PlayStation 4 is spying on you and can prevent you from purchasing used games
Sony, makers of the PlayStation 4 have updated the device's Software Usage Terms. Those who preordered the machine are in for a few nasty surprises: By using the system, you are giving Sony permission to spy on you through the PlayStation network (PSN), and game publishers permission to control the content you buy.
The information comes by way of Sony itself, which outlines the upcoming console's restrictions in sections dealing with reporting and resale. Section 14 of the Software Usage Terms is titled "Are we monitoring PSN?" This details how Sony keeps track of users and user-generated media (UGM), including but not limited to written messages, voice messages and uploaded videos.
We can't monitor all PSN activity and we make no commitment to do so," Sony states. "However, we reserve the right in our sole discretion to monitor and record any or all of your PSN activity and to remove any of your UGM at our sole discretion, without further notice to you. In practice, this likely means that Sony will monitor players who have been reported for bad behavior or posting offensive content, especially since previous sections deal with negative online experiences and how to report them."
In practice, this likely means that Sony will monitor players who have been reported for bad behavior or posting offensive content, especially since Sections 12 and 13 deal with negative online experiences and how to report them. Section 7, which deals with resale: "You must not resell either Disc-based Software or Software Downloads, unless expressly authorized by us and, if the publisher is another company, additionally by the publisher."
The message is clear: Lending PS4 games may be as easy as handing them over to a friend, but reselling them may require a few extra hoops. Sony and individual publishers may not put any restrictions on reselling games, but they have every right to.http://www.tomsguide.com/us/ps4-spy-game-sales,news-17846.html
Facebook's plans for data collection are beyond all imagination:
Facebook, Inc. filed its 178th patent application for a consumer profiling technique the company calls “inferring household income for users of a social networking system.”
“The amount of information gathered from users,” explain Facebook programmers Justin Voskuhl and Ramesh Vyaghrapuri in their patent application, “is staggering — information describing recent moves to a new city, graduations, births, engagements, marriages, and the like.” Facebook and other so-called tech companies have been warehousing all of this information since their respective inceptions. In Facebook’s case, its data vault includes information posted as early as 2004, when the site first went live. Now in a single month the amount of information forever recorded by Facebook —dinner plans, vacation destinations, emotional states, sexual activity, political views, etc.— far surpasses what was recorded during the company’s first several years of operation. It is believed that Facebook has amassed one of the widest and deepest databases in history. Facebook has over 1,189,000,000 “monthly active users” around the world as of October 2013, providing considerable width of data. And Facebook has stored away trillions and trillions of missives and images, and logged other data about the lives of this billion plus statistical sample of humanity. Adjusting for bogus or duplicate accounts it all adds up to about 1/7th of humanity from which some kind of data has been recorded. According to Facebook’s programmers like Voskuhl and Vyaghrapuri, of all the clever uses they have already applied this pile of data toward, Facebook has so far “lacked tools to synthesize this information about users for targeting advertisements based on their perceived income.” Now they have such a tool thanks to the retention and analysis of variable the company’s positivist specialists believe are correlated with income levels. They’ll have many more tools within the next year to run similar predictions. Indeed, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and the hundreds of smaller tech lesser-known tech firms that now control the main portals of social, economic, and political life on the web (which is now to say everywhere as all economic and much social activity is made cyber) are only getting started. The Big Data analytics revolutions has barely begun, and these firms are just beginning to tinker with rational-instrumental methods of predicting and manipulating human behavior. The way you type, the rate, common mistakes, intervals between certain characters, is all unique, like your fingerprint, and there are already cyber robots that can identify you as you peck away at keys. Facebook has even patented methods of individual identification with obviously cybernetic overtones, where the machine becomes an appendage of the person. U.S. Patents 8,306,256, 8,472,662, and 8,503,718, all filed within the last year, allow Facebook’s web robots to identify a user based on the unique pixelation and other characteristics of their smartphone’s camera. Identification of the subject is the first step toward building a useful data set to file among the billion or so other user logs. Then comes analysis, then prediction, then efforts to influence a parting of money. http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/how-facebooks-applications-patents-give-away-its-designs-profiting-our-behavior