Researchers have made glasses that convince facial recognition systems you are someone else.
Confirming what Clark Kent has already known for decades, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shown that wearing dorky-looking glasses is a great way to confuse people about your identity.
It’s no secret that American law has been building facial recognition databases to aide in its investigations. But a new, comprehensive report on the status of facial recognition as a tool in law enforcement shows the sheer scope and reach of the FBI’s database of faces and those of state-level law enforcement agencies: Roughly half of American adults are included in those collections. And that massive assembly of biometric data is accessed with only spotty oversight of its accuracy and how it’s used and searched.
Yahoo wants to take advertising to the next level—that is, the Orwellian level—bombarding people in public places with targeted advertising served up by the surveillance society. That's according to a Yahoo patent application recently published by the US Patent and Trademark Office. According to Yahoo, the time has come to move outdoor and public-facing advertising into the digital age—and get there by deploying more intrusive techniques than how it's now done online.
Facebook on Tuesday launched end-to-end encryption for all users of its Messenger mobile app, though the option isn't on by default, and comes with some other limitations.
"Secret Conversations" must not only be toggled on in the app's Settings, but manually enabled for each new conversation by tapping "Secret" in the top right corner of the "New Message" screen. Encryption can't be applied retroactively, and both the sender and the receiver must have the latest version of Messenger.
A team of scientists has come up with a new attack method that in the hands of certain adversaries can be used to deanonymize Tor traffic by monitoring the traffic that goes into a Tor relay and the HTTP and DNS traffic that comes out of a Tor exit node.
Called DefecTor, this new attack is an improved version of what security and privacy experts call a "Tor correlation attack."
A former Verizon Wireless network technician in Alabama has admitted to using company computers to steal and sell private customers' location and call data over a period of five years. As Ars Technica reports, Daniel Traeger of Birmingham faces up to five years in prison or a $250,000 fine for the federal hacking charge. As part of a plea deal, Traeger confessed that he sold the data to an unnamed private investigator.
Apple's iMessage had a few security holes in March and April that potentially leaked photos and contacts, respectively. Though quickly patched, they are a reminder that the company faces a never-ending arms race to shore up its security to keep malicious hackers and government agencies out. But that doesn't mean they will always be able to keep it private. A report from The Intercept states that iMessage conversation metadata gets logged in Apple's servers, which the company could be compelled to turn over to law enforcement by court order.
Many users rely on cloud-based machine learning and data collection for everything from tagging photos of friends online to remembering shopping preferences. Although this can be useful and convenient, it can also be a user privacy disaster. With new machine learning features in its latest phone and desktop operating system releases, Apple is exploring ways to provide these kinds of services and collect related user data with more regard for privacy. Two of these features—on-device facial recognition and differential privacy—deserve a closer look from a privacy perspective.
When football fans get violent and charged with "hooliganism," they wind up getting prohibited from their team stadiums for a time to prevent more mayhem. But the current system of manually checking these blocked citizens in on game day is cumbersome. To counter that, the Netherlands' governing football association KNVB will roll out a device soon that tracks banned fans using GPS and biometrics. While it could be a technologically convenient for offenders and authorities, it's a solution with privacy concerns.
Newly published documents from Edward Snowden have shed more light on American surveillance operations in the UK. The Intercept details how the NSA and GCHQ used information gathered by Menwith Hill Station, a massive but tightly sealed facility that intercepts satellite data transmissions worldwide. Among other things, the files appear to include evidence that links UK-based surveillance to American anti-terrorism campaigns outside official combat zones.
