Group items tagged

X to doubt

"We are inured to the idea that professional environments have a built-in layer of surveillance, and now that this environment has merged with the home for many workers, some of these practices have started to look more extreme. But the discussion about surveillance should not start and end with the tools employers use to monitor people working from home. We should instead be asking: how necessary is any of this?"

"Rival French and Russian disinformation campaigns have sought to deceive and influence internet users in the Central African Republic ahead of an election later this month, Facebook said on Tuesday. Facebook said it was the first time it had seen foreign influence operations directly engage on its platforms, with fake accounts denouncing each other as "fake news"."

"A preliminary study finds that facial recognition algorithms struggle to identify people wearing masks. The study tested 89 commercial facial recognition algorithms, and the best had error rates between 5% and 50% in matching unmasked photos with photos of the same person wearing a digitally-applied mask. Masks both lowered the algorithms' accuracy rates and raised the number of failures to process. The more of the nose is covered by the mask the lower the algorithm's accuracy; however, error rates were generally lower with round masks; and the algorithms generally performed worse with black masks than with surgical blue ones. False positive remained stable or declined a small amount."

"North America, Central America, and Caribbean In the U.S., a 2016 study showed that already half of American adults were captured in some kind of facial recognition network. More recently, the Department of Homeland Security unveiled its "Biometric Exit" plan, which aims to use facial recognition technology on nearly all air travel passengers by 2023, to identify compliance with visa status."

"How Instagram transformed our personal lives Ten years after its first post, the app exerts an almost inconceivable degree of influence over our culture, psychology and relationships"

"Lizzo's comments came just a week after Instagram unveiled a new feature that allows users to limit comments and DM requests during "spikes of increased attention". The feature, which users can opt in or out of, automatically hides comments from accounts that don't follow the user or only recently followed the user."

"RIGHTS DEFENDERS raised concerns yesterday over the move to force all |cellphone users in the restive South to submit their pictures for facial-recognition identification."

"Remote surveillance software like Sneek, also known as "tattleware" or "bossware", represented something of a niche market pre-Covid. But that all changed in March 2020, as employers scrambled to pull together work-from-home policies out of thin air. In April last year, Google queries for "remote monitoring" were up 212% year-on-year; by April this year, they'd continued to surge by another 243%."

"We all fear our smartphones spy on us, and I'm subject to a new type of surveillance. An app called TapCounter records each time I touch my phone's screen. My swipes and jabs are averaging about 1,000 a day, though I notice that's falling as I steer shy of social media to meet my deadline. The European company behind it, QuantActions, promises that through capturing and analysing the data it will be able to "detect important indicators related to mental/neurological health"."

"Costco customers at four of the retailer's Chicago-area warehouses may have had their payment information compromised after employees discovered five card-skimming devices during routine PIN pad inspections at the end of August. "We promptly removed the skimmers, notified law enforcement, and engaged a forensics firm to analyze the devices," A Costco spokesperson told FOX Business in a statement. "It appears that these skimmers had the ability to capture information on the magnetic stripe of a payment card, including name, card number, expiration date, and CVV.""

"Social media giant, Facebook, announced Tuesday that it is shutting down its facial recognition system which automatically identifies users in photos and videos, citing growing societal concerns about the use of such technology. "Regulators are still in the process of providing a clear set of rules governing its use," said Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Facebook, in a blog post. "Amid this ongoing uncertainty, we believe that limiting the use of facial recognition to a narrow set of use cases is appropriate.""

"The problem is, a lot of those electronics were being used to monitor students, even combing through private chats, emails and documents all in the name of protecting them. More than 80% of surveyed teachers and 77% of surveyed high school students told the CDT that their schools use surveillance software on those devices, and the more reliant students are on those electronics, unable to afford supplementary phones or tablets, the more they are subjected to scrutiny."

"The slightly misleading name for this resource is "personal data." Whether handed over intentionally or unwittingly, it captured by social media, cookies, and the internet of things captures, second-by-second now, granular details of behavior, temperament, and even thinking. It is an enormously valuable asset because it can be used to draw inferences not just about the expected future behavior of the producing subject."

"WhatsApp users are to be given the option to have their messages disappear after 24 hours, a change that drew immediate criticism from children's charities. In a blog post announcing the change, WhatsApp, which has 2 billion users, said its mission was to "connect the world privately"."

"The constitutional right to safe, legal abortion has evaporated following the recent Supreme Court decision. Some states with so-called "trigger bans" have immediately criminalized abortion. Next, Congress may seek to criminalize abortion in all 50 states, putting the government in control of peoples' bodies. Google is fully complicit in the criminalization of people seeking abortion care. That's because Google stores historical location data about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies through "geofence" orders that unmask the identities of anyone who traveled to a specific place at a specific time-like an abortion clinic on a specific day. Google received 11,554 such geofence warrants in 2020."

"Parents tell Guardian Australia that "playing" on Omegle is something kids do at parties, at sleepovers. It just takes one of the group to have a screen with internet access and before long they are chatting to strangers all over the world."