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June 6, 2022: Surveillance roundup

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Bookstores from last week's show, thanks to David in London. (Click image to zoom in.)

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Today: Surveillance roundup. The surveillance state keeps growing, with new assaults on privacy launched by Mastercard, JPMorgan, even the Mets at Citi Field. And portable spy apps like Clearview and PimEyes allow anyone with a smartphone to identify you on the street. This sort of news doesn’t get enough coverage, which is why we have to discuss it on Techtonic.

• Google collects almost 40 data points per user - the most of top tech giants (AtlasVPN, May 25, 2022): “They [Google] gather your name, phone number, payment information if you have made any purchases through Google, email address, emails you send and receive, films, photographs, documents, and spreadsheets you have stored, and your Youtube comments. On top of that, Google records your search keywords, video views, and interactions with content and adverts. Even calls made through Google are not private since Google records calling and receiving party numbers, forwarding numbers, call times and dates, call durations, routing information, and call types.”

• FTC Charges Twitter with Deceptively Using Account Security Data to Sell Targeted Ads (May 25, 2022): “Twitter asked users to give their phone numbers and email addresses to protect their accounts. The firm then profited by allowing advertisers to use this data to target specific users. ... ‘Twitter obtained data from users on the pretext of harnessing it for security purposes but then ended up also using the data to target users with ads,’ said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. ‘This practice affected more than 140 million Twitter users, while boosting Twitter’s primary source of revenue.’”

• JPMorgan employees describe growing ‘paranoia’ as the company tracks their office attendance, calls, calendars, and more (Insider, May 27, 2022): “one worker even installing a ‘mouse jiggler’ to evade ‘Big Brother’” ... “JPMorgan Chase built a powerful data-collection platform called the ‘Workplace Activity Data Utility’ (or ‘WADU’) shortly before the advent of the coronavirus pandemic. It has inspired widespread suspicion and mistrust in the two years since, the workers said in interviews. ... The bank tracks a variety of workplace-related data about hundreds of thousands of workers’ communications and activities throughout the day. Tracking of individual employees’ activities begins the moment they log into their virtual workspaces until they log out. Some employees described adopting unusual behaviors [like the ‘mouse jiggler’] to evade the system’s detection during breaks or interludes throughout the day.”

• “Every new crisis, we increase surveillance. We increase security theater. We further destroy our expectations of privacy and our rights to liberty and autonomy. Every crisis. Every time. And it never solves anything.” -UNH law professor Tiffany Li, May 25, 2022

• Experts Alarmed by Zoom's Tech for Detecting Users' Emotions (Futurism, May 20, 2022): “According to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, human rights experts are worried about Zoom’s plans to develop emotion-detecting software for its products. In an April blog post, the company announced plans for the tech, arguing that emotion and sentiment surveillance could drives sales and productivity.”

• Pay ‘with a smile or a wave’: why Mastercard’s new face recognition payment system raises concerns (The Conversation, May 24, 2022): “customers will have to install an app which will take their picture and payment information. This information will be saved and stored on the third-party provider’s servers. At checkout, the customer’s face will be matched with the stored data [and] funds will be deducted automatically. The “wave” option is a bit of a trick: as the customer watches the camera while waving, the camera still scans their face – not their hand. Similar authentication technologies are used on smartphones (face ID) and in many airports around the world, including “smartgates” in Australia. China started using biometrics-based checkout technology back in 2017. But Mastercard is among the first to launch such a system in Western markets – competing with the “pay with your palm” system used at cashier-less Amazon Go and Whole Foods brick and mortars in the United States.”

• Opening day at Citi Field brings new eats and attractions for Mets fans (Gothamist, April 15, 2022): “There, a variety of speakers addressed everything from game-day promotions – a Francisco Lindor bobblehead gnome, a Pete Alonso polar bear bobblehead – to some pretty futuristic technology. ‘Our new Mets Express entry technology . . . will allow fans to use their face as their ticket to enter the ballpark,’ explained Oscar Fernandez, the Mets’ vice president of technology solutions.” The article goes straight into reviewing food: “The sandwich was a very tasty if slightly messy bite, with honey dripping off the sides of the biscuit. I moved on to Pig Beach Barbecue, a Brooklyn-based restaurant. . . .”

• Face scanner Clearview AI aims to branch out beyond police (AP News, April 1, 2022): “the New York startup is looking to launch a new business venture to compete with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft in verifying people’s identity using facial recognition. The new “consent-based” product would use Clearview’s algorithms to verify a person’s face, but would not involve its ever-growing trove of some 20 billion images, which Ton-That said is reserved for law enforcement use. Such ID checks that can be used to validate bank transactions or for other commercial purposes are the “least controversial use case” of facial recognition, he said. ... One of its biggest known federal contracts is with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — particularly its investigative arm, which has used the technology to track down both the victims and perpetrators of child sexual exploitation. Clearview in March also started offering its services for free to the Ukrainian military, in part to help identify dead Russian soldiers using Clearview’s repository of about 2 billion images scraped from Russian social media website VKontakte.”

• Facial recognition firm Clearview AI tells investors it’s seeking massive expansion beyond law enforcement (Washington Post, Feb 16, 2022): “The facial recognition company Clearview AI is telling investors it’s on track to have 100 billion facial photos in its database within a year, enough to ensure ‘almost everyone in the world will be identifiable’...”

• A Face Search Engine Anyone Can Use Is Alarmingly Accurate (by Kashmir Hill in the NYT, May 26, 2022): “For $29.99 a month, a website called PimEyes offers a potentially dangerous superpower from the world of science fiction: the ability to search for a face, finding obscure photos that would otherwise have been as safe as the proverbial needle in the vast digital haystack of the internet. A search takes mere seconds. You upload a photo of a face, check a box agreeing to the terms of service and then get a grid of photos of faces deemed similar, with links to where they appear on the internet.” But the founder said not to worry, because... “he was relying on people to act ‘ethically,’ offering little protection against the technology’s erosion of the long-held ability to stay anonymous in a crowd.”

• My students cheated... A lot (by Matt Crump, May 26, 2022). Crump is a teacher at Brooklyn College who, unbeknownst to the students, joined a WhatsApp chat set up by his students. “I opened the chat. There they were, all those pictures, the same ones from the photos app. I had forgotten that WhatsApp has a setting to automatically save all of the media posted in the chat to my phone. I wasn’t hacked. My students were cheating like frenetic spambots. This was going to be bad.”

• Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never Met (by Kashmir Hill in the NYT, May 27, 2022): “Keeping test takers honest has become a multimillion-dollar industry, but Honorlock and its competitors, including ExamSoft, ProctorU and Proctorio, have faced major blowback along the way: widespread activism, media reports on the technology’s problems and even a Senate inquiry. Some surveilled test takers have been frustrated by the software’s invasiveness, glitches, false allegations of cheating and failure to work equally well for all types of people. ... Honorlock hasn’t previously disclosed exactly how its artificial intelligence works, but a company spokeswoman revealed that the company performs face detection using Rekognition, an image analysis tool that Amazon started selling in 2016. The Rekognition software looks for facial landmarks — nose, eyes, eyebrows, mouth — and returns a confidence score that what is onscreen is a face. It can also infer the emotional state, gender and angle of the face.” ... As for Honorlock competitor ProctorU, “ProctorU, an Honorlock competitor, no longer offers an A.I.-only product that flags videos for professors to review. ‘The faculty didn’t have the time, training or ability to do it or do it properly,’ said Jarrod Morgan, ProctorU’s founder. ... All suspicious behavior is now reviewed by one of the company’s approximately 1,300 proctors, most of whom are based abroad in cheaper labor markets.”

• Taser abandons plans to build stun gun-equipped drones for schools (by Alex Hern in the Guardian, today, June 6, 2022): “Flying stun gun plan in response to US school shootings was expression of potential, not launch timetable, says CEO.” (See also the July 15, 2019 show for more about Taser/Axon.)

• We Need to Take Back Our Privacy (Zeynep Tufekci in the NYT, May 19, 2022) ... along the same lines as, from last November, You Are the Object of a Secret Extraction Operation by Shoshana Zuboff.

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