Vigilant News

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Surveillance

Thousands of Companies Are Monitoring Every Facebook User, According to a Study

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A comprehensive investigation, conducted in partnership between Consumer Reports and The Markup, has exposed the vast extent of data surveillance that is directed at users of Facebook. Some study participants were monitored by as many as 7,000 businesses.

709 volunteers were asked to contribute archives of their Facebook user data. Consumer Reports was astounded to learn that 186,892 distinct organizations had transmitted information about these users to Facebook.

Data from each participant was, on average, disseminated by 2,230 companies; however, certain users’ data was shared by more than 7,000 companies.

This examination brought attention to a less prevalent type of monitoring referred to as server-to-server tracking, in which personal information is transmitted directly from the servers of a company to the servers of Meta. This method occurs in addition to the more obvious approach that employs Meta tracking pixels on company websites.

Emil Vazquez, a spokesperson for Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, defended the company’s data practices, stating: “We offer a number of transparency tools to help people understand the information that businesses choose to share with us, and manage how it’s used.”

Consumer Reports, on the other hand, identified problems with these tools, such as ambiguous data provider identities and advertising service providers frequently disregarding user opt-out requests.

An unexpected discovery was the widespread occurrence of LiveRamp, a data broker, which was detected in the data of 96% of the participants in the study. In addition to obscure data aggregators, the roster of organizations that provide Facebook with data comprises prominent retailers such as Home Depot, Macy’s, Walmart, as well as Experian and TransUnion’s Neustar, Amazon, Etsy, and PayPal. LiveRamp’s lack of response to a request for comment regarding this subject is noteworthy.

There were two primary collection categories from which the study obtained its data: “events” and “custom audiences.” The latter entails advertisers transferring customer profiles, which comprise mobile advertising IDs and email addresses, to Meta in order to target advertisements on Meta’s platforms. “Events” refer to tangible transactions that occur in the physical world, such as visits to websites or purchases from stores, and are enabled through the utilization of Meta’s software in applications, monitoring pixels on websites, and server-to-server tracking.

The deputy director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Caitriona Fitzgerald, conveyed apprehension regarding the scope of monitoring in an interview with The Markup: “This type of tracking which occurs entirely outside of the user’s view is just so far outside of what people expect when they use the internet.” Additionally, she stated, “they [consumers] don’t expect Meta to know what stores they walk into or what news articles they’re reading or every site they visit online.”

Gates Foundation Donates $200 Million Towards Expanding Digital ID Surveillance System

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Last month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donated a whopping $1.27 billion to “advance progress toward global goals,” with $200 million earmarked to aid in the creation of a “global digital ID system.”

A September 21st press release on the Gates Foundation’s own website says that the $200 million package will be used to create an infrastructure that “encompasses tools such as interoperable payment systems, digital ID, data-sharing systems, and civil registry databases” that purports to make countries “more resilient to crises such as food shortages, public health threats, and climate change, as well as to aid in pandemic and economic recovery.”

“We see the greatest progress when governments, the private sector, and local communities collaborate in global health programs,” said Bill Gates, co-chair. “The commitment this week to combat preventable diseases and save millions more lives through the Global Fund replenishment is a great step forward in getting back on track to reach the Sustainable Development Goals.”

Speaking with The Defender shortly after this monetary pledge, Michael Rectenwald, author of “Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom,” warned of the negative consequences of digital identifications.

“Of all the other means of identifying and tracking subjects, digital identity poses perhaps the gravest technological threat to individual liberty yet conceived,” he said. “It has the potential to trace, track and surveil subjects and to compile a complete record of all activity, from cradle to grave.”

It is widely believed that certain members of the ruling class want to continue certain aspects of the COVID-era restrictions, which includes a desire to make digital IDs a permanent and universal reality.

 The World Economic Forum (WEF) is actively promoting digital IDs. The Known Traveler Digital Identity (KTDI) is a WEF initiative that, according to its website, “brings together a global consortium of individuals, governments, authorities, and the travel industry to enhance security in world travel.”

A discussion about invasive digital identity and surveillance wouldn’t be complete without mentioning China, where these practices are already established.

China’s social credit system is a massive undertaking of government surveillance that utilizes facial recognition technology in order to have the ability to identify every single person in China. It does this through some 600 million surveillance cameras and is used to uphold its social credit system.

Maybe population-control-obsessed billionaires like Bill Gates have purely altruistic motives, maybe not. Either way, it certainly seems as though the western elites would like to roll out a similar identification system to China’s social credit system.

 

Is There a Target on Your Back? Predictive AI May have Already Flagged You
Is it only a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm?

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Ryan DeLarme
May 11th, 2022

The level of invasive surveillance taking place each second around the globe is staggering, and that’s only referring to what we actually know about. Chances are that you or somebody you know has been assessed and assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities, and viewpoints.

It was reported back in 2016 that officers in Fresno, California have been using a controversial new software called “Beware”, which surveils citizens and calculates a citizen’s “Threat Score”.

It may sound like something out of a dystopian nightmare world, but this type of surveillance has been around for a long time. With the rapid growth of technology, they are finding new ways to keep tabs not only on you in the present, but also on your probable future.

Intrado, the company that created the threat-scoring software, says that Beware:

 “sorts and scores billions of publicly-available commercial records in a matter of seconds – alerting responders to potentially dangerous situations while en route to, or at the location of, a 9-1-1 request for assistance.”

The Washington Post was granted access to the Fresno Police Department’s $600,000 Real-Time Crime Center where Beware is being used. The Post reported:

On 57 monitors that cover the walls of the center, operators zoomed and panned an array of roughly 200 police cameras perched across the city. They could dial up 800 more feeds from the city’s schools and traffic cameras, and they soon hope to add 400 more streams from cameras worn on officers’ bodies and from thousands from local businesses that have surveillance systems.

The cameras were only one tool at the ready. Officers could trawl a private database that has recorded more than 2 billion scans of vehicle licenses plates and locations nationwide. If gunshots were fired, a system called ShotSpotter could triangulate the location using microphones strung around the city. Another program, called Media Sonar, crawled social media looking for illicit activity. Police used it to monitor individuals, threats to schools and hashtags related to gangs.

In the same fashion that the Harris Corporation keeps the details of its Stingray cell-site simulators and trackers under wraps, Intrado considers the finer details of Beware’s calculating threat scores to be a “trade secret.”

Intraldo may not be inclined to disclose exactly how the threat score is calculated, but we know that it includes information from arrest reports, databases, web searches, and yes, even social media posts. We all learned from the Cambridge Analytica scandal that today data is more sought after than gold, and we are quickly learning that data probably isn’t only harvested for marketing purposes. 

This type of technology is not limited to just law enforcement. Social Services seems to be getting in on the action as well, with computer algorithms attempting to predict which households are more likely to be found guilty of child abuse and neglect. Presumably, all it would take is an AI bot targeting a household for potential neglect for a family to be investigated, potentially landing the child in foster care.

According to the Associated Press, once an incident of potential neglect is reported to a child protection hotline, the report is run through a screening process that pulls together “personal data collected from birth, Medicaid, substance abuse, mental health, jail and probation records, among other government data sets.” The algorithm then calculates the child’s potential risk and assigns a score of 1 to 20 to predict the risk that a child will be placed in foster care in the two years after they are investigated. “The higher the number, the greater the risk. Social workers then use their discretion to decide whether to investigate.

What they consider potential neglect can include everything from inadequate housing to poor hygiene, which are far cries from verified physical or sexual abuse. Who knows what factors could play a role in this going forward, things like the January 6th Committee suggest that it’s not too far-fetched something like political affiliation could become a factor in determining whether or not you maintain guardianship over your own children.

The potential ramifications of how these programs could be used are unnerving. What’s worse is that, as we said before, this is only the tech we know about – who knows what kind of classified software is being used by Governments and the militaries of the world.