Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
Woman Says Her Amazon Device Recorded Private Conversation, Sent It Out to Random Contact
May 24th, 2018I can’t believe people pay to have these things in their homes. Via: KIRO 7: A Portland family contacted Amazon to investigate after they say a private conversation in their home was recorded by Amazon’s Alexa — the voice-controlled smart speaker — and that the recorded audio was sent to the phone of a random […]
Pentagon Worked with “Private-Sector Organizations” on Plan to Verify Identity with Mobile Phones
May 23rd, 2018Via: Nextgov: The Defense Department is funding a project that officials say could revolutionize the way companies, federal agencies and the military itself verify that people are who they say they are and it could be available in most commercial smartphones within two years. The technology, which will be embedded in smartphones’ hardware, will analyze […]
Amazon Selling Face-Recognition Tech to Police
May 22nd, 2018Amazon, a large CIA contractor, is selling face-recognition tech to police. Via: AP: The American Civil Liberties Union and other privacy activists are asking Amazon to stop marketing a powerful facial recognition tool to police, saying law enforcement agencies could use the technology to “easily build a system to automate the identification and tracking of […]
Japan: Directorate for Signals Intelligence
May 21st, 2018Via: The Intercept: The directorate has a history that dates back to the 1950s; its role is to eavesdrop on communications. But its operations remain so highly classified that the Japanese government has disclosed little about its work – even the location of its headquarters. Most Japanese officials, except for a select few of the […]
Google: Behavioral Sequencing
May 18th, 2018Via: The Verge: Google has built a multibillion-dollar business out of knowing everything about its users. Now, a video produced within Google and obtained by The Verge offers a stunningly ambitious and unsettling look at how some at the company envision using that information in the future. The video was made in late 2016 by […]
U.S. Cell Carriers Are Selling Access to Real-Time Phone Location Data
May 17th, 2018Via: zdnet: Four of the largest cell giants in the US are selling your real-time location data to a company that you’ve probably never heard about before. In case you missed it, a senator last week sent a letter demanding the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigate why Securus, a prison technology company, can track any […]
South Wales Police Facial Recognition System Generated 92% False Positives at Soccer Match
May 7th, 2018Via: Engadget: Ask critics of police face recognition why they’re so skeptical and they’ll likely cite unreliability as one factor. What if the technology flags an innocent person? Unfortunately, that caution appears to have been warranted to some degree. South Wales Police are facing a backlash after they released data showing that their face recognition […]
Chinese Firms Use ‘Mind-Reading’ Devices to Monitor Workers’ Emotions
April 30th, 2018As I’ve always said (recent example) re: EEG data and these sorts of claims: I doubt it works at all, but the fact that they’re trying is disturbing enough. Via: Sydney Morning Herald: Workers in China are being hooked up with brain-reading devices that feed information about their moods to their employers, raising fears about […]
Dark Journalist X-Series: Pine Gap
April 28th, 2018Dark Journalist is slowly and carefully weaving many strange threads together with his outstanding X-Series. I usually post this sort of material on the Cryptogon Backchannel, but I’m posting this to the main page because Pine Gap is a standard Cryptogon topic, in terms of the surveillance and communications aspects of the facility that we’re […]
Amazon Designing Some Sort of Home Robot
April 23rd, 2018Via: Bloomberg: Ten years ago, Amazon introduced the Kindle and established the appeal of reading on a digital device. Four years ago, Jeff Bezos and company rolled out the Echo, prompting millions of people to start talking to a computer. Now Amazon.com Inc. is working on another big bet: robots for the home. The retail […]
