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""In 2022, the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database was leaked. This database contains many TB of data and information on billions of Chinese citizen," the post said. "Databases contain information on 1 billion Chinese national residents and several billion case records, including: name, address, birthplace, national ID number, mobile number, all crime/case details.""

"Ring recently revealed how often the answer to that question has been yes. The Amazon company responded to an inquiry from US Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.), confirming that there have been 11 cases in 2022 where Ring complied with police "emergency" requests. In each case, Ring handed over private recordings, including video and audio, without letting users know that police had access to-and potentially downloaded-their data. This raises many concerns about increased police reliance on private surveillance, a practice that's long gone unregulated."

"Every day, nearly 5 million people use São Paulo's metro system. Every one of their faces may have been recorded in a facial recognition system that has been in use since early 2020. In a March 23 decision, a São Paulo State court ordered the Metro company to stop using the technology. The Metro appealed the decision, claiming its monitoring system "rigorously obeys the General Law on Data Protection," but the argument was rejected by the same court in mid-April."

"The UK is not Russia. For all that the many civil liberty campaigners will complain, as is their role, the independence of the judiciary remains strong. The laws relating to freedom of association, expression and right to privacy are well defended in parliament and outside. But the technology, the means by which the state might insert itself into our lives, is developing apace. The checks and balances are not. The Guardian has revealed that the government is legislating, without fanfare, to allow the police and the National Crime Agency to run facial recognition searches across the UK's driving licence records. When the police have an image, they will be able to identify the person, it is hoped, through the photographic images the state holds for the purposes of ensuring that the roads are safe. Searching those digital images would have taken more man-hours than could have been justified in the old analogue world. It is now a matter of pushing a button, thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence systems that are able to match biometric measurements in a flash."

"Once you gather up every reported incident of violence in one place, however, the threat seems far greater. A record of up to date criminal activity might be useful if you are new to an area. Businesses considering locations and homeowners interested in moving might use it to get certain information. But it can also facilitate panic and unjustified accusations."

"The music industry is urging streaming platforms not to let artificial intelligence use copyrighted songs for training, in the latest of a run of arguments over intellectual property that threaten to derail the generative AI sector's explosive growth. In a letter to streamers including Spotify and Apple Music, the record label Universal Music Group expressed fears that AI labs would scrape millions of tracks to use as training data for their models and copycat versions of pop stars."

"Jailed former prime minister Imran Khan on Saturday claimed victory in the Pakistan general elections 2024 through a pre-recorded audio-visual message created using artificial intelligence, hours after his political rival and ex-PM Nawaz Sharif claimed to have won the election."

"Deepfakes were not the only manifestation of AI in the Indian elections. Long before the election began, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a tightly packed crowd celebrating links between the state of Tamil Nadu in the south of India and the city of Varanasi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Instructing his audience to put on earphones, Modi proudly announced the launch of his "new AI technology" as his Hindi speech was translated to Tamil in real time. In a country with 22 official languages and almost 780 unofficial recorded languages, the BJP adopted AI tools to make Modi's personality accessible to voters in regions where Hindi is not easily understood. Since 2022, Modi and his BJP have been using the AI-powered tool Bhashini, embedded in the NaMo mobile app, to translate Modi's speeches with voiceovers in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Odia, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi."

"Seeing an opportunity, Franklin decided to take advantage. On 9 July, the company said that it would begin to support digital employees as part of its platform and treat them like any other employee. "Today Lattice is making AI history," Franklin pronounced. "We will be the first to give digital workers official employee records in Lattice. Digital workers will be securely onboarded, trained and assigned goals, performance metrics, appropriate systems access and even a manager. Just as any person would be." The pushback was swift - and, in many cases, brutal, particularly on LinkedIn, which is generally not known for its savage engagement like X (formerly known as Twitter). "This strategy and messaging misses the mark in a big way, and I say that as someone building an AI company," said Sawyer Middeleer, an executive at a firm that uses AI to help with sales research, on LinkedIn. "Treating AI agents as employees disrespects the humanity of your real employees. Worse, it implies that you view humans simply as 'resources' to be optimized and measured against machines. It's the exact opposite of a work environment designed to elevate the people who contribute to it.""

"Train the Deep Learning Ahem Detector with two sets of audio files, "a negative sample with clean voice/sound" (minimum 3 minutes) and "a positive one with 'ahem' sounds concatenated" (minimum 10s) and it will detect "ahems" in any voice sample thereafter."

A system called EyeDrop uses a head-mounted eye tracker that simultaneously records your field of view so it knows where you are looking on the screen. Gazing at an object - a photo, say - and then pressing a key, selects that object. It can then be moved from the screen to a tablet or smartphone just by glancing at the second device, as long as the two are connected wirelessly.

"FROM THE BOING BOING SHOP   FOLLOW US Twitter / Facebook / RSS Singhealth, a Singaporean public health service, suffered the worst breach in Singaporean history, losing control of 1.5 million peoples' data; included in the breach was prescription data on 160,000 people, including Singapore's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong."

"Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you've been. Google's support page on the subject states: "You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored." That isn't true. Even with "location history" paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking."

"Yet so-called smart devices inarguably depend on thousands of low-paid humans who annotate sound snippets so tech companies can upgrade their electronic ears; our faintest whispers have become one of their most valuable datasets."

"In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles-including some you really wouldn't want shared on the Internet. In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sits on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh. The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot's Roomba J7 series robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label audio, photo, and video data used to train artificial intelligence."