Privacy & New Media

Chicago Tribune
Ally Marotti
May 14, 2020

Illinois Facebook users could soon learn if they’re eligible for up to $300 as part of a class-action settlement alleging the social media giant violated state privacy law with its facial tagging feature.

Attorneys representing users filed court documents last week showing class members are estimated to receive between $150 and $300 as part of a massive $550 million settlement reached in January. There is no timeline set on notification or payout, and a federal judge in San Francisco must approve the details.

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New York Times
Charlie Warzel
Feb. 18, 2020

It invades our privacy. But does it work?

“In the year I’ve been writing this column, and voraciously reading articles about digital privacy, an unsettling theme has emerged. A report introduces a piece of technology with terrifying, privacy-eroding implications. The technology — facial recognition, digital ad tracking, spyware, you name it — is being rapidly deployed by companies that aren’t considering the potential societal harms. The report produces understandable frustration and concern. Then, upon further examination, the claims regarding the technology break down. That groundbreaking piece of technology, it turns out, is deeply flawed. Instead of a perfect panopticon, you have a surveillance-state equivalent of a lemon, or worse yet, total snake oil.

The trend is most common when it comes to facial recognition.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/opinion/facial-recognition-surveillance-privacy.html

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Washington Post
Editorial Board
July 5, 2020

“Defenders of unregulated facial recognition technology have always asked for concrete evidence of harm. Now they have it — and lawmakers in both chambers of Congress have signaled a willingness to act.

The New York Times reported last month that a man in Michigan named Robert Williams was wrongfully arrested early this year after an algorithm misidentified him, indicating to officers that he was a match for surveillance video of someone shoplifting $3,800 worth of watches. Police showed up at his home, handcuffed him in front of his wife and daughters and held him for 30 hours, during which time he demonstrated to detectives that he wasn’t the black man depicted in their grainy image. Weeks later in court, the prosecutor moved to dismiss his case.

“How does one explain to two little girls that a computer got it wrong, but the police listened to it anyway?” Mr. Williams wrote in an op-ed for The Post.

How does the government explain the same to its citizens? Last week, Sens. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) introduced legislation that would impose a moratorium on biometric surveillance technologies until rules to govern them are in place.”

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New York Times
Nellie Bowles
July 10, 2020 Updated July 13, 2020

“It sounds sinister. A soft-spoken cryptocurrency mogul is paying for a private network of high-definition security cameras around the city. Zoom in and you can see the finest details: the sticker on a cellphone, the make of a backpack, the color of someone’s eyes.

But in San Francisco, a city with a decades-long anti-authority streak, from hippies and pioneering gay rights activists to the techno-utopian libertarians and ultra-progressives of today, the crypto mogul has found a surprisingly receptive audience.

Here’s why: While violent crime is not high in the city, property crime is a constant headache. Anyone who lives here knows you shouldn’t leave anything — not a pile of change, not a scarf — in a parked car. Tourists visiting the city’s vistas like Twin Peaks or the famously windy Lombard Street are easy marks. The city government has struggled to solve the problem.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/business/camera-surveillance-san-francisco.html

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Gizmodo
Shoshana Wodinsky
8/03/20

“a team from the University of Chicago has come up with a much subtler tactic that still effectively fights back against these sorts of snooping algorithms.

Called “Fawkes”—an homage to the Guy Fawkes mask that’s become somewhat synonymous with the aptly named online collective Anonymous—the Chicago team initially started working on the system at the tail end of last year as a way to thwart companies like Clearview AI that compile their face-filled databases by scraping public posts.”

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https://gizmodo.com/this-algorithm-might-make-facial-recognition-obsolete-1844591686

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