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From manipulating elections to selling user data, technology is improving, or should we say intruding, day by day.
The tracking of user data has been a point of contention for some time now. Cambridge Analytica, a British data company, shut down because they used the Facebook data of millions of voters in the 2016 US Presidential Elections. Moreover, Mark Zuckerberg went to court to defend Facebook’s privacy policy and struggled to explain how cookies work.
Now, the MoviePass app is working on an optimized way to consume ads on the internet. They’ll track your eyeballs and figure out whether you are just playing an ad or watching it, according to sources.
Black Mirror comes to life
Worrying 🫣 #moviepass #freedom #lost pic.twitter.com/F2owQlaF82
— PopArc (@Deedona3) February 13, 2022
This is eerily similar to a Black Mirror episode, Men Against Fire. For instance, the idea is to track your eyeballs when watching a movie, and an ad pops up. The ad will shut down if you aren’t watching it. These ads include Super Bowl commercials, Christmas and New Year ads, and advertising ads.
In the Men Against Fire episode, the story follows Stripe, a soldier who is equipped with Mass (a neural implant), that allows him to locate and kill roaches — zombie-looking people. After a few missions, Stripe found a device left by one of the roaches and it disrupted the MASS device signals showing the reality of the world. He realized that MASS is making normal people look like roaches and he is actually commiting genocide.
In this episode, the story revolves around dehumanizing the enemy and misusing technology, which is horribly similar to MoviePass’s goal of tracking eyeballs.
On the other hand, business owners advertise a lot and spend tons of money on every campaign. These businesses use buzzwords to entice users to click on ads and buy their products. With the help of MoviePass, they need accurate information on whether or not the people are watching their ads.
All in all, the company won’t be successful because this is just a bizarre and illogical method. This technology can hurt an organization’s status because intelligent companies don’t scale businesses like this. Tracking user’s data is becoming a growing problem, and MoviePass could possibly become another Cambridge Analytica company trying to manipulate user data.
Data leak at Internet Society
People are still clumsy with how data is stored on the internet. Recently, thousands of members of the Internet Society were victims of a massive data leak, files, and login details.
The Internet Society is an international non-profit lobby for a safer internet and runs campaigns to protect online privacy. The irony!
According to reports, they stated that the associated management software wasn’t configured correctly, and that’s how they lost the data of Internet Society members. The prime cause was the misconfiguration of the systems. The credits for this discovery goes to a Clario researcher and Bob, an independent researcher, who found out the backdoor and alerted the Internet Society.
🚨 #DataBreach Alert 🚨
— Laurent (@Laurent_Perche) February 18, 2022
➡️ Internet Society
➡️ 80,000 records
Unprotected Microsoft Azure cloud repository.#DataLeak includes:
❌ Name
❌ Login / Pwd
❌ Mailing address#CyberSecurity #Infosec #hacker #CyberAttack #cybercrime #DataSecurity #privacy pic.twitter.com/iVqYDqDkSA
Attention Linux administrators
Security researchers have detected leaked root privileges on Linux operating systems. To put it simply, root privileges are granted to the root account. This means it can read and write any file on the system, act as any user, change the system configuration, install and remove software, and upgrade the operating system and/or firmware. In essence, if you have root privilege, you can perform almost any action on the system.
In addition, once the hacker has root privileges, they can do anything. Administrators are urged to apply security patches for their Linux operating systems as soon as possible to plug this hole.
The scam in Microsoft’s team collaboration is why people are on the verge of data leaks. This is how you install malware on your devices. The hacker can quickly start a discussion with one of your team members while disguising themselves as Microsoft team support representatives and attack malware-prone files in the middle of a conversation.
To defend against this emerging problem, IT administrators have to install anti-malware protection that sandboxes and sends attachments in collaboration software.
Canadians getting scammed
Canadians are claiming to receive phone calls for someone in the Canadian government asking for private information. Turns out, this is a big fraud, with scammers looking to get access to your personal information, bank details, and Canadian government information. If you are in Canada and getting one of those calls, just hang up. Seriously!
In 2021 alone, a number of Canadians fell victim to such scams, mounting to a collective loss of almost $231 million. The scammers are said to have taken advantage of the fact that thousands of people have turned to online shopping. Some of the top scams reported include rental, online rental fraud, and puppy advertising.
According to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Center, less than 5% of all fraud victims in Canada report their experiences to law enforcement agencies. By reporting a scam, you give law enforcement the information they need to catch the perpetrators and keep others from becoming victims.
Be vigilant. Be responsible!
If only Trudeau’s government was as concerned with protecting Canadians from digital and phone scammers, as they are about seizing donated money to the Trucker Convoy.
— Reiko Koyama (@reikokoyama79) February 16, 2022
Sameed Ajax
June 20, 2023
10 months ago
