CNET: Governments could track COVID-19 lockdowns through social media posts. “Your posts on social media have been harvested for advertising. They’ve been taken to build up a massive facial recognition database. Now that same data could be used by companies and governments to help maintain quarantines during the coronavirus outbreak.”
digital surveillance
CNET: Governments could track COVID-19 lockdowns through social media posts
CNET: Governments could track COVID-19 lockdowns through social media posts. “Ghost Data, a research group in Italy and the US, collected more than half a million Instagram posts in March, targeting regions in the country where residents were supposed to be on lockdown. It provided those images and videos to LogoGrab, an image recognition company that can automatically identify people and places. The company found at least 33,120 people violated Italy’s quarantine orders.”
EXCLUSIVE: Documents Show Modi Govt Building 360 Degree Database To Track Every Indian (Huffington Post)
Huffington Post: EXCLUSIVE: Documents Show Modi Govt Building 360 Degree Database To Track Every Indian. “The Narendra Modi government is in the final stages of creating an all-encompassing, auto-updating, searchable database to track every aspect of the lives of each of India’s over 1.2 billion residents, previously undisclosed government documents reviewed by HuffPost India establish.”
The Verge: Google location data turned a random biker into a burglary suspect
The Verge: Google location data turned a random biker into a burglary suspect. “A Florida man who used a fitness app to track his bike rides found himself a suspect in a burglary when police used a geofence warrant to collect data from nearby devices, an NBC News investigation finds. Zachary McCoy had never been in the home where the burglary occurred, but by leaving his location settings on for the RunKeeper app, he unwittingly provided information about his whereabouts to Google, which placed him at the scene of the crime.”
Techdirt: NSA Blew $100 Million On Phone Records Over Five Years, Generated Exactly One Usable Lead
Techdirt: NSA Blew $100 Million On Phone Records Over Five Years, Generated Exactly One Usable Lead. “The telephone metadata program the NSA finally put out to pasture in 2019 was apparently well past its expiration date. Since the initial Snowden leak in 2013, critics have argued the program needed to die since it was obviously the sort of general warrant rummaging (only without the warrant!) the founding fathers headed off with the Fourth Amendment.”
Northeastern University: Understanding when smart speakers mistakenly record conversations
Northeastern University: Understanding when smart speakers mistakenly record conversations. “Voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, OK Google, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana are becoming increasingly pervasive in our homes, offices, and public spaces. While convenient, these systems also raise important privacy concerns—namely, what exactly are these systems recording from their surroundings, and does that include sensitive and personal conversations that were never meant to be shared with companies or their contractors? These aren’t just hypothetical concerns from paranoid users: there have been a slew of recent reports about devices constantly recording audio and cloud providers outsourcing to contractors transcription of audio recordings of private and intimate interactions.”
Engadget: Carnegie Mellon built an ‘opt-out’ system for nearby tracking devices
Engadget: Carnegie Mellon built an ‘opt-out’ system for nearby tracking devices. “It’s getting easier to control what your smart home devices share, but what about the connected devices beyond your home? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon’s CyLab think they can give you more control. They’ve developed an infrastructure and matching mobile app (for Android and iOS) that not only informs you about the data nearby Internet of Things devices are collecting, but lets you opt in or out. If you’re not comfortable that a device in the hallway is tracking your presence, you can tell it to forget you.”
