Tag: surveillance
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How Long Until Citizen Gets Someone Killed?
Written by Lil Kalish on Mother Jones.
’Jim Thatcher, an urban studies professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma, is skeptical. “If you give people this power to draw attention based around a dangerous event,” Thatcher says, “then they are actually encouraged to seek out, or at worst manufacture, these dangerous events,” noting the speed with which Citizen escalated the manhunt. Like many others, Thatcher downloaded Citizen during last year’s protests. He wondered whether it might be used as a tool for “sousveillance,” a term surveillance activists use in reference to turning cameras back on authorities. That didn’t shake out. “Let’s be explicitly clear here,” he says. “The ‘frictionless’ solution provided by a for-profit company for a public health and safety issue is just…not good. There’s no outcome where this ends well.”
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Hamid Khan, founder of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, an anti-police-surveillance group, says the manhunt wasn’t Citizen gone awry; it was Citizen working as designed. Khan sees the app as part of a “culture of deputization and vigilantism” built on the “see something, say something” ethos of neighborhood watch, now “taking a more technological sort of spin.” He says tools like Citizen, with their patina of officialdom and impartial reporting, “are becoming a license to racially profile and go after some of the most vulnerable community members—particularly the unhoused—and to criminalize them.”’
Read ‘How Long Until Citizen Gets Someone Killed?’ on the Mother Jones site.
Tagged with: Citizen, surveillance, vigilantes.
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Here’s the File Clearview AI Has Been Keeping on Me, and Probably on You Too
Written by Anna Merlan on Motherboard.
“You may have forgotten about the photos you uploaded to a then-popular social media site ten or fifteen years ago… but Clearview hasn’t,” Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, wrote in an email. “A lot of data about individuals can quickly become ‘stale’ and thus low-value by those seeking to monetize it. Jobs, salaries, addresses, phone numbers, those all change. But photos are different: your face doesn’t go stale.”
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“What is clear is that this information is available to far more people than Clearview likes to acknowledge, and that they have future, as-yet-unannounced plans for their photos of your face.”
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“The face search results show exactly why we need a moratorium on face surveillance. In a democratic society, we should not accept our images being secretly collected and retained to create a mass surveillance database to be used, disclosed, and analyzed at the whim of an unaccountable company.”—Jeramie D. Scott
Tagged with: Clearview AI, facial recognition, surveillance.
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I don’t track you
When you visit this website, I don’t track you.
Read more…
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Smart home tech can help evict renters, surveillance company tells landlords
Written by Alfred Ng on CNET.
“While the features that come with smart locks or doorbell cameras offer conveniences for homeowners, they open up concerns about privacy for renters – who might not have signed on for constant surveillance.”
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“Facial recognition and emerging forms of AI give landlords alarming power to harass rent-stabilized tenants.”
Read ‘Smart home tech can help evict renters, surveillance company tells landlords’ on the CNET site.
Tagged with: smart home, surveillance, discrimination.
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Don’t Regulate Facial Recognition. Ban It.
Written by Evan Greer on Buzzfeed News.
“The surveillance dystopia is on the horizon, and companies like Microsoft and Amazon are helping build it. Despite their platitudes of caution and ethics, we’ve seen the consequences of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos. And if we don’t stop the spread of facial recognition, its latest lucrative surveillance product, we’ll soon count our most basic freedoms among the things they’ve broken.”
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“Company after company in Silicon Valley has been pushing furiously ahead with the development of face-scanning surveillance tools. They see money to be made selling this tech to governments, airlines, and other private businesses. Facing growing concern from the public and lawmakers, the industry has disingenuously asked for “regulation.” This is straight out of Big Tech’s lobbying playbook — asking Congress to pass laws and then swooping in to help write them. By doing so, they hope to avoid the real debate: whether facial recognition surveillance should be allowed at all.”
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“There is no time to waste. Authoritarian surveillance programs are always used to target the most vulnerable and marginalized, and facial recognition enables the automation of oppression.”
Read ‘Don’t Regulate Facial Recognition. Ban It.’ on the Buzzfeed News site.
Tagged with: facial recognition, surveillance, regulation.
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Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids
Written by Lois Beckett on The Guardian.
“Unlike gun control, Marlow said, ‘Surveillance is politically palatable, and so they’re pursuing surveillance as a way you can demonstrate action, even though there’s no evidence that it will positively impact the problem.’” … “Some people think that technology is magic, that artificial intelligence will save us,” Vance said. “A lot of the questions and a lot of the privacy concerns haven’t [been] thought of, let alone addressed.” … “For black students, and students with disabilities, who already face a disproportionate amount of harsh disciplinary measures, the introduction of new kinds of surveillance may be especially harmful, privacy experts said.”
Tagged with: surveillance, schools, privacy.
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‘We are hurtling towards a surveillance state’: the rise of facial recognition technology
Written by Anna Devlin on The Guardian.
“Out in the wider world, anonymity is no longer guaranteed. Facial recognition gives police and companies the means of identifying and tracking people of interest, while others are free to go about their business. The real question is: who gets that privilege?”
Tagged with: facial recognition, privacy, surveillance.
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How ICE Picks Its Targets in the Surveillance Age
Written by McKenzie Funk on The New York Times Magazine.
“For decades, the overriding objective of American business and government has been to remove friction from the tracking system, by linking networks, by speeding connections, by eliminating barriers. But friction is the only thing that has ever made privacy, let alone obscurity, possible. If there’s no friction, if we can all be profiled instantly and intimately, then there’s nothing to stop any of our neighbors from being targeted — nothing, that is, except our priorities.”
A long, sickening, read.
Read ‘How ICE Picks Its Targets in the Surveillance Age’ on the The New York Times Magazine site.
Tagged with: surveillance, government surveillance, ICE.
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The Rise of Networked Vigilante Surveillance
Written by Elizabeth Joh on Slate.
“Neighborhoods armed with Ring videos, Flock readers, and NextDoor posts have the power to create networked engines of suspicion, sometimes ill-founded or erroneous, that may embolden residents to take actions they should not.”
Read ‘The Rise of Networked Vigilante Surveillance’ on the Slate site.
Tagged with: surveillance, privacy, community.
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At the Border of Europe's Surveillance State
Written by Nicole Chi on Are We Europe.
“[E]ven if not lawless, historically, borders have been vulnerable places for human rights—particularly the right to privacy—as border guards extend government intrusion into our private lives with the authority of upholding national security. Now, data collection and artificial intelligence are threatening to turn borders into an underregulated free-for-all.”
Read ‘At the Border of Europe's Surveillance State’ on the Are We Europe site.
Tagged with: privacy, surveillance, discrimination.