Data privacy commissioner

Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Global surveillance is increasing, with governments requesting almost 40 per cent more user data from Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft during 2020 than in the year before. According to a report from privacy firm Surfshark, the US topped the list, with nearly two million user accounts affected since 2013 and 469,000 in 2020 alone. This represents a little over 585 accounts per 100,000 population. Second on the list was Germany, with 489 requests per 100,000, followed by the UK, with 486. Singapore and France round out the top five. "The massive growth of online crime in 2020 went hand-in-hand with the increase in data requests that Big Tech companies received," says Agneska Sablovskaja, lead researcher at Surfshark. "Globally, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic saw a staggering year-over-year growth of accounts requested for government surveillance from 0.9 million to 1.3 million. This could be … [Read more...] about Government Data Requests Rise Globally

New York (CNN Business) Kaicheng Yang, a researcher at Indiana University's Observatory on Social Media, received quite the surprise last week. Botometer , a tool he helped build to examine automated activity on Twitter, had been mentioned in court documents in the legal battle between Twitter and Elon Musk over their $44 billion acquisition deal . Musk, who originally said part of his plan for owning Twitter was to "defeat the spam bots," has more recently accused Twitter of lying about the number of bots on its platform, and has argued he should be able to walk away from the deal if Twitter won't provide the information necessarily to back up its publicly reported estimates. Twitter ( TWTR ) has sued Musk in an effort to compel him to complete the deal. Elon Musk's legal team has publicly filed its official response to Twitter's lawsuit Musk's answer to Twitter's lawsuit , which was made public Friday, states that the billionaire's team … [Read more...] about Elon Musk cited this tool in his bot dispute with Twitter. Its creator has thoughts

In 2020, 56% of Americans agreed that journalists were purposely trying to mislead people, illustrating an unprecedented dip in confidence in the press. With that backdrop, and in an election year with peak political polarization, rolling out a brand-new media publication was “absurd,” admits Nabiha Syed, president of The Markup , a digital outlet focused on holding tech companies accountable. “How are we going to get people to trust us when they’ve never heard of us, especially when we are interrogating tools that people are using and are sometimes beloved?” advertisement advertisement But the founders felt that the site’s mission was critical: to investigate the power and practices of Big Tech. Plus, it was going to do things differently. The Markup is nonprofit newsroom, funded by philanthropists, including more than $20 million from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. It is data-driven, and only publishes about twice a week, in order to be as … [Read more...] about This news outlet is exposing Big Tech’s practices by building its own tech tools