Last night, the Cambridge City Council unanimously voted to approve an ordinance requiring community control over police surveillance. Under the ordinance, City agencies including the police are required to seek City Council permission before buying, acquiring, or otherwise using new surveillance technologies....
A new patent application filed by Amazon could enable the kind of dystopian face tracking envisioned in the movies and sci-fi books, where thousands of cameras are linked to track one person as they move through a city. The patent application, published...
A new study examining a face surveillance program implemented by the South Wales police finds the system is wrong 50 percent of the time. The Financial Times reports: The facial recognition technology used by South Wales Police was developed by Japanese company...
Headed home for the holidays? If you have any down time this weekend, here are three simple things you can do with your family to firm up your digital security. Install Privacy Badger on everyone’s web browsers. This neat browser extension, developed...
On June 28, 2018, a man shot and killed five people at the Annapolis, Maryland newspaper the Capital Gazette. After law enforcement apprehended the suspect on the scene, they say, they used facial recognition technology to identify him as Jarrod Ramos. The...
French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu has insisted that naming is an exertion of power. Powerful elites have long used naming and classifying not only to legitimize knowledge, but also to perpetuate and reproduce harmful and oppressive historical practices. Language can liberate, but it can...
Big tech companies are the beneficiaries of hundreds of millions of dollars of government contracts, many of which involve surveillance and law enforcement operations. Over the past few years, workers at large tech firms have begun flexing their civic muscles, and ringing...
Midday yesterday, activists affiliated with immigrants rights groups NWDC Resistance and Mijente donned Jeff Bezos masks outside Amazon’s Seattle Spheres building to protest the tech giant’s collaboration with ICE. The activists demanded Amazon stop marketing and selling its face surveillance technology, Rekognition,...
The use of face surveillance technologies is fast becoming the norm in government and the private sector, but a new survey by the Brookings Institution shows agencies and companies deploying this technology are out of step with the desires of most Americans...
A showdown between data privacy advocates and major tech firms is heating up in Congress, with one side arguing for robust regulations outlawing data discrimination and other exploitative practices, and the other pushing for a federal law to wipe out state level...