Congratulations to Harvard University History of Science doctoral candidate Aaron Gluck-Thaler on the 2024-25 CBI Tomash Fellowship. We are thrilled to have Aaron as a fellow in the upcoming academic year! #ai#artificialintelligence#surveillance#science#tech#history
#Cars#Privacy#DataProtection#Honda#Surveillance: "I wanted to turn off data collection on my car because it’s creepy and I thought the option would be simple. It turns out that shutting off data collection and figuring out what’s been collected is much more difficult than it would seem. I know because it took me — a reasonably informed and technologically savvy person — a month to finally do so.
I’m in good company.
“It’s comically difficult,” Thorin Klosowski, a security and privacy activist at Electronic Frontier Foundation, who’s written about how to do just this, told me. “I do this for a living and I am not 100% positive I have gotten everything correct, which is ridiculous.”
In March, my husband and I bought a new Honda. When I turned on the car to leave the dealership, I got a notification telling me that data sharing was on. Right next to “on” was an “off” button. Simple enough! But when I hit “off” I got a message telling me it was “unable to change settings while network is invalid.” Right.
My children were screaming at me from the back seat, so I assumed this was a problem I could easily fix another time."
Canadians: we have stopped arming Israel but we are still purchasing from Israel (mostly #surveillance defence tech) and if you have a moment to ask the government to stop, it would help: #Canada#cdnpoli
"The use of surveillance is being normalised in schools to such an extent that parents often have little understanding of how their children's data, images and footage is being captured and retained."
"NSO Group, which makes Pegasus spyware, keeps trying to extract information from Citizen Lab researchers."
"With the lawsuit now moving forward, NSO is trying a different tactic: demanding repeatedly that Citizen Lab hand over every single document about its Pegasus investigation."
Worth noting that former NSO Group CEO behind this spyware is already back with a heavily VC funded surveillance company called "Dream Security" -
@ben They’re not yours, they’re theirs. Jeff Atwood thanks you for your free labour. (I’m kidding, he doesn’t. Feel grateful he even allowed you to contribute in the first place, serf.)
Speaking of Jeff Atwood, isn’t he the guy helping fund Mastodon now? 🤔
Update: been told Jeff left StackExchange a while ago so please substitute whichever Silicon Valley tech bro is currently running it.
"Man probiert so lange, ein verfassungsrechtlich mehr als fragwürdiges Verfahren politisch durchzusetzen, bis sich die Rechtsprechungslinie der höchsten Gerichte irgendwann ändert."
— Dennis-Kenji Kipker, Bremer Professor für IT-Sicherheitsrecht
#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."
I like how social media and news sites call it your "feed". Makes me feel like a farm animal getting fattened up for slaughter so I can be divided up and sold piecemeal to advertisers.
#Surveillance#Privacy#DataProtection#AdTech: "Nearly every time we load new content on an app or a Web site, ad-exchange companies—Google being the largest among them—broadcast data about our interests, finances, and vulnerabilities to determine exactly what we’ll see; more than a billion of these transactions take place in the U.S. every hour. Each of us, the data-privacy expert Wolfie Christl told me, has “dozens or even hundreds” of digital identifiers attached to our person; there’s an estimated eighteen-billion-dollar industry for location data alone. In August, 2022, Mozilla reviewed twenty pregnancy and period-tracking apps and found that fifteen of them made a “buffet” of personal data available to third parties, including addresses, I.P. numbers, sexual histories, and medical details. In most cases, the apps used vague language about when and how this data could be shared with law enforcement. (A 2020 foia lawsuit filed by the A.C.L.U. revealed that the Department of Homeland Security had purchased access to location data for millions of people in order to track them without a warrant. ice and C.B.P. subsequently said they would stop using such data.) The scholar Shoshana Zuboff has called this surveillance capitalism, “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.” Through our phones, we are under perpetual surveillance by companies that buy and sell data about what kind of person we are, whom we might vote for, what we might purchase, and what we might be nudged into doing." https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/the-hidden-pregnancy-experiment
This week we held an online briefing about our report, 'Prevent and the Pre-Crime State: How unaccountable data sharing is harming a generation.'
Hear more about the UK Prevent programme and its dangers from Sara Chitseko (ORG), Dr Layla Aitlhadj (PreventWatch), Ilyas Nagdee (Amnesty International UK and Professor Charlotte Heath-Kelly (The University of Warwick).