How could you be surprised if you follow facial recognition at all?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wx83bz/verkada-hacked-facial-recognition-customers
Hacked Surveillance Camera Firm Shows Staggering Scale of Facial Recognition
Hackers have broken into Verkada, a popular surveillance and facial recognition camera company, and managed to access live feeds of thousands of cameras across the world, as well as siphon a Verkada customer list. The breach shows the astonishing reach of facial recognition-enabled cameras in ordinary workplaces, bars, parking lots, schools, stores, and more.
If not faces, license plates. No rules here?
License-Plate Scans Aid Crime-Solving but Spur Little Privacy Debate
License-plate readers are feeding immense databases with details on Americans’ driving habits, helping solve crimes despite little public awareness about the breadth of the data collected or how it is used.
The vast network of automated license-plate scanners, which has been growing for decades, makes it nearly impossible to drive anywhere in the U.S. without being observed. The scanners first appeared on telephone poles and police cars, then on toll plazas and bridges, and in parking lots. Today, scanners are routinely placed on tow trucks and municipal garbage trucks, gathering images of plates on cars they pass while making their rounds.
… The scanners, which automatically grab images of any plates they identify, are an often-overlooked layer of the surveillance that blankets Americans, along with social media, online searches, mobile-phone apps and credit-card purchases. Private companies feed snapshots of plate numbers—including time, date and location—then share that information with police departments, which are largely free to access it at their discretion.
The scope of these data pools is difficult to measure. But Vigilant Solutions, a division of Motorola Solutions Inc. and one of the largest private vendors of data and scanners, boasted a decade ago that it had 450 million plate scans in its commercial database, with 35 million new plates added each month.
Today, the company’s marketing materials say its database contains more than nine billion scans of American citizens’ license plates. That means Vigilant—one of dozens of companies in its industry—has more than 30 license-plate scans for every registered vehicle on the nation’s roads today.
Interesting. Do you have to point to a specific person or policy?
German Court Overturns GDPR Fine, Raises Legal Questions About Fines Against Companies
On February 18, 2021, the District Court of Berlin overturned a €14.5 million fine that had been imposed on German real estate company Deutsche Wohnen SE. The Court held that the fine – which was issued by the Berlin Supervisory Authority (“SA”) and had been the second highest fine in Germany so far under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) – failed to satisfy certain rules under German law, and therefore was invalid.
This case raises important questions on the interplay between the GDPR and German law regarding the attribution of regulatory offenses to a company. In this blog post, we consider this topic in greater depth and how it may eventually be resolved in court.
… Although the official decision of the Berlin District Court has yet to be published, the Berlin SA said the Court concluded that “fines can only be imposed on legal entities if there is evidence of a specific act by management or legal representatives that led to the offense” (see press release of the Berlin SA here, in German).
But can we teach them to lie well?
https://thenextweb.com/neural/2021/03/10/it-might-be-unethical-to-force-ai-to-tell-us-the-truth/
Study: It might be unethical to force AI to tell us the truth
… A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University today published a pre-print study discussing situations like this and whether we should allow AI to lie. Perhaps shockingly, the researchers appear to claim that not only should we develop AI that lies, but it’s actually ethical. And maybe even necessary.
… You can check out the entire study here on arXiv.
Antitrust is the new “in” topic?
https://www.ft.com/content/d5bb5ebb-87ef-4968-8ff5-76b3a215eefc
EU struggles to build antitrust case against Amazon
Regulators in Brussels are struggling to gather enough evidence to bring antitrust charges against Amazon, despite working on the landmark case for nearly two years, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
In July 2019, EU regulators accused the online retailer of manipulating its algorithm to boost its own products “artificially” over its rivals’. As a result, they alleged, users often end up buying lower-quality products at a higher price.
But EU officials are still struggling to understand how Amazon's algorithm works, despite sending a series of detailed questions to the company about the criteria used to boost a product’s visibility, according to people familiar with the matter.
These people added that officials are also unlikely to be able to view the online retailer's proprietary code directly to build their case, owing to legal barriers around trade secrets.
(Related)
Facebook Seeks to Dismiss Antitrust Suits, Saying It Hasn’t Harmed Consumers
Facebook Inc. FB +3.01% on Wednesday asked a federal judge to dismiss antitrust lawsuits by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general, arguing that government enforcers have no valid basis for alleging the social media giant is suppressing competition.
The FTC “utterly ignores the reality of the dynamic, intensely competitive high-tech industry in which Facebook operates,” the company said in seeking to dismiss the commission’s case. In a second motion, Facebook argued the states’ case “does not and cannot assert that their citizens paid higher prices, that output was reduced, or that any objective measure of quality declined as a result of Facebook’s challenged actions.”
I want one! Should be a simple upgrade to deal with a Miller Moth infestation. New York might deploy on to handle their ‘Sky Rats’ (pigeons).
Terrifying Raspberry Pi-powered AI mosquito-killing laser gives off serious Terminator vibes
A Russian PhD student at South Ural University, apparently irked by the fact that disease-spreading mosquitos kill hundreds of thousands of people every year, created an innovative, if utterly horrifying solution: a 1W laser controlled by a Raspberry Pi, powered by an AI neural network, capable of detecting and incinerating mosquitos all by itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment