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American consumers spent five hours per day on their mobile devices, and showed a dizzying 69% year-over-year increase in time spent in apps like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The prevalence of apps represents a concrete example of the movement away from the old notion of accessing the Internet through a browser and the new reality of the connected world and its myriad elements – news, social media, entertainment – being with us all the time

“In the 90s and even through the early 2000s, for many people, there was this way of thinking about cyberspace as a space that was somewhere else: it was in your computer. You went to your desktop to get there,” Weigel says. “One of the biggest shifts that’s happened and that will continue to happen is the undoing of a border that we used to perceive between the virtual and the physical world.”

While many of us think of the smartphone as a portal for accessing the outside world, the reciprocity of the device, as well as the larger pattern of our behavior online, means the portal goes the other way as well: it’s a means for others to access us

Weigel sees the unfettered access to our data, through our smartphone and browser use, of what she calls the big five tech companies – Apple, Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon – as a legitimate problem for notions of democracy

an unfathomable amount of wealth, power, and direct influence on the consumer in the hands of just a few individuals – individuals who can affect billions of lives with a tweak in the code of their products

“This is where the fundamental democracy deficit comes from: you have this incredibly concentrated private power with zero transparency or democratic oversight or accountability, and then they have this unprecedented wealth of data about their users to work with,”

the rhetoric around the Internet was that the crowd would prevent the spread of misinformation, filtering it out like a great big hive mind; it would also help to prevent the spread of things like hate speech. Obviously, this has not been the case, and even the relatively successful experiments in this, such as Wikipedia, have a great deal of human governance that allows them to function properly

We should know and be aware of how these companies work, how they track our behavior, and how they make recommendations to us based on our behavior and that of others. Essentially, we need to understand the fundamental difference between our behavior IRL and in the digital sphere – a difference that, despite the erosion of boundaries, still stands

“Whether we know it or not, the connections that we make on the Internet are being used to cultivate an identity for us – an identity that is then sold to us afterward,” Lynch says. “Google tells you what questions to ask, and then it gives you the answers to those questions.”

It isn’t enough that the apps in our phone flatten all of the different categories of relationships we have into one broad group: friends, followers, connections. They go one step further than that. “You’re being told who you are all the time by Facebook and social media because which posts are coming up from your friends are due to an algorithm that is trying to get you to pay more attention to Facebook,” Lynch says. “That’s affecting our identity, because it affects who you think your friends are, because they’re the ones who are popping up higher on your feed.”

Media companies using this technology claim it is now possible for the “mood” of the reader or viewer to be tracked in real time and the content of the advertising to be changed accordingly

ads targeted at readers based on their predicted moods rather than their previous behaviour improved the click-through rate by 40%.

Given that the average click through rate (the number of times anyone actually clicks on an ad) is about 0.4%, this number (in gross terms) is probably less impressive than it sounds.

Cambridge Analytica, the company that misused Facebook data and, according to its own claims, helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, used psychographic segmentation.

For many years “contextual” ads served by not very intelligent algorithms were the bane of digital editors’ lives. Improvements in machine learning should help eradicate the horrible business of showing insurance advertising to readers in the middle of an article about a devastating fire.

The words “brand safety” are increasingly used by publishers when demonstrating products such as Project Feels. It is a way publishers can compete on micro-targeting with platforms such as Facebook and YouTube by pointing out that their targeting will not land you next to a conspiracy theory video about the dangers of chemtrails.

the exploitation of psychographics is not limited to the responsible and transparent scientists at the NYT. While publishers were showing these shiny new tools to advertisers, Amazon was advertising for a managing editor for its surveillance doorbell, Ring, which contacts your device when someone is at your door. An editor for a doorbell, how is that going to work? In all kinds of perplexing ways according to the ad. It’s “an exciting new opportunity within Ring to manage a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbours. This position is best suited for a candidate with experience and passion for journalism, crime reporting, and people management.” So if instead of thinking about crime articles inspiring fear and advertising doorbells in the middle of them, what if you took the fear that the surveillance-device-cum-doorbell inspires and layered a crime reporting newsroom on top of it to make sure the fear is properly engaging?

The media has arguably already played an outsized role in making sure that people are irrationally scared, and now that practice is being strapped to the considerably more powerful engine of an Amazon product.

This will not be the last surveillance-based newsroom we see. Almost any product that produces large data feeds can also produce its own “news”. Imagine the Fitbit newsroom or the managing editor for traffic reports from dashboard cams – anything that has a live data feed emanating from it, in the age of the Internet of Things, can produce news.

reflecting seriously on the societal context of a research position may prompt a scientist to accept the job—and to take it upon herself or himself to help restrain unthinking innovation at work, by raising questions about whether every feature that can be added should in fact be implemented. (The same goes for whether certain lines of research should be pursued and particular findings published.)

The challenge for each of us, moving forward, is to ask ourselves and one another, hopefully far earlier in the research process than did Germany’s Walther Gerlach: “What are we working for?”

the spread of persistent surveillance technologies is particularly worrisome because they remove any limit on how much information police can gather on a person’s movements. “The border is the natural place for the government to start using them, since there is much more public support to deploy these sorts of intrusive technologies there,”

the company’s ultimate goal is to build a “layer” of electronic surveillance equipment across the entire perimeter of the U.S. “Over time, we’ll expand not only to the northern border, but to the ports and harbors across the country,”

In addition to fixed and mobile surveillance towers, other technology that CBP has acquired and deployed includes blimps outfitted with high-powered ground and air radar, sensors buried underground, and facial recognition software at ports of entry. CBP’s drone fleet has been described as the largest of any U.S. agency outside the Department of Defense

Nellie Jo David, a Tohono O’odham tribal member who is writing her dissertation on border security issues at the University of Arizona, says many younger people who have been forced by economic circumstances to work in nearby cities are returning home less and less, because they want to avoid the constant surveillance and harassment. “It’s especially taken a toll on our younger generations.”

Border militarism has been spreading worldwide owing to neoliberal economic policies, wars, and the onset of the climate crisis, all of which have contributed to the uprooting of increasingly large numbers of people, notes Reece Jones

In the U.S., leading companies with border security contracts include long-established contractors such as Lockheed Martin in addition to recent upstarts such as Anduril Industries, founded by tech mogul Palmer Luckey to feed the growing market for artificial intelligence and surveillance sensors — primarily in the borderlands. Elbit Systems has frequently touted a major advantage over these competitors: the fact that its products are “field-proven” on Palestinians

Verlon Jose, then-tribal vice chair, said that many nation members calculated that the towers would help dissuade the federal government from building a border wall across their lands. The Tohono O’odham are “only as sovereign as the federal government allows us to be,”

Leading Democrats have argued for the development of an ever-more sophisticated border surveillance state as an alternative to Trump’s border wall. “The positive, shall we say, almost technological wall that can be built is what we should be doing,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in January. But for those crossing the border, the development of this surveillance apparatus has already taken a heavy toll. In January, a study published by researchers from the University of Arizona and Earlham College found that border surveillance towers have prompted migrants to cross along more rugged and circuitous pathways, leading to greater numbers of deaths from dehydration, exhaustion, and exposure.

“Walls are not only a question of blocking people from moving, but they are also serving as borders or frontiers between where you enter the surveillance state,” she said. “The idea is that at the very moment you step near the border, Elbit will catch you. Something similar happens in Palestine.”

CBP is by far the largest law enforcement entity in the U.S., with 61,400 employees and a 2018 budget of $16.3 billion — more than the militaries of Iran, Mexico, Israel, and Pakistan. The Border Patrol has jurisdiction 100 miles inland from U.S. borders, making roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population theoretically subject to its operations, including the entirety of the Tohono O’odham reservation

Between 2013 and 2016, for example, roughly 40 percent of Border Patrol seizures at immigration enforcement checkpoints involved 1 ounce or less of marijuana confiscated from U.S. citizens.

the agency uses its sprawling surveillance apparatus for purposes other than border enforcement

documents obtained via public records requests suggest that CBP drone flights included surveillance of Dakota Access pipeline protests

CBP’s repurposing of the surveillance tower and drones to surveil dissidents hints at other possible abuses. “It’s a reminder that technologies that are sold for one purpose, such as protecting the border or stopping terrorists — or whatever the original justification may happen to be — so often get repurposed for other reasons, such as targeting protesters.”

The impacts of the U.S. border on Tohono O’odham people date to the mid-19th century. The tribal nation’s traditional land extended 175 miles into Mexico before being severed by the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, a U.S. acquisition of land from the Mexican government. As many as 2,500 of the tribe’s more than 30,000 members still live on the Mexican side. Tohono O’odham people used to travel between the United States and Mexico fairly easily on roads without checkpoints to visit family, perform ceremonies, or obtain health care. But that was before the Border Patrol arrived en masse in the mid-2000s, turning the reservation into something akin to a military occupation zone. Residents say agents have administered beatings, used pepper spray, pulled people out of vehicles, shot two Tohono O’odham men under suspicious circumstances, and entered people’s homes without warrants. “It is apartheid here,” Ofelia Rivas says. “We have to carry our papers everywhere. And everyone here has experienced the Border Patrol’s abuse in some way.”

Tohono O’odham people have developed common cause with other communities struggling against colonization and border walls. David is among numerous activists from the U.S. and Mexican borderlands who joined a delegation to the West Bank in 2017, convened by Stop the Wall, to build relationships and learn about the impacts of Elbit’s surveillance systems. “I don’t feel safe with them taking over my community, especially if you look at what’s going on in Palestine — they’re bringing the same thing right over here to this land,” she says. “The U.S. government is going to be able to surveil basically anybody on the nation.”

In March, tech publication Protocol first reported that U.S. law enforcement agencies such as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were using Locate X. Motherboard then obtained an internal Secret Service document confirming the agency's use of the technology. Some government agencies, including CBP and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), have also purchased access to location data from another vendor called Venntel.

the company tracks 25 million devices inside the United States every month, and 40 million elsewhere, including in the European Union, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region

Motherboard found another network of dating apps that look and operate nearly identically to Mingle, including sending location data to X-Mode. Motherboard installed another dating app, called Iran Social, on a test device and observed GPS coordinates being sent to the company. The network of apps also includes Turkey Social, Egypt Social, Colombia Social, and others focused on particular countries.

Senator Ron Wyden told Motherboard in a statement that X-Mode said it is selling location data harvested from U.S. phones to U.S. military customers."In a September call with my office, lawyers for the data broker X-Mode Social confirmed that the company is selling data collected from phones in the United States to U.S. military customers, via defense contractors. Citing non-disclosure agreements, the company refused to identify the specific defense contractors or the specific government agencies buying the data,"

some apps that are harvesting location data on behalf of X-Mode are essentially hiding the data transfer. Muslim Pro does not mention X-Mode in its privacy policy, and did not provide any sort of pop-up when installing or opening the app that explained the transfer of location data in detail. The privacy policy does say Muslim Pro works with Tutela and Quadrant, two other location data companies, however. Motherboard did observe data transfer to Tutela.

The Muslim Mingle app provided no pop-up disclosure in Motherboard's tests, nor does the app's privacy policy mention X-Mode at all. Iran Social, one of the apps in the second network of dating apps that used much of the same code, also had the same lack of disclosures around the sale of location data.

"The question to ask is whether a reasonable consumer of these services would foresee of these uses and agree to them if explicitly asked. It is safe to say from this context that the reasonable consumer—who is not a tech person—would not have military uses of their data in mind, even if they read the disclosures."

Decades ago, Iranian law required women to take off headscarves in line with modernization plans, with police sometimes forcing women to do so. But hijab wearing became compulsory in 1979 when the country became a theocracy.

Shajarizadeh and others monitoring the ongoing outcry have noticed that some people involved in the protests are confronted by police days after an alleged incident—including women cited for not wearing a hijab. “Many people haven't been arrested in the streets,” she says. “They were arrested at their homes one or two days later.”

Some face recognition in use in Iran today comes from Chinese camera and artificial intelligence company Tiandy. Its dealings in Iran were featured in a December 2021 report from IPVM, a company that tracks the surveillance and security industry.

US Department of Commerce placed sanctions on Tiandy, citing its role in the repression of Uyghur Muslims in China and the provision of technology originating in the US to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The company previously used components from Intel, but the US chipmaker told NBC last month that it had ceased working with the Chinese company.

When Steven Feldstein, a former US State Department surveillance expert, surveyed 179 countries between 2012 and 2020, he found that 77 now use some form of AI-driven surveillance. Face recognition is used in 61 countries, more than any other form of digital surveillance technology, he says.

"This move to mine users for emotional data points based on the false idea that AI can track and analyze human emotions is a violation of privacy and human rights,"