Privacy

The New York Times’ recent story on Clearview AI, maker of a secretive facial recognition app that markets its product to law enforcement, has raised critical questions about what can be done to protect our privacy online. Clearview claims to have amassed a dataset of over three billion face images by scraping websites like Facebook, YouTube, and Venmo.

The solution to the Clearview problem is clear: comprehensive federal privacy legislation that gives consumers real power over their data and real power to fight back.

London’s police department said Friday that it would begin using facial recognition technology in the city to identify people off the street in real time with video cameras, adopting a level of surveillance that is rare outside of China.

Two Microsoft employees sat opposite one another in a Washington State Senate hearing room last Wednesday. Ryan Harkins, the company’s senior director of public policy, spoke in support of a proposed law that would regulate government use of facial recognition. “We would applaud the committee and all of the bill sponsors for all of their work to tackle this important issue,” he said.

On November 8, 2018, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos received an unexpected text message over WhatsApp from Saudi Arabian leader Mohammed bin Salman. The two had exchanged numbers several months prior, in April, at a small dinner in Los Angeles, but weren’t in regular contact; Bezos had previously received only a video file from the crown prince in May that reportedly extolled Saudi Arabia’s economy. The November text had an attachment as well: an image of a woman who looked like Lauren Sanchez, with whom Bezos had been having an unreported affair.

The EU is due to publish a paper in February exploring how to better regulate emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. But a draft of the upcoming document has shown that another worrisome technology – facial recognition software – is also being scrutinized. The EU is even going so far as to propose a three to five-year ban on the technology to allow rules and regulations time to catch up.

In 2019, FBI investigators working on a case in Ohio were tasked with executing a search warrant on property owned by Baris Ali Koch, reports Forbes. Among the items seized was a locked iPhone 11 Pro Max that, according to the report, investigators subsequently accessed without Apple's help.

Koch stands accused of misprision of a felony for helping his convicted brother flee the U.S. by providing a duplicate driver's license and lying to federal agents. He is currently awaiting sentencing.

“Chinese Spyware Pre-Installed on All Samsung Phones (& Tablets)” declares the title of a post from earlier this week that’s kicked up quite a storm on Reddit. In it, the author launches into an analysis of a utility in Samsung’s Device Care mobile application — specifically, the storage scanner feature inside the application (which can’t be removed by the user). The scanner is useful, in that it can find unnecessary files junking up your phone and remove them to free up space.

An Android phone subsidized by the US government for low-income users comes preinstalled with malware that can't be removed without making the device cease to work, researchers reported on Thursday.

Fittingly for the start to a new decade, California decided to go big with its 2020 New Year’s resolution. Today, the California Consumer Privacy Act goes into effect. Passed unanimously in June 2018, it’s the first law in the US to set up a comprehensive set of rules around consumer data, akin to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Industry and privacy advocates have been fighting over the fine print ever since.

A third-party government supplier has exposed hundreds of thousands of applications containing birth-certificate data.

The trove of information is owned by a company that provides an online platform to state governments – including California, New York and Texas – that allows residents to request copies of vital records. Fidus Information Security found the database hosted in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) storage bucket that was left open to the internet.