This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare. One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping …
Not sure it’s practical, but it’s certainly striking. [...]
Not long ago, I rented an SUV from a well-known car rental company. Within hours of an employee scanning my driver's license, a high-resolution scan of my ID was available for sale on the dark web. An exposé published Tuesday by KrebsOnSecurity reports that my license was one of …
Comcast has added motion detection as a feature to its wireless routers: The feature sends push notifications to users when motion is detected near a connected device, such as a TV or printer. It has different settings for when people are home, asleep, or away. The Xfinity app also …
The New York Times has a long article ( alt link ) on surveillance systems aimed at babies. They are increasingly using AI. Nanit and its rivals want to own 24/7 health tracking for the sub-four-foot set. And their already astonishing levels of baby data collection are just the beginning …
There are many companies manufacturing adversarial clothing designed to confuse facial recognition systems. It’s a cool idea, but I worry that it’s mostly security theater: “Our patterns play with that chaos, confuse algorithms and make it way harder to pin you down,” he said. Bell, however, said …
Last month, the story broke (alternate link ) that Madison Square Garden uses facial recognition software on everyone entering the facility, and—among other groups—flags activists that oppose using facial recognition. Turns out that the system was shut off for Taylor Swift’s wedding. Evan Greer—one of the …
He’s being prosecuted for giving border officials a code that wiped his phone : The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most modern Google Pixel devices. Tunick’s attorneys confirmed GrapheneOS was running on …
Governments are switching, but I’m not sure it makes a difference :...some municipalities, including Denver, Colorado, are ditching their Flock arrays. But keep in mind that if they’re only switching from Flock to another brand of license-plate readers, like Axon, it’s like a gambling addict trying …
Yet another Israeli mass surveillance company : Made by Israeli surveillance company Cognyte, the tech simulates a mobile phone tower, which forces nearby phones to connect to it. That enables cops to keep tabs on any phones in the vicinity whether they’re owned by a suspect in a case …
It’s a lot : According to information obtained by The Tech, MIT is spending over $3 million on more than 500 AI surveillance cameras in academic buildings, residence halls, and outdoor areas along Memorial Drive. Installation of the new cameras, along with the wiring and infrastructure that will support …
Daniel Solove argues in the Wall Street Journal (alternate link ) that giving people control of their personal data is not an effective way to regulate privacy in this era. Instead, we need to hold companies accountable for their actions, similar to what we do with food and drug companies …
In the near future, AI -powered surveillance systems will be able to track everything we do in public, and much of what we do in private. And if we do something wrong—shoplift, litter, jaywalk, you name it—the system will notice, retain it, tie it to your official …
This is from a 2024 company presentation : Officers can also tap into data showing a car’s decals, bumper stickers, back and top racks—along with temporary and unique state tags. Flock calls it a “Vehicle Fingerprint” and it’s touted as a way for law enforcement officials to …
Papa Johns is spying on people’s buying activities to predict when they are low on food: The pizza chain recently tapped NBCUniversal, Instacart and the dentsu-owned media agency Carat for help reaching consumers when they’re low on groceries—and thus more likely to be swayed by a …
The Financial Times has a good article on how AI is changing the capabilities of video surveillance, with information from both Israel/Iran and Russia. I wrote about this sort of thing a few years ago, how AI enables mass spying in the way that computers and networks enabled …
We know that ICE wants to deploy eyeglasses with facial recognition that can identify people in real time. Turns out Meta is prototyping the feature with a Pentagon supplier. (Alternate news story.) [...]
I haven’t thought about the privacy issues surrounding professional athletes and wearables. Wearables present serious privacy issues for “Average Joe” consumers, who are entrusting tech companies to safely store and protect their biometric data. Imagine the stakes for a professional athlete, whose entire livelihood could be affected by …
There are over a dozen cases around the country where police officers are using the Flock surveillance camera system to obsessively and illegally stalk people. Alternate link. [...]
A proposed FCC rule would kill burner phones: phones whose accounts are not attached to a particular person. The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country’s telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all phone customers, including a government issued identification number …
Not identifying people based on their use of Wi-Fi routers, but identifying people using Wi-Fi signals. This is accomplished through what is known as WiFi sensing, or the use of WiFi signals to infer information about a physical environment. When radio signals like WiFi travel through a space, they …
Businesses are advised against paying – but many are prepared to deal to protect users’ privacy After a week of outages, hundreds of millions of students’ data stolen, delayed assignment due dates and school login pages being defaced by hackers, the US tech firm Instructure – which operates the education platform …
Technology minister tells Commons ‘de-identified’ information from UK Biobank advertised for sale on Alibaba The confidential health records of half a million British volunteers have been offered for sale on Chinese website Alibaba, the UK government has confirmed. The “de-identified” data, belonging to participants in the UK Biobank project …
ICE has admitted that it uses spyware from the Israeli company Graphite. [...]
Grupo Seguritech is a Mexican surveillance company that is expanding into the US. [...]