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"In Los Angeles, the theft of computers from a county contractor's office that contained personal data for over 342,000 patients has led to a call for tighter security."

"In his full first interview as surveillance commissioner, Tony Porter - a former senior counter-terrorism officer - said the public was complacent about encroaching surveillance and urged public bodies, including the police, to be more transparent about how they are increasingly using smart cameras to monitor people."

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"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."

""My concern is that a facial recognition rejection can [create] bias," said Rudolph. "So, if someone has a lot of faith in this technology and thinks that it's foolproof, and someone is rejected by this system, that customs officer or gate agent may be predisposed to saying this person is traveling with fraudulent credentials. That's a crime and a serious issue.""

"In the meantime, I actually like how most of these islands represent an attempt by education institutions to embrace the weirdness of the web. The current crop of education startups seem bland and antiseptic in comparison to these virtual worlds. I can't take a Coursera class on a pirate ship, or attend office hours in front of an edX campfire. And honestly, that's probably a good thing. But it makes the web slightly less interesting."

"Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg called for new global regulations governing the internet, recommending overarching rules on hateful and violent content, election integrity, privacy and data portability."

""If they are not happy, and not eating well, in some cases you can predict whether the pig is sick," said Jackson He, chief executive officer of Yingzi Technology, a small firm based in the southern city of Guangzhou that has introduced its vision of a "future pig farm" with facial and voice recognition technologies. China's biggest tech firms want to pamper pigs, too. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, and JD.com, its rival, are using cameras to track pigs' faces. Alibaba also uses voice-recognition software to monitor their coughs."

"New Yorkers can expect to be fined from $25 to $250 if police officers catch them "using a portable electronic device while crossing a roadway"."

"This RFID-enabled device allowed its proud new owners to do things such as log into their computer, open doors and purchase food in the office cafeteria with a flick of the wrist. Nearly half of the company's 85 workers had the device implanted when the firm held a "chip party". YIKES!

"YouTube will rely more on machine learning and less on human reviewers during the coronavirus outbreak. Normally, algorithms detect potentially harmful content and send it to human reviewers for assessment. But these are not normal times, and in an effort to reduce the need for employees and contractors to come into an office, YouTube will allow its automated system to remove some content without human review."

"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"."

"The lack of answers the Jacksonville sheriff's office have provided in Lynch's case is representative of the problems that facial recognition poses across the country. "It's considered an imperfect biometric," said Garvie, who in 2016 created a study on facial recognition software, published by the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, called The Perpetual Line-Up. "There's no consensus in the scientific community that it provides a positive identification of somebody.""

"More than 400,000 crime records could have been affected by a data blunder, with records for serious offences supposed to be kept forever accidentally deleted and police fearing criminals may not be caught, a letter from a senior officer reveals. The records were accidentally deleted due to a coding error on 10 January, and the incident affects fingerprints, DNA, and arrest records on the police national computer (PNC)."

"The UK's information commissioner just told a parliamentary subcommittee on online harms and disinformation that a secret arrangement between her office and Facebook prevents her from publicly answering whether or not Facebook contacted the ICO about completing a much-trumpeted 'app audit'."

"Last month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent to Microsoft that outlines a process to create a conversational chatbot of a specific person using their social data. In an eerie twist, the patent says the chatbot could potentially be inspired by friends or family members who are deceased, which is almost a direct plot of a popular episode of Netflix's Black Mirror."

"Take Yoti, for instance: the company provides a range of age verification services, partnering with CitizenCard to offer a digital version of its ID, and working with self-service supermarkets to experiment with automatic age recognition of individuals. John Abbott, Yoti's chief business officer, says the system is already as good as a person at telling someone's age from a video of them, and has been tested against a wide range of demographics - including age, race and gender - to ensure that it's not wildly miscategorising any particular group. The company's most recent report claims that a "Challenge 21" policy (blocking under-18s by asking for strong proof of age from people who look under 21) would catch 98% of 17-year-olds, and 99.15% of 16 year olds, for instance."

"Squires said that Bridges had a reasonable expectation that his face would not be scanned in a public space and processed without his consent while he was not suspected of wrongdoing. The court heard that thousands of people have had their biometric data taken in the past two years by AFR technology used by South Wales police."

""Social media giants like Twitter receive an unprecedented liability shield based on the theory that they are a neutral platform, not an editor with a viewpoint," he said during an Oval Office signing ceremony for an executive order designed to rein in big technology companies."