Very few services are immune from this. I learned recently that Airbnb (YC W09) actually sells your chat logs[2] and stay history(!) to data brokers, which can be used for stalking or kidnapping in the wrong hands.
Coinbase (YC S12) is also one of the companies that sells your activity log (including IP addresses and timestamps, which amounts to a location tracklog) to a third party without your explicit consent (other than creating a Coinbase account).
1: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59vbp5/shady-data-brokers...
2: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/business/secret-consumer-...
What We Look for in Founders
4. Naughtiness
Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
I mean, if I had a friend who openly claimed to be 'naughty' in this way, I'd start being very cautious around them.
By not following those assumptions (rules) you can make a new better model which might have better accuracy at representative real world problem than the existing model.
It doesn't mean that it's unethical or morally wrong. It doesn't have to be.
I find it weird to say good founders should 'delight in breaking rules', as that is a really consumer tech biased (and frankly, privileged teenage male) point of view, where external stakes are relatively low.
That attitude can be pretty counterproductive in a lot of important industries. It may be necessary to break certain rules to achieve a larger common good, but to bias toward breaking them (rather than to see it as simply sometimes necessary) represents one of tech's worse qualities, and probably does a lot to filter out a lot of potential founders.
Also take issue with the idea that successful founders are 'usually good people'. At least in my experience most are in the chaotic neutral camp where they generally don't care much about externalities as long as they're not too bad or seriously affect them, and their ideas about 'changing the world' are generally indistinguishable from their own personal success.
That's a pretty big misrepresentation of the NY Times article. From the article:
> Sift doesn’t sell or share any of the data it has with third parties.
Sift is a third party risk analysis provider. One of its big selling points is that it can correlate fraud signals across multiple data sets. So, essentially, companies that DON'T want to share data with each other can share data with sift and rely on it to provide aggregate results back. In this way it's the opposite of a data broker. Companies trust it to hold sensitive data they don't want to share.
There are a lot of reasons why any centralized fraud prevention service is concerning and I know that many companies, including Airbnb, limit their use of these signals for that reason. Truthfully, I think the dangers of such a service far outweigh their value and it simply shouldn't exist at all.
Regardless, it's quite different than selling your data to a data broker. If there were any indication that Sift were selling or sharing this data I guarantee they would get dropped instantly. If you believe that a company can't really care about its users' privacy (and you might be justified in that) just consider that sharing this data would be the same as sharing it with the fraudsters it ostensibly tries to stop. That would defeat the entire point of the service.
To a sibling poster, the premise of the NYT article is that Sift allowed end users to download their own data because of GDPR not in violation of it.
There are often threads on here criticizing Airbnb for allowing fraud on the platform and saying they do nothing to prevent it. Here we're criticizing them for sharing data with a centralized fraud system to gain signal on potential fraud.
I think this is the crux of the discussion about the surveillance state vs "defund the police". Algorithmic fraud detection is a frequently racist invasion of privacy. But fraud and crime are also both bad and tend to have a more significant impact on a company's brand / reputation than overreaching in terms of data collection and surveillance. So it's very important to hold them accountable for their use of data but let's not muddy the argument by misrepresenting what's happening.
I don’t want my booking site disclosing my location to others who may use it to harm me, full stop. I have no idea what internal controls, if any, Sift or any other service provider has in place to screen their own staff or their own data handling procedures for safety. Even Equifax didn’t get this stuff right.
If I am telling a vendor where I sleep and when I am sleeping there, it is a huge breach of my privacy and safety for them to tell third parties without my explicit consent. This includes even relatively innocuous stuff, like database hosting. One disgruntled employee and a .torrent file later and many people’s lives or safety are put at risk.
I also wish Gene Hackman had become a CRISPR scientist, not an actor.
Some aggregator third-party add-on library integrated into other apps snarfing up data is a bit different and more concerning, though thankfully it's the specific sort of thing GDPR and CCPA were designed against.
No. MobileWalla's statement in the article:
"African American males made up the majority of protesters in the four observed cities vs. females,” Mobilewalla claimed. “Men vs. women in Atlanta (61% vs. 39%), in Los Angeles (65% vs. 35%), in Minneapolis (54% vs. 46%) and in New York (59% vs. 41%). "
All it means is that among African American blacks, males were the majority.
The key is:
""African American males made up the majority of protesters in the four observed cities vs. females,”"
vs. females (when looking at male-female distribution in the African American pop of protesters, in those four cities the majority were men).
This is very clear. No idea what you are talking about.
A substantial majority of the protesters were white, in the cities where the data was gathered, with the highest percentage in Minneapolis (85%), followed by Los Angeles (78%), and Atlanta and New York (both at 76%). A total of 18% of the protesters were African American in Atlanta, 11% in Minneapolis, 13% in New York and 3% in Los Angeles. Those numbers remained steady during the nighttime hours. Hispanic and Asian American participation was less than 10% in all four cities.
https://www.mobilewalla.com/about/press/new-report-reveals-d...
https://www.mobilewalla.com/about/press/new-report-reveals-d...
Again, nothing you say here can be found at the URL you provided. In fact the words "male", "female" and even "%" do not exist at that URL.
>"Ethnicity Distribution: A substantial majority of the protesters were white, in the cities where the data was gathered, with the highest percentage in Minneapolis (85%), followed by Los Angeles (78%), and Atlanta and New York (both at 76%). A total of 18% of the protesters were African American in Atlanta, 11% in Minneapolis, 13% in New York and 3% in Los Angeles. Those numbers remained steady during the nighttime hours. Hispanic and Asian American participation was less than 10% in all four cities.
Male vs. Female During the daytime hours, the majority of Black Lives Matter protesters were male in Atlanta (58%), Minneapolis (56%) and New York (62%). However, in Los Angeles, the greatest number of protesters during daytime were women. At nighttime, the percentage of male protesters increased in all four cities.
African American Males vs. Females African American males made up the majority of protesters in the four observed cities vs. females. Men vs. women in Atlanta (61% vs. 39%), in Los Angeles (65% vs. 35%), in Minneapolis (54% vs. 46%) and in New York (59% vs. 41%). There was no statistical change for the nighttime hours.
How Old Were the Protesters? The overall age of the protesters in all four cities skewed heavily in the 18-34 age ranging from 66% in New York and L.A., 67% in Minneapolis to 69% in Atlanta. Protesters in the 55+ age group ranked second ranging from 24% in New York, 23% in Atlanta and Minneapolis to 20% in Los Angeles."
I think the source is a little bit clearer.
https://www.mobilewalla.com/about/press/new-report-reveals-d...
https://www.mobilewalla.com/about/press/new-report-reveals-d...
has no data and no clarification.
I don't know what's up with their website. The link redirect to a page about covid-19 as of now (https://www.mobilewalla.com/blog/fighting-covid-19-with-loca...
Same: no data and no clarification at that URL.
Bing cache: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=https%3a%2f%2fwww.mobilewa...
https://f.hubspotusercontent40.net/hubfs/4309344/MW%20Protes...
The protests appear to have been all been majority (70%+) white, assuming we believe this report. This seems to indicate that some of the wording they used in the text is incredibly confusing.
The data is aggregate data. It shows mostly males, in the 18-34 age bracket, mostly white.
The CEO whose surname is Datta. Quite appropos.