Totally expected, but still good to hear: Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, which maintains the nonprofit Signal messaging app, reaffirmed that Signal would leave the U.K. if the country’s recently passed Online Safety Bill forced Signal to build “backdoors” into its end-to-end encryption. “We would leave the … Read More “Signal Will Leave the UK Rather Than Add a Backdoor” »
Category: privacy
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Jake Appelbaum’s PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Nothing major, but a few more tidbits. Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years ago. At this point, those documents are more historical than anything else. And it’s unclear who has those archives anymore. … Read More “New Revelations from the Snowden Documents” »
A new Mozilla Foundation report concludes that cars, all of them, have terrible data privacy. All 25 car brands we researched earned our *Privacy Not Included warning label—making cars the official worst category of products for privacy that we have ever reviewed. There’s a lot of details in the report. They’re all bad. BoingBoing post. … Read More “Cars Have Terrible Data Privacy” »
A used government surveillance van is for sale in Chicago: So how was this van turned into a mobile spying center? Well, let’s start with how it has more LCD monitors than a Counterstrike LAN party. They can be used to monitor any of six different video inputs including a videoscope camera. A videoscope and … Read More “Own Your Own Government Surveillance Van” »
License plate scanners aren’t new. Neither is using them for bulk surveillance. What’s new is that AI is being used on the data, identifying “suspicious” vehicle behavior: Typically, Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology is used to search for plates linked to specific crimes. But in this case it was used to examine the driving … Read More “Applying AI to License Plate Surveillance” »
This is why we need regulation: Zoom updated its Terms of Service in March, spelling out that the company reserves the right to train AI on user data with no mention of a way to opt out. On Monday, the company said in a blog post that there’s no need to worry about that. Zoom … Read More “Zoom Can Spy on Your Calls and Use the Conversation to Train AI, But Says That It Won’t” »
Imagine a future in which AIs automatically interpret—and enforce—laws. All day and every day, you constantly receive highly personalized instructions for how to comply with the law, sent directly by your government and law enforcement. You’re told how to cross the street, how fast to drive on the way to work, and what you’re allowed … Read More “AI and Microdirectives” »
The French police are getting new surveillance powers: French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. […] Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones, the measure would allow the … Read More “French Police Will Be Able to Spy on People through Their Cell Phones” »
No surprise, but Google just changed its privacy policy to reflect broader uses of all the surveillance data it has captured over the years: Research and development: Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public. For example, we use publicly available … Read More “Google Is Using Its Vast Data Stores to Train AI” »
Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence: While security cameras are commonplace in American cities, self-driving cars represent a new level of access for law enforcement and a new method for encroachment on privacy, advocates say. Crisscrossing the city on their routes, self-driving cars capture a wider swath of footage. And … Read More “Self-Driving Cars Are Surveillance Cameras on Wheels” »