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" sex offender convicted of making more than 1,000 indecent images of children has been banned from using any "AI creating tools" for the next five years in the first known case of its kind. Anthony Dover, 48, was ordered by a UK court "not to use, visit or access" artificial intelligence generation tools without the prior permission of police as a condition of a sexual harm prevention order imposed in February. The ban prohibits him from using tools such as text-to-image generators, which can make lifelike pictures based on a written command, and "nudifying" websites used to make explicit "deepfakes"."

"A police investigation has been launched after MPs were apparently targeted in a "spear-phishing" attack, in what security experts believe could be an attempt to compromise parliament. A police force said it had started an inquiry after receiving a complaint from an MP who was sent a number of unsolicited messages last month."

"The public is often supportive of the use of such tech: 59% of U.K. adults told a survey they "somewhat" or "strongly" support police use of facial recognition technology in public spaces, and a Pew Research study found 46% of U.S. adults said they thought it was a good idea for society. In China, one study found that 51% of respondents approved of facial recognition tech in the public sphere, while in India, 69% of people said in a 2023 report that they supported its use by the police. But while authorities generally pitch facial recognition as a tool to capture terrorists or wanted murderers, the technology has also emerged as a critical instrument in a very particular context: punishing protesters. "

" A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company's chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police. The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday. "(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake," senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city's public broadcaster RTHK. Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company's UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said."

"The use of "geofence warrants" have exploded in recent years, in large part thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones coupled with hungry data companies like Google vacuuming up and storing huge amounts of its users' location data, which becomes obtainable by law enforcement requests. Police can use geofence warrants (also known as reverse-location warrants) to demand that Google turn over information on which users' devices were in a particular geographic area at a certain point in time."

"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."

"The European Parliament secured a ban on use of real-time surveillance and biometric technologies including emotional recognition but with three exceptions, according to Breton. It would mean police would be able to use the invasive technologies only in the event of an unexpected threat of a terrorist attack, the need to search for victims and in the prosecution of serious crime."

"Some of Britain's biggest retailers, including Tesco, John Lewis and Sainsbury's, have been urged to pull out of a new policing strategy amid warnings it risks wrongly criminalising people of colour, women and LGBTQ+ people. A coalition of 14 human rights groups has written to the main retailers - also including Marks & Spencer, the Co-op, Next, Boots and Primark - saying that their participation in a new government-backed scheme that relies heavily on facial recognition technology to combat shoplifting will "amplify existing inequalities in the criminal justice system"."

"The campaign is spearheaded by the privacy advocate Big Brother Watch and is also backed by 31 groups including Liberty, Amnesty International and the Race Equality Foundation. Police have deployed live facial recognition at large-scale public events, including King Charles's coronation. The statement said: "We hold differing views about live facial recognition surveillance, ranging from serious concerns about its incompatibility with human rights, to the potential for discriminatory impact, the lack of safeguards, the lack of an evidence base, an unproven case of necessity or proportionality, the lack of a sufficient legal basis, the lack of parliamentary consideration, and the lack of a democratic mandate. "We call on UK Police and private companies to immediately stop using live facial recognition for public surveillance.""

""We know [geofence warrants] are a ubiquitous policing tool, and as long as companies make it possible to comply with these sorts of court orders, they're putting their users at risk," Fox Cahn said. "Whether it's Google or Uber or Lyft or payment companies, by segregating their user data in a way which prevents the aggregated location searches, you can keep that data while preventing compliance with a geofence warrant.""

"In the context of ongoing corruption crises, rising anti-migrant rhetoric and anti-human-rights movements, and threats to press freedom, the role of social media companies may seem like a lesser priority, but in fact, it is a crucial part of the picture. People's rights and freedoms offline are being jeopardised by online platforms' current business model, where profit is made from stoking up anger and fear. At the South African human rights organisation where I work, the Legal Resources Centre, we are seeing an escalation of xenophobic violence that is often incited on social media. A recent joint investigation we conducted with international NGO Global Witness showed that Facebook, TikTok and YouTube all failed to enforce their own policies on hate speech and incitement to violence by approving adverts that included calls on the police in South Africa to kill foreigners, referred to non-South African nationals as a "disease", as well as incited violence through "force" against migrants."

"In past months, an AI-generated image of an explosion at the Pentagon caused a brief dip in the stock market. AI audio parodies of US presidents playing video games became a viral trend. AI-generated images that appeared to show Donald Trump fighting off police officers trying to arrest him circulated widely on social media platforms. The Republican National Committee released an entirely AI-generated ad that showed images of various imagined disasters that would take place if Biden were re-elected, while the American Association of Political Consultants warned that video deepfakes present a "threat to democracy"."

"Emmanuel Macron is facing a backlash after threatening to cut off social media networks as a means of stopping the spread of violence during periods of unrest. Élysée officials and government ministers responded on Wednesday by insisting the president was not threatening a "general blackout" but instead the "occasional and temporary" suspension of platforms. The president's comments came as ministers blamed young people using social media such as Snapchat and TikTok for organising and encouraging rioting and violence after the shooting dead of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb last week."

"While the systemic brutality used by Colombian police to quell national protests in 2021 was real and is well documented, photos recently used by Amnesty International to highlight the issue were not. The international human rights advocacy group has come under fire for posting images generated by artificial intelligence in order to promote their reports on social media - and has since removed them. The images, including one of a woman being dragged away by police officers, depict the scenes during protests that swept across Colombia in 2021. But any more than a momentary glance at the images reveals that something is off."

"Campaigners fear the face-scanning technology could be used against protesters, and that police have done so before. The Met insisted the technology would not be used to quell lawful protest or target activists. But campaign groups do not believe them. Britain's biggest force said: "It is not used to identify people who are linked to, or have been convicted of, being involved in protest activity." A leading academic expert said the number of people whose faces would be scanned would make it the largest deployment yet of live facial recognition (LFR) in the UK."

"Unrecord's appearance at the centre of gaming conversation raises another question: as game graphics improve, to the extent where you don't need millions of dollars and dozens of people to create games that look impressively realistic, how far do we go with it? Motorcycle racing game Ride 4 made waves recently with ultra-realistic gameplay footage of bikes zooming around rainy Northern Ireland; in that context, photorealism is a boon. But when games involve violence, as they often do, it becomes much more uncomfortable. I have suppressed mild disgust for years at the gratuitous neck-snapping or stabbing animations in most first-person shooters. How much worse would that instinctive ickiness be if the game and its characters looked more real?"

"ne YouTuber, Dan Duffy, joined the search just to post a video of himself joining it, and was fined on a public order offence, which he also filmed. One TikTok account, Curtis Cool Stuff, posted a video of a man digging up woodland, and another of him roaming around a derelict house opposite the bank where Bulley was last seen. Another group of men had to be dispersed from the house, having travelled there from Liverpool."

"The Italian supreme court ordered prosecutors last month to disclose how the Sky ECC data had been retrieved, arguing that it was impossible to have a fair trial if the accused is unable to access the evidence or assess its reliability and legality, a position supposed by the NGO Fair Trials. Whether prosecutors choose to do so could determine whether the arrests made this week lead to convictions or not. Prosecutors in the UK face a similar dilemma in relation to the hacking of EncroChat, another secret messaging platform that had the added facility of a "panic" button that when pressed would immediately erase the phone's contents."

"You're nailing the problem: the tech sales people and the politicians are all on the same drug, which is "This tech is perfect", because it's cheaper than more police. There's a lawsuit in the US because a black man was wrongly arrested based on facial recognition. Tech companies need to be held to account. One company we focused on, Clearview AI, scraped social networks - collected images of people's faces and data from publicly available information - to create its software. Facial recognition relies on artificial intelligence. It needs to study faces. And only the government - the DVLA etc - and social networking companies have access to a lot of faces."

"The legal but harmful provisions have become a lightning rod for concerns that the bill will result in an overly censorious approach on social media platforms. Tory MPs including David Davis have argued that the legal but harmful provisions in the bill mean tech firms will "inevitably err on the side of censorship" in how they police their platforms, while Truss has said she wants to "make sure free speech is allowed" when the bill comes back."