Facial recognition technology being used to identify shoplifters & VIP customers:
Facial recognition technology, already employed by some retail stores to spot and thwart shoplifters, may soon be used to identify and track the freest spenders in the aisles.
The NEC Corporation, for instance, is working on “V.I.P. identification” software, based on face recognition, for hotels and other businesses “where there is a need to identify the presence of important visitors.”
And companies like FaceFirst, in Camarillo, Calif., hope to soon complement their shoplifter-identification services with parallel programs to help retailers recognize customers eligible for special treatment.
“Just load existing photos of your known shoplifters, members of organized retail crime syndicates, persons of interest and your best customers into FaceFirst,” a marketing pitch onthe company’s site explains. “Instantly, when a person in your FaceFirst database steps into one of your stores, you are sent an email, text or SMS alert that includes their picture and all biographical information of the known individual so you can take immediate and appropriate action.”
Joseph Rosenkrantz, the chief executive of FaceFirst, envisages stores using the software to recognize shoppers and immediately send personalized offers to their phones. But he expects retailers to seek permission from their customers first.
“That would require opt-in consent,” he told me recently.
Facial recognition measures and records biological patterns unique to individuals. Like concerns over the proliferation of genetic data, the debate over facial recognition ultimately revolves around whether a person has a right to control who has access to his or her biometric data and how it can be used.
Because facial recognition can be used covertly to identify and track people by name at a distance, some civil liberties experts call it unequivocally intrusive. In view of intelligence documents made public by Edward J. Snowden, they also warn that once companies get access to such data, the government could, too. “This is you as an individual being monitored over time and your movements and habits being recorded,” says Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for privacy issues at the American Civil Liberties Union. “That is a very scary technological reality.”
For the technology to work, a company or government agency must create a database containing photos or video stills of individuals. Next, a typical system extracts complex measurements — often topological — of each face. Then it converts each person’s facial data into a mathematical code, or “faceprint.” If security cameras record someone at, say, a store or a casino, the system can compare the faceprint of that live image to those in the database, taking only a few seconds to run through millions of faceprints and find a match.
Some international airports use the technology to identify employees as well as frequent fliers who have been cleared by government security services. Facebook offers face-matching software, called “Tag Suggestions,” to automatically suggest to members the names of people in photos they’ve uploaded. Google said last year that it would not approve “at this time” apps for Google Glass that use facial recognition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/technology/when-no-one-is-just-a-face-in-the-crowd.html?_r=1
Fitbit, Nike, and Garmin could sell your personal fitness data without your permission:
Fitness-minded Americans have started wearing sporty wrist-band devices that track tons of data:
Weight, mile splits, steps taken per day, sleep quality, sexual activity, calories burned—sometimes, even GPS location. People use this data to keep track of their health, and are able send the information to various websites and apps. But this sensitive, personal data could end up in the hands of corporations looking to target these users with advertising, get credit ratings, or determine insurance rates. In other words, that device could start spying on you—and the Federal Trade Commission is worried.
“Health data from [a woman’s] connected device, may be collected and then sold to data brokers and other companies she does not know exist,” Jessica Rich, director of the Bureau for Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission, said in a speech on Tuesday for Data Privacy Day. “These companies could use her information to market other products and services to her; make decisions about her eligibility for credit, employment, or insurance; and share with yet other companies. And many of these companies may not maintain reasonable safeguards to protect the data they maintain about her.”
Several major US-based fitness device companies contacted by Mother Jones—Fitbit, Garmin, and Nike—say they don’t sell personally identifiable information collected from fitness devices.
But privacy advocates warn that the policies of these firms could allow them to sell data.
When you buy one of these bracelets or clip-on devices, you have the option ofautomatically sending fitness data to the Fitbit website. And the site encourages you to also submit other medical information, such as blood pressure and glucose levels. According to Fitbit’s privacy policy, “At times Fitbit may make certain personal information available to strategic partners that work with Fitbit to provide services to you.” Stephna May, a Fitbit spokesperson, says that the company “does not sell information collected from the device that can identify individual users, period.” However, she says that the company would consider marketing “aggregate information” that cannot be linked back to an individual user—which is outlined in the privacy policy as aggregated gender, age, height, weight, and usage data.
Nike, which makes the Nike + Fuel Band, says in its privacy policy that the company may collect a host of personal information, but doesn’t say that it can be shared with advertising companies. Joy Davis Fair, a Nike spokesperson, says that the company, “does not share consumer data” with outside advertisers, but selectively shares it with other companies under the Nike’s corporate umbrella, including Converse and Hurley. Garmin’s policy says that users have to consent in order for the company to sell personal information. A Garmin spokesman says the company doesn’t sell personal or aggregated information to advertisers, and doing so isn’t part of the company’s business model. (Polar Flow, which makes the Polar Loop band, is the only company with a privacy policy that explicitly says it won’t sell personally identifiable data for advertising. It is based in Finland and subject to stringent European Union privacy laws.)
Jeffrey Chester, executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy, says that these privacy policies are so broad that they could allow the companies to sell health data—even if they aren’t doing so now. “When companies promise that they aren’t selling your data, that’s because they haven’t developed a business model to do so yet,” Chester says.
Mr. Rosenkrantz of FaceFirst claims its current shoplifter-recognition service is less intrusive than typical in-store video security systems. Video cameras capture everyone who walks into a store and the images are usually kept for 30 days, he claims, whereas FaceFirst allegedly destroys faceprints of all consumers except those whom retailers have previously caught shoplifting.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/are-fitbit-nike-and-garmin-selling-your-personal-fitness-data
Google wants to automatically send your videos & photos to law enforcement:
Google recently filed a patent for a system that identifies when and where a “mob” event takes place and sends multimedia alerts to relevant parties. The patents are actually titled “Mob Source Phone Video Collaboration” and “Inferring Events Based On Mob Sourced Video“.
Excerpt from US Patent #20140025755:
“When there are at least a given number of video clips with similar time stamps and geolocation stamps uploaded to a repository, it is inferred that an event of interest has likely occurred, and a notification signal is transmitted (e.g., to a law enforcement agency, to a news organization, to a publisher of a periodical, to a public blog, etc.).”
The fact that “law enforcement agencies” and “news organization(s)” are the first two examples provided by Google themselves is our greatest cause for concern. Especially at a time when privacy issues seem to take center stage all too often in the worst way possible.
The exact details of this system – if put into practice – would likely be buried deep in a Terms of Service document. We’re guessing the most effective solution (for Google) would be collect aggregate and anonymous data to which you opted-in (time and location data of multimedia), extrapolating that data to identify “mob source” events, and then sharing related, publicly available multimedia to 3rd parties.
This could be used in any of the typical “nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd” scenario, from bar fights and car accidents to flash mobs and unpredictably Arandom occurrences.
http://phandroid.com/2014/01/29/google-mob-sourced-video-patent/
Click here to see Google’s scary ‘smart’ home of the future.
There’s no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public & legislators:
EFF & ACLU argue LAPD should release Automatic License Plate Reader records to public:
EFF and the ACLU of Southern California filed the opening brief in our lawsuit against the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department for information on how the agencies are using Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR). We argue the departments are improperly withholding these records, keeping important information about this invasive surveillance technology from the public.
Both EFF and the ACLU have argued that ALPRs—high-speed cameras mounted on poles and patrol cars that record every passing vehicle’s license plate, along with time, date and location—raise serious privacy concerns because the location data they collect reveals a great deal of personal information.
They have also argued, though, that the only way to have an informed public debate about appropriate limits on ALPRs is through greater transparency about how the technology is actually being used. This is why we’ve asked for a week’s worth of data collected by all of LAPD and LASD’s ALPR cameras, in addition to policies and procedures on how the agencies say they’re using the technology. It isn’t possible to know what police are really doing until we have at least a representative slice of the data they collect.
Law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles are trying to keep a lid on the data, it’s no secret that police use of ALPRs has exploded in recent years. A September 2009 survey reported that 70 of 305 randomly-selected police departments nationwide (23 percent) used ALPRs. A 2011 survey of more than 70 police departments showed that 79 percent used ALPR technology and 85 percent expected to acquire or increase use in the next five years. On average, these agencies expected that 25 percent of police vehicles would be equipped with license plate readers by 2016.
Already many agencies have created massive databases that record the travels of millions of drivers in a city, region or state. According to the LA Weekly, LASD and LAPD “are two of the biggest gatherers of automatic license plate recognition information,” logging 160 million data points, an average of 22 scans for every one of the 7 million vehicles registered in Los Angeles county. Agencies also share data, so that, for example, LASD can query license plate data from 26 other police agencies in Los Angeles County and is working to expand its reach to Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
The data can trigger instant alerts if a scanned plate is associated with a crime, is on a stolen vehicle list or meets other criteria. Departments, and even individual units, can also create their own “hot lists” so that ALPR users will be alerted whenever a “vehicle of interest” is located. Officers can also enter individual plates into their ALPR system to be searched for during that shift. Officers don’t seem to need reasonable suspicion (much less a warrant) before adding plates to these “hot lists,” and LASD’s own records note that the hot lists don’t automatically provide “sufficient justification to pull over or detain vehicle occupants.”
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/los-angeles-cops-should-release-automatic-license-plate-reader-records-eff-aclu
What would you do if the Feds were watching you?
http://www.npr.org/2014/01/31/265354655/what-would-you-do-if-the-feds-were-watching-you
Why should you be worried about NSA surveillance?
http://www.npr.org/2014/01/31/265386281/why-should-you-be-worried-about-nsa-surveillance
Is too much privacy bad for your health?
http://www.npr.org/2014/01/31/265700003/is-too-much-privacy-bad-for-your-health
Does more convenience mean less privacy?
http://www.npr.org/2014/01/31/265742367/does-more-convenience-mean-less-privacy
Can the open-data revolution change our democracies?
http://www.npr.org/2014/01/31/265694831/can-the-open-data-revolution-change-our-democracies
Image source: http://ww1.prweb.com/prfiles/2013/09/24/11156955/PrivacyProf_Infographic_FINAL.pdf
http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-future-of-our-privacy.html