What price security? This seems disproportionate
to me.
Jim Schultz reports that Lockport School District
got snookered into wasting millions of dollars on surveillance
instead of education:
Even though Lockport is a very small school district (just 4,600 students overall), next fall when our students return to class they will be greeted with something no other schools in the nation have, a $2.7 million system of high-tech facial recognition cameras. The story behind those cameras is a cautionary tale of what can happen when your fears over school security let you be taken for a ride by clever salesmen.
Read more of his opinion piece on The
Public.
“English, as she is spoke”
Judge says
‘literal but nonsensical’ Google translation isn’t consent for
police search
Machine translation of foreign languages is
undoubtedly a very useful thing, but if you’re going for anything
more than directions or recommendations for lunch, its shallowness
is a real barrier. And when it comes to the law and constitutional
rights, a “good enough” translation doesn’t cut it, a judge has
ruled.
The
ruling (PDF) is not hugely consequential, but it is indicative of
the evolving place in which translation apps find themselves in our
lives and legal system.
… The
case in question involved a Mexican man named Omar Cruz-Zamora,
who was pulled over by cops in Kansas. When they searched his car,
with his consent, they found quite a stash of meth and cocaine, which
naturally led to his arrest.
But there’s a catch: Cruz-Zamora doesn’t speak
English well, so the consent to search the car was obtained via an
exchange facilitated by Google
Translate — an exchange that the court found was insufficiently
accurate to constitute consent given “freely and intelligently.”
… It doesn’t mean that consent is impossible
via Google Translate or any other app — for example, if Cruz-Zamora
had himself opened his trunk or doors to allow the search, that
likely would have constituted consent.
Why not just give it to the people who ask for it?
Stuart Leavenworth reports:
REYKJAVÍK, ICELAND — Sometime in the future, U.S. researchers will be able to press a button and reliably identify the thousands of people who carry cancer-causing genes, including those that trigger breast cancer.
In Iceland, that day is already here. With a relatively uniform population and extensive DNA databases, Iceland could easily pinpoint which of its people are predisposed to certain diseases, and notify them immediately. So far, the government has refused to do so. Why? Iceland confronts legal and ethical obstacles that have divided the nation and foreshadow what larger countries may soon face.
On one side of the debate there, you have those
who argue that of course you should tell people, but their argument
strikes me as seriously flawed:
“That is utter, thorough bulls–t,” Dr. Kári Stefánsson, a world-renowned Icelandic neurologist and biotech leader who has been at the center of the nation’s DNA debate, told McClatchy in an interview in his Reykjavík office. “There is a tradition in American society, there is a tradition in Icelandic society, to save people who are in life-threatening situations, without asking them for informed consent. Should there be a different rule if the danger is because of a mutated gene?”
But Dr. Stefánsson’s argument fails when you
consider that in these genetic cases, you are generally not talking
about warning someone of imminent life-threatening decisions
that need to be made. This is definitely NOT comparable to the
situation in which a person is unconscious when brought to an
emergency room, and the medical personnel are permitted legally and
ethically to assume that they do have consent to treat,
because failure to make that assumption is likely to lead to death of
the patient.
If we are talking about notifying people that they
are predisposed to certain diseases, well, they genereally do have
some time to think about whether they would want to be warned or not.
Does Dr. Stefánsson think that he has a duty to inform that somehow
trumps a person’s right to decide that they do not want to know
their future or fate?
The more difficult question I see is what do we do
about notifying parents – and teenagers – about the likelihood
that teens or youth are at risk. If there is nothing that can be
done to change the eventual outcome – i.e., if the person will
still get the disease no matter whether you tell/warn them or not,
what have you accomplished by alerting them? I suppose one could
argue that you allow the person to make more informed life decisions,
e.g., maybe they will decide not to have children if they know there
is a very high risk that they would be passing along a currently
incurable genetic disorder that might cause pain or suffering for any
offspring. Or perhaps they will decide that if they are going to
lose cognitive function early, they may not want to spend ten years
in academic studies but would enjoy life more if they focus on other
things.
There’s much to think about and discuss. And I
think an argument could be made that supports Dr. Stefánsson’s
firm belief that people should be informed, but he hasn’t made his
case by trying to make the analogy he tries to make.
Read more on
McClatchyDC
Who knew there was a Center for the study of
Drones?
Bard College's Center
for the Study of the Drones released a report
about law enforcement acquiring drones and what they found is
troubling.
… Why do university police need license plate
readers, drones and a command vehicle?
There it is, law enforcement's mantra being used
over and over again. Police need this spy gear to keep the public
safe.
Good luck trying to find out which university
police department has purchased a drone. Most university police
departments can and do ignore FOIA requests. (Click here,
here
& here
to learn more.)
Following the next “Next Big Thing?”
… Ofo's business is dockless
bike sharing, and it was about to launch its US operations in
Seattle. Dockless bike share is just the latest of a dozen new
approaches to urban mobility in increasingly congested cities.
Ride-hailing services, app-powered carpools, on-demand car rentals,
electric
bikes, scooters,
and even self-driving taxis are all jockeying
for riders on the streets of American cities. Together they are
reinventing the way we navigate
urban environments, reducing private car usage, improving traffic
and commute times, and cutting emissions.
But where alternatives to car ownership are
well-established in the US's major metropolises, bike shares are
still finding their niche. Paris, London, and New York have all
adopted bike share programs that use docks, bulky stations that are
built into parking spaces that dictate where the bikes' users must
start and end rides. Though they cost a fraction of a more
traditional, multibillion-dollar transit project, the stations are
still expensive to install and maintain, and their fixed locations
limit the number of riders they can attract.
What makes a dockless bike share program appealing
is that, beyond the bikes themselves, it doesn't need any
infrastructure. With nothing to build, a city can introduce a new
way of getting around virtually overnight. A smartphone app tells
users where cheap, GPS-enabled bikes are located and lets them rent
one.
Will Wikipedia become the source of all trusted
knowledge?
Facebook
and Google must do more to support Wikipedia
The digital commons has become a common problem,
clogged by disinformation, stripped of privacy and squeezed by
insatiable shareholders. Online propagandists stoke violence, data
brokers sway elections, and our most intimate personal information is
for sale to the highest bidder. Faced with these difficulties, big
tech is increasingly turning to Wikipedia for support.
You may not realise how ubiquitous Wikipedia is in
your everyday life, but its open, collaboratively-curated data is
used across semantic, search and structured data platforms on the
web. Voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Google Home source
Wikipedia articles for general knowledge questions; Google’s
knowledge panel features Wikipedia content for snippets and essential
facts; Quora contributes to and utilises the Wikidata open data
project to connect topics and improve user recommendations.
More recently, YouTube and Facebook have turned
to Wikipedia for a new reason: to address their issues around
fake news and conspiracy theories. YouTube said that they would
begin linking to Wikipedia articles from conspiracy videos, in order
to give users additional – often corrective – information about
the topic of the video. And Facebook rolled out a feature using
Wikipedia’s content to give users more information about the
publication source of articles appearing in their feeds.
Perspective. Hoist on their own petard? Sending
junk mail to get me to authorize you to send me junk mail is probably
not the best possible strategy.
No one is
opening those emails about privacy updates, and marketers are getting
nervous
-
The GDPR requires companies to send emails to people on their mailing list who have never bought anything, asking permission to keep emailing them.
-
Most Americans are not opening those emails, and some are using them to unsubscribe.
-
As a result, some email marketers stand to lose 80 percent of their marketing lists -- or face huge fines from the EU if they keep trying to email these people without permission.
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