They’re a thing: Developers say digital plates utilize “advanced telematics” — to collect tolls, pay for parking and send out Amber Alerts when a child is abducted. They also help recover stolen vehicles by changing the display to read “Stolen,” thereby alerting everyone within eyeshot. This makes no sense to me. The numbers are static. … Read More “Digital License Plates” »
Category: surveillance
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The Spanish Soccer League’s smartphone app spies on fans in order to find bars that are illegally streaming its games. The app listens with the microphone for the broadcasts, and then uses geolocation to figure out where the phone is. The Spanish data protection agency has ordered the league to stop doing this. Not because … Read More “Spanish Soccer League App Spies on Fans” »
Maciej Cegłowski has a really good essay explaining how to think about privacy today: For the purposes of this essay, I’ll call it “ambient privacy” — the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives … Read More “Maciej Cegłowski on Privacy in the Information Age” »
According to foreign policy experts and the defense establishment, the United States is caught in an artificial intelligence arms race with China — one with serious implications for national security. The conventional version of this story suggests that the United States is at a disadvantage because of self-imposed restraints on the collection of data and … Read More “Data, Surveillance, and the AI Arms Race” »
Citizen Lab just published an excellent report on the stalkerware industry. Boing Boing post. Powered by WPeMatico
Interesting article about how traditional nation-based spycraft is changing. Basically, the Internet makes it increasingly possible to generate a good cover story; cell phone and other electronic surveillance techniques make tracking people easier; and machine learning will make all of this automatic. Meanwhile, Western countries have new laws and norms that put them at a … Read More “How Technology and Politics Are Changing Spycraft” »
Human Rights Watch has reverse engineered an app used by the Chinese police to conduct mass surveillance on Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang. The details are fascinating, and chilling. Boing Boing post. Powered by WPeMatico
Data & Society just published a report entitled “Workplace Monitoring & Surveillance“: This explainer highlights four broad trends in employee monitoring and surveillance technologies: Prediction and flagging tools that aim to predict characteristics or behaviors of employees or that are designed to identify or deter perceived rule-breaking or fraud. Touted as useful management tools, they … Read More “On Surveillance in the Workplace” »
This system claims to detect suspicious behavior that indicates shoplifting: Vaak, a Japanese startup, has developed artificial intelligence software that hunts for potential shoplifters, using footage from security cameras for fidgeting, restlessness and other potentially suspicious body language. The article has no detail or analysis, so we don’t know how well it works. But this … Read More “Detecting Shoplifting Behavior” »
The Nest home alarm system shipped with a secret microphone, which — according to the company — was only an accidental secret: On Tuesday, a Google spokesperson told Business Insider the company had made an “error.” “The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs,” … Read More “The Latest in Creepy Spyware” »