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Reporter Kashmir Hill tested life in a smart home by adding numerous connected devices. The self-heating bed gave her daily reports on whether she'd reached her "sleep goal". She liked the convenience of the voice-activated lights, coffee maker, and music, the ability to convey a message to a toddler through a toy, and the robot vacuum cleaner. Meanwhile, colleague Surya Mattu built a Raspberry Pi router to monitor these devices to find out what data they collected and where they wanted to send…
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Under a secret deal beginning in 2012, the data mining company Palantir provided software to a New Orleans Police Department programme that used a variety of data such as ties to gang members, criminal histories, and social media to predict the likelihood that individuals would commit acts of violence or become victims. This partnership was extended three times through February 21, 2018. Even city council members had no idea the arrangement existed even though Palantir has used its New Orleans…
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LinkNYC, a system of 1,000 public wifi kiosks across all five boroughs of New City administered by the private consortium CityBridge, offers free high-speed wifi, phone calls, a charging station for mobile devices, and a built-in tablet to access a variety of city services. Announced by the mayor's office in November 2014 and deployed in 2016, the system is funded by advertisers, who pay for time on the kiosks' displays on either side. The initial privacy policy allowed LinkNYC to store…
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In a draft January 2018 report obtained by Foreign Policy and produced at the request of US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, the Department of Homeland Security called for continuous vetting of Sunni Muslim immigrants deemed to have "at-risk" profiles. Based on studying 25 terrorist attacks within the US between 2001 and December 2017, the report also suggested that immigrants to the US should be tracked on a long-term basis. Implementing the recommendations…
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In 2016, Facebook and its photo-sharing subsidiary Instagram rolled out a new reporting tool that lets users anonymously flag posts that suggest friends are threatening self-harm or suicide. The act of flagging the post triggers a message from Instagram to the user in question offering support including access to a help line and suggestions such as calling a friend. These messages are also triggered if someone searches the service for certain terms such as "thinspo", which is associated with…
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Recruiters are beginning to incorporate emotional recognition technology into the processes they use for assessing video-based job applications. Human, a London-based start-up, claims its algorithms can match the subliminal facial expressions of prospective candidates to personality traits. It then scores the results against characteristics the recruiter specifies. HireVue, which sells its service to Unilever, uses the emotion database of Affectiva, a specialist in emotion recognition that…
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A former Facebook insider explains to Wired Magazine why it's almost certain that the Trump campaign's skill using the site's internal advertising infrastructure was more important in the 2016 US presidential election than Russia's troll farm was. The first was the ads auction; the second a little-known product called Custom Audience and its accompanying Lookalike Audiences. Like Google's equivalent, Facebook's auction has advertisers bid with an ad, an ideal user specification, and a bid for…
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In 2018, pending agreement from its Institutional Review Board, the University of St Thomas in Minnesota will trial sentiment analysis software in the classroom in order to test the software, which relies on analysing the expressions on students' faces captured by a high-resolution webcam. Instructors will be able to see the aggregate detected emotions of up to 42 students displayed in a glance at their computer screen. The project hopes to help teachers adapt their approaches in response, but…
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In a report on mobile security updates, the US Federal Trade Commission finds that because of the complexity of the mobile ecosystem applying security updates to operating system software on some mobile devices is time-consuming and complicated. Based on information gathered from eight device manufacturers - Apple, Blackberry, Google, HTC, LG, Microsoft, Motorola, and Samsung, the FTC recommends that manufacturers should deploy these updates more quickly and suggests that manufacturers should…
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Two of the most notorious malware outbreaks of 2017 were the ransomware WannaCry and the wiper malware NotPetya. Both relied on the NSA's EternalBlue exploit of the Microsoft Server Message Block, which was leaked online by the hacker group The Shadow Brokers. Along with EternalBlue, The Shadow Brokers also leaked three other exploits: EternalSynergy, EternalRomance, and EternalChampion. In early 2018, RiskSense security researcher Sean Dillon ported these three to work on Windows versions…
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In February 2018 the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a contract with Vigilant Solutions, giving it access to the company's giant database of billions of license plate records, which can be searched to produce every place a given license plate has been seen in the last five years and issue instantaneous email alerts whenever a particular plate is newly sighted. Vigilant collects few of its own photos, but it acquires data from vehicle repossession agencies and other private…
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The story began with the free Bylock messaging app, which was used between 2014 and 2016 and which the Turkish government associated with treason and followers of Fethullah Gülen, the group they believe was behind the attempted 2016 coup. The app was downloaded roughly half a million times and had 215,000 registered users. When the government began arresting people who had no traces of the app on their phones, digital forensics experts Tuncay Beşikçi and Koray Peksayar, and lawyer Ali…
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Security researcher Scott Helme found more than 4,000 websites, including many belonging to the UK government, were infected with Coinhive, code that mines the cryptocurrency Monero. Among the sites affected were those belonging to the Information Commissioner's Office, the Student Loans Company, and Barnsley Hospital. The hackers resopnsible had tampered with the Browsealoud plug-in, used by many websites to help give access to visually impaired people. The rapid rise in cryptocurrency prices…
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The popular app Citymapper, which began in London and has since expanded to New York, Paris, and Amsterdam, is a live journey planning application that integrates all available modes of transport. Providing this service allows Citymapper to collect vast amounts of data: where, when, and by what modes of transport people travel and the exact routes they take. An app update in October 2015 added a feature allowing users to share routes and arrival times with friends via customised web addresses,…
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In a study of COMPAS, an algorithmic tool used in the US criminal justice system , Dartmouth College researchers Julia Dressel and Hany Farid found that the algorithm did no better than volunteers recruited via a crowdsourcing site. COMPAS, a proprietary risk assessment algorithm developed by Equivant (formerly Northpointe), considers answers to a 137-item questionnaire in order to provide predictions that are used in making decisions about sentencing and probation. In a case brought by a…
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In February 2018 the Home Office gave the Yorkshire Police 250 scanners that use a smartphone app to run mobile fingerprint checks against the UK's criminal fingerprint and biometrics database (IDENT1) and the Immigration and Asylum Biometrics System (IABS). The app was simultaneously made available to all 5,500 frontline Yorkshire Police officers, with a plan to roll the service out to another 20 forces by the end of 2018. Police are able to use the scanners when people they stop on the street…
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Amazon, which is already known for closely monitoring its warehouse workers has been granted two US patents on a wristband that could use ultrasonic sound pujlses and radio transmissions track a worker's every move, pause, or fidget, and vibrate to provide haptic feedback to nudge them when they make an error. It is unknown whether the company intends to manufacture the wristbands or issue them to workers. In the patents, Amazon says the goal is to streamline time-consuming tasks.
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Princeton University's WebTap - Web Transparency and Accountability - project conducts a monthly automated census of 1 million websites to measure tracking and privacy. The census detects and measures many or most of the known privacy violations researchers have found in the past: circumvention of cookie blocking, leakage of personally identifiable information to third parties, Canvas fingerprinting, and many more. The research also examines the effect of browser privacy tools and cookie…
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In 2017, Facebook introduced two mechanisms intended to give users greater transparency about its data practices: the "why am I seeing this?" button users can click to get an explanation of why they're being shown a particular ad, and an Ad Preferences page that shows users a list of attributes the system has inferred about them. To examine the level of transparency provided by the respective ad explanations and data explanations these two mechanisms provide, a group of researchers conducted a…
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In January 2018 the Cyberspace Administration of China summoned representatives of Ant Financial Services Group, a subsidiary of Alibaba, to rebuke them for automatically enrolling its 520 million users in its credit-scoring system. The main complaint was that people using Ant's Alipay service were not properly notified that enrolling in the credit-scoring system would also grant Ant the right to share their personal financial data, including information about their income, savings, and…
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Modern vehicles are networks of sophisticated computers on wheels that can collect more intimate data about ourselves and our lives than smartphones do. The agreements covering nearly every new vehicle that is leased or sold in the US often now include a clause permitting the manufacturer to monitor where the car goes, how the owner drives, and even the in-car entertainment they prefer. In 2018, it was estimated that 78 million of these cars had internet connections that allow the data…
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The first signs of the combination of AI and surveillance are beginning to emerge. In December 2017, the digital surveillance manufacturer IC Realtime, launched a web and app platform named Ella that uses AI to analyse video feeds and make them instantly searchable - like a Google for CCTV. Company CEO Matt Sailor demonstrated a version of Ella hooked up to 40 cameras trained on an industrial park that was able to respond with relevant footage to searches such as "a man wearing red" or "UPS…
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Police investigating the 2016 rape and murder of a 19-year-old medical student were unable to search the iPhone of suspect Hussein Khavari, an Afghan refugee who declined to give them his password. The investigators gained access to the phone via a private company in Munich, and went through Apple's health app data to discern what kinds of activities Khavari participated in on the day of the murder. The app identified the bulk of his activity as "climbing stairs". An investigator of similar…
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In February 2018 Uber and the city of Cincinnati, Ohio announced the Cincinnati Mobility Lab, a three-year-partnership that will allow the city and the surrounding area in northern Kentucky to use Uber data for transport planning. Cincinnati, like many cities, is anxious to identify the impact of Uber and Lyft on local roads and transit networks. Uber claims 200,000 app users and 4,000 active drivers in the Cincinnati area, and sees the city as a representative example for a test that it may…
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In October 2017, the farm equipment manufacturer John Deere began requiring American farmers to sign an agreement forbidding almost all repair and modification of the equipment they buy and also preventing them from suiting for software-related problems. In response, the began hacking their John Deere tractors with internet-sourced Ukrainian firmware in order to circumvent the restrictions. Farmers, who have traditionally had the ability to repair their own equipment, view the restrictions as…
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As a gift in 2012, the Chinese government built the African Union's $200 million Addis Ababa headquarters, where African ministers and heads of state meet twice a year to discuss major continental issues. In 2017, Le Monde Afrique discovered that the building's computer systems incorporated an undocumented portal that grants Chinese administrators access to the entire system. After the surveillance was exposed, the AU acquired its own servers and declined China's offer to configure them; it…
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In February 2018, police in China began using connected sunglasses equipped with facial recognition to scan crowds looking for suspected criminals. In a test at a busy train station in the city of Zhengzhou, police were able to identify and apprehend seven suspects accused of crimes ranging from hit-and-run to human trafficking. Police also identified 26 people using fake IDs, according to the Communist Party's People's Daily Newspaper. The glasses allow police officers to take a…
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In February 2018 the Canadian government announced a three-month pilot partnership with the artificial intelligence company Advanced Symbolics to monitor social media posts with a view to predicting rises in regional suicide risk. Advanced Symbolics will look for trends by analysing posts from 160,000 social media accounts; the results are intended to aid the Canadian government in allocating mental health resources. The company claims to be able to predict suicidal ideation, behaviours, and…
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In 2010, Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs revealed that the reason his company changed the rules in the written agreement it requires iPhone app developers to sign was due to a report published by the vice-president of the app analytics company Flurry, Peter Farago. In one of its monthly reports on app development, Farago had published the fact that Flurry's analytics had identified 50 gadgets in use on Apple's campus that seemed likely to be the then-still-secret iPad. In line with the new…
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In November 2017, San Francisco-based Strava, maker of a GPS-enabled fitness app, published a heat map showing the activity of all its 27 million users around the world. Upon outside examination, the data visualisation, which was built from 1 billion activities and 3 trillion data points covering 27 billion kilometres of distance travelled over the previous two years, exposed individual jogging routes in remote areas, including those used by soldiers around military bases in war zones, where…