Law enforcement

A 2018 law passed in Egypt requires ride-hailing services such as Uber and local competitor Careem to supply passenger data to the security agencies when requested to do so. More than 4 million people in Egypt have used Uber since it debuted there in 2014. While human rights advocates expressed

In September 2018, when Massachusetts state police tweeted a map of responses to fires and explosions during a gas emergency, they inadvertently revealed that they were closely monitoring several activist groups, including a Facebook group for Mass Action Against Police Brutality, the Coalition to

In July 2018, members of the Internal Security Organisation, Uganda's counterintelligence agency, raided South African telecommunications provider MTN's Uganda data centre in Mutundwe. In a letter to the police, MTN said the ISO kidnapped a data manager who worked for the contractor that ran the

In May 2018, the ACLU of Northern California obtained documents under a FOIA request showing that Amazon was essentially giving away its two-year-old Rekognition facial recognition tools to law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Orlando, Florida. Amazon defended the move by saying the technology has

At the 2017 Champions League Final, South Wales Police deployed an automated facial recognition system that wrongly identified more than 2,000 people in Cardiff as potential criminals. The system's cameras watched 170,000 people arrive in Cardiff for the football match between Real Madrid and

In 2018 genetic testing companies such as Ancestry and 23andMe agreed on guidelines for sharing users' DNA data and handling police requests. The guidelines, which include easy-to-read privacy policies, were inspired by two incidents: one in which local investigators used the GEDmatch DNA comparison

In 2018 a report from the Royal United Services Institute found that UK police were testing automated facial recognition, crime location prediction, and decision-making systems but offering little transparency in evaluating them. An automated facial recognition system trialled by the South Wales

At the 2018 DefCon security conference, a researcher from the security firm Nuix presented the discovery that body cameras from five different manufacturers shoe cameras are in use by US law enforcement are vulnerable to remote digital attacks, some of which could manipulate footage so it could not

Police and blackmailers in Egypt are using gay dating apps like Grindr, Hornet, and Growlr to find targets tor arrest and imprisonment while the developers who can make changes are thousands of miles away and struggle to know what to change to protect their users. In a typical story, a target finds

The US company Securus provides a cellphone tracking service that can locate almost any cellphone in the US within seconds by obtaining data from major carriers via a system used by marketers and other companies. In 2018, former Mississippi County, Missouri, sheriff Cory Hutcheson was charged in

In May 2018, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office announced it would investigate Police Scotland after Privacy International filed a complaint that offers' use of "cyber kiosks", which when connected to a device can view all its data, violated the Data Protection Act. Trials of the technology

In 2018, the chair of the London Assembly's police and crime committee called on London's mayor to cut the budget of the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime, which provides oversight, in order to pay for AI systems. The intention was that the efficiencies of adopting AI would free up officers'

The small, portable GrayKey box, costing $15,000 for an internet-connected version tied to a specific location or $30,000 for an offline version usable anywhere, takes two minutes to install proprietary software designed to guess an iPhone's passcode. Intended for use by law enforcement officials

Under a secret deal beginning in 2012, the data mining company Palantir provided software to a New Orleans Police Department programme that used a variety of data such as ties to gang members, criminal histories, and social media to predict the likelihood that individuals would commit acts of

In a draft January 2018 report obtained by Foreign Policy and produced at the request of US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, the Department of Homeland Security called for continuous vetting of Sunni Muslim immigrants deemed to have "at-risk" profiles. Based on studying 25

In February 2018 the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a contract with Vigilant Solutions, giving it access to the company's giant database of billions of license plate records, which can be searched to produce every place a given license plate has been seen in the last five years