#Cybersecurity#Telegram#Messaging#Geolocation: "A recently launched tool allows anyone to search a specific set of coordinates for Telegram users that have a certain setting enabled, and then plot their approximate physical location on a map, according to 404 Media’s own tests. The tool, dubbed “Close-Circuit Telegram Vision” or CCTV, piggybacks off an intended feature of Telegram called “Find People Nearby” which is disabled by default. The typical purpose of that feature is to find other Telegram users nearby to the current user’s physical location. The new tool, meanwhile, lets anyone search globally for people who have the setting turned on.
The news presents a recontextualization of data which users may consent to being available in one context, but which is now being presented in another.
“They have a protection mechanism but it's not enough to protect,” Ivan Glinkin, a cybersecurity professional and creator of CCTV, said in an online chat."
#SocialMedia#SocialNetworks#ContentModeration#Algorithms#RecommendationEngines#Messaging: "So you joined a social network without ranking algorithms—is everything good now? Jonathan Stray, a senior scientist at the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, has doubts. “There is now a bunch of research showing that chronological is not necessarily better,” he says, adding that simpler feeds can promote recency bias and enable spam.
Stray doesn’t think social harm is an inevitable outcome of complex algorithmic curation. But he agrees with Rogers that the tech industry’s practice of trying to maximize engagement doesn’t necessarily select for socially desirable results.
Stray suspects the solution to the problem of social media algorithms may in fact be … more algorithms. “The fundamental problem is you've got way too much information for anybody to consume, so you have to reduce it somehow,” he says."
#CyberSecurity#Surveillance#Encryption#Messaging: "The current crop of suggestions seem to concede that governments shouldn’t have direct access. Instead, they want services to backdoor themselves and act as gatekeepers to law enforcement. That’s not an improvement; it’s still centralized, and it makes these companies responsible for any misuse of the data that they have access to, requiring everyone on the planet to trust a few big tech companies with our private and most intimate conversations – hardly a direction that society wants to go in in 2024. ‘Trust me, I’m in charge’ is a poor model of governance or security.
These ‘solutions’ also ignore the reality that the ‘bad guys’ will just use other tools to communicate; information is information. That will leave law abiding people giving up their privacy and security for little societal gain." https://www.mnot.net/blog/2024/04/29/power
#CyberSecurity#Privacy#Messaging#Metadata#Encryption: "When stored, aggregated and analyzed, this metadata provides ample information that could potentially incriminate someone or be submitted to authorities. When WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger enabled end-to-end encryption for messages, of course it was a welcome and widely celebrated change. But it’s important to remember that not all end-to-end encryption utilizes the same standards, some implementations are more secure than others, so it’s something that shouldn’t necessarily be accepted at face value. More importantly: collecting and storing an obscene amount of metadata should invite global scrutiny, considering this data is often combined with whatever other information companies like Meta harvest about your identity (which is a lot.)
This is one of the many reasons why we need to resist giving out our phone numbers just to access an app, especially to do something as personal and intimate as private messaging. Even though users can sometimes mask their numbers with a username, their identity on the app is still fundamentally tied to their phone number. App operators have access to this, as well as user contacts. Additionally, with a simple modification to the app's source code, the contacts may also gain access in some cases. This should raise more concerns about privacy, and it makes the need for anonymity difficult to achieve." https://simplex.chat/blog/20240416-dangers-of-metadata-in-messengers.html
At what point are the #Democrats going to start engaging in coordinated #messaging, and pushing content to combat the flood of #rightwing bullshit? The clock is ticking, and we can't afford to wait til the night before the election to suddenly realize that effort is needed to inform the voters of the facts.
The messaging app you choose impacts others as well, not just yourself, and while you personally may not require complete privacy, others in your network might have their lives depend on it.
💬 "In March 2020 the information system for dealing with Covid was; I would wheel in a whiteboard and grab a marker and Simon Stephens would read out from scraps of paper, faxes that he'd got from the NHS…" - Dominic Cummings interviewed on Helen Lewis has Left the Chat, on BBC Sounds.