Bringing an assistant into the phone calls of customers to help with a restaurant booking is an idea fraught with privacy concerns. Australian telco Optus recently opened a privacy can of worms when the company introduced internally a live-transcription service that captures the phone call interaction between customers and a call centre officer. What is your opinion on this technology and its potential privacy implications? Learn more in an interesting ZDNet article: . Seow Yoke Kong, Optus vice president of IT, has labelled the feature as assisting the human by taking notes from the phone call. The human still has to confirm the notes are accurate, however, but Seow said it saves the officer around five minutes not having to take their own notes. "At the end of day [it] is a summary of what are the follow up actions required … essentially an assistant to help them take notes," he said, speaking with media about the feature during last month's Red Hat Forum in Melbourne. The link for this article located at ZDNet is no longer available. . Optus' new programmable voice features raise major privacy concerns, requiring thorough scrutiny of data collection practices and user trust implications. Programmable Voice, Telecommunication, Privacy Issues, Customer Service, Live Transcription. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
An undisclosed number of countries have direct backdoor access to the communications passing through the network of telecommunications giant Vodafone, without needing to obtain a warrant, according to a new transparency report released by the company.. Governments in these countries have direct cables or interception systems connected to the networks of Vodafone and other telecoms, which allow them to silently intercept and record all communications that pass over the networks. This happens at the flick of a switch and without the countries obtaining court permission or notifying the telecoms that they are accessing the data, according to Vodafone. The link for this article located at Wired is no longer available. . Authorities are provided covert entry points into Vodafone systems, jeopardizing the confidentiality of user communications.. Government Surveillance, Telecommunication Backdoors, Privacy Threats. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
Anticryptography is based on the idea of making a message that decodes itself. The idea is closely linked with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and is an attempt to answer the challenge of communicating with another, perhaps vastly different, intelligence. The . . . . Anticryptography is based on the idea of making a message that decodes itself. The idea is closely linked with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and is an attempt to answer the challenge of communicating with another, perhaps vastly different, intelligence. The goal in anticryptography is to create a message that can be easily deciphered, even by somebody (or something) who has no prior knowledge of how the message is composed or what information it contains. While we may never detect an information-bearing signal from another solar system, or decide to broadcast our own message, anticryptography has many real-world applications in software development and telecommunication, most of which have so far been overlooked. . Anticryptography is based on the idea of making a message that decodes itself. The idea is closely l. anticryptography, based, making, message, decodes, itself, closely. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
Oscar S. Cisneros writes: "A new government-approved standard for telecommunications equipment violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, critics say. The standard, released in updated form last week by the Telecommunication Industry Association, instructs telecommunications hardware manufacturers on . . . . Oscar S. Cisneros writes: "A new government-approved standard for telecommunications equipment violates the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, critics say. The standard, released in updated form last week by the Telecommunication Industry Association, instructs telecommunications hardware manufacturers on how to build their equipment so that it complies with a federal wiretap law passed by Congress in 1994." In today's day and age where we are all prone to our traffic being sniffed an issue like this should be important to all of us. The link for this article located at Wired News is no longer available. . Oscar S. Cisneros recently highlights concerns about a newly sanctioned telecommunications protocol by the government, claiming it violates Fourth Amendment protections. Telecommunications Regulations, Privacy Advocacy, Government Surveillance. . Anthony Pell
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