February 22, 2017

Gambling with User Data

30 minutes

The debate between users volunteering their data for better service versus being perceived as a creepy company who covertly gathers user data remains a hot topic for the Inside Out Security panel –Cindy Ng, Kris Keyser, Mike Buckbee, and Kilian Englert.

There were two recent stories that triggered this debate. Recently, a smart television manufacturer agreed to pay a $2.2 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission for “collecting viewing data on 11 million consumer TVs without the consumer’s knowledge or consent.” Is that creepy or perhaps the argument could be made that viewing data only helps with the overall user experience?

Contrast the aforementioned story with one where psychologists and data scientists can measure a user’s voluntary Facebook likes to diagnose a personality type. This is known as psychometrics and measured using a model often referred to as OCEAN: openness (how open you are to new experiences?), conscientiousness (how much of a perfectionist are you?), extroversion (how sociable are you?), agreeableness (how considerate and cooperative you are?), and neuroticism (are you easily upset?). With your personality type identified, marketers believe that it can be used to influence users in a future purchasing decision or voting in a presidential election.

The panelists had vastly different views on acceptable and unacceptable behaviors.

Tool of the week: Git pre-commit hook to search for Amazon AWS API keys.

Other stories covered in this podcast:

Introducing "fabricated" data breaches to Have I been pwned

Engineers hack a casino slot machine

Really, really smart computers that play poker

Microsoft hosts the Windows source in a monstrous 300GB Git repository

76 apps in Apple’s App Store still don’t use best practices to protect user data

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