About time?
Geopolitical implications of AI and digital surveillance adoption
… The United States and partner democracies have implemented sanctions, export controls, and investment bans to rein in the unchecked spread of surveillance technology, but the opaque nature of supply chains leaves it unclear how well these efforts are working. A major remaining vacuum is at the international standards level at institutions such as the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union (ITU), where Chinese companies have been the lone proposers of facial recognition standards that are fast-tracked for adoption in broad parts of the world.
To continue addressing these policy challenges, this brief provides five recommendations for democratic governments and three for civil society.
Does better/newer/other technology make this more concerning? I think not.
https://www.pogowasright.org/cops-will-be-able-to-scan-your-fingerprints-with-a-phone/
Cops Will Be Able to Scan Your Fingerprints With a Phone
Matt Burgess reports:
For more than 100 years, recording people’s fingerprints has involved them pressing their fingertips against a surface. Originally this involved ink but has since moved to sensors embedded in scanners at airports and phone screens. The next stage of fingerprinting doesn’t involve touching anything at all.
So-called contactless fingerprinting technology uses your phone’s camera and image processing algorithms to capture people’s fingerprints. Hold your hand in front of the camera lens and the software can identify and record all the lines and swirls on your fingertips. The technology, which has been in development for years, is ready to be more widely used in the real world. This includes use by police—a move that worries civil liberty and privacy groups.
Read more at WIRED.
This technique has been used before…
https://www.pogowasright.org/the-stolen-sip/
The Stolen Sip
A New York appellate court expunges a teen’s DNA sample, which was obtained by police who gave him a cup of water before taking it for DNA testing without his knowledge or consent.
Read the ruling In the Matter of Francis O.
Source: Courthouse News, via Joe Cadillic
Intelligence gathering tools are whatever works for you…
https://www.protectprivacynow.org/news/eye-opening-report-on-how-coffee-makers-could-spy-on-you
Eye-Opening Report on How Coffee Makers Could Spy on You
In the early post-Cold War era, anti-Communist crusaders were often accused of being hysterical, seeing Communists under their beds. Now a report from Christopher Balding and Joe Wu, researchers at New Kite Data Labs. sees the Chinese Communist Party inside coffee makers in American homes. And they are not crazy.
This alarming report is a consequence of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which ordinary appliances are given smart applications to interact with each other, as well as to report on performance and consumer behavior. According to Balding, interviewed by The Washington Times, Chinese-made coffee makers gather and report information about customers’ names, their locations, usage patterns and other information. In hotels, a coffee maker could report to China types of payments and routing information.
Similar issues have been found with vacuum cleaners that respond to voice commands, baby monitors and video doorbells.
The Chinese government has famously built a “panopticon,” a ubiquitous surveillance network that seamlessly integrates facial recognition, social media activities, payments, and other data to potentially track every citizen of that country. IoT, by design but mostly by technological evolution, is rapidly scaling the capacity to bring universal surveillance into the homes of the world.
Have we been thinking too small?
https://www.bespacific.com/what-makes-data-personal/
What Makes Data Personal?
Montagnani, Maria Lillà and Verstraete, Mark, What Makes Data Personal? (June 4, 2022). UC Davis Law Review, Vol. 56, No. 3, Forthcoming 2023, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4128080 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4128080
“Personal data is an essential concept for information privacy law. Privacy’s boundaries are set by personal data: for a privacy violation to occur, personal data must be involved. And an individual’s right to control information extends only to personal data. However, current theorizing about personal data is woefully incomplete. In light of this incompleteness, this Article offers a new conceptual approach to personal data. To start, this Article argues that personal data is simply a legal construct that describes the set of information or circumstances where an individual should be able to exercise control over a piece of information. After displacing the mythology about the naturalness of personal data, this Article fashions a new theory of personal data that more adequately tracks when a person should be able to control specific information. Current approaches to personal data rightly examine the relationship between a person and information; however, they misunderstand what relationship is necessary for legitimate control interests. Against the conventional view, this Article suggests that how the information is used is an indispensable part of the analysis of the relationship between a person and data that determines whether the data should be considered personal. In doing so, it employs the philosophical concept of separability as a method for making determinations about which uses of information are connected to a person and, therefore, should trigger individual privacy protections and which are not. This framework offers a superior foundation to extant theories for capturing the existence and scope of individual interests in data. By doing so, it provides an indispensable contribution for crafting an ideal regime of information governance. Separability enables privacy and data protection laws to better identify when a person’s interests are at stake. And further, separability offers a resilient normative foundation for personal data that grounds interests of control in a philosophical foundation of autonomy and dignity values—which are incorrectly calibrated in existing theories of personal data. Finally, this Article’s reimagination of personal data will allow privacy and data protection laws to more effectively combat modern privacy harms such as manipulation and inferences.”
How Microsoft has changed…
Microsoft’s framework for building AI systems responsibly
Today we are sharing publicly Microsoft’s Responsible AI Standard, a framework to guide how we build AI systems. It is an important step in our journey to develop better, more trustworthy AI. We are releasing our latest Responsible AI Standard to share what we have learned, invite feedback from others, and contribute to the discussion about building better norms and practices around AI.
(Related)
https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/21/microsoft_api_ai_algorithms/
Microsoft promises to tighten access to AI it now deems too risky for some devs
Deep-fake voices, face recognition, emotion, age and gender prediction ... A toolbox of theoretical tech tyranny
“What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.” Did Shakespeare have the right idea? (Perhaps he was an AI?)
From AIs to an unhappy elephant, the legal question of who is a person is approaching a reckoning
Happy the elephant’s story is a sad one. She is currently a resident of the Bronx Zoo in the US, where the Nonhuman Rights Project (a civil rights organisation) claims she is subject to unlawful detention. The campaigners sought a writ of habeas corpus on Happy’s behalf to request that she be transferred to an elephant sanctuary.
Historically, this ancient right which offers recourse to someone being detained illegally had been limited to humans. A New York court previously decided that it excluded non-human animals. So if the courts wanted to find in Happy’s favour, they would first have to agree that she was legally a person.
It was this question that made its way to the New York Court of Appeal, which published its judgment on June 14. By a 5-2 majority, the judges sided with the Bronx Zoo. Chief Judge DiFiore held that Happy was not a person for the purposes of a writ of habeas corpus, and the claim was rejected. As a researcher who specialises in the notion of legal personhood, I’m not convinced by their reasoning.
DiFiore first discussed what it means to be a person. She did not dispute that Happy is intelligent, autonomous and displays emotional awareness. These are things that many academic lawyers consider sufficient for personhood, as they suggest Happy can benefit from the freedom protected by a writ of habeas corpus. But DiFiore rejected this conclusion, signalling that habeas corpus “protects the right to liberty of humans because they are humans with certain fundamental liberty rights recognised by law”. Put simply, whether Happy is a person is irrelevant, because even if she is, she’s not human.
(Related)
https://www.newsweek.com/soon-humanity-wont-alone-universe-opinion-1717446
Soon, Humanity Won't Be Alone in the Universe | Opinion
… Even if humanity has been alone in this galaxy, till now, we won't be for very much longer. For better or worse, we're about to meet artificial intelligence — or AI — in one form or another. Though, alas, the encounter will be murky, vague, and fraught with opportunities for error.
(Related)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/google-ai-ethics-sentient-lemoine-warning/
Opinion We warned Google that people might believe AI was sentient. Now it’s happening.
By Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell
A Post article by Nitasha Tiku revealed last week that Blake Lemoine, a software engineer working in Google’s Responsible AI organization, had made an astonishing claim: He believed that Google’s chatbot LaMDA was sentient. “I know a person when I talk to it,” Lemoine said. Google had dismissed his claims and, when Lemoine reached out to external experts, put him on paid administrative leave for violating the company’s confidentiality policy.
But if that claim seemed like a fantastic one, we were not surprised someone had made it. It was exactly what we had warned would happen back in 2020, shortly before we were fired by Google ourselves. Lemoine’s claim shows we were right to be concerned — both by the seductiveness of bots that simulate human consciousness, and by how the excitement around such a leap can distract from the real problems inherent in AI projects.
Perspective.
https://www.bespacific.com/how-to-future/
How to Future
Via LLRX – How to Future – Kevin Kelly, is a Web Maverick and by his own definition, a futurist. This discipline is comprised of really keen historians who study the past to see the future. They look carefully at the past because most of what will happen tomorrow is already happening today. In addition, most of the things in the future will be things that don’t change, so they are already here. The past is the bulk of our lives, and it will be the bulk in the future. It is highly likely that in 100 years or even 500 years, the bulk of the stuff surrounding someone will be old stuff, stuff that is being invented today. All this stuff, plus our human behaviors, which are very old, will continue in the future.
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