Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
Britain: Police Fine Pedestrian £90 for Disorderly Behaviour After Hiding His Face from Facial Recognition Camera
May 16th, 2019Via: Daily Mail: Police fined a pedestrian £90 for disorderly behaviour after he tried to cover his face when he saw a controversial facial recognition camera on a street in London. Officers set up the camera on a van in Romford, East London, which then cross-checked photos of faces of passers-by against a database of […]
Man Makes Videos Critical of New Zealand Government, Gets Visits by Armed Police
May 15th, 2019Here are the videos that attracted the attention of the police. This is a Facebook post with the video of one of the police visits. In case you don’t use Facebook, someone mirrored the video on YouTube: Via: Cross the Rubicon:
Monsanto ‘Compiled Dossier’ on Political Opponents
May 13th, 2019Via: BBC: French officials are investigating after revelations that agro-chemicals firm Monsanto compiled a potentially illegal file on critics on chemicals and genetically modified crops. The document was made by a PR agency working for Monsanto, which makes the controversial weed killer glyphosate. Marketed as Roundup by Monsanto, the weed killer has come under fire […]
All Four Major Wireless Carriers Hit With Lawsuits Over Sharing, Selling Location Data
May 13th, 2019Via: TechDirt: We’ve noted repeatedly that if you’re upset about Facebook’s privacy scandals, you should be equally concerned about the wireless industry’s ongoing location data scandals. Not only were the major carriers caught selling your location data to any nitwit with a checkbook, they were even found to be selling your E-911 location data, which […]
Swarms of Drones, Piloted by Artificial Intelligence, May Soon Patrol Europe’s Borders
May 12th, 2019Step 1: Facilitate and encourage illegal immigration to the point of collapsing European society. Step 2: Deploy swarms of surveillance drones to interrogate/track/identify individuals at random. You know, since we created the problem in the first place, we’ll come up with a “solution.” Step 3: ….. (Fill in the blank) Hmm. I know. How about: […]
Privacy Experts, Senators Demand Investigation of Amazon’s Child Data Collection Practices
May 12th, 2019Via: The Intercept: Last year, a coalition of privacy advocates and child psychologists warned against putting an Amazon Alexa speaker anywhere near your child on the fairly reasonable grounds that developing minds shouldn’t befriend always-on surveillance devices, no matter how cute the packaging. Now, a group of privacy researchers, attorneys, and U.S. senators are calling […]
IBM: Use AI to Identify Vaccine-Hesitant Parents
May 8th, 2019Mmm hmm. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black Via: IEEE: Growing skepticism toward vaccines has sparked a flareup of measles outbreaks affecting New York City neighborhoods, cruise ships, international airports and even Google’s Mountain View headquarters. To help family physicians reach out to […]
For Lower-Paid Workers, the Robot Overlords Have Arrived
May 2nd, 2019Via: Wall Street Journal: It’s time to stop worrying that robots will take our jobs — and start worrying that they will decide who gets jobs. Millions of low-paid workers’ lives are increasingly governed by software and algorithms. This was starkly illustrated by a report last week that Amazon.com tracks the productivity of its employees […]
U.S. Searches of Phones, Laptops at Airports Rising
May 1st, 2019Via: AP: U.S. government searches of travelers’ cellphones and laptops at airports and border crossings nearly quadrupled since 2015 and were being done for reasons beyond customs and immigration enforcement, according to papers filed Tuesday in a federal lawsuit that claims scouring the electronic devices without a warrant is unconstitutional. The government has vigorously defended […]
FCC Approves SpaceX’s Plans to Fly Internet-Beaming Satellites in Lower Orbit
April 30th, 2019In case you’re not being hit with enough EM smog already… Via: The Verge: The Federal Communications Commission has approved SpaceX’s request to fly a large swath of its future internet-beaming satellites at a lower orbit than originally planned. The approval was a major regulatory hurdle the company needed to clear in order to start […]
