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Content Type: Examples
The Danish company Blip Systems deploys sensors in cities, airports, and railway stations to help understand and analyse traffic flows and improve planning. In the UK's city of Portsmouth, a network of BlipTrack sensors was installed in 2013 by VAR Smart CCTV, and the data it has collected is used to identify problem areas and detect changing traffic patterns. The city hope that adding more sensors to identify individual journeys will help reduce commuting times, fuel consumption, and vehicular…
Content Type: Examples
In February 2018 the Canadian government announced a three-month pilot partnership with the artificial intelligence company Advanced Symbolics to monitor social media posts with a view to predicting rises in regional suicide risk. Advanced Symbolics will look for trends by analysing posts from 160,000 social media accounts; the results are intended to aid the Canadian government in allocating mental health resources. The company claims to be able to predict suicidal ideation, behaviours, and…
Content Type: Examples
A pregnancy-tracking app collected basic information such as name, address, age, and date of last period from its users. A woman who miscarried found that although she had entered the miscarriage into the app to terminate its tracking, the information was not passed along to the marketers to which the app's developer had sold it. A few weeks before her original due date, a package was delivered to her home including a note of congratulations and a box of baby formula. Although the baby had died…
Content Type: Examples
In the wake of Tesla’s first recorded autopilot crash, automakers are reassessing the risk involved with rushing semi-autonomous driving technology into the hands of distractible drivers. But another aspect of autopilot—its ability to hoover up huge amounts of mapping and “fleet learning” data—is also accelerating the auto industry’s rush to add new sensors to showroom-bound vehicles. This may surprise some users: Tesla’s Terms of Use (TOU) does not explicitly state that the company will…
Content Type: Examples
Caucuses, which are used in some US states as a method of voting in presidential primaries, rely on voters indicating their support for a particulate candidate by travelling to the caucus location. In a 2016 Marketplace radio interview, Tom Phillips, the CEO of Dstillery, a big data intelligence company, said that his company had collected mobile device IDs at the location for each of the political party causes during the Iowa primaries. Dstillery paired caucus-goers with their online…
Content Type: Examples
In 2015, the Royal Parks conducted a covert study of visitors to London's Hyde Park using anonymised mobile phone signals provided by the network operator EE to analyse footfall. During the study, which was conducted via government-funded Future Cities Catapult, the Royal Parks also had access to aggregated age and gender data, creating a detailed picture of how different people used the park over the period of about a year. The study also showed the percentage of EE subscribers who visited…
Content Type: Examples
In 2015, ABI Research discovered that the power light on the front of Alphabet's Nest Cam was deceptive: even when users had used the associated app to power down the camera and the power light went off, the device continued to monitor its surroundings, noting sound, movement, and other activities. The proof lay in the fact that the device's power drain diminished by an amount consistent with only turning off the LED light. Alphabet explained the reason was that the camera had to be ready to be…
Content Type: Examples
Because banks often decline to give loans to those whose "thin" credit histories make it hard to assess the associated risk, in 2015 some financial technology startups began looking at the possibility of instead performing such assessments by using metadata collected by mobile phones or logged from internet activity. The algorithm under development by Brown University economist Daniel Björkegren for the credit-scoring company Enterpreneurial Finance Lab was built by examining the phone records…
Content Type: Examples
In 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California published a report revealing that the social media monitoring service Geofeedia had suggested it could help police track protesters. The report's publication led Twitter and Facebook to restrict Geofeedia's access to their bulk data. ACLUNC argued that even though the data is public, using it for police surveillance is an invasion of privacy. Police are not legally required to get a warrant before searching public data; however…
Content Type: Examples
At the Sixth Annual Conference on Social Media Within the Defence and Military Sector, held in London in 2016, senior military and intelligence officials made it clear that governments increasingly view social media as a tool for the Armed Forces and a "new front in warfare". Social media are also viewed as a source of intelligence on civilian populations and enemies and as a vector for propaganda. The conference was sponsored by Thales, which was working with the National Research Council of…
Content Type: Examples
In 2016, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory developed a new device that uses wireless signals that measure heartbeats by bouncing off a person's body. The researchers claim that this system is 87% accurate in recognising joy, pleasure, sadness, or anger based on the heart rate after first measuring how the individual's body reacts in various emotional states. Unlike a medical electrocardiogram, it does not require a sensor to be attached to the person's…
Content Type: Examples
For some months in 2017, in one of a series of high-risk missteps, Uber violated Apple's privacy guidelines by tagging and identifying iPhones even after their users had deleted Uber's app. When Apple discovered the deception, CEO Tim Cook told Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to cease the practice or face having the Uber app barred from the App Store.
External Link to Story
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/23/technology/travis-kalabnick-pushes-uber-and-himself-to-the-precipice.html
Content Type: Advocacy
On 20 March 2015, Privacy International and Open Rights Group submitted comments on the UK Government's draft Equipment Interference Code of Practice.
The UK has been hacking for over a decade, yet the release of the draft Code of Practice is the first time the UK intelligence services have sought public authorisation for their activities. Indeed, it is the first time the intelligence services have publicly acknowledged they engage in hacking.
Unfortunately, the draft Code of…