Surveillance

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…

A change to TikTok’s U.S. privacy policy on Wednesday introduced a new section that says the social video app “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information” from its users’ content. This includes things like “faceprints and voiceprints,” the policy explained. Reached for comment, TikTok could not confirm what product developments…

GATINEAU, QC, June 10, 2021 – The RCMP’s use of facial recognition technology (FRT) to conduct hundreds of searches of a database compiled illegally by a commercial enterprise is a violation of the Privacy Act, an investigation has found. In a Special Report to Parliament, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner…

About the Authors Yuan Stevens Policy Lead on Technology, Cybersecurity and Democracy, Ryerson Leadership Lab and Cybersecure Policy Exchange at Ryerson University Yuan (“You-anne”) Stevens is a legal and policy expert focused on cybersecurity, privacy, and human rights. She brings years of international experience to her role at Ryerson University…

GOOGLE GOT SOME good press a few weeks ago when it announced in a blog post that it would be moving forward with its plans to remove third-party cookies from the Chrome browser. The move had been announced early last year as part of the company’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, but now Google has…

A hot potato: Facebook broadly discloses the fact that it tracks people around the web even if they don’t have accounts, by virtue of social plugins, Facebook-linked logins, Facebook Analytics, as well as ad measurement tools on some websites. However, its attempts to scale back a $15 billion class action lawsuit…

As smartphone apps track our every move, a group of technologists in the US and UK this week offered guidelines for the ethical uses of location data. Leaders of the American Geographical Society and Britain’s mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey, want companies to commit to 10 principles, including minimizing data…