The 118th Block: The police are trolls; troll the police!
(For legal reasons, the headline is a joke only.)
This week…
My favourite soundcheck line for a podcast recording is “take those peanut butter and cracker jacks.” Just sharing.
And now, a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
How to save more lives and avoid a privacy apocalypse
Tim Harford:
In the mid-1990s, the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission, an insurer of state employees, released healthcare data that described millions of interactions between patients and the healthcare system to researchers. Such records could easily reveal highly sensitive information — psychiatric consultations, sexually transmitted infections, addiction to painkillers, bed-wetting — not to mention the exact timing of each treatment. So, naturally, the GIC removed names, addresses and social security details from the records. Safely anonymised, these could then be used to answer life-saving questions about which treatments worked best and at what cost.
That is not how Latanya Sweeney saw it. Then a graduate student and now a professor at Harvard University, Sweeney noticed most combinations of gender and date of birth (there are about 60,000 of them) were unique within each broad ZIP code of 25,000 people. The vast majority of people could be uniquely identified by cross-referencing voter records with the anonymised health records. Only one medical record, for example, had the same birth date, gender and ZIP code as the then governor of Massachusetts, William Weld. Sweeney made her point unmistakable by mailing Weld a copy of his own supposedly anonymous medical records.
Read on for the probable solution.
Even if TikTok and other apps are collecting your data, what are the actual consequences?
Ausma Bernot on The Conversation:
TikTok collects rich consumer information, including personal information and behavioural data from people’s activity on the app. In this respect, it’s not different from other social media companies.
They all need oceans of user data to push ads onto us, and run data analytics behind a shiny facade of cute cats and trendy dances.
However, TikTok’s corporate roots extend to authoritarian China – and not the US, where most of our other social media come from. This carries implications for TikTok users.
Hypothetically, since TikTok moderates content according to Beijing’s foreign policy goals, it’s possible TikTok could apply censorship controls over Australian users.
This means users’ feeds would be filtered to omit anything that doesn’t fit the Chinese government’s agenda, such as support for Taiwan’s sovereignty, as an example. In “shadowbanning”, a user’s posts appear to have been published to the user themselves, but are not visible to anyone else.
It’s worth noting this censorship risk isn’t hypothetical. In 2019, information about Hong Kong protests was reported to have been censored not only on Douyin, China’s domestic version of TikTok, but also on TikTok itself.
Then in 2020, [the Australian Strategic Policy Institute] found hashtags related to LGBTQ+ are suppressed in at least eight languages on TikTok. In response to ASPI’s research, a TikTok spokesperson said the hashtags may be restricted as part of the company’s localisation strategy and due to local laws.
Royal Malaysia Police behind pro-govt ‘troll farm’? Meta alleges coordinated inauthentic behaviour
Lancelot Theseira for The Vibes:
The Royal Malaysia Police has been accused of running a troll farm that sought to promote the current government coalition and to criticise its opponents, said tech giant Meta.
In its Quarterly Adversarial Threat Report, Meta claimed that close to 1,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts, as well as Facebook groups and pages, were removed for violating the platform’s policy against coordinated inauthentic behaviour.
Meta defines such behaviour as the coordinated use of fake accounts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal.
According to the report, this network was made up of at least 596 Facebook accounts, 180 Facebook pages, 11 Facebook groups, and 72 Instagram accounts, with a cumulative total of almost half a million followers.
Additionally, the network was active across Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram and “posted memes in Malay in support of the current government coalition, with claims of corruption among its critics”.
On Facebook in particular, the network managed pages that posed as independent news entities and “promoted police while criticising the opposition”.
Clowns.
What I read, watch, and listen to…
I’m reading about the bleeding edge of itch research by Moheb Constandi on NEO.LIFE.
I heard good initial reviews of it so I’ll be watching The Sandman.
Reviews, opinion pieces and other stray links:
A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease by Charles Pillar for Science.
My dad denies what colonization stole from us by Jillian Sunderland for CBC.
Chart of the week
Florian Zandt on monkeypox watch for Statista: