In February, a court in the Argentinian capital ruled that the public surveillance system, known as the Fugitive Facial Recognition System (SNRP), will remain suspended as there is still no agreement on how to audit the technology. No date has been defined on when the system might be re-activated.
The court has instructed the city’s government and civil society groups ODIA, Vía Libre and CELS to come up with an institutional framework, a budget and a clear methodological plan for an audit of the system before its reintroduction. The two sides, however, have been clashing on how to proceed with auditing the software and re-activating the system.
I wish there was a way to share pics of my kids and family members without feeling like I'm shoving them into the maw of the pic scraping facial recognition machine.
I guess I could block their eyes or something but is that sufficient? Plus sometimes the eyes make the picture. Suggestions welcome. #privacy#FacialRecognition
🇬🇧 #AIAct: EU Parliament approves instruction manual for establishing a high tech surveillance state with real-time #facialrecognition all over Europe.
My speech as a #Pirate: No to biometric mass surveillance, Yes to freedom!
"But, of course, Ring presents itself as more than just the surveillance arm of a multibillion dollar corporation deployed to your front door. It hijacks the human need for security or safety and transmutes it into a need for Ring. It is chiefly the needs of Amazon that are being met, particularly given the way that Ring allows Amazon to also profit from partnerships with police departments."
"...[One] example... is the belief in some quarters that the problem with facial recognition technology is simply that it seems, in its present iteration, to be especially biased against people of color, as if the tool would be just and good as soon as it was calibrated so that people of color were equally legible to its gaze. In other words, equal access to fundamentally degrading institutions and their products is not justice."
Contrary to their initial plan, the Department had been pushed into letting the Justice Committee hold hearings on the quality of their proposed legislation. This stage is called pre-legislative scrutiny. Consider it a sort of institutional effort by the legislature to avoid laws coasting onto the books in a state of unchallenged group-think.
So, on Tuesday the Committee heard from the Deputy Commissioner of the DPC, from me and Olga Cronin (for DRI and ICCL), from the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland and from the Law Society of Ireland. Then they heard from Drew Harris, the Garda Commissioner and a sentence or two from the Department officials who were promoting the Heads of Bill before the Committee."
"Stanley sounded alarm after consulting Invenda sales brochures that promised "the machines are capable of sending estimated ages and genders" of every person who used the machines without ever requesting consent."
#Canada#Surveillance#Biometrics#FacialRecognition#VendingMachines: "Canada-based University of Waterloo is racing to remove M&M-branded smart vending machines from campus after outraged students discovered the machines were covertly collecting facial-recognition data without their consent.
The scandal started when a student using the alias SquidKid47 posted an image on Reddit showing a campus vending machine error message, "Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe," displayed after the machine failed to launch a facial recognition application that nobody expected to be part of the process of using a vending machine."
#UK#FacialRecognition#Privacy#Biometrics: "Privacy International (PI), Big Brother Watch (BBW), StopWatch, CopWatch, Defend Digital Me, Liberty and Statewatch have written to Home Secretary James Cleverly to raise concerns over the danger posed to UK society by Facial Recognition Technology (FRT).
In a letter sent on 18 January 2024, the signatories raised concerns over the escalating use of FRT and warned the Home Secretary that "The indiscriminate use of this dystopian biometric technology to identify people in public spaces is a form of mass surveillance [...] happening in a democratic vacuum, without specific legislation to restrict its use".
We called on the Home Secretary to "put an immediate end to the radical expansion of the use of FRT in order to protect the fundamental freedoms of all members of UK society". "
Homeland is a novel, and perhaps today we'd classify it Hope Punk. Like the books of Olivia E. Butler, I'm not sure I could read Homeland right now - too close to current events 😢
Using error-prone #FacialRecognition, the police will be allowed to search police databases across Europe for faces, a majority decided today ("Prüm II").
#EU#AI#AIAct#Biometrics#MassSurveillance#FacialRecognition: "On 8 December 2023, EU lawmakers celebrated reaching a deal on the long-awaited Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. Lead Parliamentarians reassured their colleagues that they had preserved strong protections for human rights, including ruling out biometric mass surveillance (BMS).
Yet despite the lawmakers’ bravado, the AI Act will not ban the vast majority of dangerous BMS practices. Instead, it will introduce – for the first time in the EU – conditions on how to use these systems. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and EU Member State ministers will vote on whether they accept the final deal in spring 2024.
#EU#DataProtection#Privacy#Biometrics#FacialRecognition#Fingerprinting#Migrants: "An EU plan to use an automatic fingerprinting system and facial recognition software on irregular migrants and asylum-seekers is problematic and should not become a precedent for other laws, the bloc´s data protection chief said on Friday.
“There is no evidence that the measures envisaged in the regulation are actually justified,” said a statement from Wojciech Wiewiorowski, the independent European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS).
“I take the lack of an impact assessment as worrying, given the nature of the personal data at stake -- sensitive biometric data -- and that vulnerable people may be involved -- migrants,” he said."
#EU#AI#AIAct#Biometrics#Surveillance#FacialRecognition: "Civil society fought a strong campaign against allowing the use of “real time” remote biometric identification (RBI) systems in publicly accessible spaces by public and private entities, arguing that the use of such systems in such places effectively puts everyone constantly in a suspects’ line-up that threatens the exercise of fundamental rights such as the right to demonstrate and express one’s opinion in public, i.e., that it amounts to mass surveillance. But in the end, the AI Act only contains an in-principle prohibition on the use of such systems in publicly accessible places for law enforcement purposes, subject to complex conditions and exceptions
As well as tighter definitions, my legal analysis (accessible below) shows there are at least five areas where the final text of the EU AI Act on this issue could be improved from a fundamental rights perspective:"
My local branch of #Booths (popularly known, but erroneously, as the Waitrose of the North) has introduced a #facialrecognition system into its local branch (and for all I know, all of its branches).
And in a classic bit of 'securitisation' we are told via a sticker on the door, this is for the staff & our safety.
The creeping Orwell-isation of the UK continues;
wonder if they'll be able to link that to my Booth loyalty card & credit card data?
A Lord's Committee has questioned the legal basis of this intrusive tech.
Politicians must not charge ahead with its creeping use while leaving police forces to write their own rules over our liberty and sleepwalk into a surveillance State.
#EU#AI#AIAct#Biometrics#MassSurveillance#FacialRecognition: "On 8 December 2023, EU lawmakers celebrated reaching a deal on the long-awaited Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. Lead Parliamentarians reassured their colleagues that they had preserved strong protections for human rights, including ruling out biometric mass surveillance (BMS).
Yet despite the lawmakers’ bravado, the AI Act will not ban the vast majority of dangerous BMS practices. Instead, it will introduce – for the first time in the EU – conditions on how to use these systems. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and EU Member State ministers will vote on whether they accept the final deal in spring 2024."
Es gibt viele Beispiele die aufzeigen, wie die vielbeschworene Digitalisierung und "Smartifizierung der Welt" vor allem eine Transformation in eine noch autoritärere und repressivere Zukunft bedeuten kann.
Die biometrische Überwachung/Verfolgung von Frauen in Iran und von Kriegsdienstverweigernden in Russland sowie die Zero-Covid-Politik des chinesischen Staates sind aktuell offensichtliche Beispiele dafür. Und auch im Überwachungskapitalismus des "demokratischen Westens" werden solche Entwicklungen schon seit einer ganzen Weile auf hohen Ebenen herbeigesehnt, wie z.B. das Dokument "Smart City Charta" von Bundesinstituten und dem Bundesumweltministerium aus dem Jahr 2017 zeigt.
Eine schön deutliche Einordnung dieses Dokuments (im Rahmen einer vergangenen Veranstaltung) findet sich hier:
"But while authorities generally pitch facial recognition as a tool to capture terrorists or wanted murderers, the technology has also emerged as a critical instrument in a very particular context: punishing protesters.
(...)
In countries where demonstrating can come with physical or political risk, large-scale protests have historically offered a degree of anonymity, and, with it, a level of protection. Mass protests are a way for citizens to express dissent as a collective — often under the assumption that “they can’t arrest us all.”
But in the last decade, the spread of facial recognition technology has changed that equation: A lone face in a crowd is no longer anonymous; facial recognition allows #authorities to capture people’s identities en masse."