the frog notices

[twoeleven]

Internet companies' growing ambitions spook 51 percent of Americans: Reuters/Ipsos poll

(Reuters) - The personal data gathering abilities of Google, Facebook and other tech companies has sparked growing unease among Americans, with a majority worried that Internet companies are encroaching too much upon their lives, a new poll showed.

Google and Facebook generally topped lists of Americans' concerns about the ability to track physical locations and monitor spending habits and personal communications, according to a poll conducted by Reuters/Ipsos from March 11 to March 26.

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But their grand ambitions are inciting concern, according to the poll of nearly 5,000 Americans. Of 4,781 respondents, 51 percent replied "yes" when asked if those three companies, plus Apple, Microsoft and Twitter, were pushing too far and expanding into too many areas of people's lives.

This poll measures accuracy using a credibility interval and is accurate to plus or minus 1.6 percentage points.

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i haven't found the poll itself, so i don't know what they specifically asked, nor what else they asked... but i didn't look very hard. regardless of the details, i don't expect people to change their habits yet. perhaps if a little birdy (or perhaps a wealthy civil-liberties group) were to buy a huge set of records for random individuals and let them know what personal information is available about them for a price, they might start kicking.

meanwhile, another frog is trying to overturn the pot... er, law: Lawsuit targets use of warrantless NSA wiretaps in criminal prosecutions
By Ken Dilanian
April 6, 2014, 5:55 p.m

WASHINGTON — When federal prosecutors charged Colorado resident Jamshid Muhtorov in 2012 with providing support to a terrorist organization in his native Uzbekistan, court records suggested the FBI had secretly tapped his phones and read his emails.

But it wasn't just the FBI. The Justice Department acknowledged in October that the National Security Agency had gathered evidence against Muhtorov under a 2008 law that authorizes foreign intelligence surveillance without warrants, much of it on the Internet. His lawyers have not been permitted to see the classified evidence.

In January, Muhtorov became the first defendant to challenge the constitutionality of that law, which allows the NSA to vacuum up phone and email conversations involving Americans as long as one end of the communication is abroad.

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this oughta be fun to watch. damn bill of rights gets in the way of perfectly good show trials!


OTOH, judge collyer is happy to let the government kill random people if they wave the magic "national security" wand. strange... i have this hazy memory that once upon a time in a distant kingdom, a bunch of wig-wearing fops drop-kicked the wicked king for "depriving [them...] of the benefits of trial by jury". apparently, that was just a dream.