In recent years, China has made significant strides in the development and implementation of a massive surveillance network known as “Skynet.” No kidding, it’s after Terminator’s Movie” This ambitious project aims to enhance public security and control through the widespread use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition, and big data analysis. — Read More
Tag Archives: Surveillance
Clearview AI and the end of privacy, with author Kashmir Hill
Today, I’m talking to Kashmir Hill, a New York Times reporter whose new book, Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It, chronicles the story of Clearview AI, a company that’s built some of the most sophisticated facial recognition and search technology that’s ever existed. As Kashmir reports, you simply plug a photo of someone into Clearview’s app, and it will find every photo of that person that’s ever been posted on the internet. It’s breathtaking and scary.
Kashmir is a terrific reporter. At The Verge, we have been jealous of her work across Forbes, Gizmodo, and now, the Times for years. She’s long been focused on covering privacy on the internet, which she is first to describe as the dystopia beat because the amount of tracking that occurs all over our networks every day is almost impossible to fully understand or reckon with. But people get it when the systems start tracking faces — when that last bit of anonymity goes away
… But not everyone. Your Face Belongs to Us is the story of Clearview AI, a secretive startup that, until January 2020, was virtually unknown to the public, despite selling this state-of-art facial recognition system to cops and corporations. — Read More
AI Chatbots Can Guess Your Personal Information From What You Type
The way you talk can reveal a lot about you—especially if you’re talking to a chatbot. New research reveals that chatbots like ChatGPT can infer a lot of sensitive information about the people they chat with, even if the conversation is utterly mundane.
The phenomenon appears to stem from the way the models’ algorithms are trained with broad swathes of web content, a key part of what makes them work, likely making it hard to prevent. “It’s not even clear how you fix this problem,” says Martin Vechev, a computer science professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland who led the research. “This is very, very problematic.”
Vechev and his team found that the large language models that power advanced chatbots can accurately infer an alarming amount of personal information about users—including their race, location, occupation, and more—from conversations that appear innocuous. — Read More
An NYPD security robot will be patrolling the Times Square subway station
The New York Police Department (NYPD) is implementing a new security measure at the Times Square subway station. It’s deploying a security robot to patrol the premises, which authorities say is meant to “keep you safe.” We’re not talking about a RoboCop-like machine or any human-like biped robot — the K5, which was made by California-based company Knightscope, looks like a massive version of R2-D2. Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of privacy rights group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, has a less flattering description for it, though, and told The New York Times that it’s like a “trash can on wheels.” — Read More
The Technology Facebook and Google Didn’t Dare Release
One afternoon in early 2017, at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., an engineer named Tommer Leyvand sat in a conference room with a smartphone standing on the brim of his baseball cap. Rubber bands helped anchor it in place with the camera facing out. The absurd hat-phone, a particularly uncool version of the future, contained a secret tool known only to a small group of employees. What it could do was remarkable.
… Mr. Leyvand turned toward a man across the table from him. The smartphone’s camera lens — round, black, unblinking — hovered above Mr. Leyvand’s forehead like a Cyclops eye as it took in the face before it. Two seconds later, a robotic female voice declared, “Zach Howard.”
“That’s me,” confirmed Mr. Howard, a mechanical engineer. — Read More
New York police will use drones to monitor backyard parties this weekend, spurring privacy concerns
Those attending outdoor parties or barbecues in New York City this weekend may notice an uninvited guest looming over their festivities: a police surveillance drone.
The New York City police department plans to pilot the unmanned aircrafts in response to complaints about large gatherings, including private events, over Labor Day weekend, officials announced Thursday. — Read More
This AI Watches Millions Of Cars Daily And Tells Cops If You’re Driving Like A Criminal
Artificial intelligence is helping American cops look for “suspicious” patterns of movement, digging through license plate databases with billions of records. A drug trafficking case in New York has uncloaked — and challenged — one of the biggest rollouts of the controversial technology to date.
InMarch of 2022, David Zayas was driving down the Hutchinson River Parkway in Scarsdale. His car, a gray Chevrolet, was entirely unremarkable, as was its speed. But to the Westchester County Police Department, the car was cause for concern and Zayas a possible criminal; its powerful new AI tool had identified the vehicle’s behavior as suspicious.
Searching through a database of 1.6 billion license plate records collected over the last two years from locations across New York State, the AI determined that Zayas’ car was on a journey typical of a drug trafficker. — Read More
MIT & Harvard’s FAn System Reveal a Revolutionizing Real-Time Object Tracking
In a groundbreaking collaboration, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University have unveiled a pioneering open-source framework, FAn, to revolutionize real-time object detection, tracking, and following. The team’s paper, titled “Follow Anything: Open-set detection, tracking, and following in real-time,” showcases a system that promises to eliminate the limitations of existing robotic object-following systems.
The core challenge addressed by FAn is the adaptability of robotic systems to new objects. Conventional systems are confined by a closed-set structure, only capable of handling a predefined range of object categories. FAn defies this constraint, introducing an open-set approach that can detect, segment, track, and follow any object in real-time. Notably, it can dynamically adapt to new objects through inputs such as text, images, or click queries. — Read More
Read the Paper
Zoom Contradicts Its Own Policy About Training AI on Your Data
Zoom’s Terms of Service say it can train its AI on your calls, videos, and other data. The company says you don’t have to worry about that.
Zoom updated its Terms of Service on Monday after a controversy over the company’s policies about training AI on user data. Although the policy literally says that Zoom reserves the right to train AI on your calls without your explicit permission, the Terms of Service now include an additional line which says, essentially, we promise not to do that.
The company’s Terms of Service call your video, audio, and chat transcripts “Customer Content.” When you click through Zoom’s terms, you agree to give Zoom “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights” to use that Customer Content for “machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing,” and a variety of other product development purposes. The company reserves similar rights for “Service Generated Data,” which includes telemetry data, product usage data, diagnostic data, and other information it gets from analyzing your content and behavior. — Read More
New acoustic attack steals data from keystrokes with 95% accuracy
A team of researchers from British universities has trained a deep learning model that can steal data from keyboard keystrokes recorded using a microphone with an accuracy of 95%.
When Zoom was used for training the sound classification algorithm, the prediction accuracy dropped to 93%, which is still dangerously high, and a record for that medium.
Such an attack severely affects the target’s data security, as it could leak people’s passwords, discussions, messages, or other sensitive information to malicious third parties. — Read More
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