Category Archives: Surveillance technology

The Guardian: Rules urgently needed to oversee police use of data and AI – report (“Report warns that technology, uptake of which has largely been driven by cuts, could lead to discrimination”)

techdirt: Ring Continues To Pitch Facial Recognition To Law Enforcement While Claiming It Won’t Be Adding Facial Recognition To Its Cameras by Tim Cushing (“Ring continues to insist it is not adding facial recognition to its sadly super-popular doorbell cameras. … Continue reading →

Mother Jones: California Cops Are Collecting Info on Millions of Drivers Who Have Done Nothing Wrong (“With few rules and no oversight, California’s biggest law enforcement agencies are sharing millions of driver records.”)

Vice: This Senate Bill Would Ban Federal Use of Facial Recognition by Edward Ongweso Jr. (“Jeff Merkley and Cory Booker have introduced a Senate bill to place a moratorium until regulations are passed by Congress.”)

WaPo: Ring and Nest helped normalize American surveillance and turned us into a nation of voyeurs by Drew Harwell (“For all the worries about hacking, owners of Internet-connected cameras say they love watching people silently from afar — often their … Continue reading →

HuffPost: The NYPD May Be Secretly Using Facebook Photos In Its Facial Recognition Searches by Mike Hayes (“In two recent cases, however, official documents from the NYPD Facial Information Section (FIS) obtained by HuffPost indicate that social media photos were … Continue reading →

NBC News: Cute videos, but little evidence: Police say Amazon Ring isn’t much of a crime fighter by Cyrus Farivar (“Hundreds of police departments have signed agreements with Ring to gain access to footage filmed on home surveillance cameras.”)

NYTimes: Activate This ‘Bracelet of Silence,’ and Alexa Can’t Eavesdrop by Nathaniel Hill (“Microphones and cameras lurk everywhere. You may want to slip on some privacy armor.”)

Guardian: No, Clearview AI’s creepy plan to spy on us is not ‘free speech’ by Jake Laperruque

Vox: The world’s scariest facial recognition software, explained By Rebecca Heilweil (“Clearview AI built a massive database of faces that it’s making available to law enforcement, and nobody’s stopping it.”)

Reuters: Coronavirus brings China’s surveillance state out of the shadows by Yingzhi Yang & Julie Zhu (“When the man from Hangzhou returned home from a business trip, the local police got in touch. They had tracked his car by his … Continue reading →

The Atlantic: A World Without Privacy Will Revive the Masquerade by Jonathan Kittrain (“As the growing scale of facial recognition shows, more data can always be extracted.”)

Slate: Clearview’s Terrifying Facial Recognition Can’t Go Back in the Bottle by Aaron Mak (“Around half a dozen big tech companies have now demanded that Clearview AI, the now-notorious facial recognition company that has scraped more than 3 billion images … Continue reading →

NYTimes: Opinion: The Government Uses ‘Near Perfect Surveillance’ Data on Americans (“Congressional hearings are urgently needed to address location tracking.”)

Law.com: Google Hit With Class Action Under Illinois Biometric Privacy Law Over Facial Recognition by Ross Todd (“The complaint claims Google ‘failed to obtain consent from anyone’ when it introduced facial recognition to its cloud service for storing and sharing … Continue reading →

Boston Globe: Editorial: Facial-recognition tech may have value, but real-time surveillance goes too far (“Software that identifies people in videos could create a privacy nightmare. A patchwork of city bans won’t prevent it.”)

Vox: Why we don’t know as much as we should about police surveillance technology by Rebecca Heilweil (“Despite a growing number of high-tech tools, law enforcement agencies don’t seem to want to disclose what they’re using.”)

Chicago Sun Times: CPD using controversial facial recognition program that scans billions of photos from Facebook, other sites by Tom Schuba (“Critics say Clearview AI’s software is an invasive overreach because it grabs the photos without the consent of those … Continue reading →