Police departments across the country could soon have access to facial recognition technology in the Breathalyzer tests they give and the body cameras they wear.
The post Public to Be Scanned in Real Time as Police Body Cameras May Soon Get Facial Recognition appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
The Facebook scandal involving personal data mishandled by Cambridge Analytica has raised concerns over the privacy of the information we share on our social media accounts.
Some countries have gone as far as to legislate Internet data privacy with laws granting the “right to be forgotten.”
Yet Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says we don’t need such regulations here in the states. Is he right?
This is a Reality Check you won’t get anywhere else.
It’s an unsettling thought: your personal data, being manipulated on a global scale. Where you live, what kind of car you drive, how many children you have, what food you eat, how much you money you earn, what clothes you wear, how you exercise, the list goes on and on.
While other countries are tightening laws on Internet privacy and how corporations can use your data, such as the UK’s data protection law with its “right to be forgotten,” the United States seems to be stuck in the 1980s on the issue.
And though California has been a leader in privacy, the last meaningful update to the state’s privacy laws was in the 1980s, long before today’s technology.
For context, Census data shows that in 1989, 15 percent of American households owned a computer.
Today, according to Pew Research, 77 percent of Americans have a smartphone—a computer in their pocket or purse.
And in 2015, those smartphone owners used about 27 smartphone apps per month, according to Statista.
You know you don’t. And yet, a California-based group called the Californians for Consumer Privacy has raised concern about how our information is collected and sold.
From that group came the California Consumer Privacy Act. The act is intended to not only hold major corporations making $50 million per year or more responsible for their consumers’ data, but also giving Californians the right to know where and to whom their data is being disclosed or sold, and if their data is being properly protected.
From the checkout at Target, to your Facebook account, browsing the Internet or even just walking on a city street—credit cards are being swiped, messages are being shared, and cameras are recording.
So are the rules of how businesses use your data fair and respectful of your privacy?
One of the key aspects of the California Consumer Privacy Act is a right of action against companies that store data but have not taken reasonable steps to secure that data. That means consumers can sue companies that didn’t protect their data.
What exactly “reasonable steps” means needs to be fleshed out in the courts, but there are plenty of examples of companies that didn’t take “reasonable steps” until after data was compromised.
From December 19, 2013, “Target says hackers breached its system and stole 40 million credit card numbers.”
From September 18, 2014, “Almost immediately after word broke that Home Depot had been hacked, security experts were noting that the breach was likely even worse than the massive Target that had preceded it.”
From October 2, 2014, “JP Morgan just revealing that an August data breach could affect 76 million households.”
From February 5, 2015, “One of America’s largest health insurers, Anthem, this morning confirmed a massive data breach. Reports say hackers may have stolen up to 80 million records. No credit card or medical information is in danger, but Social Security numbers, birthdays and addresses may have been compromised.”
We believe the corporation will use our information for the purpose of their service. Once your information is outside of the intended use, it’s nearly impossible to control it.
And third party sharing of your data allows it is be used, shared and disseminated without any control on your part. Big data is powerful force in the United States. But should big data be allowed to do whatever it wants with your information. If not, how do we, as the public, get some control back?
The post Reality Check: Is Your Personal Data Safe Online? (VIDEO) appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
Bitcoin mining “rigs” like this one are growing rapidly in the U.S.
The vast popularity of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin will lead to blackouts and higher electric bills unless something changes fast. Digital currencies are not controlled by the big banks yet, but rather by a network of users who an incredible amount of electrical power while processing tracking, verifying transactions and building complex blockchains.
Cryptocurrency mining; the process by which digital currencies are created, does in fact use vast amounts of electricity. And it’s growing. The amount of electricity used in Bitcoin mining increased by 610% between April 2017 and April 2018, data from Digicomist indicates. Bitcoin miners worldwide now use enough electricity to power 5.5 million American homes.
Disturbingly, Bitcoin (BTC) is just one cryptocurrency; experts think there are now more than 1,000 cryptocurrencies on the market. Those digital coins are attracting a lot of money; over $600 billion was invested in the cryptocurrency market at the end of 2017, Coindesk’s State of Blockchain report estimated. That means the cryptocurrency market is now worth more than the national economy of Argentina – a country of 43.85 million people.
Cryptocurrency Mining is Big Business
Digital currencies have become one of the most lucrative investments around. Coindesk estimated that all significant cryptocurrencies increased in value by more than 1,000% in 2017.
Bitcoin’s price increased from around $900 a Coin at the end of 2016 to a high of approximately $20,000 at the end of 2017, Coindesk estimated. Bitcoin’s price fell to $7,967 on April 16, 2018, but Bitcoin trading volume hit a record high on April 12, MarketWatch reported.
Such gains are attracting big money to cryptocurrency. George Soros and the Rockefeller family have announced plans to invest in altcoins in April 2017. Much of the investment will go into cryptocurrency mining which is very lucrative.
Observers think the biggest cryptocurrency miner; China’s Bitmain, made more money than the computer chipmaker NVIDIA, one of the most lucrative tech stocks, CNBC reported. NVIDIA’s income increased by 54.61% to $2.911 billion during 2017, Bitmain might have made a profit of $3 billion to $4 billion in 2017.
How Cryptocurrency Mining Threatens Electricity Supplies
Bitmain is one of the companies identified as a threat to the electricity supply in the nation of Iceland. Bitmain operates mining farms; datacenters that harvest cryptocurrency and sells computers designed for mining or mining rigs to investors.
Iceland’s residents are worried that cryptocurrency miners will use up most of their island’s very cheap electricity, The Washington Post reported. The fear is that miners might use so much electrical power that they might monopolize the island’s limited electricity supply.
Cryptocurrency Mining popular in the US
Cryptocurrency mining is not widespread in the United States yet, but it’s coming.
The Eastman Kodak Company unveiled plans to sell a cryptocurrency mining rig called the KashMiner to the public in January. Kodak plans to install mining rigs at its headquarters in Rochester, New York, to augment the company’s income.
News stories did not say how much electricity the KashMiner uses, but if it becomes popular, it can cause shortages or blackouts. If Kodak is successful, other companies might follow its lead.
Cryptocurrency mining by individuals is already extremely popular in the United States. There is a severe shortage of computer-graphics cards; that are used in mining, at retailers like Best Buy, Ars Technica reported in January. The shortage developed because of all the people trying cryptocurrency mining.
Individual mining is hard to stop because almost anybody with a computer, an internet connection, and a graphics card can do it. Even though it is easy, miners can make several hundred dollars a month.
Another threat is that largescale commercial cryptocurrency mining might start in areas of the US with cheap electricity such; as Washington State, or Louisiana. Major miners have ignored North America so far, but CNBC reported Bitmain has plans to mine in Canada.
Watch out for Cryptocurrency Mining
Cryptocurrency mining has not caused significant power grid blackouts yet, but it could happen. In fact, it can happen in any country where inflation destroys the buying power of the currency while increasing the value of cryptocurrencies. This currency issue has already happened in Venezuela.
Households and individuals should prepare for such shortages by installing their own backup power systems. People that mine cryptocurrency should definitely invest part of their profits in a backup power system so they can keep mining during blackouts.
Facebook has finally responded to requests to stop tracking users for advertising. But they aren’t going to. Instead, Facebook is going to force all of those who continue to use their social media service to accept being tracked around the internet.
“People can choose to not be on Facebook if they want,” said Facebook Deputy Chief Privacy Officer Rob Sherman. Or, they will be forced to opt into being tracked everywhere they go, and that’s just the way it is. This decision was not made in the interest of the users of Facebook, but explicitly to keep the company’s business model “intact,” reported the Independent.
Some had suggested that the site will have to make major changes once a new European Union privacy law comes into effect. Many parts of those new regulations seem in direct conflict with Facebook’s business, including new rules about what information can be harvested about users. But that’s exactly why Facebook will explicitly demand that you opt into being tracked.
Sherman said that the social network will begin seeking Europeans’ permission this week for a variety of ways Facebook uses their data, but he said that opting out of targeted marketing altogether would not be possible. Therefore, you’ll be tracked if you continue to use Facebook. “Facebook is an advertising-supported service,” Sherman said in a briefing with reporters at Facebook’s headquarters. Facebook users will only be able to limit the kinds of data that advertisers use to target their pitches, he said, but “all ads on Facebook are targeted to some extent, and that’s true for offline advertising, as well.”
Facebook, which is still the world’s largest social media network, will use what are known as “permission screens” to notify and obtain approval. “Permission screens” are simply pages filled with text that require pressing a button to advance. The screens will show up on the Facebook website and smartphone app in Europe this week and globally in the coming months, Sherman said. The screens will not give Facebook users the option to hit “decline.” Instead, they will guide users to either “accept and continue” or “manage data settings,” according to copies the company showed reporters on Tuesday.
Facebook Chief Financial Officer David Wehner warned in February the company could see a drop-off in usage due to the EU law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). But more likely than not, the drop in usage will be due to the privacy concerns many have when using social media.
We all know that privacy is a thing of the past, right? Pfff. The government spying on everyone?
That’s yesterday’s news. But if you think you’ve heard it all when it comes to the obtrusive police state panopticon, you’ve got another thing coming.
Here are five privacies you didn’t even realize you lost.
For the full video transcript and more from The Corbett Report, please click here
The post 5 Privacies You Didn’t Know You Lost (VIDEO) appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
Many users have been dropping Facebook, ceasing to use social media, or looking into the data that’s been collected about them. But if you think that what Facebook knows about you is scary, check out what Google knows about you.
Dylan Curran, an information technology consultant, took a look at just what Google knew about him. Even with his experience as a web developer, he was shocked. “I was really like: ‘Oh, my God. This is preposterous,"” Curran said. When he requested his data from Google, he found that it was constantly tracking his location in the background, including calculating how long it took to travel between different points, along with his hobbies, interests, possible weight, income, data on his apps, and records of files he had deleted. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Although Curran thinks what Google is doing is harmless and not at all malicious (we’ll agree to disagree there), he did say it’s a little unsettling that the tech giant knows so many things about him and he feels uncomfortable now that he knows how closely he’s being tracked.
“It’s wrong to trust any entity that big with so much information,” he said. “They’re just trying to make money,” and at some point, “someone is going to make a mistake.” But this information and revelation definitely struck a chord with some, and they aren’t happy about it. Curran’s original tweet now has 159,000 talking about it.
Want to freak yourself out? I"m gonna show just how much of your information the likes of Facebook and Google store about you without you even realising it
— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018
Google tracked every single place Curran had been, right down to how long he was there and the time he left.
2. This is every place I have been in the last twelve months in Ireland, going in so far as the time of day I was in the location and how long it took me to get to that location from my previous one pic.twitter.com/I1kB1vwntT
— Dylan Curran (@iamdylancurran) March 24, 2018
“All Google users are being tracked by default in terms of physically where [they’re] going and located,” Scott J. Shackelford, an associate business professor at Indiana University focusing on cybersecurity law and policy said, according to NBC News. “That is shocking to a lot of people.”
A spokesperson for Google wanted the public to know that everyone needs to be aware of their online privacy choices and review them regularly. “In order to make the privacy choices that are right for them, it’s essential that people can understand and control their Google data,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “Over the years, we’ve developed tools like My Account expressly for this purpose, and we’d encourage everyone to review it regularly.”
Google has made an array of privacy tools available through the My Account feature. It will allow users see their personal data and tracking history. It also allows people to turn off tracking mechanisms or delete individual pieces of data they want gone from the archives.
(ANTIMEDIA) — While the nation remained fixated on gun control and Facebook’s violative practices last week, the U.S. government quietly codified the CLOUD Act, its own intrusive policies on citizens’ data. While the massive, $1.2 trillion omnibus spending bill passed Friday received widespread media attention, the CLOUD Act — which lawmakers snuck into the end of the […]
This report was originally published by Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge
Facebook advertisers have threatened to abandon the platform in the wake of a massive data harvesting scandal which began after it was revealed that an app created by two psychologists – one of whom Facebook employs – gathered data on over 50 million Americans and then sold it to political data firm Cambridge Analytics and several others, who used it without consent.
Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of the social media giant gave several interviews Wednesday after spending three days in hiding, ostensibly with a crisis management team which advised him not give wholly unsatisfactory answers to one of the largest data breaches in history.
The scandal is pushing some Facebook advertisers to consider dropping the platform, reports The Times.
ISBA, a British group of advertisers that spend hundreds of millions of pounds a year on Facebook, demanded answers. It is understood that some of its 3,000 brands, which include those of the consumer goods companies Unilever and P&G, will not tolerate association with Facebook if it emerges that users’ data has found its way into the hands of brokers and political campaigners without authorisation. Sources close to the trade body said that if the company’s answers were not satisfactory, advertisers might spend their money elsewhere. ISBA will meet Facebook executives this week.
Others, such as Mozilla – the company behind the Firefox browser – have already pulled out, or as it said have “pressed pause” on Facebook advertising. In a scathing post, Mozilla said that “when Facebook takes stronger action in how it shares customer data, specifically strengthening its default privacy settings for third party apps, we’ll consider returning.” Until then, “Mozilla will advertise elsewhere” as it warned in a blog post this morning:
Mozilla is pressing pause on our Facebook advertising. Facebook knows a great deal about their two billion users — perhaps more intimate information than any other company does. They know everything we click and like on their site, and know who our closest friends and relationships are. Because of its scale, Facebook has become one of the most convenient platforms to reach an audience for all companies and developers, whether a multibillion corporation or a not-for-profit.
We understand that Facebook took steps to limit developer access to friends’ data beginning in 2014. This was after Facebook started its relationship with Cambridge University Professor Aleksandr Kogan, whose decision to share data he collected from Facebook with Cambridge Analytica is currently in the news. This news caused us to take a closer look at Facebook’s current default privacy settings given that we support the platform with our advertising dollars. While we believe there is still more to learn, we found that its current default settings leave access open to a lot of data – particularly with respect to settings for third party apps.
We are encouraged that Mark Zuckerberg has promised to improve the privacy settings and make them more protective. When Facebook takes stronger action in how it shares customer data, specifically strengthening its default privacy settings for third party apps, we’ll consider returning.
We look forward to Facebook instituting some of the things that Zuckerberg promised today
Meanwhile, Facebook shares remain under rising pressure – falling approximately 8.6% in three trading sessions and down again on Thursday premarket as investors – particularly “ethical” investment funds – reconsider their decision to hold the increasingly radioactive company.
Nordea, the largest bank in the Nordic region, which manages about £283 billion (~$400 billion USD), said that it had put some of its Facebook investments in “quarantine” while it assessed the scandal. Union Investment, a German group that manages about £255 billion ($360 billion USD), said that it was reviewing its holding of Facebook shares. –The Times
Investors have also launched several lawsuits against Facebook, claiming that the company made “false and misleading statements” regarding its privacy policies and who they share data with.
Revenue was $3.7B in 2011, and over $40B in 2017. They had a 1 billion users then and now have 2 billion users. The question is revenues went up 11x while users went up 2x. Are we sure they just sell ad space?…
…I am guessing they sell data…your data! pic.twitter.com/WiAFcOUMDu
— Ed
(@DowdEdward) March 21, 2018
One San Francisco shareholder, Fan Yuan, filed a lawsuit on behalf of an undisclosed party of investors who claim that Facebook’s “omissions” led to a “precipitous” decline in the company’s stock price – wiping out nearly $50 billion of value on Monday and Tuesday.
A Maryland woman who said that she was “frequently targeted with political ads while using Facebook” during the 2016 US election filed a separate suit against Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, alleging that the companies had treated her personal data with “absolute disregard”. Cambridge Analytica denies that it used Facebook data to “microtarget” political adverts when it worked for the Trump campaign. –The Times
Yesterday, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, who Mark Zuckerberg turned into a billionaire after Facebook bought his company for $22 billion, is now telling people to delete their Facebook accounts, promoting hashtag #deletefacebook.
It is time. #deletefacebook
— Brian Acton (@brianacton) March 20, 2018
Action was referencing the online movement that is gaining steam in the wake of the data harvesting scandal.
After staying on for three years, Acton quit Facebook in September, and is now a major backer of rival messaging service Signal, which boasts encryption to make its messages resistant to government surveillance.
In a Wednesday night interview with CNN, Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook “made mistakes,” and that “This was a major breach of trust and I’m really sorry that this happened. Our responsibility now is to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Zuckerberg also vowed to notify all users “whose data might have been affected” by the breach, and will be “happy” to testify before congress “if it’s the right thing to do.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he is "happy to" testify before Congress "if it"s the right thing to do" https://t.co/nqc5puq5Ua pic.twitter.com/LW5Pn9ak8z
— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) March 22, 2018
Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post that he has pledged to investigate suspicious apps and ban developers who violate data sharing rules or refuse to comply with an audit. He added: “We will restrict developers’ data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, we will remove developers’ access to your data if you haven’t used their app in three months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in — to only your name, profile photo and email address.”
“We’ll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their private data. We’ll have more changes to share in the next few days.”
That said, tens of thousands of apps could be harvesting data…
Yesterday Dr Kogan, the Russian-linked Cambridge academic who obtained the data of 50 million users by offering “personality quizzes” before selling the data to Cambridge Analytica, told the BBC that “tens of thousands” of apps could have done the same thing.
A Facebook whistleblower told MPs that the company had ignored his warnings and lost control of users’ data by giving easy access to developers. Sandy Parakilas said that when he worked at the company in 2011-12 “personal identifiable data was basically allowed to leave Facebook”. He told MPs that he had warned executives that poor safeguards could enable foreign powers or data brokers to harvest data. –The Times
ISBA notes: “The claims that other apps using the Facebook platform, and pre-dating 2015, have collected similar bodies of personal data and that controls for distribution have been inadequate, raise questions about the possibility that Facebook data has been, or is being used improperly elsewhere. ISBA is asking Facebook for a full account.”
The Monmouth University Polling Institute found that 74% of Americans believe that the “deep state” is manipulating public policy unelected and behind the scenes. Only 21% don’t think the deep state exists.
Those numbers are compelling considering the mainstream media’s very obvious attempt to get everyone to believe that the deep state is a figment of the imagination. The poll also interestingly indicates that those in every single political group, republicans, democrats, and independents, all believe the deep state is manipulating the government. “We usually expect opinions on the operation of government to shift depending on which party is in charge,” Monmouth University Polling Institute Director Patrick Murray said in a statement. “But there’s an ominous feeling by Democrats and Republicans alike that a ‘Deep State’ of unelected operatives are pulling the levers of power.”
The numbers indicate that 31 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of independents reported that they believe a deep state “definitely exists,” while 19 percent of Democrats believe this. Pollsters also found that a majority of those polled, 63 percent, said they were “not familiar” with the term deep state, however. Thirteen percent said they were “very familiar,” while 24 percent said they were “somewhat familiar.”
But that’s not all this poll uncovered about public opinion. A majority of the American public believe that the U.S. government engages in widespread monitoring of its own citizens and worry that the U.S. government could be invading their own privacy. Interestingly, there are no significant partisan differences when it comes to whether or not a person believes their government is spying on them. 57% of independents, 51% of Republicans, and 50% of Democrats are at least somewhat worried the federal government is monitoring their activities. Another 24% of the American public are not too worried and 22% are not at all worried.
“This is a worrisome finding. The strength of our government relies on public faith in protecting our freedoms, which is not particularly robust. And it’s not a Democratic or Republican issue. These concerns span the political spectrum,” Murray.
Another important factor uncovered in the poll is that just over 1-in-5 Americans (22%) feel angry with Washington while the vast majority (59%) feel dissatisfied. Very few express a positive feeling toward DC with just 12% reporting as satisfied and only 4% are happy with the government.
The survey of 803 adults was conducted from March 2 to 5. It has a slim margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
(The Real Agenda News) SÃO PAULO – Facial recognition technology comes loaded with comfort, yes, promises of greater security, okay. But it also comes loaded with a major, yet often ignored inconvenience: Violation of Privacy.
In parallel, the expansion of an entire security industry revolves around it and slowly but surely society turns into the Orwellian nightmare of a place of controlled citizens.
Derived from artificial intelligence, facial recognition took its first steps in the mid-sixties.
Those early attempts to use a computer to recognize a human face have led to a technology that has reached an amazing level of maturity.
Proof of this is the iPhone X, which enshrines something that a few years ago belonged to the domain of science fiction: unlock a phone with the image of our face.
“When you find a technology like this in a consumer device like the telephone,” says Enrique Dans, professor of Innovation at IE Business School, “it means that with it you can do everything”.
In China, a country that has set itself the goal of becoming a leader in artificial intelligence research and applications in 2030, one can now scan the face with the Xiaohua Qianbao mobile application and ask for a loan from the virtual bank operated by Xiaohua; go to a Kentucky Fried Chicken in the city of Hangzhou and pay with a smile -Smile to Pay is the latest system developed by the online payment application Alipay, and control student class attendance at Nanking University of Communications.
There, the technology of facial recognition advances firmly of the hand of Face ++, a Chinese start-up that at the end of October defeated Facebook, Google, and Microsoft in tests of recognition of face images in the International Conference of Vision by Computer celebrated in Italy.
That same month the company raised 460 million dollars in a round of financing.
But the expansion of the phenomenon is not limited to that territory. Toronto stores use it to detect thieves. Facebook has been using it for a long time to tag the person who appears in the photo.
In fact, in 2015 it already announced that he could identify someone with an 83% success without showing his face; body type, hairstyle or posture are sufficient elements.
The new challenge for researchers is now to get the identification of people wearing dark glasses, veil, mask, balaclava: at the University of Basel, Switzerland, Professor Bernhard Egger works on a system that creates a 3D face pattern form of the uncovered areas of the face.
Thus, the facial recognition market moves more than 3,300 billion in the world and could reach 7,7 billion in 2022, according to the consultancy MarketsandMarkets.
Banks, airlines, telephony, computer manufacturers, all open up to this new form of biometric identification that supposes a leap forward in front of the fingerprint and the iris.
Tace is not the same as the fingerprint. When we go to renew a bank card, we agree to give this biometric data to the authorities. But our face can be captured by whoever wants without our consent. With any camera on the street, anywhere.
This technology consists of two basic modalities, as explained in a telephone conversation from Michigan by the great expert Anil K. Jain, professor of computer engineering and director of the biometric research group at the University of Michigan.
The face detection or authentication, in which the system compares two images: the one we have stored in the phone -in the case of the iPhone- and a 3D model that is created from the face that is presented in front of the screen, and the face search, in which an image is crossed with those stored in a database to see that they match -to identify strangers-.
“In this second it is much easier to make mistakes,” explains Jain. “You need powerful computers and ample databases with millions of faces.”
It is this second modality that has triggered the debate on privacy and freedoms.
Its combination with the growing self-exposure in social networks is ending the era of anonymity.
The best example is offered by the FindFace application, which last year unleashed a storm in Russia: one pulls out the phone and takes a picture of the passenger traveling in the metro in front; the algorithm of the application crosses the image with those existing in the social network Vkontakte, which has more than 400 million profiles; with an efficiency of 70%, and lets people know who that person is.
The British newspaper The Guardian reported that the Australian Attorney General has been in talks with telephone operators and banks for the private use of its facial verification service in 2018.
Data protection experts are worried about the use that companies can make of their clients’ faces.
An investigation by The Washington Post revealed in November that Apple was sharing face information with some applications; and that made a change, as a result of journalistic research, requiring an app to inform users of the privacy policy.
Facebook, Google and Snapchat, on the other hand, are three of the companies that have already been sued in Illinois for the capture and storage of users’ images without their consent.
Can we trust that the companies of the new digital economy will not market our faces?
“The problem is that there is a total lack of transparency,” says Kelly Gates, a professor at the University of California San Diego and author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance.
“The police, like the Army, is experimenting, but we do not know what they are doing.”
This researcher, who now studies the techniques of forensic video analysis, assures that there is a proliferation of videos and data coming from drones, street cameras and stores whose analysis is outsourced to private companies:
“Scientists say that it is a technology with which many mistakes are made. There is no science that supports it and, even so, it continues to be used. “
Everything is because it does not happen as in that dystopia signed by Terry Gilliam, Brazil, a 1985 film in which a mistake of data leads to the arrest of Mr. Buttle when the target was Mr. Tuttle.
“You are pursuing a perfect security that is never going to be achieved. To think that, in contexts of violence, all this is the great solution is like buying more air conditioners to solve the problems posed by climate change “.
In the end, the question is in which hands falls the use of this technology and the handling of our data.
Countries with problems of human rights and freedoms have a tremendous instrument for persecution of dissidents.
Does anyone imagine this technology in the hands of a far-right government in Europe? Or in a country ruled by radical Islamists?
We cite these cases because it is clear that in western countries governments are already using it to illegally spy on people everyday.
The post Facial Recognition: Convenience vs Privacy appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
Both Congress and the Department of Homeland Security have never justified the biometric scanners at airports that could cost Americans $1 billion in 2018.
Thanks to a new law in Vermont, the state may soon know your online purchases to pressure residents to pay a “use tax,” WCAX reported.
Vermont’s use tax is meant to make sure that Vermont citizens don’t shop online or across the border to avoid the state’s sales tax. Currently, only about 10 percent of people pay the 6% use tax according to Tax Commissioner Kaj Samsom. He estimated about half of taxpayers owe the tax. So about 80 percent of people are currently not paying the tax. But that may change next year as the new measure will allow tax authorities to chase after residents who don’t pay the tax.
Lawmakers passed legislation that requires online retailers with more than $100,000 in sales to Vermonters each year to report to customers and the tax department how much they’ve spent with them. This measure applies to anyone who has spent more than $500 with an online retailer. The state hopes you’ll use that information to calculate how much tax you should have paid.
This has sparked privacy concerns, although Samsom assures that the product purchased wouldn’t be shown to tax authorities, only the retailer and the customer’s name and address.
“It is focused on folks with a lot of online activity with larger vendors. The information would be pretty bare-bones, we expect, if it complies with the law which is the name of the retailer, the name of the taxpayer and probably the address. Not what they purchased,” Vermont Tax Commissioner Kaj Samsom said.
It has put Samsom in a tough spot. He had testified against this to lawmakers.
“But now I have to enforce it,” he said.
Samsom said Republican Vermont Gov. Phil Scott opposed the data collection, citing privacy concerns.
“There were privacy concerns because if you think about it, just the name of the vendor is a new set of information that Vermonters are not used to the tax department having,” Samsom said.
Scott was among the 20,000 Vermonters to receive a notice from the Department of Taxes warning that they may owe the state the 6% tax and to double-check their tax returns for the last three years.
“He did receive one of the use tax letters from the Tax Department,” Rebecca Kelley, a spokeswoman for the Governor said. “It shows you that there was no bias in who the letters were sent to.”
The state and Vermonters should get the first round of data from online retailers at the end of January, the news publication reported.
Samsom said the state is missing out on about $20 million. So even if the effort by the tax department doesn’t collect all the money owed, they hope to at least get some of it.
Aaron Kesel writes for Activist Post. Support us at Patreon. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Steemit, and BitChute. Ready for solutions? Subscribe to our premium newsletter Counter Markets.
Slowly but surely, Americans have been conditioned to give up any expectations of privacy in the name of public safety and/or for simple technological conveniences. However, there remains, even today, a tiny sliver of the population that would prefer to not have their every movement tracked no matter how antiquated that makes them look. Be that as it may, per a recent discovery from Quartz, those old-school folks better hope they haven"t been using an Android device for the past 11 months.
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 when they’re connected to the internet, a Quartz investigation has revealed.
Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers—even when location services are disabled—and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals’ locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy.
Quartz observed the data collection occur and contacted Google, which confirmed the practice.
Of course, the company that has been collecting your location data for nearly a year now without your knowledge, would like for you to know that you shouldn"t worry too much about your privacy because they can assure you the data was never "used or stored" and was only collected to help "improve the speed and performance of message delivery"....
The cell tower addresses have been included in information sent to the system Google uses to manage push notifications and messages on Android phones for the past 11 months, according to a Google spokesperson. They were never used or stored, the spokesperson said, and the company is now taking steps to end the practice after being contacted by Quartz. By the end of November, the company said, Android phones will no longer send cell-tower location data to Google, at least as part of this particular service, which consumers cannot disable.
“In January of this year, we began looking into using Cell ID codes as an additional signal to further improve the speed and performance of message delivery,” the Google spokesperson said in an email. “However, we never incorporated Cell ID into our network sync system, so that data was immediately discarded, and we updated it to no longer request Cell ID.”
...you know, because wireless carriers haven"t quite figured out yet how to efficiently route data streams through network nodes just yet...
It is not clear how cell-tower addresses, transmitted as a data string that identifies a specific cell tower, could have been used to improve message delivery. But the privacy implications of the covert location-sharing practice are plain. While information about a single cell tower can only offer an approximation of where a mobile device actually is, multiple towers can be used to triangulate its location to within about a quarter-mile radius, or to a more exact pinpoint in urban areas, where cell towers are closer together.
The practice is troubling for people who’d prefer they weren’t tracked, especially for those such as law-enforcement officials or victims of domestic abuse who turn off location services thinking they’re fully concealing their whereabouts. Although the data sent to Google is encrypted, it could potentially be sent to a third party if the phone had been compromised with spyware or other methods of hacking. Each phone has a unique ID number, with which the location data can be associated.
“It has pretty concerning implications,” said Bill Budington, a software engineer who works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for digital privacy. “You can kind of envision any number of circumstances where that could be extremely sensitive information that puts a person at risk.”
"It is really a mystery as to why this is not optional,” said Matthew Hickey, a security expert and researcher at Hacker House, a security firm based in London. “It seems quite intrusive for Google to be collecting such information that is only relevant to carrier networks when there are no SIM card or enabled services.”
Of course, if their excuse for this gross invasion of privacy is even remotely true, then we look forward Google"s follow-up report to Android users detailing precisely how much faster their text messages are now than before...we won"t hold our breath.
What could possibly go wrong? While some parents are speaking up, others are blindly accepting the horrifying reality of cameras in school bathrooms.
While some say microchipping humans is the wave of the future, others think it could be the Biblical “mark of the beast.” Regardless, the next group to face the potentiality of being microchipped like dogs are Olympic athletes.
According to WND, the head of an association of Olympic athletes wants to require anyone who participates in the Summer or Winter Games to be implanted with a tracking chip to prevent the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Mike Miller, the CEO of the World Olympians Association, remarked recently at an anti-doping forum in London that athletes should accept digital implants or be barred from Olympic-level competition, according to The Guardian.
Speaking to anti-doping leaders at a Westminster forum on integrity in sport, Miller said: “In order to stop doping we need to chip our athletes where the latest technology is there.” He continued, saying: “Microchips get over the issue of whether the technology can be manipulated because they [athletes] have no control over the device. The problem with the current anti-doping system is that all it says is that at a precise moment in time there are no banned substances but we need a system which says you are illegal substance-free at all times and if there are changes in markers they will be detected.”
Consumer privacy expert Liz McIntyre, the co-author of “Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Purchase and Watch Your Every Move,” called Miller’s proposal “outrageous,” insisting “no human being should ever be forced to accept a tracking implant to fully participate in society.” Miller reiterates that it isn’t about “privacy,” however, and Olympic athletes aren’t exactly regular members of society. “Some people say it’s an invasion of privacy,” Miller said. “Well, sport is a club and people don’t have to join the club if they don’t want to, if they can’t follow the rules.”
Although Miller didn’t specify what kind of microchip technology he was considering, McIntyre pointed out there are RFID chips with sensors that could detect the health status of a host or substances in the blood as would be the intention – to stop drug cheats. “When someone in Miller’s position has the audacity to suggest that RFID dog tracking chips are an acceptable prerequisite for participation in any endeavor, it’s time for action,” McIntyre said.
“Some people say we shouldn’t do this to people,” Miller said. “Well, we’re a nation of dog lovers, we’re prepared to chip our dogs and it doesn’t seem to harm them, so why aren’t we prepared to chip ourselves?”
Perhaps we microchip dogs because we own them, and perhaps we don’t want a microchip because we don’t feel like being owned by whoever demands we have that chip implanted. It’s a difficult concept for the more authoritarian minds in society to grasp, sadly.
Earlier this year, a company in Wisconsin became the first to microchip the employees.
The idea to microchip athletes will probably not sit well considering the existing Adams whereabouts system is already invasive when it comes to an athletes privacy. Whereabouts rules dictate that athletes must declare on an online database where they will be every day for a one-hour window between 5 am and 11 pm, so drug testers can turn up without warning. The athlete biological passport system has been the most crucial development in anti-doping in recent years, with blood test results analyzed over a period of time for the effects rather than just the mere presence of drugs.
Nicole Sapstead, the UK Anti-Doping chief executive, was wary a move to microchipping of athletes would represent an egregious invasion of their privacy. “We welcome verified developments in technology which could assist the fight against doping. However, can we ever be sure that this type of thing could never be tampered with or even accurately monitor all substances and methods on the prohibited list? There is a balance to be struck between a right to privacy versus demonstrating that you are clean. We would actively encourage more research in whether there are technologies in development that can assist anti-doping organizations in their endeavors.”
Miller claimed he was not speaking on behalf of the WOA when he suggested implanting Olympic athletes with microchips. “I’m just throwing the idea out there,” he said. “I’m gauging reaction from people but we do need to think of new ways to protect clean sport. I’m no Steve Jobs but we need to spend the money and use the latest technology.”
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Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 1 people
Date: October 18th, 2017
Website: www.SHTFplan.com
Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.
Authored by Andrew Napolitano via LewRockwell.com,
Here we go again. The United States has been rattled to the core by an unspeakable act of evil perpetrated by a hater of humanity. A quiet, wealthy loner rented a hotel suite in Las Vegas, armed it with shooting platforms and automatic weapons, knocked out two of the windows, and shot at innocents 32 floors below. Fifty-nine people were murdered, and 527 were injured.
The killer used rifles that he purchased legally and altered illegally. He effectively transformed several rifles that emit one round per trigger pull and present the next round in the barrel for immediate use (semiautomatics) into rifles that emit rounds continuously when the trigger is pulled — hundreds of rounds per minute (automatics). Though some automatic rifles that were manufactured before 1986 can lawfully be purchased today with an onerous federal permit, automatic weapons generally have been unlawful in the United States since 1934. Even the police and the military are not permitted to use them here.
I present this brief summary of the recent tragedy and the implicated gun laws to address the issue of whether the government can keep us safe.
Those who fought the Revolution and wrote the Constitution knew that the government cannot keep us safe. Because they used violence against the king and his soldiers to secede from Great Britain, they recognized that all people have a natural right to use a weapon of contemporary technological capabilities to protect themselves and their liberty and property. They sought to assure the exercise of this right by enacting the now well-known Second Amendment, which prohibits the government from infringing upon the right to keep and bear arms.
When the Supreme Court interpreted this right in 2008 and 2010, it referred to the right to keep and bear arms as pre-political. “Pre-political” means that the right pre-existed the government. It is a secular term for a fundamental, or natural, right. A natural right is one that stems from our humanity — such as freedom of thought, speech, religion, self-defense, privacy, travel, etc. It does not come from the government, and it exists in the absence of government.
The recognition of a right as fundamental or natural or pre-political is not a mere academic exercise. This is so because rights in this category cannot be abrogated by the popular will. Stated differently, just as your right to think as you wish and say what you think cannot be interfered with or taken away in America by legislation, so, too, your right to own, carry and use arms of the same sophistication as are generally available to bad guys and to government officials cannot be interfered with or taken away by legislation. That is at least the modern theory of the Second Amendment.
Notwithstanding the oath that all in government have taken to uphold the Constitution, many in government reject the Second Amendment. Their enjoyment of power and love of office rank higher in their hearts and minds than does their constitutionally required fidelity to the protection of personal freedoms. They think the government can right any wrong and protect us from any evil and acquire for us any good just to keep us safe, even if constitutional norms are violated in doing so.
Can the government keep us safe? In a word, no.
This is not a novel or arcane observation but rather a rational conclusion from knowing history and everyday life. In Europe, where the right to keep and bear arms is nearly nonexistent for those outside government, killers strike with bombs and knives and trucks. In America, killers use guns and only stop when they are killed by law-abiding civilians or by the police.
The answer to government failure is a candid recognition that in a free society - one in which we are all free to come and go as we see fit without government inquiry or interference - we must be prepared for these tragedies.
We must keep ourselves safe, as well as those whom we invite onto our properties.
Surely, if the president of the United States were to have appeared at the concert venue in Las Vegas to address the crowd, the Las Vegas killer would never have succeeded in bringing his arsenal to his hotel room. Government always protects its own. Shouldn’t landowners who invite the public to their properties do the same?
Add to government’s incompetence its useless intrusive omnipresence. In present-day America, the National Security Agency — the federal government’s domestic spying agency — captures in real time the contents of every telephone call, email and text message, as well as all data sent over fiber-optic cables everywhere in the U.S. Thus, whatever electronic communications the Las Vegas killer participated in prior to his murders are in the possession of the federal government.
Mass surveillance is expressly prohibited by the Fourth Amendment, but the government does it nevertheless. It claims it does so to keep us safe. Yet this exquisite constitutional violation results in too much information for the feds to examine in a timely manner. That’s why the evidence of these massacres - from Sandy Hook to Boston to Orlando to San Bernardino to Las Vegas - is always discovered too late. At this writing, the government has yet to reveal what it knew about the Las Vegas killer’s plans before he executed them and executed innocents.
This leaves us in a very precarious position today.
The government cannot keep us safe, but it claims that it can. It wants to interfere with our natural rights to self-defense and to privacy, but whenever it does so, it keeps us less safe. And in whatever arena it keeps us less safe and falsely fosters the impression that we are safe, we become less free.
On Tuesday, Apple revealed their newest phone. The new line was anticipated by Apple users and is another cult favorite. But many are rightly skeptical of the “FaceID” feature.
FaceID, is a tool that would use facial recognition to identify individuals and unlock their phones for use. Unsurprisingly, this has generated some major anxiety about mass spying and privacy concerns. Retailers already have a desire for facial recognition technology. They want to monitor consumers, and without legally binding terms and Apple could use FaceID to track consumer patterns at its stores or develop and sell data to others.
That seems minor on the surface, but the ramifications could be enormous. It’s also highly possible that police would be able to more easily unlock phones without consent by simply holding an individual’s phone up to his or her face, violating the rights of the person to privacy.
But FaceID should create fear about another form of government surveillance too. And this one is a rights violation of every person on earth: mass scans to identify individuals based on face profiles. Law enforcement is rapidly increasing their use of facial recognition; one in two American adults are already enrolled in a law enforcement facial recognition network, and at least one in four police departments has the capability to run face recognition searches. This could make Apple the target for a new mass surveillance order.
While Facebook has a powerful facial recognition system, it doesn’t maintain the operating systems that control the cameras on phones, tablets, and laptops that stare at us every day. Apple’s new system completely changes that. For the first time, a company will have a facial recognition system with millions of profiles, and the hardware to scan and identify faces throughout the world.
According to Wired, this is a system already ripe for government abuse. The government could issue an order to Apple with a set of targets and instructions to scan iPhones, iPads, and Macs to search for specific targets based on FaceID, and then Apple would provide the government with those targets’ location based on the GPS data of devices’ that receive a match. Apple has a good record of fighting for user privacy, but there’s only so much the company could do if its objections to an order are turned down by the courts. And the government is already looking into how this could benefit them, but are hiding behind the guise of “privacy.” On Wednesday Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota) released a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, asking how the company will handle the technology’s security and privacy implications.
But this type of sleazy “Big Brother” activity by the government is not new.
Over the last decade the government has increasingly embraced this type of mass scan method. Edward Snowden’s disclosures revealed the existence of Upstream, a program under FISA Section 702 (set to expire in just a few months). With Upstream, the NSA scans all internet communications going into and out of the United States for surveillance targets’ emails, as well as IP addresses and what the agency has called cybersignatures. And last year Reuters revealed that Yahoo, in compliance with a government order, built custom software to scan hundreds of millions of email accounts for content that contained a digital signature used by surveillance targets. –Wired
Mass facial recognition scans are unconstitutional and a gross violation of human privacy rights. But that has yet to stop the overreaching government from its pursuit of an even more effective method of their goal of dystopian mass surveillance.
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Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 222 people
Date: September 14th, 2017
Website: www.SHTFplan.com
Copyright Information: Copyright SHTFplan and Mac Slavo. This content may be freely reproduced in full or in part in digital form with full attribution to the author and a link to www.shtfplan.com. Please contact us for permission to reproduce this content in other media formats.
While the United States government has pushed for increasing mass surveillance over the years, the latest requests from the Department of Justice could set the Trump Administration apart from its predecessors as it demands the IP addresses of at least 1.3 million people who visited an anti-Trump website.
In a blog post published by the web hosting provider DreamHost, it confirmed that it has been working with the DOJ for several months “to comply with legal process, including a Search Warrant (PDF) seeking information about one of our customers’ websites,” and it is now attempting to challenge the request, in order to ensure users’ privacy.
The website in question is disruptj20.org, which DreamHost described as “a website that organized participants of political protests against the current United States administration.” Although the host claims to have “no insight into the affidavit for the search warrant” because the records are sealed, it noted that “the DOJ has recently asked DreamHost to provide all information available to us about this website, its owner, and, more importantly, its visitors.”
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DreamHost noted that in addition to the 1.3 million visitor IP addresses, the DOJ’s demands include “contact information, email content, and photos of thousands of people—in an effort to determine who simply visited the website.”
“DreamHost, like many online service providers, is approached by law enforcement regularly to provide information about customers who may be the subject of criminal investigations. These types of requests are not uncommon; our legal department reviews and scrutinizes each request and, when necessary, rejects and challenges vague or faulty orders.”
More than 200 people were indicted on felony rioting charges in connection with the DisruptJ20 protests that were scheduled around President Trump’s inauguration in Washington on Jan. 20.
READ MORE: Washington Lawmaker Proposes Bill To Charge Protesters With "Economic Terrorism"
As a result, the DOJ is now claiming that it needs access to records and information on the website and its owner, along with IP addresses that could be used to identify at least 1.3 million visitors, on the basis that those visitors could be guilty of “coordinating illegal behavior.”
However, DreamHost is fighting back, and arguing that the information DOJ is requesting “could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment. That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind.”
In a legal statement opposing the request, DreamHost’s general counsel, Chris Ghazarian, said the search warrant “not only aims to identify the political dissidents of the current administration, but attempts to identify and understand what content each of these dissidents viewed on the website.”
By publicizing its fight with the DOJ, DreamHost is following in the footsteps of Apple when it alerted the public about its battle with the FBI in March 2016. A hearing on the case of DreamHost vs. DOJ is scheduled for Friday in Washington.
“The internet was founded—and continues to survive, in the main—on its democratizing ability to facilitate a free exchange of ideas. Internet users have a reasonable expectation that they will not get swept up in criminal investigations simply by exercising their right to political speech against the government. We intend to take whatever steps are necessary to support and shield these users from what is, in our view, a very unfocused search and an unlawful request for their personal information.”
Image source: Pixabay.com
Are “privacy” and “anonymity” mere synonyms, at least, when placed in the context of online safety and IT security? Simply put, no. While privacy and anonymity may have similar tradecraft practices and protocols, the very heart of their differences lay in the desired objective.
Perhaps the most succinct way to tell the two apart is this: think of online privacy measures as a defensive deployment to deter attackers that operate under the stealth of anonymity. In other words …
Privacy uses an active approach to prevent the leakage of data, which is usually executed at the software level. It’s a bit like using camouflage so that the bombers can’t find your bunker.
Anonymity is what makes a stealth bomber, stealthy. Whatever that bomber decides to do next, however, is up to the bomber. Whether or not it decides to kill its target or not, it is kept safe because stealth (anonymity) means missiles can’t find it.
Discover How To Become Invisible In Today’s Surveillance State!
One such service that employs these tactics would be Protonmail. Their end-to-end encryption of your email keeps your communications private. However, their proxy-server location in Switzerland ensures that even if the NSA wanted to take a peek at who sent an email, they’d have no idea who they actually were looking at.
What Is Online Privacy?
What Is Online Anonymity?
Everyone Can Be Found. Not Everyone Wants to Try That Hard.
Whether you seek a titanium wall of privacy or total anonymity, it’s important to realize that the moment an impregnable system exists, it’s already on its deathbed. The world of IT security and Internet privacy is one that is ruled by a gargantuan arms race. Regardless of how strong and robust the defenses, any digital castle can be brought to its knees if an attacker possesses the necessary determination to do so. For this reason, the winner in this game tends to be the stealthy, swift sniper, and not the slow, massive tank.
Goofy Gadget Can Recharge Your Laptop — And Jump-Start Your Car!
Wired’s Andy Greenberg, in an article titled How to Be Anonymous Online, argued that by using “cryptographic anonymity tools to hide your identity,” network eavesdroppers “may not even know where to find your communications, let alone snoop on them.”
“Hide in the network,” security guru Bruce Schneier said. “The less obvious you are, the safer you are.”
However, it’s not always about the software, adding layer after layer of protections, rerouting your communications from node to node, bouncing your data packets from Beijing to Jamaica in order to access some private server in Sweden. It’s about being a needle in a field of needles. It’s about not being noticed by the people who may be looking for you. It’s about achieving the transformation into a non-obvious digital being just like the rest of them, and blending in with the billions of others in the information sea.
To trade your uniqueness is engaging in this global shell-game of titanic proportions, the Holy Grail of digital anonymity.
What are your best tips for staying anonymous online? Share your advice in the section below:
You’re Being Watched: 7 Sneaky Ways The Government Is Tracking Your Every Move. Read More Here.
