Group items tagged

"Chinese scientists have developed a 500 megapixel facial recognition camera four times more detailed than the human eye that can identify individuals from crowds of tens of thousands in streets or at sports stadiums. "

"Twitter sent a letter this week to the small start-up company, Clearview AI, demanding that it stop taking photos and any other data from the social media website "for any reason" and delete any data that it previously collected, a Twitter spokeswoman said. "

"But the default settings of the service are configured in the expectation of trust between participants, meaning trolls can wreak havoc. Some zoombombers have used the screensharing feature to broadcast pornography and violent imagery. "

"There are three big challenges in the Internet space that all countries must face in the near future. China's approach to the challenges will impact not only Chinese Internet users, but potentially all Internet users. What interface follows the smart hone, whether it be AR-enabled glasses, foldable screens, or wearable projectors, will not only be influenced by China's substantial Internet-using population, but also by their manufacturing. Privacy, as it relates to online information collecting and sale, has consequences for broader community standards, and there is no one-size fits all approach to this issue. China must engage their own ethicists, community, government and technologists to develop a solution that works for China. Finally, globalization. Most of China's internet success has been within China, but as China begins to consider how it might attract users from outside its borders, it will need to consider dialing back the protections that have held foreign Internet companies at bay."

"As the number of coronavirus cases in South Korea exceeded 6,000 this week, there was a rise, too, in complaints about information overload in the form of emergency virus text alerts that have included embarrassing revelations about infected people's private lives."

"As Reuters reports, on March 28 SpaceX sent out an email to all of its 6,000+ employees telling them access to the Zoom video chat service had been disabled. The email stated, "We understand that many of us were using this tool for conferences and meeting support ... Please use email, text or phone as alternate means of communication." The stated reason given for disabling access to the service is, "significant privacy and security concerns.""

"Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan calls Zoom a "privacy disaster," filled with "creepy" features that send tracking data to Facebook even if you don't have a Facebook account and tell meeting hosts if attendees aren't paying attention. Zoom's privacy policy allows it to use what it calls "customer content" for advertising purposes."

"The study by US-based thinktank the Technology Policy Institute (TPI) is the first that attempts to quantify the value of online privacy and data. It assessed how much privacy is worth in six countries by looking at the habits of people in the United States, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Columbia and Argentina."

""The combination of the coronavirus, facial recognition on our phones, fear of surveillance, and late-stage capitalism really struck a chord with the internet," said Baskin."

"Clearview, the shady facial-recognition firm with links to law-enforcement and alt-right internet trolls, reports that its entire client list has been stolen."

"Where the researchers struck gold was by realising that a large (but not overly large pair of glasses) could act to "change the pixels" even in a real photo. By picking a pair of "geek" frames, with relatively large rims, the researchers were able to obscure about 6.5% of the pixels in any given facial picture. Printing a pattern over those frames then had the effect of manipulating the image."

"The company, Unacast, went live with its Social Distancing Scoreboard Tuesday. The dashboard, billed as a public health utility, includes a county-by-county breakdown of people's movement patterns. It assigns each county a grade, which Unacast based (at least in part) on how much people are traveling. "

"The app, which scraped billions of photos from the likes of Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and other online platforms, drew the world's attention last weekend following a detailed report in the New York Times. The app's supposed capability to identify practically anyone from even low-quality photos frightened privacy advocates and officials. And today, one of the latter - New Jersey's attorney general Gurbir Grewal - actually did something about it."

"Interest in so-called dazzle camouflage appears to have grown substantially since the Metropolitan police announced last week that officers will be using live facial recognition cameras on London's streets - a move described by privacy campaigners and political activists as "dangerous", "oppressive" and "a huge threat to human rights"."

"We are talking about vast fields of aggregate data, the scale of which is difficult to comprehend; this data can be parsed by the artificial intelligence recommendation algorithms that Google has pioneered, and that now steer everything from employment application processes to dating apps."

"In short, it's not great out there if you're a person who cares about privacy, and it's likely to keep getting worse. In the long run, pressure on state and federal regulators to enact and enforce laws that can limit the collection and use of such data is likely to be the most efficient way to effect change. But in the shorter term, individuals have a conundrum before them: can you go out and exist in the world without being seen?"

""Every generation is having fun with it," said Jon Alexis, partner in the fast-casual Malibu Poke in Dallas, which opened Nov. 28 with three kiosks that allow guests to save their order history and access them again through facial recognition. "It has exceeded my expectations.""

"At a time when science fiction and reality feel as if they are collapsing in on each other, we must resist the temptations of Big Brother; we would just be trading one kind of lockdown for another."