In the paper Emotionless: Privacy-Preserving Speech Analysis for Voice Assistants, researchers propose adding a privacy-preserving intermediate layer between users and cloud services.

Following in the footsteps of other large corporations such as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon; Microsoft silently updated its privacy statement admitting it has a group of people listening to users' conversations and interactions through its platform —and transcribing part of those dialogs:Our processing of personal data for these purposes includes both automated and manual (human) methods of processing .

"These leaks about a potential Executive Order from the White House are troubling on many levels, from the order's potential to violate the First Amendment, to its apparent disregard for the independence of agencies like the FCC and the FTC, to its intent to unilaterally limit Section 230 which promotes moderated online communities free of hate speech and misinformation," said Chris Lewis, president and CEO of Public Knowledge.

After two recent mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, President Trump said his administration would ask social media companies to develop tools that could detect potential mass shooters.

"And by demonstrating a proof-of-concept using implanted electrodes as part of their effort to help patients with speech loss, we hope UCSF's work will inform our development of the decoding algorithms and technical specifications needed for a fully non-invasive, wearable device.

Nitesh Saxena also confirmed The Hacker News that the attack can not be used to capture targeted users' voice or their surroundings because "that is not strong enough to affect the phone's motion sensors, especially given the low sampling rates imposed by the OS," and thus also doesn't interfere with the accelerometer readings.

Karan Bhatia , Google vice president of global government affairs and public policy, demurred when pressed by senators to undergo an independent audit of the company’s content management practices, as both Facebook and Twitter have done, saying his company is in a “very different situation.”.

Google today defended its practice of having workers listen to users' Google Assistant queries, following the leak of 1,000 voice recordings to a media outlet. Google's blog post today said it uses "a wide range of safeguards to protect user privacy throughout the entire review process.".

PARIS (Reuters) - In a world first, Facebook has agreed to hand over the identification data of French users suspected of hate speech on its platform to judges, France’s minister for digital affairs Cedric O said on Tuesday.

Speaking shortly afterwards on the same radio program, Damian Collins, who chairs a UK parliamentary committee that has called for Facebook to be investigated by the UK’s privacy and competition regulators , suggested the company is seeking to use self-serving self-regulation to evade wider responsibility for the problems its platform creates — arguing that what’s really needed are state-set broadcast-style regulations overseen by external bodies with statutory powers.

Some security controls frequently used for server's devices are given below. Rights and permissions are commonly assigned on servers, but rarely on mobile devices such as tablets and smart-phones. Mantrap and cipher lock: These are examples of physical security and they can be used to restrict access to a server room.

by Gavin O'Malley @mp_gavin, May 23, 2019 Facebook now estimates that 5% of monthly active accounts are fake, according to the social giant’s latest Community Enforcement Report. In the first quarter of 2019, Facebook took down 4 million hate speech posts, according to Rosen.

The story so far: On May 31, 2019, the U.S. Department of State introduced a change in online visa forms for immigrant (form DS-260) and non-immigrant visas (form DS-160) requiring applicants to register their social media handles over a five-year period.

Alexa, Amazon's virtual assistant system that runs on the company's Echo series of smart speakers, works by listening out for a 'wakeword' that tells the device to turn on its extended speech recognition systems in order to respond to spoken commands.

African Americans are simultaneously more likely to be enrolled in face recognition databases and the targets of police surveillance use.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation fought on behalf of Reddit commenter Darkspilver, a Jehovah's Witness who posted public and internal documents from The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society online.

Accordingly, Watch Tower’s subpoena could not pass the well-established “Doe” test, which allows a party to use the courts to pierce anonymity only where they can show that their claims are valid and also that the balance of harms favors disclosure.

If we are to learn from the behavior of the social media platforms, there will inevitably be a point where if you don’t write in the politically correct way, or accept all of “Ideas” recommendation to “help” you with more “inclusive” language, perhaps you could be banned from using the product at all.

Thus, the voice codec used in the project provides a bitrate of 800 bps, works with 90 ms frames containing 540 6KHz PCM samples, compressing them to 72 bits of data.

In the rush to prevent the next scandal, policies may either fail to address the actual concerns or be so broad in their definition of covered entities, data, or personal information that they could impact basically every aspect of the American economy.

The report said the Amazon team transcribes the recordings and shares the conversations with other parts of the company in order to make Alexa's "understanding of human speech" better.

The data was uploaded by third-party Facebook app developers: Mexican media company Cultura Colectiva and an app called At the Pool. Sign up for our Recode Daily newsletter to get the top tech and business news stories delivered to your inbox.

Current ‘Enemies of the Internet’: The governments of these countries usually block popular applications and technologies, filter specific websites and sometimes even manipulate the content that is allowed by sharing propaganda and fake news. Privacy and geo-blocked content bypass, are the two main purposes of the VPN, so it’s an essential tool when fighting cyber censorship.

Twitter is adding new options to its reporting process for tweets that share personal information, adding much more specific fields that users can highlight when submitting reports.

Amazon doesn’t disclose exact figures, but when I asked how many Echo devices have been sold, a spokeswoman said “tens of millions.” By the end of last year, more than 40 million smart speakers had been installed worldwide, according to Canalys, a technology-research firm.

"These unintentional microphones sense speech with high enough fidelity for the Shazam service to recognize a song recorded through the hard drive." The team's research work, scheduled to be presented in May at the 2019 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy , explores how it's possible to alter HDD firmware to measure the offset of a disk drive's read/write head from the center of the track it's seeking.

According to a former Facebook insider who was interviewed by Project Veritas, the social media giant has allegedly developed an entire set of tools that it frequently uses to suppress conservative voices and target outspoken right-leaning users.

EFF supports legislative efforts in Washington and Massachusetts to place a moratorium on government use of face surveillance technology. The moratoriums would stay in place, unless lawmakers determined these technologies do not have a racial disparate impact, after hearing directly from minority communities about the unfair impact face surveillance has on vulnerable people.

"The sensitive vocoder and powerful neural networks represented the sounds the patients had originally listened to with surprising accuracy." Dr. Mesgarani and his team plan to test more complicated words and sentences next, and they want to run the same tests on brain signals emitted when a person speaks or imagines speaking.

“It’s clear from already public information that all of the agencies we’re targeting in our FOIA lawsuit engage in manual and automated surveillance of social media users and their speech, and it’s unacceptable for the government to withhold details about this domestic spying,” Cagle and Handeyside said.