Surveillance

This article was copublished with Consumer Reports, an independent, nonprofit organization that works side by side with consumers for truth, transparency and fairness in the marketplace. Learn more here. By now most internet users know their online activity is constantly tracked. No one should be shocked to see ads for items they…

A new test of how Apple gathers usage data from iPhones has found that the company collects personally identifiable information while explicitly promising not to. The privacy policy governing Apple’s device analytics says the “none of the collected information identifies you personally.” But an analysis of the data sent to Apple shows it includes a permanent, unchangeable ID number called a Directory Services…

Following a formal notice which remained unaddressed, the CNIL imposed a penalty of 20 million euros and ordered CLEARVIEW AI to stop collecting and using data on individuals in France without a legal basis and to delete the data already collected. How does the CLEARVIEW AI’s facial recognition service works?…

This podcast series, intended for private sector companies doing business in Québec, dives into the requirements of Act 25 coming into force on September 22, 2022. Candice Hévin and Marie-Eve Jean, from our Privacy & Data Protection Group, lead the discussions on the changes to the private sector regime, namely the amendments to the…

In early 2012, the New York Times Magazine put out a cover story about Andrew Pole, a statistician working for Target who was tasked with inventing a way to identify potentially pregnant shoppers, even if those shoppers didn’t want the company to know. The rationale, Pole said, was that moms-to-be are a multi-million…

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined Clearview AI Inc £7,552,800 for using images of people in the UK, and elsewhere, that were collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition. The ICO has also issued an enforcement…

NEW YORK – A controversial face recognition company that’s built a massive photographic dossier of the world’s people for use by police, national governments and — most recently — the Ukrainian military is now planning to offer its technology to banks and other private businesses. Clearview AI co-founder and CEO Hoan…

Meta has big plans for the future. And they all involve extracting even more data from consumers. Last week, the company released a positioning statement emphasizing a bold, tech-driven vision for its metaverse ambitions: smarter personal assistants, a fully immersive AR/VR experience, universal language translation, self-supervised machine learning, human-like AI, etc. All of…

Imagine an Internet of Snitches, each scanning whatever data they have access to for evidence of crime. Beyond the OS itself, individual phone apps could start looking for contraband. Personal computers would follow their lead. Home network file servers could pore through photos, videos and file backups for CSAM and…

On Friday February 19th, someone drove past the Lake Merced Golf Club, along freeway 280, and were outside the Dignity Health-GoHealth Urgent Care facility. But their car was most frequently parked outside a specific address in the fancy Noe Valley area of San Francisco. I know this because a company…