that fusion centers have "yielded little, if any, benefit to federal counterterrorism intelligence efforts," instead producing reams of low-quality information while labeling Muslim Americans engaging in innocuous activities, such as voter registration, as potential threats. More recently, fusion centers have been caught monitoring racial and social justice organizers and protests and promoting fake social media posts by right-wing provocateurs as credible intelligence regarding potential violence at anti-police brutality protests. Further, many police departments that get information from social media through fusion centers (or from federal agencies like the FBI and DHS directly) have a history of targeting and surveilling minority communities and activists, but lack basic policies that govern their use of social media. Finally, existing agreements permit the U.S. government to share social media data - collected from U.S. visa applicants, for example - with repressive foreign governments that are known to retaliate against online critics.

The broad dissemination of social media data amplifies some of the harms of social media monitoring by eliminating context and safeguards. Under some circumstances, a government official who initially reviews and collects information from social media may better understand - from witness interviews, notes of observations from the field, or other material obtained during an investigation, for example - its meaning and relevance than a downstream recipient lacking this background. And any safeguards the initial agency places upon its monitoring and collection - use and retention limitations, data security protocols, etc. - cannot be guaranteed after it disseminates what has been gathered. Once social media is disseminated, the originating agency has little control over how such information is used, how long it is kept, whether it could be misinterpreted, or how it might spur overreach.

Together, these dynamics amplify the harms to free expression and privacy that social media monitoring generates. A qualified and potentially unreliable assessment based on social media that a protest could turn violent or that a particular person poses a threat might easily turn into a justification for policing that protest aggressively or arresting the person, as illustrated by the examples above. Similarly, a person who has applied for a U.S. visa or been investigated by federal authorities, even if they are cleared, is likely to be wary of what they say on social media well into the future if they know that there is no endpoint to potential scrutiny or disclosure of their online activity. Formerly, one branch of DHS I&A had a practice of redacting publicly available U.S. person information contained in open-source intelligence reports disseminated to partners because of the "risk of civil rights and liberties issues." This practice was an apparent justification for removing pre-publication oversight to identify such issues, which implies that DHS recognized that information identifying a person could be used to target them without a legitimate law enforcement reason.

What role do private companies play, and what is the harm in using them?

Both the FBI and DHS have reportedly hired private firms to help conduct social media surveillance, including to help identify threats online. This raises concerns around transparency and accountability as well as effectiveness.

Transparency and accountability: Outsourcing surveillance to private industry obscures how monitoring is being carried out; limited information is available about relationships between the federal government and social media surveillance contractors, and the contractors, unlike the government, are not subject to freedom of information laws. Outsourcing also weakens safeguards because private vendors may not be subject to the same legal or institutional constraints as public agencies.

Efficacy: The most ambitious tools use artificial intelligence with the goal of making judgments about which threats, calls for violence, or individuals pose the highest risk. But doing so reliably is beyond the capacity of both humans and existing technology, as more than 50 technologists wrote in opposing an ICE proposal aimed at predicting whether a given person would commit terrorism or crime. The more rudimentary of these tools look for specific words and then flag posts containing those words. Such flags are overinclusive, and garden-variety content will regularly be elevated. Consider how the word "extremism," for instance, could appear in a range of news articles, be used in reference to a friend's strict dietary standards, or arise in connection with discussion about U.S. politics. Even the best Natural Language Processing tools, which attempt to ascertain the meaning of text, are prone to error, and fare particularly poorly on speakers of non-standard English, who may more frequently be from minority communities, as well as speakers of languages other than English. Similar concerns apply to mechanisms used to flag images and videos, which generally lack the context necessary to differentiate a scenario in which an image is used for reporting or commentary from one where it is used by a group or person to incite violence.

New content moderation policies give the company broad discretion. Their efficacy will depend on how they're enforced.

Voyager Labs markets itself to law enforcement with claims that it can predict criminal behavior based on dubious algorithms.

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Social Media Surveillance by the U.S. Government

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A growing and unregulated trend of online surveillance raises concerns for civil rights and liberties.

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One way we could be living in a similar world to 1984 is the use of modern surveillance technology by the government. Today every street corner has a camera, almost your every movement is monitored. Even the telescreen has basically been replicated. The modern phone has a microphone and a camera built into it which Apple, Samsung, or any other phone company can tap into at any time. Siri is always listening to you waiting for you to say "Hey Siri." Google monitors your search history and what websites you visit to build a database on you. It typically includes your gender, sexual orientation, interests, even where you live. Nothing you do is truly anonymous nowadays - Joshua Lopez

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Google Analytics, a product used to log visitors to websites that integrates with the company's ad-targeting systems, was found on almost 70 percent of sites. DoubleClick, a dedicated ad-serving system from Google, was found on close to 50 percent of sites. The top five most common tracking tools were all Google-owned.

The new study, which was conducted using an open-source tool, also uncovered a stealthy new technique used by some small tracking companies that exploits the way browsers process audio, using it to "fingerprint" computers so they can be tracked around the Web. The researchers say the technology they used to collect their findings could help regulators and the developers of tools that block tracking, like some ad blockers.

Online publishers use tracking code from Google, Facebook, and many other companies to help target advertising. When a company's code is embedded on many different sites, it can build up detailed profiles on individuals as they move around the Web, assigning them unique identifiers so they can be recognized again.

Researchers and privacy advocates say this practice deserves close scrutiny.

For example, a tracker that knows you recently browsed articles related to pregnancy, baby clothes, and miscarriage might indeed be able to find an ad you are likely to click. Because the systems that do this are automated, it is likely that no human looked at the data. But you may not feel comfortable with the idea of that information bouncing around a tangle of companies and algorithms outside your control.

Research has shown how Google's ad-targeting system can use information in ways that might be seen as discriminatory: for example, by targeting men but not women with ads for high-paying jobs (see " Probing the Dark Side of Google's Ad-Targeting System"). Documents leaked by Edward Snowden indicated that the National Security Agency tapped into Google's online tracking systems as a way to identify surveillance targets.

The new study of online trackers was carried out by Arvind Narayanan, an assistant professor at Princeton, and grad student Steven Englehardt. They surveyed the one million sites using software developed at Princeton, called OpenWPM, which has been released for free. It automatically visits websites using the Firefox browser and logs any tracking technology it encounters.

Narayanan says the study turned up causes for both concern and hope.

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Largest Study of Online Tracking Proves Google Really Is Watching Us All

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If you read or clicked anything online today, some part of Google probably knows about it. That's one lesson from the largest study yet of the technology that tracks people's movements around the Web. When Princeton researchers logged the use of tracking code on the Internet's million most popular websites, Google code was found on...

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Daniel Aceituno-I feel that we are living in a world with some similarities as 1984 with how we always have something or someone listening in on us, Social media can be listening to give you recommendation on what it seems you are interested in. You can also see that some forms of government already have the same type of government as 1984, North Korea is a great example because they are all forced to love their country, they aren't allowed to say anything bad about their leader or they can be punished. If anyone tries to speak out they can be tortured or killed.

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Tue 13 Feb 2018 10.58 EST Last modified on Tue 13 Feb 2018 17.00 EST

ave you ever brought up an ex's Instagram profile in a moment of weakness, and pawed sadly though photos of them looking happy with someone else? How about meeting someone promising and then browsing their recent Facebook postings to get to know them better? Or, in the first weeks of a new relationship, have you found yourself scouring publicly posted words and photos for hidden meaning when they haven't texted back? I'll admit it: I have, in my early 20s, after three pints. I think anyone who has ever been caught in the web of social media would be lying if they said they had never indulged in a bit of harmless "research".

Is Twitter responsible for the use of its platform to harass? Is Instagram when someone uses it to stalk an ex?

Social media has normalised the kind of behaviour that would have been called stalking in any previous era. Think about the lengths you'd have to go to to stare at your ex with someone else in the 90s; you'd have to actually follow them around, perhaps disguised as a hedge, or break into their house to steal photographs in a Mission Impossible-style caper. It is easy to imagine how, for a dangerous minority of people, it could be an easy step from "normal" social media stalking to, say, downloading a covert phone app that listens to their conversations or tracks their movements. There has been a spike in technology-related stalking activities reported to the National Stalking Helpline, the Guardian reported on Tuesday - hardly surprising when it's so easy to buy and use the kind of technology that would previously have been confined to one of James Bond's cars.

Bugging and GPS-tracking used to be so expensive that they were only used by governments and private investigators, but a quick Amazon search offers up a hidden car-tracking device for US$27 (£19). In the related items: a spy cam disguised as a USB charger, $52. These items are marketed as a "real-time teen-driving coach", nanny cams or parental control software, but there is nothing to stop them being used for nefarious purposes. Meanwhile, law enforcement struggles to keep up: victims of stalking or online harassment are frequently told simply to stop going online, which for a 19-year-old in 2018 is like being told not to breathe air. As the National Stalking Helpline's manager, Clare Elcombe Webber, points out, it feels like there are near-infinite technologies to help stalkers but few to help victims.

It is comforting to suppose that there is a massive difference between harmless social media stalking and the kind that crosses over into criminal behaviour, but the gap between the two is not as big as we like to think. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have normalised the idea of having access to people whenever we want, and slowly eroded the concept of personal privacy. People have become comfortable with the idea of being tracked by governments and companies through their phones, only balking when they realise the full extent of the surveillance. In using these services, even if we lock down every privacy setting we're given (and many people don't), we give people unnatural access to our lives.

Social media companies don't tend to think too hard about what happens when things go bad. When Facebook unveiled its "timeline" feature in 2011, it cheerfully framed the idea of making your entire Facebook history browsable by any new acquaintance as "chronicling your life story", illustrating the concept with a video tracking a happy couple from meeting to marrying to procreating via Facebook photos and status updates. My immediate thought was: what happens if they get divorced? Facebook offered no solution for this besides painstakingly deleting or untagging old posts, one by one. It introduced a "take a break" function in 2015 to deal with the problem it had created around failed relationships. Similarly, it seems that social media companies somehow did not foresee that they were providing excellent tools for stalkers.

In accepting someone as a friend or follower, even on private profiles, you are usually giving them access to everything you've ever posted. What if that person later turns out to be dangerous? Even if we waited to approve Instagram followers until we felt we knew them well in real life, you can never be sure. Ask anyone who has ever dated someone who later went on to stalk them.

Is Twitter responsible for the use of its platform to harass? Is Instagram responsible when someone uses it to stalk an ex? Should the developers of spyware also be criminally liable when someone uses it to illegally monitor a spouse? These are all questions that need to be re-examined. Doubtless, governments, which are currently subjecting the tech companies to scrutiny, will pursue that. But they should be alive to the role they have played in bringing us to this point. The technologies now being used for private stalking - GPS tracking, keylogging, microphone-hijacking and spy cameras - were often themselves developed and deployed by governments for espionage or public surveillance.

Even if we are now attuned - perhaps resigned - to trading our privacy for the limited joys and usefulness of social media platforms and potentially nefarious toys such as drones, the platforms themselves must take responsibility. Since 2016, fuelled by the revelations about the spread of fake news and the disastrous effect social media is having on our politics and public discourse, a "techlash" has been building. The tech industry's short-sightedness when it comes to the social and moral implications of its products is largely behind it . To stem it, tech companies will have to incorporate more humanity and foresight into their visions for the future.

* Keza MacDonald is video games editor at the Guardian
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Social media spying is turning us into a stalking society | Keza MacDonald

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Tue 13 Feb 2018 10.58 EST Last modified on Tue 13 Feb 2018 17.00 EST ave you ever brought up an ex's Instagram profile in a moment of weakness, and pawed sadly though photos of them looking happy with someone else? How about meeting someone promising and then browsing their recent Facebook postings to get to know them better?

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MASEN MAHE-The main connection I make with 1984 and the real world is how much the media controls peoples thinking. For Example, paragraph 2 in the article states, "But for every article about Facebook’s creepy stalker behavior, thousands of other companies are breathing a collective sigh of relief that it’s Facebook and not them in the spotlight. Because while Facebook is one of the biggest players in this space, there are thousands of other companies that spy on and manipulate us for profit." (https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/26/opinions/data-company-spying-opinion-schneier/index.html)

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Editor's Note: Bruce Schneier is the author of " Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World." The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, news articles and commentators have focused on what Facebook knows about us. A lot, it turns out. It collects data from our posts, our likes, our photos, things we type and delete without posting, and things we do while not on Facebook and even when we're offline. It buys data about us from others. And it can infer even more: our sexual orientation, political beliefs, relationship status, drug use, and other personality traits - even if we didn't take the personality test that Cambridge Analytica developed.

But for every article about Facebook's creepy stalker behavior, thousands of other companies are breathing a collective sigh of relief that it's Facebook and not them in the spotlight. Because while Facebook is one of the biggest players in this space, there are thousands of other companies that spy on and manipulate us for profit.

Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff calls it " surveillance capitalism." And as creepy as Facebook is turning out to be, the entire industry is far creepier. It has existed in secret far too long, and it's up to lawmakers to force these companies into the public spotlight, where we can all decide if this is how we want society to operate and - if not - what to do about it.

There are 2,500 to 4,000 data brokers in the United States whose business is buying and selling our personal data. Last year, Equifax was in the news when hackers stole personal information on 150 million people, including Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and driver's license numbers.

You certainly didn't give it permission to collect any of that information. Equifax is one of those thousands of data brokers, most of them you've never heard of, selling your personal information without your knowledge or consent to pretty much anyone who will pay for it.

Surveillance capitalism takes this one step further. Companies like Facebook and Google offer you free services in exchange for your data. Google's surveillance isn't in the news, but it's startlingly intimate. We never lie to our search engines. Our interests and curiosities, hopes and fears, desires and sexual proclivities, are all collected and saved. Add to that the websites we visit that Google tracks through its advertising network, our Gmail accounts, our movements via Google Maps, and what it can collect from our smartphones.

That phone is probably the most intimate surveillance device ever invented. It tracks our location continuously, so it knows where we live, where we work, and where we spend our time. It's the first and last thing we check in a day, so it knows when we wake up and when we go to sleep. We all have one, so it knows who we sleep with. Uber used just some of that information to detect one-night stands; your smartphone provider and any app you allow to collect location data knows a lot more.

Surveillance capitalism drives much of the internet. It's behind most of the "free" services, and many of the paid ones as well. Its goal is psychological manipulation, in the form of personalized advertising to persuade you to buy something or do something, like vote for a candidate. And while the individualized profile-driven manipulation exposed by Cambridge Analytica feels abhorrent, it's really no different from what every company wants in the end. This is why all your personal information is collected, and this is why it is so valuable. Companies that can understand it can use it against you.

None of this is new. The media has been reporting on surveillance capitalism for years. In 2015, I wrote a book about it. Back in 2010, the Wall Street Journal published an award-winning two-year series about how people are tracked both online and offline, titled "What They Know."

Surveillance capitalism is deeply embedded in our increasingly computerized society, and if the extent of it came to light there would be broad demands for limits and regulation. But because this industry can largely operate in secret, only occasionally exposed after a data breach or investigative report, we remain mostly ignorant of its reach.

This might change soon. In 2016, the European Union passed the comprehensive General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. The details of the law are far too complex to explain here, but some of the things it mandates are that personal data of EU citizens can only be collected and saved for "specific, explicit, and legitimate purposes," and only with explicit consent of the user. Consent can't be buried in the terms and conditions, nor can it be assumed unless the user opts in. This law will take effect in May, and companies worldwide are bracing for its enforcement.

Because pretty much all surveillance capitalism companies collect data on Europeans, this will expose the industry like nothing else. Here's just one example. In preparation for this law, PayPal quietly published a list of over 600 companies it might share your personal data with. What will it be like when every company has to publish this sort of information, and explicitly explain how it's using your personal data? We're about to find out.

In the wake of this scandal, even Mark Zuckerberg said that his industry probably should be regulated, although he's certainly not wishing for the sorts of comprehensive regulation the GDPR is bringing to Europe.

He's right. Surveillance capitalism has operated without constraints for far too long. And advances in both big data analysis and artificial intelligence will make tomorrow's applications far creepier than today's. Regulation is the only answer.

The first step to any regulation is transparency. Who has our data? Is it accurate? What are they doing with it? Who are they selling it to? How are they securing it? Can we delete it? I don't see any hope of Congress passing a GDPR-like data protection law anytime soon, but it's not too far-fetched to demand laws requiring these companies to be more transparent in what they're doing.

One of the responses to the Cambridge Analytica scandal is that people are deleting their Facebook accounts. It's hard to do right, and doesn't do anything about the data that Facebook collects about people who don't use Facebook. But it's a start. The market can put pressure on these companies to reduce their spying on us, but it can only do that if we force the industry out of its secret shadows.

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It's not just Facebook. Thousands of companies are spying on you | CNN

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For every article about Facebook's creepy stalker behavior, thousands of other companies are breathing a collective sigh of relief that it's not them in the spotlight, writes Bruce Schneier.

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Facebook, and many corporate companies spy on us. They sell data they collect about us to each other; data like our address, credit score, relatives, and income. But it gets creepier. From our online activity, they also infer other data like our sexual orientation, political beliefs, personality traits, relationship status, drug use, and other information.

In Chapter 1 of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston states: "It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away." This captures the insecurity I have as an individual who is constantly being monitored online and we must use online technology to participate in society as a consumer, student, and individual and so I feel like we don't have much individual choice.

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Editor's Note: Bruce Schneier is the author of " Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World." The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, news articles and commentators have focused on what Facebook knows about us. A lot, it turns out. It collects data from our posts, our likes, our photos, things we type and delete without posting, and things we do while not on Facebook and even when we're offline. It buys data about us from others. And it can infer even more: our sexual orientation, political beliefs, relationship status, drug use, and other personality traits - even if we didn't take the personality test that Cambridge Analytica developed.

But for every article about Facebook's creepy stalker behavior, thousands of other companies are breathing a collective sigh of relief that it's Facebook and not them in the spotlight. Because while Facebook is one of the biggest players in this space, there are thousands of other companies that spy on and manipulate us for profit.

Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff calls it " surveillance capitalism." And as creepy as Facebook is turning out to be, the entire industry is far creepier. It has existed in secret far too long, and it's up to lawmakers to force these companies into the public spotlight, where we can all decide if this is how we want society to operate and - if not - what to do about it.

There are 2,500 to 4,000 data brokers in the United States whose business is buying and selling our personal data. Last year, Equifax was in the news when hackers stole personal information on 150 million people, including Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and driver's license numbers.

You certainly didn't give it permission to collect any of that information. Equifax is one of those thousands of data brokers, most of them you've never heard of, selling your personal information without your knowledge or consent to pretty much anyone who will pay for it.

Surveillance capitalism takes this one step further. Companies like Facebook and Google offer you free services in exchange for your data. Google's surveillance isn't in the news, but it's startlingly intimate. We never lie to our search engines. Our interests and curiosities, hopes and fears, desires and sexual proclivities, are all collected and saved. Add to that the websites we visit that Google tracks through its advertising network, our Gmail accounts, our movements via Google Maps, and what it can collect from our smartphones.

That phone is probably the most intimate surveillance device ever invented. It tracks our location continuously, so it knows where we live, where we work, and where we spend our time. It's the first and last thing we check in a day, so it knows when we wake up and when we go to sleep. We all have one, so it knows who we sleep with. Uber used just some of that information to detect one-night stands; your smartphone provider and any app you allow to collect location data knows a lot more.

Surveillance capitalism drives much of the internet. It's behind most of the "free" services, and many of the paid ones as well. Its goal is psychological manipulation, in the form of personalized advertising to persuade you to buy something or do something, like vote for a candidate. And while the individualized profile-driven manipulation exposed by Cambridge Analytica feels abhorrent, it's really no different from what every company wants in the end. This is why all your personal information is collected, and this is why it is so valuable. Companies that can understand it can use it against you.

None of this is new. The media has been reporting on surveillance capitalism for years. In 2015, I wrote a book about it. Back in 2010, the Wall Street Journal published an award-winning two-year series about how people are tracked both online and offline, titled "What They Know."

Surveillance capitalism is deeply embedded in our increasingly computerized society, and if the extent of it came to light there would be broad demands for limits and regulation. But because this industry can largely operate in secret, only occasionally exposed after a data breach or investigative report, we remain mostly ignorant of its reach.

This might change soon. In 2016, the European Union passed the comprehensive General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. The details of the law are far too complex to explain here, but some of the things it mandates are that personal data of EU citizens can only be collected and saved for "specific, explicit, and legitimate purposes," and only with explicit consent of the user. Consent can't be buried in the terms and conditions, nor can it be assumed unless the user opts in. This law will take effect in May, and companies worldwide are bracing for its enforcement.

Because pretty much all surveillance capitalism companies collect data on Europeans, this will expose the industry like nothing else. Here's just one example. In preparation for this law, PayPal quietly published a list of over 600 companies it might share your personal data with. What will it be like when every company has to publish this sort of information, and explicitly explain how it's using your personal data? We're about to find out.

In the wake of this scandal, even Mark Zuckerberg said that his industry probably should be regulated, although he's certainly not wishing for the sorts of comprehensive regulation the GDPR is bringing to Europe.

He's right. Surveillance capitalism has operated without constraints for far too long. And advances in both big data analysis and artificial intelligence will make tomorrow's applications far creepier than today's. Regulation is the only answer.

The first step to any regulation is transparency. Who has our data? Is it accurate? What are they doing with it? Who are they selling it to? How are they securing it? Can we delete it? I don't see any hope of Congress passing a GDPR-like data protection law anytime soon, but it's not too far-fetched to demand laws requiring these companies to be more transparent in what they're doing.

One of the responses to the Cambridge Analytica scandal is that people are deleting their Facebook accounts. It's hard to do right, and doesn't do anything about the data that Facebook collects about people who don't use Facebook. But it's a start. The market can put pressure on these companies to reduce their spying on us, but it can only do that if we force the industry out of its secret shadows.

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It's not just Facebook. Thousands of companies are spying on you | CNN

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For every article about Facebook's creepy stalker behavior, thousands of other companies are breathing a collective sigh of relief that it's not them in the spotlight, writes Bruce Schneier.