Tag: surveillance
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The Doorbell Company That’s Selling Fear
Written by Joshua Benton on The Atlantic.
“News organizations have multiple and sometimes conflicting incentives that might affect how they present the local police blotter. A company that sells security-optimized doorbells has only one incentive: emphasizing that the world is a scary place, and you need to buy our products to protect you.”
Read ‘The Doorbell Company That’s Selling Fear’ on the The Atlantic site.
Tagged with: Ring, crime, surveillance.
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The creeping threat of facial recognition
Written by S.A. Applin on Fast Company.
“Once facial recognition and other AI becomes pervasive—and in the absence of serious enforceable laws that can put guardrails on the technology—we will be unprotected, and as such will be subjected to any purpose to which the government or business wants to put our identities and locations. This is where greed, profit, and power come into play as motivators.”
Read ‘The creeping threat of facial recognition’ on the Fast Company site.
Tagged with: facial recognition, surveillance, discrimination.
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The Devastating Consequences of Being Poor in the Digital Age
Written by Mary Madden on The New York Times.
“The poor experience these two extremes — hypervisibility and invisibility — while often lacking the agency or resources to challenge unfair outcomes. For instance, they may be unfairly targeted by predictive policing tools designed with biased training data or unfairly excluded from hiring algorithms that scour social media networks to make determinations about potential candidates. In this increasingly complex ecosystem of “networked privacy harms,” one-size-fits-all privacy solutions will not serve all communities equally. Efforts to create a more ethical technology sector must take the unique experiences of vulnerable and marginalized users into account.”
Read ‘The Devastating Consequences of Being Poor in the Digital Age’ on the The New York Times site.
Tagged with: privacy, surveillance, discrimination.
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Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police
Written by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries on NYTimes.
“Technology companies have for years responded to court orders for specific users’ information. The new warrants go further, suggesting possible suspects and witnesses in the absence of other clues. Often, Google employees said, the company responds to a single warrant with location information on dozens or hundreds of devices.”
“The technique illustrates a phenomenon privacy advocates have long referred to as the “if you build it, they will come” principle — anytime a technology company creates a system that could be used in surveillance, law enforcement inevitably comes knocking. Sensorvault, according to Google employees, includes detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide and dating back nearly a decade.”
Read ‘Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police’ on the NYTimes site.
Tagged with: Google, surveillance, dragnet.
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Windows To Your Soul
In this week’s Ind.ie roundup, I wrote about privacy, politics, tracking, Timelines, and a little thing called “corporate nullification.”
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The Social Web: A Glorious Dystopia
Lots of good quotes and a book recommendation in this week’s Ind.ie roundup.
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Tethered Beings
This week the Ind.ie roundup returns with a big one. Great news on the UK surveillance legislation front, and lots of corporation news.
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Farewell Caspar
We didn’t have an Ind.ie roundup the previous week because we were moving, though Aral wrote a quick update on what’s happening with our move.
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dConstruct 2014
Jeremy Keith is a master curator of brilliant talks from wonderful speakers, and Friday’s dConstruct was a great event. Gone are the days where I write long connected writeups on conference themes.
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