#CyberSecurity#DataBreach#Biometrics#FacialRecognition#DataProtection#Australia: "Police and federal agencies are responding to a massive breach of personal data linked to a facial recognition scheme that was implemented in bars and clubs across Australia. The incident highlights emerging privacy concerns as AI-powered facial recognition becomes more widely used everywhere from shopping malls to sporting events.
The affected company is Australia-based Outabox, which also has offices in the United States and the Philippines. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Outabox debuted a facial recognition kiosk that scans visitors and checks their temperature. The kiosks can also be used to identify problem gamblers who enrolled in a self-exclusion initiative. This week, a website called “Have I Been Outaboxed” emerged, claiming to be set up by former Outabox developers in the Philippines. The website asks visitors to enter their name to check whether their information had been included in a database of Outabox data, which the site alleges had lax internal controls and was shared in an unsecured spreadsheet. It claims to have more than 1 million records.
The incident has rankled privacy experts who have long set off alarm bells over the creep of facial recognition systems in public spaces such as clubs and casinos."
#AI#EU#AIAct#Biometrics#Surveillance#MassSurveillance: "Throughout spring 2024, European Union (EU) lawmakers have been taking the final procedural steps to pass a largely disappointing new law, the EU Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act.
This law is expected to come into force in the summer, with one of the most hotly-contested parts of the law – the bans on unacceptably harmful uses of AI – slated to apply from the end of 2024 (six months and 20 days after the legal text is officially published).
The first draft of this Act, in 2021, proposed to ban some forms of public facial recognition, showing that lawmakers were already listening to the demands of our Reclaim Your Face campaign. Since then, the AI Act has continued to be a focus point for our fight to stop people being treated as walking barcodes in public spaces.
But after a gruelling three-year process, AI Act negotiations are coming to an underwhelming end, with numerous missed opportunities to protect people’s rights and freedoms or to uphold civic space.
One of the biggest problems we see is that the bans on different forms of biometric mass surveillance, or BMS, are full of holes. BMS is the term we’ve used as an umbrella for different methods of using people’s biometric data to surveil them in an untargeted or arbitrarily-targeted way – which have no place in a democratic society."
In an exclusive interview with The Times, the Met’s director of intelligence, Lindsey Chiswick, said that the tool had been a “game-changer”, triggering an arrest every two hours of alleged criminals including rapists, burglars and robbers since it was introduced last April.
A Whitehall source said that it had been so successful that the government was planning to make a policy statement setting out its facial recognition strategy in May or June.
#EU#Biometrics#EURODAC#Surveillance#FacialRecognition#AsylumReform: "On Wednesday (10 April), the EU is set to vote on a new set of asylum and migration reforms. Among the many controversial changes proposed in the new migration pact, one went almost unnoticed — a seemingly innocent reform of the EU's asylum database, EURODAC.
Although framed as purely technical adjustments, the reality is far more malicious. The changes to EURODAC will massively exacerbate violence against people on the move.
Reform of this 20 year-old database will make it the technological sword of EU's hostile asylum and border policies. It will harness the most nefarious surveillance technologies that exist to date — namely the capture, processing and analysis of biometric data — and enable EU states to have full control over migrants' body and movements.
With the collection of biometrics, the body has already become a "passport" for many. Biometrics is the process of making data out of a person's biological or physiological characteristics. Fingerprints, facial images and iris scans are among the forms of biometrics most widely used by states to uniquely identify a person." https://euobserver.com/opinion/158292
FTC denies rating board's suggestion for age verification system
The Federal Trade Commission has denied a petition to allow companies to use facial age estimation (FAE) technology to obtain parental consent when collecting data from children under 13, a requirement for the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
#UK#London#Surveillance#Biometrics#FacialRecognition: "The question of who, exactly, police want to talk to is what privacy watchdogs are concerned about. One 23-year-old man flagged by the system for possession of points and blades was later found to have six rounds of ammunition, stolen mobile phones, a large quantity of cannabis and a stolen Oyster card linked to a robbery in 2022. Other arrests were variously for assault, burglary, theft, pickpocketing, breaching court-imposed conditions, fraud, threatening behavior and obstructing a constable.
Calling these arrests “precision policing” is dubious at best, says Madeleine Stone, senior advocacy officer for Big Brother Watch.
“Rather than actively pursuing people who pose a risk to the public, police officers are relying on chance and hoping that wanted people happen to walk in front of a police camera.”
A news release on the Met police’s website says the facial recognition system “identifies people who are on a bespoke watchlist which can include those who are wanted, have outstanding arrest warrants as issued by the court, or to ensure a person is complying with their conditions.”
#Surveillance#Biometrics#FacialRecognition#Israel#Palestine#Gaza: "Israel is deploying a mass facial recognition program in Gaza, conducting surveillance of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent, according to a new report from The New York Times.
As the publisher reports, speaking to Israeli intelligence officers, military officials, and soldiers, the facial recognition program is run by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)'s military Unit 8200, which is "collecting and cataloging the faces of Palestinians". The program reportedly uses technology from Corsight, an Israel facial recognition company that provides services for government agencies, law enforcement, and corporations, alongside Google Photos.
The Times says this mass surveillance is being rolled out in Israel to identify members of Hamas, following the Oct. 7 attacks. The Israeli military also set up checkpoints — along roads Palestinians are using to flee the war — with facial recognition cameras, and soldiers have used security camera footage, videos uploaded by Hamas on social media, and also asked Palestinian prisoners to identify anyone affiliated with Hamas." https://mashable.com/article/israel-palestine-gaza-facial-recognition-program
#Russia#Surveillance#Biometrics#FacialRecognition#GigEconomy: "Now TBIJ, in partnership with Follow The Money and Paper Trail Media, can reveal that the technology used to repress dissent against Putin’s authoritarian regime is powered by unwitting gig workers in the global south. A sprawling global network supporting Russia’s surveillance regime draws in US investment firms, one of Russia’s biggest tech companies and two companies sanctioned for their alleged role in Putin’s oppression.
At the heart of it all is Toloka, a little-known tech platform that recruits the gig workers and raises questions about the effectiveness of EU sanctions. Before a recent restructure, all of Toloka was ultimately owned by Yandex, a Russian tech giant with major shareholders in the west.
A #Montreal lawyer wants to file a class action lawsuit against the Chinese-owned discount shopping app #Temu, alleging that customers' data was stolen.
#Surveillance#Biometrics#FacialRecognition: "New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill has been writing about the intersection of privacy and technology for well over a decade; her book about Clearview AI’s rise and practices was published last fall. She speaks with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about how face recognition technology’s rapid evolution may have outpaced ethics and regulations, and where we might go from here.
In this episode, you’ll learn about:
The difficulty of anticipating how information that you freely share might be used against you as technology advances.
How the all-consuming pursuit of “technical sweetness” — the alluring sensation of neatly and functionally solving a puzzle — can blind tech developers to the implications of that tech’s use.
The racial biases that were built into many face recognition technologies.
In February, a court in the Argentinian capital ruled that the public surveillance system, known as the Fugitive Facial Recognition System (SNRP), will remain suspended as there is still no agreement on how to audit the technology. No date has been defined on when the system might be re-activated.
The court has instructed the city’s government and civil society groups ODIA, Vía Libre and CELS to come up with an institutional framework, a budget and a clear methodological plan for an audit of the system before its reintroduction. The two sides, however, have been clashing on how to proceed with auditing the software and re-activating the system.
Air Canada, Emirates among carriers using biometric data for travelling
While airlines and airports say facial recognition can make air travel — an often tedious experience — more efficient and seamless, privacy advocates argue the use of biometric data is fraught and open to abuse.
Contrary to their initial plan, the Department had been pushed into letting the Justice Committee hold hearings on the quality of their proposed legislation. This stage is called pre-legislative scrutiny. Consider it a sort of institutional effort by the legislature to avoid laws coasting onto the books in a state of unchallenged group-think.
So, on Tuesday the Committee heard from the Deputy Commissioner of the DPC, from me and Olga Cronin (for DRI and ICCL), from the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland and from the Law Society of Ireland. Then they heard from Drew Harris, the Garda Commissioner and a sentence or two from the Department officials who were promoting the Heads of Bill before the Committee."
#Canada-based University of #Waterloo is racing to remove M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after outraged students discovered the machines were covertly collecting facial-recognition data…
Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe," displayed after the machine failed to launch a facial recognition application that nobody expected to be part of the process of using a vending machine.
#Canada#Surveillance#Biometrics#FacialRecognition#VendingMachines: "Canada-based University of Waterloo is racing to remove M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after outraged students discovered the machines were covertly collecting facial-recognition data without their consent.
The scandal started when a student using the alias SquidKid47 posted an image on Reddit showing a campus vending machine error message, "Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe," displayed after the machine failed to launch a facial recognition application that nobody expected to be part of the process of using a vending machine."
Your fingerprints can be recreated from the sounds made when you swipe on a touchscreen — Chinese and US researchers show new side channel can reproduce fingerprints to enable attacks
An interesting new attack on biometric security has been outlined by a group of researchers from China and the US. PrintListener: Uncovering the Vulnerability of Fingerprint Authentication via the Fi ...continues
#UK#FacialRecognition#Privacy#Biometrics: "Privacy International (PI), Big Brother Watch (BBW), StopWatch, CopWatch, Defend Digital Me, Liberty and Statewatch have written to Home Secretary James Cleverly to raise concerns over the danger posed to UK society by Facial Recognition Technology (FRT).
In a letter sent on 18 January 2024, the signatories raised concerns over the escalating use of FRT and warned the Home Secretary that "The indiscriminate use of this dystopian biometric technology to identify people in public spaces is a form of mass surveillance [...] happening in a democratic vacuum, without specific legislation to restrict its use".
We called on the Home Secretary to "put an immediate end to the radical expansion of the use of FRT in order to protect the fundamental freedoms of all members of UK society". "