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Black Mirror

ALERT! Apple Beings Giving Black Mirror-Style ‘Trust Scores’ Using Your Calls & Emails

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Apple Begins Tracking Your Calls & Emails to Assign You a ‘Trust Score’

ANTIMEDIA| — Apple has rolled out a new policy to analyze your data and determine a “trust score” based on what it finds, Venture Beat reported this week.

In an update to its privacy policy issued last week, the company warned users it would be tracking emails and calls in order to prevent fraud.

“To help identify and prevent fraud, information about how you use your device, including the approximate number of phone calls or emails you send and receive, will be used to compute a device trust score when you attempt a purchase,“ the text reads.

Venture Beat notes that this new text “appears in the iTunes Store & Privacy windows of iOS and tvOS devices,” observing that this is not a run-of-the-mill update:

“This provision is unusual for a few reasons, perhaps the least of which is that Apple TVs don’t make phone calls or send emails. As such, it’s unclear how Apple computes the device trust score for iTunes purchases made through Apple TVs, but there’s other potential ‘information about how you use your device’  that could be scraped and abstracted.”

The outlet continued:

“It’s equally unclear how recording and tracking the number of calls or emails traversing a user’s iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch would better enable Apple to verify a device’s identity than just checking its unique device identifier. Every one of these devices has both hardcoded serial numbers and advertising identifiers, while iPhones and cellular iPads also have SIM cards with other device-specific codes.”

In a statement to Venture Beat, Apple said: “[T]he only data it receives is the numeric score, which is computed on-device using the company’s standard privacy abstracting techniques, and retained only for a limited period, without any way to work backward from the score to user behavior.”

The company also said that “No calls, emails, or other abstractions of that data are shared with Apple.”

Apple has insisted it does not share private user data and has had a long, public battle with the FBI over its refusal to submit to demands they violate their encryption technology.

ALSO SEE: China Is Implementing a ‘Social Ranking System’ Straight out of the Netflix Hit Series Black Mirror 

Nevertheless, some social media users compared the concept of a “trust score” to an episode of the dystopian Netflix show Black Mirror. That episode details a society where people rank each other, generating scores that affect their ability to buy homes, use transport, and even engage with other individuals.

In real life, China has imposed a social credit score that has already restricted the ability of citizens to function, including banning travel. It can also be used to ban low-ranking people from using dating apps, attending schools, and luxury hotels.

While Apple’s new ranking system is far from anything that dystopian, its adoption is yet another sign of the ubiquitous technology and data analysis of consumers wielded by monolithic tech companies in modern life.

Creative Commons:  Anti-Media

China Is Implementing a ‘Social Ranking System’ Straight out of the Netflix Hit Series Black Mirror

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Passengers wait to board trains ahead of the Chinese Lunar New Year, at Nanjing Railway Station in Jiangsu province, China January 31, 2018. China Daily via REUTERS

China to bar people with bad ‘social credit’ from planes, trains

Have you watched the Netflix hit series called Black Mirror? (see video below)

In “Nosedive,” the first episode of Black Mirror’s third season, people rate each interaction they have. A lovely conversation would net both participants a 5, while a fight would result in 1s.

A person’s societal status, as well as related benefits like premium airline bookings and access to certain events and venues, revolves around one’s score. As the title suggests, the protagonist struggles in this type of system, especially if they have an unfortunate case of bad luck.

For those who are not aware of Big Brother’s grip on human affairs, this system is now becoming reality …in China…

And if you’re into conspiracy ….might Black Mirror be some sort of predictive programming for those of us living in the US???

Reuters reports:

China said it will begin applying its so-called social credit system to flights and trains and stop people who have committed misdeeds from taking such transport for up to a year.

People who would be put on the restricted lists included those found to have committed acts like spreading false information about terrorism and causing trouble on flights, as well as those who used expired tickets or smoked on trains, according to two statements issued on the National Development and Reform Commission’s website on Friday.

Those found to have committed financial wrongdoings, such as employers who failed to pay social insurance or people who have failed to pay fines, would also face these restrictions, said the statements which were dated March 2.

It added that the rules would come into effect on May 1.

The move is in line with President’s Xi Jinping’s plan to construct a social credit system based on the principle of “once untrustworthy, always restricted”, said one of the notices which was signed by eight ministries, including the country’s aviation regulator and the Supreme People’s Court.

READ MORE: Slaughterbots: They Cannot Be Stopped (WATCH) 

China has flagged plans to roll out a system that will allow government bodies to share information on its citizens’ trustworthiness and issue penalties based on a so-called social credit score.

However, there are signs that the use of social credit scoring on domestic transport could have started years ago. In early 2017, the country’s Supreme People’s Court said during a press conference that 6.15 million Chinese citizens had been banned from taking flights for social misdeeds.

WATCH THIS VIDEO: Black Mirror’s S03E01 called ‘Nosedive” Airport scene

MIT students told to watch “Black Mirror” episodes as part of their studies to learn about the unintended consequences of technology

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NEWSTARGET| The critically acclaimed TV-show-turned-Netflix series Black Mirror has been on a roll for pretty much the entirety of its six-season-long run. Despite its typically shocking storylines and twists — which prompt viewers to stop watching after every episode to contemplate what they just saw — it is almost universally loved and always near the top of most must-watch lists on the internet.

It has garnered so much attention, in fact, that a top professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Media Lab has gone so far as to require her students to watch all of its episodes as part of their curriculum. With the MIT Media Labs’ history of being an “outside of the box” kind of institution, this should be no surprise. But there’s no denying that requiring students to watch a specific TV show as part of their lessons is quite far from the norm.

According to Pattie Maes, the founder and director of the Fluid Interfaces research group at the MIT Media Lab, her purpose in making the students watch the show Black Mirror is to instill in them a sense of awareness of what vile and despicable things might be possible if technology is driven to advance in the wrong direction.

“I just think that as designers of computer technologies that will get into the hands of 2.5 billion people, that anyone who was involved in designing new services and new interfaces should really think carefully about what the impact the technologies they develop will have on society and on people’s lives,” she said.

Maes may not be the first person to recognize that Black Mirror is basically a negative version of how things can go wrong with technology, but she’s certainly the first to make a lesson plan out of it. In her view, it can be useful for all of her students — or anyone involved in the development of new digital services and systems — to watch the show and see the things that happen in it as what should be avoided. The main idea behind the professor’s plan then is simply to expose the students to possible scenarios that they absolutely must keep in mind as they work on developing next-generation technology in their future startups and companies.

Maes herself has plenty of experience in the fields of artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and cognitive augmentation. So many of the show’s most popular episodes have resonated with her, and in her view, it is in the best interest of the students to watch all of these episodes themselves.

“I think the typical engineering education should include more types of activities and courses that teach students to think about why and whether they want to build something,” explained Maes. She points out to Facebook as the quintessential example of a service that was built by a lot of engineers. “I think they made a lot of mistakes and didn’t think enough about all sorts of consequences of choices they made in how they implement things,” she said.

Since she has incorporated the show into the student curriculum, Maes now hopes that there will be a new generation of thoughtful engineers that will be able to harness the power of technology in more responsible ways than their predecessors. And of course, steer things in the right direction at the first sign of danger.

“We need people who design new systems that are more aligned with people’s real, true interests and goals,” Maes said. “We need people who will be changing the future for the better.”