New Zealand Election Fraud

It seems that this election season has not gone without fraud. In New Zealand, a vote for “Bird of the Year” has been marred by fraudulent votes:

More than 1,500 fraudulent votes were cast in the early hours of Monday in the country’s annual bird election, briefly pushing the Little-Spotted Kiwi to the top of the leaderboard, organizers and environmental organization Forest & Bird announced Tuesday.

Those votes — which were discovered by the election’s official scrutineers — have since been removed. According to election spokesperson Laura Keown, the votes were cast using fake email addresses that were all traced back to the same IP address in Auckland, New Zealand’s most populous city.

It feels like writing this story was a welcome distraction from writing about the US election:

“No one has to worry about the integrity of our bird election,” she told Radio New Zealand, adding that every vote would be counted.

Asked whether Russia had been involved, she denied any “overseas interference” in the vote.

I’m sure that’s a relief to everyone involved.

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“Privacy Nutrition Labels” in Apple’s App Store

Apple will start requiring standardized privacy labels for apps in its app store, starting in December:

Apple allows data disclosure to be optional if all of the following conditions apply: if it’s not used for tracking, advertising or marketing; if it’s not shared with a data broker; if collection is infrequent, unrelated to the app’s primary function, and optional; and if the user chooses to provide the data in conjunction with clear disclosure, the user’s name or account name is prominently displayed with the submission.

Otherwise, the privacy labeling is mandatory and requires a fair amount of detail. Developers must disclose the use of contact information, health and financial data, location data, user content, browsing history, search history, identifiers, usage data, diagnostics, and more. If a software maker is collecting the user’s data to display first or third-party adverts, this has to be disclosed.

These disclosures then get translated to a card-style interface displayed with app product pages in the platform-appropriate App Store.

The concept of a privacy nutrition label isn’t new, and has been well-explored at CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University.

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