- Nov 2022
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themarkup.org themarkup.org
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Some of the sensitive data collection analyzed by The Markup appears linked to default behaviors of the Meta Pixel, while some appears to arise from customizations made by the tax filing services, someone acting on their behalf, or other software installed on the site. Report Deeply and Fix Things Because it turns out moving fast and breaking things broke some super important things. Give Now For example, Meta Pixel collected health savings account and college expense information from H&R Block’s site because the information appeared in webpage titles and the standard configuration of the Meta Pixel automatically collects the title of a page the user is viewing, along with the web address of the page and other data. It was able to collect income information from Ramsey Solutions because the information appeared in a summary that expanded when clicked. The summary was detected by the pixel as a button, and in its default configuration the pixel collects text from inside a clicked button. The pixels embedded by TaxSlayer and TaxAct used a feature called “automatic advanced matching.” That feature scans forms looking for fields it thinks contain personally identifiable information like a phone number, first name, last name, or email address, then sends detected information to Meta. On TaxSlayer’s site this feature collected phone numbers and the names of filers and their dependents. On TaxAct it collected the names of dependents.
Meta Pixel default behavior is to parse and send sensitive data
Wait, wait, wait... the software has a feature that scans for privately identifiable information and sends that detected info to Meta? And in other cases, the users of the Meta Pixel decided to send private information ot Meta?
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- Jul 2021
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themarkup.org themarkup.org
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consumer friendly
Including the "consumer" here is a red herring. We're meant to identify as the consumer and so take from this statement that our rights and best interests have been written into these BigTech-crafted laws.
But a "consumer" is different from a "citizen," a "person," we the people.
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- Aug 2020
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Horstmann, K. T., Buecker, S., Krasko, J., Kritzler, S., & Terwiel, S. (2020). Who does or does not use the “Corona-Warn-App” and why? [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/e9fu3
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- Apr 2020
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blog.zoom.us blog.zoom.us
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Thousands of enterprises around the world have done exhaustive security reviews of our user, network, and data center layers and confidently selected Zoom for complete deployment.
This doesn't really account for the fact that Zoom have committed some atrociously heinous acts, such as (and not limited to):
- Abuse how installation works on macOS
- Claiming to support end-to-end encryption while not doing that and then, shadily inventing a nomenclature that steers away from standards
- Sending your data to Facebook even if you don't have a Facebook account and hiding this practice from their privacy policy
- Installing a web server on your Mac that Apple had to build a tool to erase
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- Aug 2018
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Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia told the AP it is “frustratingly common” for technology companies “to have corporate practices that diverge wildly from the totally reasonable expectations of their users,” and urged policies that would give users more control of their data. Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey called for “comprehensive consumer privacy and data security legislation” in the wake of the AP report.
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