Category Archives: Privacy

Big Tech, Big Brother

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This time, it’s Tim Cook’s Apple.

In a report released [last] Wednesday, the company argues that allowing users to download apps directly onto their iPhones without having to use Apple’s App Store would harm customers by threatening privacy protections, complicating parental controls and potentially exposing users’ data to ransomware attacks.

Say that’s true. It remains the user’s personal choice to run that risk. It remains the user’s personal responsibility to deal with that risk.

Is Cook denying the personal agency average Americans have in their decisions and in their property?

Or is Cook denying the cell phone user’s own property in the cell phone he bought—often for a thousand dollars—and uses? Is Cook claiming Apple retains primary ownership in that cell phone he “sold” to the user?

In any event, I decline to acknowledge Apple, Inc, or any of its managers as Big Brother.

Privacy—and Trust

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Parents of children in the People’s Republic of China have a new “aid.”

ByteDance is peddling a “study lamp” that lets teachers and parents constantly monitor children, ostensibly while the children are doing their schoolwork.

The lamps come equipped with two built-in cameras—one facing the child and another offering a bird’s-eye view from above—letting parents remotely monitor their children when they study. There is a smartphone-sized screen attached to each lamp, which applies artificial intelligence to offer guidance on math problems and difficult words. And parents can hire a human proctor to digitally monitor their children as they study.

What else, though, is ByteDance monitoring, what other data is ByteDance collecting about the kids, the things they’re doing, with whom they’re doing it, parents’ handling of their kids? And passing it on to the PRC’s intelligence community under that 2017 law?

There’s also the question of trust. Not trust in Big Brother—or Uncle Xi—but trust between children and parents, and the ability of children to trust at all. What message are parents sending to their own children when the parents—and other authority figures, known to the children to be there at the parents’ request—insist on being, constantly and immediately, over the kids’ shoulders to be sure those kids are behaving properly? That the kids are fundamentally untrustworthy, maybe? That they’re unworthy in some way?

And there’s the creation of dependency on instant answers.

Some Chinese media outlets and parents have also criticized the idea of placing an interactive touch screen in front of children as they study, warning that the lamp would make children accustomed to seeking easy answers from technology.

And what brave new world for us when ByteDance brings these…devices…to America?

Patient Privacy

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The Wall Street Journal article headline says it all.

Google Strikes Deal With Hospital Chain to Develop Healthcare Algorithms

Alphabet, through its Google subsidiary, is going to be given access to patient records—patient identification, medical history, drug prescription and use, Internet-connected medical device use and medical device-originated reporting—by a major healthcare provision chain, HCA Healthcare Inc.

Dr Jonathan Perlin, President of HCA’s Clinical Services Group and Chief Medical Officer assures us:

Data are spun off of every patient in real time[.]

In real time. As the patient is hooked into the Internet via an ostensibly privacy-protecting connection.

The claimed goal of this…partnership…is to

develop algorithms to help improve operating efficiency, monitor patients and guide doctors’ decisions, according to the companies.

However,

Google will access data when needed with consent from HCA….

But not necessarily with the consent of the patient, it seems.

Perlin does promise that patient-identifying data will be stripped before HCA passes patient data to Alphabet.

Of course.

Never mind that patient monitoring is tough to do without those data. Never mind that developing algorithms for monitoring patients is tough to do without those data in the mix for, you know, testing.

Alphabet’s penchant for taking user personal data for its own purposes, including monetizing those data for the company’s benefit, is long-standing and well-known. Now the company, with the active collusion of a major hospital chain, is expanding that reach into patient medical data—Alphabet user or not.

Patient privacy be damned. It’s a brave new world.

Definitions

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The Supreme Court has agreed to take up Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which is about a Mississippi law that substantially bars abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The Court’s ruling, whatever they decide, however united or split they decide to be, will substantially impact their 1992 Planned Parenthood v Casey ruling that created a bar against “substantial burdens” on a putative right to abortion and their Roe v Wade ruling of 20 years earlier that manufactured out of the umbras a “right” to abortion.

The Court, though, in keeping with Chief Justice John Roberts’ timidity, is unlikely to decide the matter broadly, possibly even avoiding Constitutional matters altogether. It has taken up, from the several questions in front of the lower courts, only the narrow one of whether all pre-viability bans on elective abortions violate the Constitution.

It occurs to me that even that much hinges on the definition of “viability.”

Here’s the Merriam-Webster Online definition of viability as it pertains to babies:

the capability of a fetus to survive outside the uterus

Roe‘s creation set an implicitly technology-based threshold of the third trimester for its viability standard. There’s nothing in the definition of viability about requiring medical support—or medical intervention of any sort—for the fetus to survive outside the uterus. Medical technology has advanced considerably in the 40 years since Roe; the 15 weeks of Dobbs is within the capability of today’s medical technology.

Texas just enacted a similar ban, but that State’s threshold was set at 6 weeks. That does stretch the bounds of today’s medical technology, but maybe doesn’t exceed them. The Court’s Dobbs ruling will, of course, impact the Texas law if it goes one way. Or, the Court could uphold Dobbs, but say 6 weeks goes too far.

In any event, while the technology basis of Roe‘s threshold is strongly implied, it would be good if the Court in its ruling explicitly stated that the threshold depends on medical technology and can be moved toward conception as medicine increases its ability to sustain fetuses and bring them to term outside the uterus.

Controls

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Governments at the State level (look for this to become nationalized under the Biden administration) are trying to force high school students and their families to give up to those State governments (and potentially to the Federal government) their families’ financial condition as a condition of graduating from high school.

Notice that. Petty academic considerations no longer would be sufficient criteria for graduating from a supposedly academic facility. Letting Government peer into private wallets and purses are about to become a primary criterion for fitness to graduate.

The rationalization for this invasion is to guide more high school students toward college. (I’ll elide, in this post, the idea that college isn’t for everyone; a significant fraction—possibly a majority—of high school seniors would be much better off in a trade school or community college learning a trade.)

The government preferred financial record to be executed, according to these governments, is the FAFSA form—the Free Application for Federal Student Aid—which gives access to government academic grants. In Florida, high school seniors who eschewed the FAFSA form missed out on $100 million in Federal Pell grants, for instance.

What’s not discussed in these coming mandates is that the form also gives government access to our bank account contents. If the goal is to guide more high school students toward college, an alternative answer is for high schools, their districts, and the State and Federal governments to do a better job of publicizing the plethora of Federal (and State, etc) grants and other funding sources. That publicity does not need letting governments to peer into private accounts to achieve.

That alternative is so plain that questions arise regarding why Governments choose not to consider it.