Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
Facial Recognition Is Tracking Customers as They Shop in Stores
November 24th, 2017Via: CNBC: Retailers are using facial recognition to collect data about customers as they shop in stores, according to an IT company with insight into the space. “One of the big things brick-and-mortar retailers are getting into now is knowing their customers … tracking who’s entering their mall and how they’re behaving,” said Mark Lunt, […]
Google Collects Android Users’ Locations Even When Location Services Are Disabled
November 21st, 2017Shocker. Via: Quartz: Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card? Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google […]
Massive U.S. Military Social Media Spying Archive Left Wide Open in AWS S3 Buckets
November 18th, 2017Via: The Register: Three misconfigured AWS S3 buckets have been discovered wide open on the public internet containing “dozens of terabytes” of social media posts and similar pages – all scraped from around the world by the US military to identify and profile persons of interest. The archives were found by UpGuard’s veteran security-breach hunter […]
Surveillance Cameras Made by China Are Hanging All Over the U.S.
November 13th, 2017Via: Wall Street Journal: The Memphis police use the surveillance cameras to scan the streets for crime. The U.S. Army uses them to monitor a base in Missouri. Consumer models hang in homes and businesses across the country. At one point, the cameras kept watch on the U.S. embassy in Kabul. All the devices were […]
TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports
November 13th, 2017Via: EFF: The “PreCheck” program is billed as a convenient service to allow U.S. travelers to “speed through security” at airports. However, the latest proposal released by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reveals the Department of Homeland Security’s greater underlying plan to collect face images and iris scans on a nationwide scale. DHS’s programs will […]
Big Data Meets Big Brother as China Moves to Rate Its Citizens
November 8th, 2017Behold, the biggest Magic 8 Ball ever. Via: Wired: On June 14, 2014, the State Council of China published an ominous-sounding document called “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System”. In the way of Chinese policy documents, it was a lengthy and rather dry affair, but it contained a radical idea. What […]
Nothing to Hide
October 29th, 2017Via: Vimeo: NOTHING TO HIDE (Oct. 2016) is an independent documentary dealing with surveillance and its acceptance by the general public through the “I have nothing to hide” argument.
U.S. Widens Surveillance to Include ‘Homegrown Violent Extremists’
October 25th, 2017Mmm hmm. Via: Reuters: The U.S. government has broadened an interpretation of which citizens can be subject to physical or digital surveillance to include “homegrown violent extremists,” according to official documents seen by Reuters. The change last year to a Department of Defense manual on procedures governing its intelligence activities was made possible by a […]
Tech Firms Seek Washington’s Prized Asset: Top-Secret Clearances
October 23rd, 2017Via: Bloomberg: In doing so, companies such as Facebook Inc. are competing with defense contractors, financial firms and the U.S. government itself. Security clearances are a rare and valued commodity, whether at a bank trying to prevent hackers from stealing credit-card data and emptying accounts or at a manufacturer building parts for a stealth fighter […]
‘Why ProtonMail Is More Secure Than Gmail’
October 23rd, 2017Disclosure: I have no relationship with ProtonMail, besides being a user of the service. — While I wouldn’t assume that ProtonMail is as secure as they claim it to be, what is very clear is that far less of your personal information is going to leak from ProtonMail than it would from Gmail, which essentially […]
