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"The uniforms allow school officials, teachers, and parents to keep track of the exact times that students leave or enter the school, Lin Zongwu, principal of the No. 11 School of Renhuai in Guizhou Province, told the state-run newspaper Global Times on Dec. 20. If students skip school without permission, an alarm will be triggered. If students try to game the system by swapping uniforms, an alarm also will sound, as facial-recognition equipment stationed at the school entrance can match a student's face with the chip embedded in the uniform."

"The robust way to do that, the way that can't be set aside at the whim of a government, is to require systems to be built so as not to collect data about a person. The basic principle is that a system must be designed not to collect certain data, if its basic function can be carried out without that data."

How long before this is used without our knowledge in facial recognition systems? "Through the use of the data from this lab study and a formula Kim and Yang applied called "fractal dimension," Kim and Yang discovered a negative relationship between the fractal dimension of pupil dilation and a person's workload, showing that pupil dilation could be used to indicate the mental workload of a person in a multitasking environment."

"Launched in response to terror attacks in New Zealand in May, where a lone gunman killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch while livestreaming the massacre on Facebook, it calls for the "effective enforcement" of laws prohibiting the dissemination of terrorist content. It also states that all action on the issue must be consistent with the principles of a free, open and secure Internet, without compromising freedom of expression."

"Many services retain the data they harvest indefinitely, and some have been caught storing (and losing) the data without encryption: for example, in 2017 the Greater Manchester Police were found to have lost data from victims of violent and sexual crimes, which had been stored unencrypted on DVDs and sent through the post."

"Encryption is the digital lock which gives us the security to trust our financial data and inner-most thoughts to the cloud, and without which everything, and I mean everything, in our digital lives might be exposed. "

"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."

"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?"

"Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a model for traffic without ownership. You pay a monthly fee for it, like with Spotify, tell the app where you are going and get instant access to taxis, Ubers, buses, and so on. Everything is available on-demand and ownership is no longer needed."

"In October, American teachers prevailed in a lawsuit with their school district over a computer program that assessed their performance. The system rated teachers in Houston by comparing their students' test scores against state averages. Those with high ratings won praise and even bonuses. Those who fared poorly faced the sack. The program did not please everyone. Some teachers felt that the system marked them down without good reason. But they had no way of checking if the program was fair or faulty: the company that built the software, the SAS Institute, regards its algorithm a trade secret and would not disclose its workings."

"NFTs are created on Ethereum's blockchain, which is immutable, meaning it cannot be altered. No one can undo your ownership of an NFT or re-create that exact same one. They're also "permissionless," so anyone can create, buy, or sell an NFT without asking for permission. Finally, every NFT is unique, and can be viewed by anyone. "

"Interoperability is the technical term for what we've lost as tech has matured. Software can be interoperable, either through common, open file formats, or through different programs speaking directly to one another, and so too can hardware: open standards are what allow you to use any headphones with any music player, for instance, or buy a TV without worrying if it will work with your streaming set-up."

""I think, without question, having access to quantitative data about our conversations, about facial expressions and intonations, would provide another dimension to the clinical interaction that's not detected right now," said Barron, a psychiatrist based in Seattle and author of the new book Reading Our Minds: The Rise of Big Data Psychiatry."

"We need to look at the nose to tail production of artificial intelligence. The seeds of the data problem were planted in the 1980s, when it became common to use data sets without close knowledge of what was inside, or concern for privacy. It was just "raw" material, reused across thousands of projects."

"But that was not before the falsely accused man had his name and image widely shared. The alert sent by Citizen contained a photo and was seen by more than 861,000 people. It read: "Citizen is offering a $30,000 reward to anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest of the arson suspect." Citizen told the Guardian in a statement it offered the cash reward "without formal coordination with the appropriate agencies". "Once we realized this error, we immediately retracted the photo and reward offer," it said. "We are actively working to improve our internal processes to ensure this does not occur again. This was a mistake we are taking very seriously.""

"By then, calls over social media for crowds to gather in areas of Cairo, and converge in public spaces had built an unstoppable momentum. "Social media was the most important tool in the revolution," said Abdelkarim. "People could communicate very easily and express themselves without any censorship." Mubarak's police state was over run by dissenters with smartphones and Facebook accounts."

" A new AI pair programmer that helps you write better code. It helps you quickly discover alternative ways to solve problems, write tests, and explore new APIs without having to tediously tailor a search for answers on the internet. As you type, it adapts to the way you write code - to help you complete your work faster. In other words, Copilot will sit on your computer and do a chunk of your coding work for you. There's a long-running joke in the coding community that a substantial portion of the actual work of programming is searching online for people who've solved the same problems as you, and copying their code into your program. Well, now there's an AI that will do that part for you."

"It's actually a big myth that search engines need to track your personal search history to make money or deliver quality search results. Almost all of the money search engines make (including Google) is based on the keywords you type in, without knowing anything about you, including your search history or the seemingly endless amounts of additional data points they have collected about registered and non-registered users alike. In fact, search advertisers buy search ads by bidding on keywords, not people….This keyword-based advertising is our primary business model. "

"Game players-like drivers-often have to reach conclusions without full understanding of what the other players-or drivers-are doing. So more researchers are applying game theory to train self-driving cars how to act in uncertain situations."