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"Fear-mongering Citizen app apparently stepped up from crime pronouncement to vigilantism this weekend when they offered a $30k reward for information about a gentleman they believed to be an arsonist responsible for starting a large fire. It is pretty clear local law enforcement didn't ask for this assistance and that sharing of the photo could easily have endangered the "suspect," or in this case victim, especially as requested in the quote below."

"But the technology raises important issues of governance, justice and fairness. In recent months, the Black Lives Matter movement has taken action to address what it sees as an abuse of police power and surveillance technology. Facing reputational and financial costs, several major tech companies stopped developing facial recognition or selling it to the police. Microsoft went as far as petitioning the US Congress to legislate against it."

"Although you'd never guess it from mainstream media, the most significant antitrust case in more than 20 years is under way in Washington. In it, the US justice department, alongside the attorneys general of eight states, is suing Google for abusively monopolising digital advertising technologies, thereby subverting competition through "serial acquisitions" and anti-competitive auction manipulation. Or, to put it more prosaically, arguing that Google - which has between 90% and 95% of the search market - has maintained its monopoly not by making a better product, but by locking down almost every avenue through which consumers might find a different search engine and making sure they only see Google wherever they look."

"The Victorian upper house MP Georgie Purcell has lashed Nine News in Melbourne for using an image edited to make her breasts look bigger and expose her midriff, which the network blamed on "automation by Photoshop". But Adobe has cast doubt on Nine News's claim about its software, after the network broadcast the image during Monday night's bulletin. The program's news director, Hugh Nailon, apologised to the upper house Animal Justice Party MP on Tuesday for the "graphic error", and blamed "automation by Photoshop"."

"Google is not obliged to delete personal information from its search results, even when that information damages an individual's reputation, an adviser to the European court of justice has decided."

"The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said the penalty was related to the loss of a hard drive containing the details of almost 3,000 prisoners at Erlestoke prison in Wiltshire. The disk was not encrypted."

"Amid mounting financial pressure, at least a dozen police forces are using or considering predictive analytics, despite warnings from campaigners that use of algorithms and "predictive policing" models risks locking discrimination into the criminal justice system."

"Surrendering our privacy to the government would be foolish enough. But what is more insidious is the Faustian bargain made with the marketing industry, which turns every location ping into currency as it is bought and sold in the marketplace of surveillance advertising. Now, one year later, we're in a very similar position. But it's far worse. A source has provided another data set, this time following the smartphones of thousands of Trump supporters, rioters and passers-by in Washington, D.C., on January 6, as Donald Trump's political rally turned into a violent insurrection. At least five people died because of the riot at the Capitol. Key to bringing the mob to justice has been the event's digital detritus: location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing."

"Facebook has suspended the accounts of several environmental organizations less than a week after launching an initiative it said would counter a tide of misinformation over climate science on the platform. Groups such as Greenpeace USA, Climate Hawks Vote and Rainforest Action Network were among those blocked from posting or sending messages on Facebook over the weekend. Activists say hundreds of other individual accounts linked to indigenous, climate and social justice groups were also suspended for an alleged "intellectual property rights violation"."

"If the NBA really cares about player and fan safety and racial justice, it is time that they ban facial recognition from their events and arenas. Facial recognition companies are forcefully marketing their racially biased products as false solutions to COVID-19-the NBA cannot buy these lies."

"Algorithms and the data that drive them are designed and created by people, which means those systems can carry biases based on who builds them and how they're ultimately deployed. Safiya Umoja Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, offers a curated reading list exploring how technology can replicate and reinforce racist and sexist beliefs, how that bias can affect everything from health outcomes to financial credit to criminal justice, and why data discrimination is a major 21st century challenge."

"What if facial recognition technology isn't as good at recognising faces as it has sometimes been claimed to be? If the technology is being used in the criminal justice system, and gets the identification wrong, this can cause serious problems for people (see Robert Williams' story in "Facing up to the problems of recognising faces")."

"Some of Britain's biggest retailers, including Tesco, John Lewis and Sainsbury's, have been urged to pull out of a new policing strategy amid warnings it risks wrongly criminalising people of colour, women and LGBTQ+ people. A coalition of 14 human rights groups has written to the main retailers - also including Marks & Spencer, the Co-op, Next, Boots and Primark - saying that their participation in a new government-backed scheme that relies heavily on facial recognition technology to combat shoplifting will "amplify existing inequalities in the criminal justice system"."

"This week the Animal Justice Party MP Georgie Purcell had her photo edited to enlarge her breasts and insert a crop into her top that hadn't been there. Having previously been a victim of image-based abuse, Purcell said the incident felt violating, and that the explanation given by Nine News failed to address the issue. For its part, Nine blamed an "automation" tool in Photoshop - the recently launched "generative fill", which, as the name suggests, fills in the blanks of an image when it is resized using artificial intelligence. Nine said the company was working from an already-cropped version of the original image, and used the tool to expand beyond the image's existing borders. But whoever did alter the image presumably still exported the modified version without considering the impact of their changes."