Kaiser Fung, founder of Principal Analytics Prep, comments on the fake data and fraud problem in digital advertising, and calls on data scientists and analysts to rise up to the challenge.
Kaiser Fung, founder of Principal Analytics Prep, comments on the fake data and fraud problem in digital advertising, and calls on data scientists and analysts to rise up to the challenge.
Kaiser Fung, founder of Junk Charts and Principal Analytics Prep, the next-gen data analytics bootcamp, discusses ethical issues concerning Uber's collection of user data from smartphone apps.
Kaiser Fung, founder of Principal Analytics Prep and author of Numbersense, reacts to the news that Roomba captures detailed maps of people's homes.
There has been a barrage of negative publicity related to Uber recently. The latest salvo is a long article in the New York Times (link). This piece focuses on Uber's CEO, who was trained as a computer engineer, but my interest lies primarily in several revelations about how Uber collects and uses customer data. The key episode picked up by various outlets (e.g. TechCrunch, Wired) involves Uber "secretly identifying and…
A very important article from the Times starts with the following sentence: Want to invisibly spy on 10 iPhone owners without their knowledge? Gather their every keystroke, sound, message and location? That will cost you $650,000, plus a $500,000 setup fee with an Israeli outfit called the NSO Group. In the U.S., there is a disconnect between a populace whose distrust of government is at an all-time high and the…
Well, it didn't take long but private investigators have found the next big thing: Big Data. Bloomberg reported on a company called IDI, who sells our data to private investigators. (link) Unfortunately, this article is short on details and long on sensationalized catchphrases ("Every move you make. Every click you take...") The CEO of IDI boasted that "We have data on that 21-year-old who’s living at home with mom and…
In the last post in the Know Your Data series, I discussed how Uber can use its vast database of your personal trips against your personal interests. (This does not preclude the possibility that they use the data for your benefit.) It turns out that something more ominous is at foot… a number of news outlets have just published investigative reports about a company known as Vigilant Solutions (EFF, The…
The news is out that Uber got fined by the New York Attorney General's office for data breaches and privacy concerns. The headline writer for ZDNet nailed this one: "Uber fined peanuts in God View surveillance" (link). And the sub-lead has the kicker: "For a company with a valuation of over $50 billion, a $20,000 fine over user data protection is laughable." This settlement tells us one of the following…
The Daily Beast reports that Facebook knows what you just copied and pasted on your phone (link). Then, when the engineers try to explain what they are doing, it feels a bit more creepy, as usual. We all copy text and then paste it somewhere else. This can be a web link that we are transporting from one app to another, or from an email app to a browser, etc.…
This piece is part of the StatBusters column written jointly with Andrew Gelman. Hope they fix the labeling soon. In it, we talk about two recent studies on data privacy, which leads to contradictory conclusions. How should the media report such surveys? Is the brand name of the organization enough? In addition, we debunk the notion that consumers will definitely get something valuable out of sharing their data.
