Notices by Michael Veale (mikarv@someone.elses.computer)

Apple unexpectedly drops its civil suit against #spyware vendor NSO
Group as it claims discovery against it might disclose information that would benefit… spyware vendors. https://www.securityweek.com/apple-suddenly-drops-nso-group-spyware-lawsuit/

or worse, they could use real clips of James Cleverly interviews https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/25/uks-enemies-could-use-ai-deepfakes-to-try-to-rig-election-says-james-cleverly

Microsoft Stream claims that the latest version of Firefox is not a 'modern browser'...

New 📄: Rights for Those Who Unwillingly, Unknowingly and Unidentifiably Compute!

People's devices are silently co-opted for collective computation which promises data confidentiality. But what happens when ppl don't agree with the computation's ends? https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/4ugxd 🧵

As the Home Office runs a hackathon to look for ‘AI’ transcription/translation tools to reduce the #asylum backlog without a step change in investment (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/29/government-hackathon-to-search-for-ways-to-use-ai-to-cut-asylum-backlog), @restofworld reports that… surprise surprise, machine translation is jeopardising asylum claims among Afghans in the US! https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-translation-errors-afghan-refugees-asylum/

#Meta ships UK users out of EU #GDPR protection. Likely triggered by risk of stop processing orders over #Schrems II and targeted ads, which then wouldn’t apply to the UK, and a desire to keep transferring UK data to the US without the risk of CJEU involvement or intervention. UK users will no longer be able to complain to the Irish DPC, and can only rely on the ICO, which in turn may struggle to enforce penalties against the US entity (as opposed to an Irish tax vehicle) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-21/meta-shifts-uk-users-to-us-agreements-in-post-brexit-move?utm_content=business&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&leadSource=uverify%20wall#xj4y7vzkg

Twitter closing API access will drive the (questionable) study of social media posts to places like Mastodon. Classes that were teaching people social media scraping will likely turn to ActivityPub services. However, university #researchEthics committees should be wary of approving research as before. Unlike Twitter, instances and users can (and do) have much clearer views on being scraped. People can be contacted more easily for ethical consent in open protocols. Not a free for all any more.

@w3c @tag reject Google’s in-browser ad-targeting system Topics again. (minutes: https://w3c.social/@tag/109682533903910546) @robin notes Topics has ‘little chance of a credible future’. Now Google say they will ignore standard-setting; they are “committed to Topics” and “moving forward” https://www.businessinsider.com/web-standards-body-w3c-rejects-googles-ad-targeting-proposal-2023-1. Chromium’s dominance makes standards a convenient charade for G’s power.

To add insult to injury, if you use #Linux your seemingly only chance of opening this file is to use #Adobe Acrobat Reader 8, support for which ended *11 years ago*. In order to print a standard about cybersecurity!

Standards organisations, which make and own copyright to proprietary texts which will be necessary to understand and enforce laws such as the EU's AI Act, which mandate them and refer to them directly, are making it even harder to access standards by instituting pretty nasty Adobe #DRM. Many of these document are considered part of EU law for the purposes of preliminary references. See this from the BSI now. #standards #AIAct