Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 84
May 5, 2018
Russians hack home internet connections — here’s how to protect yourself
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
In late April, the top federal cybersecurity agency, US-CERT, announced that Russian hackers had attacked internet-connected devices throughout the U.S., including network routers in private homes. Most people set them up — or had their internet service provider set them up — and haven’t thought much about them since. But it’s the gateway to the internet for every device on your home network, including Wi-Fi connected ones. That makes it a potential target for anyone who wants to attack you, or, more likely, use your internet connection to attack someone else.
As graduate students and faculty doing research in cybersecurity, we know that hackers can take control of many routers, because manufacturers haven’t set them up securely. Router administrative passwords often are preset at the factory to default values that are widely known, like “admin” or “password.” By scanning the internet for older routers and guessing their passwords with specialized software, hackers can take control of routers and other devices. Then they can install malicious programs or modify the existing software running the device.
Once an attacker takes control
There’s a wide range of damage that a hacker can do once your router has been hijacked. Even though most people browse the web using securely encrypted communications, the directions themselves that let one computer connect to another are often not secure. When you want to connect to, say, theconversation.com, your computer sends a request to a domain name server — a sort of internet traffic director — for instructions on how to connect to that website. That request goes to the router, which either responds directly or passes it to another domain name server outside your home. That request, and the response, are not usually encrypted.
A hacker could take advantage of that and intercept your computer’s request, to track the sites you visit. An attacker could also attempt to alter the reply, redirecting your computer to a fake website designed to steal your login information or even gain access to your financial data, online photos, videos, chats and browsing history.
In addition, a hacker can use your router and other internet devices in your home to send out large amounts of nuisance internet traffic as part of what are called distributed denial of service attacks, like the October 2016 attack that affected major internet sites like Quora, Twitter, Netflix and Visa.
Has your router been hacked?
An expert with complex technical tools may be able to discover whether your router has been hacked, but it’s not something a regular person is likely to be able to figure out. Fortunately, you don’t need to know that to kick out unauthorized users and make your network safe.
The first step is to try to connect to your home router. If you bought the router, check the manual for the web address to enter into your browser and the default login and password information. If your internet provider supplied the router, contact their support department to find out what to do.
If you’re not able to login, then consider resetting your router — though be sure to check with your internet provider to find out any settings you’ll need to configure to reconnect after you reset it. When your reset router restarts, connect to it and set a strong administrative password. The next step US-CERT suggests is to disable older types of internet communications, protocols like telnet, SNMP, TFTP and SMI that are often unencrypted or have other security flaws. Your router’s manual or online instructions should detail how to do that.
After securing your router, it’s important to keep it protected. Hackers are very persistent and are always looking to find more flaws in routers and other systems. Hardware manufacturers know this and regularly issue updates to plug security holes. So you should check regularly and install any updates that come out. Some manufacturers have smartphone apps that can manage their routers, which can make updating easier, or even automate the process.
Sandeep Nair Narayanan, Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Anupam Joshi, Oros Family Professor and Chair, Department of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Sudip Mittal, Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Facing death, with the whitest teeth
Getty/Salon
Living as close as I am to death, I had not expected to be focused on keeping my teeth their whitest. Having been diagnosed with stage IV prostate cancer, my disease has transformed to small cell, a rare form of cancer with few effective treatments. I did take a second treatment of chemotherapy targeted directly at the small cell cancer. It worked, for a while. The chemo beat back the cancer that had grown from my prostate and bones to my liver and lungs. Within a couple of months of completing the treatment, though, the cancer returned to my liver and is now headed back to my lungs.
With hope, I’m presently waiting to learn if I qualify for a stage I small cell clinical trial. Administered by one of the three or four oncologists in the country whose research focuses on prostate-based small cell cancer, the trial has produced positive results, including some with “durability,” a new key word for me. Meanwhile, I start each day knowing my doctor has an impressive research lab devoted to next-generation treatments for my disease. Like so many advanced cancer patients today, my life is closely linked to the speed and creativity of medical science.
In the meantime I’ve been waiting weeks to hear if I’ll be accepted into the clinical trial. It’s now, I believe, a matter of days. It’s fair to say this time has been the most unusual of my 58 years. I’m in mortal limbo.
But there’s something else: what feels like a profound reorientation with the content of time and the heavy repetitiveness of it while I await word on the clinical trial. With such a hard wall before me, I feel a pronounced personal emptiness about what happens between now and then. My conscious hours are marked by a certain stillness in time. Not that time isn’t moving at all. It’s without variance. My days have a striking constant uniformity.
What flows from this cognitive condition is a surprising sense of empowerment within the small world around me. The unchanging content of time provides an opportunity to act in a peculiarly deliberate manner, to behave with an exactitude that presents a heightened promise of cause and effect. I’m not describing a new feeling or idea. Eastern and Western religion and philosophy have long contemplated repetition. It’s Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return: “avail thyself of this happy hour and of the stillness around us.” Power, freedom, and even perfection may follow.
American culture’s most important contribution to understanding the recurrence phenomenon is the 1993 film “Groundhog Day,” in which Bill Murray’s Phil, a Pittsburg TV weatherman, gets stuck in a single-day time loop in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, a place for which he has utter contempt. Waking each morning to Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” Murray soon discovers that his actions have no consequences. Binge drinking, one-night stands, and joy riding ending in fire and destruction only bring the beginning of the exact same day. Suicide doesn’t end the loop.
Realizing he’s in a kind of purgatory, Murray concentrates on intense self-improvement. With his countless days of time, he learns to speak French, sculpt ice, and play the piano.
He then turns outward. Armed with perfect knowledge of what happens during one day in Punxsutawney, Murray saves people from serious accidents. Every personal encounter and conversation throughout the day is as close and complete as possible. By movie’s end, Murray has studied, befriended and embraced virtually everyone in the small town. And with that, his Groundhog Day time loop is broken. Murray has become a good man. Humility may be his defining virtue.
My day is not unlike Murray’s in the first part of the film. He was physically manic in finding the parameters of his sentence and the few limits of his freedom. My efforts, by contrast, have largely taken place in my interior life. I don’t think anyone knows that I’m pursuing perfection. But an exuberance of opportunity is there. Amidst the still, one finds openings, little tears in time, points where concentration, purpose and will might make a difference.
Small objects of my perfection are changing continually. A few months ago it was a perfectly clean stick at chemo infusion. Today, perfect personal hygiene may have its place, but creature comfort is a lot more fun. Bone-in ribeye, new potatoes in butter and parsley, seared broccolini with garlic.
With my gift of recurrence, though, am I not obligated to aim higher? Shouldn’t my actions make others aware of the perfection I seek? Why should it remain personal and private?
In Punxsutawney, Murray uses his time loop to perfect a full humanitarian sensibility, one replete with moral responsibility to act on the townspeople’s individual longings and community shortcomings that he’s come to know so well. It’s a tall order. And it took him a very long time. The metaphysical premise of “Groundhog Day” allows for a millennium of single days for Murray to grow his democratic fellow feeling and to figure out how to ameliorate the want he sees around him.
A new realm of perfection for me is keen patience for almost anyone or anything that is not word of my clinical trial. Smile, look inside the moment, imagine the disconnected vagaries that make up this unnecessary stretch in time, let it pass easily, continue smiling.
I’m not so sure my two children notice my perfect patience. Or my wife. We’re caught up in learning how to talk and feel about my dying. We’re all far from perfection here. A work that will always be in progress until it isn’t, constructing occasions for sitting down and finding the meaning and implications of my disease is beyond us. Routine updates about my condition and treatments, finding spontaneous moments to drop pragmatically into what the future will likely bring, marking off time to do our favorite things together, and remaining imperfectly patient are the best we have done so far.
Dying is an intensely social experience. Close family and friends’ love and support have been my core post-diagnosis experience. It’s been a pinnacle of my whole life. There’s something close to perfection in such caring’s accumulative emotional effect, an oceanic feeling of collective concern from near and far -- the love that comes from what Quakers call being held in the light.
As for my part in personal encounters with loved ones, friends and colleagues, there is little perfection. Attention to basic integrity and individual autonomy often predominate. The seeping sense of tragedy and despair, the recurring re-registration of shock at the original diagnosis and current decline, the gross calculus of the likely lost living and fun with my people: I can usually hold these cornerstones of my self at bay at parties and in personal conversations. What turns me to the door is the bright line between being subject to death in this immediate way and my interlocutor, family member, friend, or colleague who is not.
I usually stay in conversation and try to listen intently. Patience is required. But that line of mortality between the two of us makes for rather lively play in perspective. Few occasions yield more empathic effort. And with perfection in mind, I imagine us both nearing Murray’s humanitarian sensibility.
My main project now is perfection in hoping. Another tall order, it’s split by real promise in revolutionary treatments and the constant weakness and imperfection of the flesh. I am told that balance can be found between hope and hopelessness, a subject position between ungainful optimism for curing advanced cancer and creating comfort and dignity in death itself. I’m hoping for the best.
Using behavioral science to build an exercise habit
Dirima via Shutterstock
This article was originally published by Scientific American.
Spring has finally sprung, which means bathing suit season is just around the corner. That ominous thought will lead many Americans to start a workout routine in the coming weeks, but having great abs at the beach isn’t the most important reason to exercise. Too little exercise is responsible for 9% of premature deaths worldwide, and we know that physical activity improves mental health as well as reducing the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. In spite of that, less than half of Americans exercise as much as they should.
So what’s the problem? It’s the same challenge that stands in the way of attaining most goals: a combination of forgetfulness, procrastination, and limited motivation. Thankfully, the field of behavioral science has solutions to offer.
1. Make it social
Scheduling workouts with other people has many scientifically-proven benefits. Finding a workout buddy ensures you’ll be held accountable for skipping a visit. It also makes exercise more fun (assuming you pick a buddy you like), and builds on the fact that we like to do the same things we see our friends doing. The next time you want to kick-start an exercise routine, find a workout buddy to help.
2. Pick the right day for a fresh start
Our motivation to tackle new things naturally ebbs and flows. Some days feel particularly well-suited to new beginnings because they signal to us that change is in the air. These are dates like the start of a new year, a new season, or even a new week. Birthdays also boost fresh start feelings and can be a great time to initiate a new routine. Pick a date that feels like a fresh start to you, and use it to motivate the launch of a new a workout habit.
3. Set a tough goal with wiggle room
Goals are highly motivating. Research indicates that many marathon runners use goals to improve their performance. If you look at the finishing times for millions of marathon runners, they pile up before round numbers like 4 hours and 5 hours. This suggests runners aim for these round number race times and then manage their performance to ensure they finish on track. The most useful goals are tough to achieve but not impossible. Recent research suggests setting ambitious goals with some wiggle room is particularly valuable. For instance, give yourself a “free pass” if you, say, miss one or two days of exercise one week when aiming to work out daily. You can create workout goals that are ambitious, but be sure to let yourself off the hook if you occasionally fall just shy of them.
4. Keep trying for at least a month
Research has shown that rewarding people with small sums of cash every time they visit the gym for a month can lead to a lasting exercise routine. Since only a month of repetition is needed to build lasting habits, be sure that when you try jumpstarting a workout routine, you keep at it intensively for at least 28 days. That should be long enough to generate lasting change.
5. Step up
If acting on the above tips sounds hard, a team has come together to make things easier: nearly fifty of the most talented minds in economics, psychology, computer science, neuroscience and medicine, including multiple Nobel laureates, members of the National Academies of Sciences, MacArthur “genius” award winners, best-selling authors, and TED speakers. We’ve built a free, non-profit, 28-day online program that only takes a few minutes of commitment each week to kick-start an exercise habit. It’s called the StepUp Program and exists thanks to the University of Pennsylvania.
The program is science in action — it’s packed with the best ideas about how to promote exercise from behavioral scientists, and we’re testing fifty-seven different variants of these best practices to figure out what most effectively helps people establish a workout habit at 24 Hour Fitness gyms around the country. When we’re done crunching the numbers on the ingredients that yield the most benefit to StepUp Program participants, we’ll share our recipe for creating a lasting habits with the world. Register at 24go.co/stepup, and then, stay tuned!
John McCain “concerned about the state of the country,” Joe Biden says
AP/Patrick Semansky
Former Vice President Joe Biden, who served from 2009 to 2017, spent time with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., at his Arizona ranch recently where he’s been battling brain cancer. In a somber interview with the New York Times published on Saturday, Biden emphasized McCain’s concerns regarding the state of America.
“Here John knows he’s in a very, very, very precarious situation, and yet he’s still concerned about the state of the country,” Biden said. “We talked about how our international reputation is being damaged and we talked about the need for people to stand up and speak out.”
The Republican reportedly continued to encourage Biden to stay in politics.
According to the interview:
“The Republican senator encouraged the former Democratic vice president to “not walk away” from politics, as Mr. Biden put it before refusing to discuss a possible 2020 presidential run. Mr. McCain is using a new book and documentary to reveal his regret about not selecting former Senator Joseph I. Lieberman as his running mate in 2008. “
Their bipartisan relationship is indeed significant in the age of Trump, one in which the country’s politics have become even very divisive. In another interesting part of the report, it was revealed that the White House has reportedly been told that Vice President Mike Pence is allowed to attend McCain’s funeral—whose funeral service is allegedly expected to be held in Washington’s National Cathedral—but President Donald Trump is not, according to the New York Times.
In the interview, Biden stressed their friendship.
“I wanted to let him [McCain] know how much I love him and how much he matters to me and how much I admire his integrity and his courage,” Biden said in the interview. “I wanted to see my friend.”
McCain was diagnosed with cancer last summer and was reportedly given a poor prognosis.
Despite his ailing health, McCain has spoken out on multiple occasions against Trump voicing his concerns for the country and GOP. In April, he released a statement criticizing Trump’s strike on Syria.
"President Trump last week signaled to the world that the United States would prematurely withdraw from Syria. Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian backers have heard him, and emboldened by American inaction, Assad has reportedly launched another chemical attack against innocent men, women and children, this time in Douma," McCain declared in a statement. "Initial accounts show dozens of innocent civilians, including children, have been targeted by this vicious bombardment designed to burn and choke the human body and leave victims writhing in unspeakable pain."
McCain also spoke up against Trump in August when he launched threats at Kim Jong-un on Twitter.
"I take exception to the President's comments because you gotta be able to do what you say you're gonna do...In other words, the old walk softly but carry a big stick, Teddy Roosevelt's saying, which I think is something that should've applied because all it's going to do is bring us closer to a serious confrontation," he said in a statement. "I think this is very, very, very serious…The great leaders I've seen don't threaten unless they're ready to act and I'm not sure President Trump is ready to act...It's the classic Trump in that he overstates things."
Phil Spector’s famous sound (and cruelty) drove The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson to wretched obsession
Getty/Bloomsbury Publishing/Salon
Excerpted from “The Beach Boys’ Smile” by Luis Sanchez (Bloomsbury, 2014). Reprinted with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing.
The drift of influence between Brian Wilson and Phil Spector was fraught with one-sided expectation and imbalance of respect. It played out to mortifying effect when Brian offered one of his own songs, “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister,” for the wall of sound treatment, pitching it as an arrangement for Darlene Love in the summer of 1964. Spector took the gesture as an opportunity to embarrass his eager admirer. At first he humored Brian by taking the time to record an instrumental backing track for the song, even coolly inviting him to participate in a recording session for it. Brian was somewhat taken aback by Spector’s acknowledgment, but he agreed to play piano for a number of takes, nervously, expectantly, before Spector cut him off abruptly and sent him on his way, thanks very much. Later, he told Brian that his piano playing just maybe wasn’t up to snuff and he had no plans to ever finish the record, so don’t ask. An official American Federation of Musicians paycheck was drawn and sent to Brian for the exact time he put into the session. If such a slight even fazed Brian, he didn’t acknowledge it publicly, and “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” eventually wound up on The Beach Boys’ "Today!" album, sung from the perspective of a protective older brother.
Spector and Wilson each shared a strong sense of how to make good pop music, but their creative dispositions were like the inverse images of each other. Where one had a natural talent for singing, songwriting, arranging, the other was neither a natural performer nor a consistently strong enough composer to write autonomously. Where one shied away from the assertiveness of business proprietorship, the other embodied it with style.
The force of Spector’s studio craft can be heard in the way it subsumes the materials of its process. For all of its magnificent impact, the music he envisioned, committed to tape and put out into the world, is possessed of self-aggrandizement, where a density of sound is dominated by the force of personality. A record like the 1963’s “Be My Baby” is practically impenetrable. The double boom, boom-boom, thwack! drum pattern that bursts the song open sounds like thick slabs of concrete stacking together, setting up a chamber with an opening just big enough for The Ronettes to sing from. Veronica Bennett pleads with such conviction and it seems like it has enough power to devastate Spector’s wall. But the architecture the song erects is too constrictive. As hard as Bennett’s wail pushes, it always echoes back on to itself; and when the music was no longer enough to keep it contained, Spector eventually made the song a grim fact, turning his marriage to Bennett into her real-life prison well into the 1970s.
Of all of Spector’s work, “Be My Baby” etched itself the deepest into Brian’s mind. In its own way, this recording is a gaping enigma in the story of Brian’s journey as an artist. Throughout the years, it comes up again and again in interviews and biographies, variably calling up themes of deep admiration, a source of consolation, and a baleful haunting of the spirit. Author David Dalton tells a particularly evocative story about spending time at Brian and then-wife Marilyn’s Bel Air home in the late ’60s aftermath of "Smile." While the couple is away, he discovers a box of tapes inside their bedroom one day. “I assumed they were studio demos or reference tracks and threw one on the tape machine. It was the strangest thing,” he wrote. “All the tapes were of Brian talking into a tape recorder. Hour after hour of stoned ramblings on the meaning of life, color vibrations, fate, death, vegetarianism and Phil Spector.” Dalton sketches Brian’s preoccupation with “Be My Baby” in terms of a spiritual seeker assiduously attempting to penetrate the mysteries of an occulted object. Brian kept copies of the song available everywhere inside his home, in his car, at the studio, for constant immersive listening. The final result of the story and the variations of it that accumulate from an array of biographies and documentaries is an image of wretchedness: Brian locked in the bedroom of his Bel Air house in the early ’70s, alone, curtains drawn shut, catatonic, listening to “Be My Baby” over and over at aggressive volumes, for hours, as the rest of The Beach Boys record something in the home studio downstairs.
The woeful irony here is that years before Brian retreated impetuously to the safety of a real or manufactured catatonia, he not only mastered the keyed-up instrument combinations and high-stakes Wagnerian sensation of Spector’s sensibility, but he also worked out a way to breach its ferocity. While putting together material for The Beach Boys’ spring 1964 album, the stupidly titled "Shut Down Vol. 2," Brian wrote “Don’t Worry Baby,” a song that he hoped would convince Spector after “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister” failed to. For Brian, the allure and power of creative proprietorship never compelled him the way it compelled Spector; the satisfaction of having one of Spector’s girl groups be the voice of one his songs was in itself more than enough of a reason to pursue collaboration. Fortunately or not, Spector never expressed an interest and Brian recorded “Don’t Worry Baby” with The Beach Boys and released it as the B-side on the single for “I Get Around.” Despite the title’s obvious reference to “By My Baby,” the overall effect of The Beach Boys record is radically different from anything Spector could have achieved with it.
On the surface, “Don’t Worry Baby” is a reiteration of the hot rod idea, but in tone and atmosphere it works against its lyrical narrative. It tells a thin story about a guy so convinced by his own braggadocio that it leads him and his car crew to an inevitable face-off with their own potential death. It’s not the particulars of the drag strip that matter here, but that the guy confesses his fear to his girlfriend, who quiets his mind with a simple phrase. Sung by Brian in an aching falsetto, the refrain “don’t worry baby” ripples so supremely that it easily capsizes the monolithic record that inspired it, defusing Spector’s claustrophobia, and resolving the problem of how to achieve dimension within the anatomy of the monaural single. “The word pictures for ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ never quite jelled beyond the force of their prayerfulness, but Brian sang them with celestial zeal,” wrote rock biographer Timothy White. I like this description, but I’m not sure the qualification White makes is necessary. The song was co-written by Brian’s then-hot rod collaborator/lyricist Roger Christian, and it’s a prime example of the way the best Beach Boys records use simple words and phrases to sensational vocal effect. The brilliance of “Don’t Worry Baby” isn’t that it advances a narrative about hot rod racing but that it transforms it into a revelatory set piece about the emotional volatility of the teenage male. It also represents the moment when Brian publicly matched Spector for commitment of feeling within the framework of the teen pop single and raised the stakes for what both of them would achieve with one of pop’s most persistent clichés.
As genetic testing for breast cancer gene mutation expands, questions arise about treatment
Getty/sturti
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
The Food and Drug Administration recently announced its authorization that permits genetics testing company 23andMe to market a test for gene mutations associated with risk of breast and ovarian cancer.
In response, 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki asserted that the test represents a “major milestone in consumer health empowerment.”
Media articles following this announcement made it clear even if the test provides an accurate result, there are significant limitations for 23andMe’s version of the test about which consumers should be aware. Notably, 23andMe discloses that the test only provides information on three genetic variants found on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes known to be associated with a higher risk for breast, ovarian and prostate cancer in people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.
According to the FDA, most mutations that would increase an individual’s risk are not detected by the test, including mutations that may occur in other patient populations.
As a health law professor and bioethicist, here are some things I think that patients should know about genetic tests and how to think about risk.
A bit about assessing risk
Research shows that women overestimate their risk of cancer and overestimate the potential of dying of cancer. This anxiety may prompt women to seek aggressive interventions even when they do not have cancer. In one study, 32.9 percent of women without a BRCA mutation who received a false positive (indicated they had cancer when in fact they did not) on a screening test for ovarian cancer and had no ovarian cancer opted for surgical removal of their ovaries, or an oophorectomy.
It is imperative to address this anxiety and situate what a cancer risk means for patients.
For starters, it is important to know that the chance of having a BRCA mutation is exceedingly rare, with only about 0.2 percent of population affected. Put another way, in a room of 500 women, only 1 would have a BRCA mutation that increases her baseline risk of breast and ovarian cancer. But even this woman with a BRCA mutation may never develop breast or ovarian cancer during her lifetime. In fact, 90 to 95 percent of most cancer diagnoses can be attributed to environmental and lifestyle factors, not an inherited faulty gene.
According to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, up to one-third of cancer-related deaths are due to obesity and sedentary lifestyle. “Exercise is one of the most important actions you can take to help guard against many types of cancer,” experts at Fred Hutchinson say. A trial published in JAMA Internal Medicine confirmed the strength of dietary modification to drastically reduce risk of breast cancer. This information should be empowering. Many patients have much more control over certain – but not all – risks than they may have thought.
These discussions raise broader questions about how we treat patients regardless of whether they have an increased risk of cancer based on genetic testing or fall into a high risk category based on family history. For patients to make meaningful health decisions, they must have accurate information that includes understanding the risks and benefits of each choice.
Implications for overtreatment
Overtreatment that stems from anxiety not only leads to unnecessary and potentially harmful interventions for the patient, but it implicates physician liability. Traditionally, oncologists may favor an aggressive approach, offering and recommending interventions as a means to avoid malpractice litigation arising from patient perception that a physician could have intervened sooner. Aggressive treatment prompted by a patient’s anxiety requires further scrutiny specifically because each preventive intervention entails serious risks.
To note, 23andMe does caution that its test results should not be used on their own to make medical decisions. Women who test either positive or negative should still follow up with their physicians, both 23andMe and the FDA say.
If a woman has a BRCA mutation that increases her risk of cancer, the physician would likely recommend a risk-reducing measure recommended by the National Cancer Institute: chemoprevention, preventive mastectomy with reconstruction, and surgical removal of ovaries and fallopian tubes, called salpingo-oophorectomy.
In the majority of cases, women who undergo mastectomy also opt for implant reconstruction, and women who undergo salpingo-oophorectomy begin taking synthetic hormone replacement therapy.
In my research, I’ve read countless clinical practice guidelines, FDA meeting minutes, congressional hearing transcripts, and case law.
Here’s what I’ve learned: The potential for cancer risk reduction is only the first part of the equation. Yes, these interventions recommended by the National Cancer Institute do reduce risk for breast and ovarian cancer. But they also increase risk of other potentially debilitating or deadly conditions.
Many physicians agree the trade-off of reducing risk of cancer is worth it. But some physicians and patients may not be aware that physicians and clinical practice guidelines may downplay, omit or dismiss risks entirely in a manner that does not necessarily correspond to scientific evidence, but may be informed by financial conflicts of interest.
Health empowerment requires a much broader conversation of what patients — both with and without a BRCA mutation – can do about their risk of cancer. On a population level, I believe everyone should have information on how to reduce cancer risk through diet and lifestyle interventions. Let’s continue the conversation of how to address patient anxiety to prevent needless overtreatment, aim for communication that accurately portrays what risks mean, and determine whether recommended interventions that pose significant risks offer sufficient clinical benefits.
Katherine Drabiak, Assistant Professor of Bioethics and Genomics, University of South Florida
Donald Trump cozies up to the NRA at annual conference
Getty/Win McNamee
On the heels of a week of unraveling, President Donald Trump capped it off by recommitting his loyalty to the National Rifle Association. Indeed, he paid a visit to the gun lobby’s annual conference on Friday, for the fourth consecutive year in a row. The visit marked his first remarks to the NRA since the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in February which killed 17 people and spurred a national movement demanding tighter gun control laws in America.
"Thanks to your activism and dedication, you have an administration fighting to protect your Second Amendment and we will protect your Second Amendment," he said on Friday. "Your Second Amendment rights are under siege, but they will never ever be under siege as long as I am your president."
“We recognize a simple fact,” Trump added. “The one thing that has always stood between the American people’s Second Amendment right and those who want to take away those rights has been conservatives in Congress willing to fight for those rights. And we’re fighting. The Constitution cannot be changed by bureaucrats, judges, or the United Nations. That’s why we are appointing judges who will interpret the Constitution as it’s written.”
Trump’s agenda unsurprisingly appeared to be to gain support for the Midterm elections.
"Don't be complacent. Don't be complacent," Trump said. "History says that when you win the presidency, you get complacent. You know the feeling? Like 90 percent of the time you win the presidency and for whatever reason you lose the midterm. We can't let that happen. And the word is complacent."
Trump was under pressure after the February shooting, which has since been a source of inspiration for teens across the country to demand gun control reform, to rise to the occasion. However, he’s done little except cast blame on Democrats—and show less than half-hearted support for solutions such as raising the age limit for assault weapons purchases—only to quickly back away from his proposals.
Trump’s remarks didn’t go unnoticed by teen activists. Indeed, on Saturday morning, Parkland shooting survivor Cameron Kasky called President Donald Trump a "professional liar" after his speech.
"He's a professional liar who will say anything to appease whatever crowd he's at," Kasky, said on CNN. "If he's in front of families, he might say something in support of common sense gun reform. But then when he's at the NRA, he'll say something to get a big cheer."
Trump later tweeted a “thank you” message to the “patriots” of the NRA.
“I want to thank all of our friends and patriots at the @NRA. We will never fail, and we will always protect your Second Amendment! God Bless you, and God Bless America!” he said.
David Hogg, another Parkland shooting survivor and student activist, responded on Twitter.
“Thanks for showing us that your heart and wallet are in the same place—- not with the kids of Parkland,” he said.
Thanks for showing us that your heart and wallet are in the same place—- not with the kids of Parkland
— David Hogg (@davidhogg111) May 4, 2018
Liz Phair on “Girly-Sound,” what guys don’t get about “Exile in Guyville” & what changed after Trump
Elizabeth Weinberg
In the last 25 years, thousands of words have been spilled about the impact, importance and genius of Liz Phair's 1993 debut album, "Exile In Guyville." There's a good reason for that: Dusky guitar tones, intricate riffs and spare percussion buoy Phair's voice and words, creating vivid, confessional songs that examine not just the vagaries of relating and communicating but also the power that comes with carving out a space for yourself in the world.
On Friday (May 4), Matador Records released "Girly-Sound To Guyville: The 25th Anniversary," featuring a remastered version of "Exile In Guyville" and the complete set of "The Girly-Sound Tapes," the legendary demos that first brought Phair notoriety. Diving into these homespun tapes today is a satisfying exercise: The lo-fi approach lends itself well to intimate nostalgia and cutting melancholy, and the unselfconscious nature of Phair's songwriting still resonates deeply.
Phair called up Salon to reminisce about the past — specifically "Guyville" and "The Girly-Sound Tapes" — and also chat about the future: the record she's been working on with Ryan Adams, which is coming out this year.
The "Girly-Sound" tapes that were used for the reissue — were those yours? Or did someone else dig them up and have them lying around?
No, we had put out the call. It was kind of a big event. It was a six-to-eight-month event to find actual usable, magnetic tape cassettes that were the original ones. [Phair's friend] Tae Won Yu had the most impressive archival collection. I don't know if [musician] Chris Brokaw ever found his in a storage space, and then someone else got in touch that they had some. Somewhere between the multiple things that Matador found, they found the versions of all the songs, which is a miracle — a miracle, I tell you. We started to do the project before we even knew if we could find them. I certainly didn't have them.
I wondered about that. The third tape was circulating for years, and I think it was a different track listing, right? It wasn't even complete.
I'm not even sure. I knew there was more than one crisis point. [Laughs.] More than one, like, "Ahhh!" We didn't go so far as to put an all-points-bulletin out to anyone who might have them; I think we stayed within private channels. But it was not a no-brainer, and it certainly was nail-biting for part of the time.
When you went back and listened to the tapes, what kind of memories were dredged up for you?
There's the embarrassment of how young and silly some of it was. When I was learning how to play them all, I pitched them all over the place. What I mean is, I record the song, and then I speed up the tracks for the "Girly-Sound" [tape] so it would sound like a little tiny girl. That means when you're trying to perform them live, or re-learn what you're playing, I can't figure out some of the stuff that I'm playing, because it's not what you would actually hear on the fret of the guitar; it's actually sped up somewhere random. There's no actual number: "Oh, I sped up three dBs, so now the E is an A, or the D is a C." It's just completely random.
Basically, when I try to re-learn this material, I just take a capo and I stick it somewhere on the guitar and start strumming what I think I was playing and try to find a voice match. Every couple of days I say something from that movie, "Shakespeare in Love," where he says, "How's it all gonna work out?" And he's like, "I don't know! It's a mystery!"
I hear the playfulness of that early time. I did not think anyone would ever hear this stuff. This is stuff I did just for me. I might have come home drunk one night and wanted to cry into my guitar and write a song, or maybe I was sort of goofing around. They were so unselfconscious and so unprofessional. That is both a lovely thing and also just mortifying.
As a writer, there's some stuff I wrote when I was really young, and you just cringe and think "How can I bury this?" You don't have that luxury though, because people have built these tapes up into being this mythical totem.
I drag all my embarrassment along behind me forever. [Laughs.] I've been living the internet world for a lot longer than the internet was around.
That is very true. Was there anything surprising when you went back and listened to your younger self?
I was surprised with how political a lot of the lyrics were. Oberlin College was definitely a politically active campus, so it shouldn't have been a surprise, but it did surprise me how a lot of the issues I'm talking about are completely relevant, even now, 25-30 years later, if we're talking "Girly-Sound." It's troubling to think we're still about to get into a war; we're still talking about the Middle East; we're still talking about militarism and sexism.
That's why I think that "Guyville" and the "Girly-Sound" tapes really still resonate with people, because the material, for lack of a better word, hasn't aged. It's still really relevant. And that's really disheartening. It's good and it's bad.
It really is. We should have moved on, but we're not. I guess maybe that also speaks to the timeless themes I chose, without even meaning to. There's a thing about "Who am I, and why do these things keep happening to me?"
I know when you actually went to record "Exile In Guyville," you once said it was like collage work. I thought that was such an interesting way of putting it, and putting together an album — and I think that's a lot of the reason why the sound is so unique. Why else do you think it's so unique?
[Co-producer] Brad Wood was really good about letting the spirit of the demos live in the recording. I think he has a less-is-more approach. He also had a jazz background, so he had a different take on it than another producer would have had, so that my weird chords and odd melodies — which are, essentially self-taught. I don't know what I'm playing, I'm just making shapes with my fingers that sound good on the fret. He protected that, and he also didn't want to clutter it up with a bunch of stuff that didn't need to be there.
I can remember him very distinctly talking about, like, "I don't think this song needs a bass line." He was very protective of the kernel of what the "Girly-Sound" tapes were. I was just unselfconscious; I didn't know enough to be scared, and I didn't know enough not to do it that way. . . . They let the weirdness of me live.
In hindsight, that was the best decision anyone made.
I think he still thinks that, too. He feels good about how he approached that. I think his jazz background played a lot into that, because I have an unusual sensibility. I like dissonance here and there. He pulled out the threads that I was putting in and made them into something kind of beautiful.
That makes sense if he has a jazz background, as dissonance wasn't necessarily foreign to him. He could be like "OK, I can work with that."
He did know how to work with that. And he knew how to do it tastefully. Casey [Rice] brought the rock. They both would be really experimental. That was the one thing we wanted — we wanted to be experimental. We would try things just for fun, and it wasn't the way things were done, but they were equally enthusiastic about the do-it-yourself [spirit]. We made it work on no budget.
That's the coolest thing too, when you say you didn't know any better. There weren't expectations; there wasn't any pressure. It was like, we're just going to do this. That's such a special thing because you only get that once in your life, in a way.
Yeah, and I love those kind of things. It reminds me of "The Blair Witch [Project]." Especially in Hollywood, if you want to compete in a certain arena, you do need budgets, you do need a studio, you need production value. But as I try to teach my son, and I don't think he's quite caught on yet, you scale your production to whatever your resources are. There can be something brilliant done for nothing, but you just scale it. It's like a fractal.
That's a really interesting way of looking at it.
I want him to be able to tackle a creative project with whatever constraints he has, and be able to fit his mind to the parameters, not say it's not doable. I don't ever want to hear someone say they can't do it. It's like a telescope, the way it can keep expanding and contracting: Just expand or contract your expectations, but go use your soul, go use your sensibility, your taste and say something, in whatever allotted time or production budget you've got. I think they're all of equal value because really what you're trying to do is to communicate to people. The end result is, "Did you convey something? How do you communicate this? Was it effective? Did it reach them? Did it move them?" And that can be done at any scale.
"Guyville" certainly did — and "Guyville" still certainly does. Absolutely. What is the biggest misconception about the record that's floating around?
I don't know if it's a misconception, I think it has to do with people not being as able to understand how it relates to [The Rolling Stones'] "Exile on Main Street." That seems to be a real sticking point, and I'm gonna go as far as to say for men. They don't get it, and it's a very . . . I've taken to describe it as shipping. Do you know what shipping is?
Oh, yeah — like in fan fiction.
I'll say something, like, "For one song, if the Rolling Stones are singing about a girl in the song, I play the girl now, and I'm sort of writing a song from that point of view," right? I'm writing myself into their material. Or, on a different song of theirs, if [the Rolling Stones are] writing a song about some topic — I don't know, like, wanting a friend to pick himself up out of a bad place — I'll maybe write about my friend, picking himself [up].
I figured they were in a comparable music scene to my music scene. There were commonalities of where we were living at that point. I think for a lot of people, they're like, "Well, wait, did you always do it that you were the girl? Or did you always?" And I'm like, "It's art! I tried to make a bouquet. Sometimes I approached it this way, and sometimes I approached it this way, but I was engaging with the material at every turn." But they want something linear, they want to know that if there was a solo then you did a solo, or if there were these instruments, then you [used these instruments]. They're looking for something rigid and provable, and I don't know what to tell them. I'd hate to see the art they collect.
It's very true. They're looking for the A to B comparison, that it's direct. But it's like, "Well, no . . ."
Intuitive. Intuitive communication is what I'm doing. I'm doing it intuitively. I'm doing it in an artistic, poetic manner, but I 1000 percent was absolutely thinking back and forth to those songs. And if you put them up, I can tell you what I was doing, what I was thinking. Even now, and I have a very bad memory. They want quantifiable, reproducible results, in which case they should probably not get into art.
You are working on music with Ryan Adams too. What's the status of that? Is there a new record?
He's been super busy, I've been super busy, and we're just trying to book out the last week-and-a-half of work. We're very close to finished.
That's very exciting.
I'll tell you what. Our original idea has morphed dramatically. In the beginning, we were gonna do a double album of "The White Album." And it just, after Trump, it just, that's just not the seriousness. . . . A lot of the songs on "The White Album" are playful and jokey-ish, folky-ish. They've got Americana threading through that. We kind of stalled out for a minute there, because it just didn't feel like the right . . . is that weird? That the political climate changed my ability to do the project. The project kind of died, because it didn't speak to where our souls were, and we couldn't work on something that didn't speak to the gravity of what we were feeling every day. We had to change. We had to go through a couple iterations to find our way back to maybe, like, a tight ten [songs] or something that speaks to what we're feeling and what we need to put out. First time in my life the climate around — and it wasn't directly in my personal life — massively affected my ability to do art.
I feel like that's a very common theme. I've talked to a lot of artists over the last year or so, and it's a very odd, singular time, in the way that their art is being influenced. It almost feels disrespectful, not to be either addressing it or doing something. It feels frivolous.
That's exactly right. Frivolous is the right word. He f**ked up my project. It's fine, it's gonna be better. I mean, he f**ked with everything. [Laughs.]
What was the best part about working with Ryan Adams?
He is so charm city. Such a genius, musically. He can create a song out of thin air in front of you that's brilliant and funny. He loves the Liz Phair that people ought to love, so he's a really good quality control bullshit [detector] like, if I am being too clever, or whatever it is. What speaks to his soul about my music is the same thing that I would want . . . that's what speaks to my soul. He is right on target for what is best about me, I guess. That's a pretty big compliment for a producer.
It sounds like he's looking at you as an artist, who you are, and not what people want you to be, or think you are, or something like that.
Yeah. I'm very confident if he flags it as excellent, then it is. And if he flags it as sub-par, it is. I don't always agree — sometimes I'll come back if it's important to me — but I'm speaking at a very high level of understanding between us, which is nice. The rapport is good. He has a different way of working, which is unusual and new for me, but it's valuable.
How to wrestle your data from data brokers, Silicon Valley — and Cambridge Analytica
Getty/Rawpixel
This article originally appeared on ProPublica.
Cambridge Analytica thinks that I’m a “Very Unlikely Republican.” Another political data firm, ALC Digital, has concluded I’m a “Socially Conservative,” Republican, “Boomer Voter.” In fact, I’m a 27-year-old millennial with no set party allegiance.
For all the fanfare, the burgeoning field of mining our personal data remains an inexact art.
One thing is certain: My personal data, and likely yours, is in more hands than ever. Tech firms, data brokers and political consultants build profiles of what they know — or think they can reasonably guess — about your purchasing habits, personality, hobbies and even what political issues you care about.
You can find out what those companies know about you but be prepared to be stubborn. Very stubborn. To demonstrate how this works, we’ve chosen a couple of representative companies from three major categories: data brokers, big tech firms and political data consultants.
Few of them make it easy. Some will show you on their websites, others will make you ask for your digital profile via the U.S. mail. And then there’s Cambridge Analytica, the controversial Trump campaign vendor that has come under intense fire in light of a report in the British newspaper The Observer and in The New York Times that the company used improperly obtained data from Facebook to help build voter profiles.
To find out what the chaps at the British data firm have on you, you’re going to need both stamps and a “cheque.”
Once you see your data, you’ll have a much better understanding of how this shadowy corner of the new economy works. You’ll see what seemingly personal information they know about you . . . and you’ll probably have some hypotheses about where this data is coming from. You’ll also probably see some predictions about who you are that are hilariously wrong.
And if you do obtain your data from any of these companies, please let us know your thoughts at politicaldata@propublica.org. We won’t share or publish what you say (unless you tell us that’s it’s OK).
Cambridge Analytica and other political consultants
Making statistically informed guesses about Americans’ political beliefs and pet issues is a common business these days, with dozens of firms selling data to candidates and issue groups about the purported leanings of individual American voters.
Few of these firms have to give your data. But Cambridge Analytica is required to do so by an obscure European rule.
Cambridge Analytica:
Around the time of the 2016 election, Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Belgian mathematician and founder of a website that helps people exercise their data protection rights called PersonalData.IO, approached me with an idea for a story. He flagged some of Cambridge Analytica’s claims about the power of its “psychographic” targeting capabilities and suggested that I demand my data from them.
So I sent off a request, following Dehaye’s coaching, and citing the UK Data Protection Act 1998, the British implementation of a little-known European Union data-protection law that grants individuals (even Americans) the rights to see the data Europeans companies compile about individuals.
It worked. I got back a spreadsheet of data about me. But it took months, cost ten pounds — and I had to give them a photo ID and two utility bills. Presumably they didn’t want my personal data falling into the wrong hands.
How you can request your data from Cambridge Analytica:
Visit Cambridge Analytica’s website here and fill out this web form.
After you submit the form, the page will immediately request that you email to data.compliance@cambridgeanalytica.org a photo ID and two copies of your utility bills or bank statements, to prove your identity. This page will also include the company’s bank account details.
Find a way to send them 10 GBP. You can try wiring this from your bank, though it may cost you an additional $25 or so — or ask a friend in the UK to go to their bank and get a cashier’s check. Your American bank probably won’t let you write a GBP-denominated check. Two services I tried, Xoom and TransferWise, weren’t able to do it.
Eventually, Cambridge Analytica will email you a small Excel spreadsheet of information and a letter. You might have to wait a few weeks. Celeste LeCompte, ProPublica’s vice president of business development, requested her data on March 27 and still hasn’t received it.
Because the company is based in the United Kingdom, it had no choice but to fulfill my request. In recent weeks, the firm has come under intense fire after The New York Times and the British paper The Observer disclosed that it had used improperly obtained data from Facebook to build profiles of American voters. Facebook told me that data about me was likely transmitted to Cambridge Analytica because a person with whom I am “friends” on the social network had taken the now-infamous “This Is Your Digital Life” quiz. For what it’s worth, my data shows no sign of anything derived from Facebook.
What you might get back from Cambridge Analytica:
Cambridge Analytica had generated 13 data points about my views: 10 political issues, ranked by importance; two guesses at my partisan leanings (one blank); and a guess at whether I would turn out in the 2016 general election.
They told me that the lower the rank, the higher the predicted importance of the issue to me.
Alongside that data labeled “models” were two other types of data that are run-of-the-mill and widely used by political consultants. One sheet of “core data” — that is, personal info, sliced and diced a few different ways, perhaps to be used more easily as parameters for a statistical model. It included my address, my electoral district, the census tract I live in and my date of birth.
The spreadsheet included a few rows of “election returns” — previous elections in New York State in which I had voted. (Intriguingly, Cambridge Analytica missed that I had voted in 2015’s snoozefest of a vote-for-five-of-these-five judicial election. It also didn’t know about elections in which I had voted in North Carolina, where I lived before I lived in New York.)
ALC Digital
ALC Digital is another data broker, which says that its info is “audiences are built from multi-sourced, verified information about an individual.” Their data is distributed via Oracle Data Cloud, a service that lets advertisers target specific audience of people — like, perhaps, people who are Boomer Voters and also Republicans.
The firm brags in an Oracle document posted online about how hard it is to avoid their data collection efforts, saying, “It has no cookies to erase and can’t be ‘cleared.’ ALC Real World Data is rooted in reality, and doesn’t rely on inferences or faulty models.”
How you can request your data from ALC Digital:
Here’s how to find the predictions about your political beliefs data in Oracle Data Cloud:
Visit http://www.bluekai.com/registry/. If you use an ad blocker, there may not be much to see here.
Click on the Partner Segments tab.
Scroll on through until you find ALC Digital.
You may have to scroll for a while before you find it.
And not everyone appears to have data from ALC Digital, so don’t be shocked if you can’t find it. If you don’t, there may be other fascinating companies with data about who you are in your Oracle file.
What you might get back from ALC Digital:
When I downloaded the data last year, it said I was “Socially Conservative,” “Boomer Voter” — as well as a female voter and a tax reform supporter.
Recently, when I checked my data, those categories had disappeared entirely from my data. I had nothing from ALC Digital.
ALC Digital is not required to release this data. It is disclosed via the Oracle Data Cloud. Fran Green, the company’s president, said that Aristotle, a longtime political data company, “provides us with consumer data that populates these audiences.” She also said that “we do not claim to know people’s ‘beliefs.’”
Big tech
Big tech firms like Google and Facebook tend to make their money by selling ads, so they build extensive profiles of their users’ interests and activities. They also depend on their users’ goodwill to keep us voluntarily giving them our locations, our browsing histories and plain ol’ lists of our friends and interests. (So far, these popular companies have not faced much regulation.) All three make it easy to download the data that they keep on you.
Firms like Google and Facebook firms don’t sell your data — because it’s their competitive advantage. Google’s privacy page screams in 72 point type: “We do not sell your personal information to anyone.” As websites that we visit frequently, they sell access to our attention, so companies that want to reach you in particular can do so with these companies’ sites or other sites that feature their ads.
How you can request your data from Facebook:
You of course have to have a Facebook account and be logged in:
Visit https://www.facebook.com/settings on your computer.
Click the “Download a copy of your Facebook data” link.
On the next page, click “Start My Archive.”
Enter your password, then click “Start My Archive” again.
You’ll get an email immediately, and another one saying “Your Facebook download is ready” when your data is ready to be downloaded. You’ll get a notification on Facebook, too. Mine took just a few minutes.
Once you get that email, click the link, then click Download Archive. Then reenter your password, which will start a zip file downloading..
Unzip the folder; depending on your computer’s operating system, this might be called uncompressing or “expanding.” You’ll get a folder called something like “facebook-jeremybmerrill,” but, of course, with your username instead of mine.
Open the folder and double-click “index.htm” to open it in your web browser.
What you might get back from Facebook
Facebook designed its archive to first show you your profile information. That’s all information you typed into Facebook and that you probably intended to be shared with your friends. It’s no surprise that Facebook knows what city I live in or what my AIM screen name was — I told Facebook those things so that my friends would know.
But it’s a bit of a surprise that they decided to feature a list of my ex-girlfriends — what they blandly termed “Previous Relationships” — so prominently.
As you dig deeper in your archive, you’ll find more information that you gave Facebook, but that you might not have expected the social network to keep hold of for years: if you’re me, that’s the Nickelback concert I apparently RSVPed to, posts about switching high schools and instant messages from my freshman year in college.
But finally, you’ll find the creepier information: what Facebook knows about you that you didn’t tell it, on the “Ads” page. You’ll find “Ads Topics” that Facebook decided you were interested in, like Housing, ESPN or the town of Ellijay, Georgia. And, you’ll find a list of advertisers who have obtained your contact information and uploaded it to Facebook, as part of a so-called Custom Audience of specific people to whom they want to show their ads.
You’ll find more of that creepy information on your Ads Preferences page. Despite Mark Zuckerberg telling Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif., in a hearing earlier this month that “all of your information is included in your ‘download your information,’” my archive didn’t include that list of ad categories that can be used to target ads to me. (Some other types of information aren’t included in the download, like other people’s posts you’ve liked. Those are listed here, along with where to find them — which, for most, is in your Activity Log.)
This area may include Facebook’s guesses about who you are, boiled down from some of your activities. Most Americans’ will have a guess about their politics — Facebook says I’m a “moderate” about US Politics — and some will have a guess about so-called “multicultural affinity,” which Facebook insists is not a guess about your ethnicity, but rather what sorts of content “you are interested in or will respond well to.” For instance, Facebook recently added that I have a “Multicultural Affinity: African American.” (I’m white — though, because Facebook’s definition of “multicultural affinity” is so strange, it’s hard to tell if this is an error on Facebook’s part.)
Facebook also doesn’t include your browsing history — the subject of back-and-forths between Mark Zuckerberg and several members of Congress — it says it keeps that just long enough to boil it down into those “Ad Topics.”
For people without Facebook accounts, Facebook says to email datarequests@support.facebook.com or fill out an online form to download what Facebook knows about you. One puzzle here is how Facebook gathers data on people whose identities it may not know. It may know that a person using a phone from Atlanta, Georgia, has accessed a Facebook site and that the same person was last week in Austin, Texas, and before that Cincinnati, but it may not know that that person is me. It’s in principle difficult for the company to give the data it collects about logged-out users if it doesn’t know exactly who they are.
Like Facebook, Google will give you a zip archive of your data. Google’s can be much bigger, because you might have stored gigabytes of files in Google Drive or years of emails in Gmail.
But like Facebook, Google does not provide its guesses about your interests, which it uses to target ads. Those guesses are available elsewhere.
How you can request your data from Google:
Visit https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout/ to use Google’s cutely named Takeout service.
You’ll have to pick which data you want to download and examine. You should definitely select My Activity, Location History and Searches. You may not want to download gigabytes of emails, if you use Gmail, since that uses a lot of space and may take a while. (That’s also information you shouldn’t be surprised that Google keeps — you left it with Gmail so that you could use Google’s search expertise to hold on to your emails. )
Google will present you with a few options for how to get your archive. The defaults are fine.
Within a few hours, you should get an email with the subject “Your Google data archive is ready.” Click Download Archive and log in again. That should start the download of a file named something like “takeout-20180412T193535.zip.”
Unzip the folder; depending on your computer’s operating system, this might be called uncompressing or “expanding.”
You’ll get a folder called Takeout. Open the file inside it called “index.html” in your web browser to explore your archive.
What you might get back from Google:
Once you open the index.html file, you’ll see icons for the data you chose in step 2. Try exploring “Ads” under “My Activity” — you’ll see a list of times you saw Google Ads, including on apps on your phone.
Google also includes your search history, under “Searches” — in my case, going back to 2013. Google knows what I had forgotten: I Googled a bunch of dinosaurs around Valentine’s Day that year … And it’s not just web searches: the Sound Search history reminded me that at some point, I used that service to identify Natalie Imbruglia’s song “Torn.”
Android phone users might want to check the “Android” folder: Google keeps a list of each app you’ve used on your phone.
Most of the data contained here are records of ways you’ve directly interacted with Google — and the company really does use the those to improve how their services work for me. I’m glad to see my searches auto-completed, for instance.
But the company also creates data about you: Visit the company’s Ads Settings page to see some of the “topics” Google guesses you’re interested in, and which it uses to personalize the ads you see. Those topics are fairly general — it knows I’m interested in “Politics” — but the company says it has more granular classifications that it doesn’t include on the list. Those more granular, hidden classifications are on various topics, from sports to vacations to politics, where Google does generate a guess whether some people are politically “left-leaning” or “right-leaning.”
Data brokers
Here’s who really does sell your data. Data brokers like the credit reporting agency Experian and a firm named Epsilon.
These sometimes-shady firms are middlemen who buy your data from tracking firms, survey marketers and retailers, slice and dice the data into “segments,” then sell those on to advertisers.
Experian
Experian is best known as a credit reporting firm, but your credit cards aren’t all they keep track of. They told me that they “firmly believe people should be made aware of how their data is being used” — so if you print and mail them a form, they’ll tell you what data they have on you.
“Educated consumers,” they said, “are better equipped to be effective, successful participants in a world that increasingly relies on the exchange of information to efficiently deliver the products and services consumers demand.”
How you can request your data from Experian:
Visit Experian’s Marketing Data Request site and print the Marketing Data Report Request form.
Print a copy of your ID and proof of address.
Mail it all to Experian at
May 4, 2018
Marriott workers confront shareholders about workplace harassment
Getty/monkeybusinessimages
Retaliation is one reason that it is harder for low-wage woman workers to say #MeToo. Many don’t have the luxury, like celebrities in Hollywood, to speak up without the fear of losing their job.
Which is why today might have marked a big step for the #MeToo movement.
On Friday, eight Marriott hotel workers from four different cities flew to the annual Marriott shareholder meeting in Washington, D.C. Their mission? To question top executives on the prevalence of sexual harassment and sexual assault faced by service workers in the hotel industry.
According to Unite Here! spokesperson Rachel Gumpert, the meeting went well, but it is still unclear as to what actions will be taken to better protect workers.
“Overall, the meeting was good. They listened, we met with head of corporate human resources, and we talked to them about the complaints we have in the hotels and he promised he was going to look into it,” Gumpert said. “He said he takes sexual harassment seriously.”
Suzy Elkouarti, who is a cocktail server at a W Hotel in Boston (W Hotels are owned by Marriott International), attended the meeting and said she often feels like she has to choose between her comfort and income at work.
“My experience working in the bar is a mix from mild stuff — men calling me ‘sweetie, sweetheart, babe,’ to men grabbing my arm when taking their order, to guests inviting me back to their rooms,” Elkouarti told Salon.
“Fortunately,” Elkouarti is in a less vulnerable position at the hotel than her coworkers because she is in the “public eye” at the bar, she explained. However, she has not received a formal training—or has been alerted of protocols to follow—if she is sexually harassed or assaulted. She does not feel that there will be any implications for an abuser who is a guest, she explained.
Elkouarti said once was asked for physical proof when she was harassed and told her manager about the incident. A guest had written lewd comments on a receipt — and she wondered, “Why do we have to turn in physical proof? Why can’t you believe women?”
Edith Santos, who also attended the meeting, works as a housekeeper in a Downtown Marriott hotel in Philadelphia. She has been working there for 25 years, and has been trying to organize a union which she says has been very challenging.
“Right now we are not being treated right,” Santos told Salon. “We want the union so things can change, so we can have better treatment.”
Santos said she and her colleagues will start working at 8 on a Sunday morning, but they aren’t allowed to leave until they clean 60 rooms.
“We are entitled to a break, but who will take a break when you have all these rooms to clean? You don’t want to get behind on your work,” she said. “It isn’t fair.”
Santos makes a little over $17 an hour; there’s no overtime.
“There is a lot of favoritism, there is sexual harassment, there is mistreatment by the managers,” she said.
While Santos isn’t a survivor of sexual harassment at work — she said if a guest made an advance on her, she would “kick him in the balls” — she did recount a time her colleague was sexually harassed.
“One time she knocked on the door [to clean the room] and a guy said 'come in,' and then he was sitting at the desk, butt naked,” she said. “She said ‘oh never mind’ I will come back, and he said ‘no come here.’”
According to unpublished U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data analyzed by Center for American Progress, more than 25 percent of sexual harassment charges filed in the last 10 years were in industries with large numbers of service-sector workers. Nearly 15 percent of the charges were filed from workers in the accommodation and food services industry.
Marriott did not respond to Salon’s request for an immediate comment.
