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At the 2016 Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies, researchers from the University of Michigan presented the results of tests that showed that industrial vehicles - a 2006 semi-trailer and a 2001 school bus - were subject to the same security flaws as had already been found in domestic cars. Via digital signals sent within a big truck's internal network, the researchers were able to change the truck's instrument panel readout, trigger unintended acceleration, and even disable part of the…
Content Type: Examples
In 2013, in collaboration with the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Chicago Police Department set up the Strategic Subjects List, an effort to identify the most likely victims and perpetrators of gun violence. In 2016, a report published by the RAND Corporation found that the project, which had been criticised by both the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, simply did not work in the sense of directing social services to those who needed them or keep…
Content Type: Examples
The light surrounding you this very second may be used to expose how much money you make, where you live, when you're home, and much more. That's the big takeaway from
A 2016 analysis of ambient light sensors by London-based security and privacy consultant and University College London researcher Lukasz Olejnik warns that light readings convey rich and sensitive data about users. Light sensors' primary use is to adjust screen brightness to the user's surroundings. However, when…
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In May 2014 the Polish Ministry of Labor and Social Policy (MLSP) introduced a scoring system to distribute unemployment assistance. Citizens are divided into three categories by their “readiness” to work, the place they live, disabilities and other data. Assignment to a given category determines the type of labor market programs that a particular person can receive from the local labor offices (e.g. job placement, vocational training, apprenticeship, activation allowance). The Panoptykon…
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A 2016 report, "The Perpetual Lineup", from the Center for Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University's law school based on records from dozens of US police departments found that African-Americans are more likely to have their images captured, analysed, and reviewed during computerised searches for crime suspects than members of other races. Because African-Americans are more likely to be arrested and have their mug shots taken, and because police criminal databases are rarely updated to…
Content Type: Examples
In 2016 reports surfaced that bricks-and-mortar retailers were beginning to adopt physical-world analogues to the tracking techniques long used by their online counterparts. In a report, Computer Sciences Corporation claimed that about 30% of retailers were tracking customers in-store via facial recognition and cameras such as Intel's RealSense cameras, which can analyse facial expressions and identify the clothing brands a customer is wearing. Intel noted that the purpose was to build general…
Content Type: Examples
The "couples vibrator" We-Vibe 4 Plus is controlled via a smartphone app connected to the device via Bluetooth. In 2016, researchers revealed at Defcon that the devices uses its internet connectivity to send information back to its manufacturer including the device's temperature, measured every minute, and vibration level, whenever a user changes it. Based on that information, the manufacturer, Standard Innovations Corporation, can work out deeply intimate information about device users. The…
Content Type: Examples
Caucuses, which are used in some US states as a method of voting in presidential primaries, rely on voters indicating their support for a particulate candidate by travelling to the caucus location. In a 2016 Marketplace radio interview, Tom Phillips, the CEO of Dstillery, a big data intelligence company, said that his company had collected mobile device IDs at the location for each of the political party causes during the Iowa primaries. Dstillery paired caucus-goers with their online…
Content Type: Examples
In what proved to be the first of several years of scandals over the use of personal data in illegal, anti-democratic campaigning, in 2015 the Guardian discovered that Ted Cruz's campaign for the US presidency paid at least $750,000 that year to use tens of millions of profiles of Facebook users gathered without their permission by Cambridge Analytica, owned by London-based Strategic Communications Laboratories. Financially supported by leading Republican donor Robert Mercer, CA amassed these…
Content Type: Examples
In 2016, security expert Ken Munro discovered security bugs in the onboard wifi in Mitsubishi's Outlander hybrid car that could be exploited to turn off the car's alarm. Some aspects of the Outlander can be controlled by a smartphone app that talks to the car via the onboard wifi. Security flaws in the way the wifi is set up include using a distinctive format for the cars' access points, enabling outsiders to track these cars. Munro also found the car was vulnerable to replay attacks; he was…
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In a presentation given at the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining conference in 2016, researchers discussed a method of using the data generated by smart card public transport tickets to catch pickpockets. In a study of 6 million passenger movements in Beijing, the researchers used a classifier to pick out anomalous journeys - sudden variations in the patterns of ordinary travellers or routes that made no sense. A second classifier primed with information derived from police reports and social…
Content Type: Examples
In 2015, a newly launched image recognition function built into Yahoo's Flickr image hosting site automatically tagged images of black people with tags such as "ape" and "animal", and also tagged images of concentration camps with "sport" or "jungle gym". The company responded to user complaints by removing some of the tags from the software's lexicon and noted that the algorithm would learn and improve when users deleted inappropriate tags. The auto-tagging system had already attracted many…
Content Type: Examples
Over the course of a few seconds in April 2013, a false tweet from a hacked account owned by the Associated Press is thought to have caused the Dow-Jones Industrial Average to drop 143.5 points and the Standard & Poor's 500 Index to lose more than $136 in value. The tweet was retweeted 4,000 times in less than five minutes. The markets recovered as soon as the fake tweet was exposed, but the "Hack Crash", as it became known, showed the need to understand how social media is connected to and…
Content Type: Examples
In the early 2000s, "Agbogbloshie", a section of Old Fadama, a large slum on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana, became a dumping ground for unwanted electronic waste, recast as "donations", from the developed world, which found it cheaper to ship in bulk than to recycle: old computers, cameras, TV sets. Over time, the area became a haven for organised criminals, who see the e-waste as a treasure trove of personal information including credit card information and private financial data that has not…
Content Type: Examples
In 2016, researchers at MIT developed a wristband device to automate tracking screen time based on an off-the-shelf colour sensor used to calibrate colour and brightness in TVs and other screens and a learning algorithm that could detect when a screen was nearby. The device was intended for use in a clinical study at Massachusetts General Hospital aiming to understand how children's behaviour contributes to health issues such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity; the wristband will…
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By 2015, the cost, invasiveness, and effort involved in conducting medical tests led to proposals for lightweight wearable sensors that could perform the same job. Several such efforts focus on making these sensors fashionably acceptable by making them out of skinlike substances with electronics embedded in them. A team at the University of Illinois is working on biostamps, which can be applied to the skin, include flexible circuits, and can be wirelessly powered. At the University of Tokyo, a…
Content Type: Examples
In 2015, the Carrefour supermarket in Lille installed a system of LED lights designed by Philips that send special offers and location data to customers' smartphones. Using the system, customers who install an app can use their smartphone camera to detect all the promotions around them or search for and locate the ones they were interested in. The supermarket also benefited from cost savings, as the new lights consumed 50% of the energy of the old ones. Most other such systems rely on Bluetooth…
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In 2015, plans to install smart electricity meters in 95% of Austrian homes by 2019 were in doubt because of legal uncertainty about data protection, with customers trying to prevent their deployment, according to Die Presse newspaper. The idea is that smart meters will allow customers to log on and view their power consumption so that they can see where they can cut back, but current studies put the savings potential at a maximum of 3 to 4%, or €30 to €50 annually. Data protection…
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In 2013, Harvard professor Latanya Sweeney found that racial discrimination pervades online advertising delivery. In a study, she found that searches on black-identifying names such as Revon, Lakisha, and Darnell are 25% more likely to be served with an ad from Instant Checkmate offering a background check to find out whether the person has been arrested. The exact cause is difficult to pinpoint without greater insight into the inner workings of Google AdSense than the company is willing to…
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The Satellite Sentinel Project, a constellation of high-powered satellites trained to find atrocities on the ground with a half-metre resolution, was set up in 2009 to find human rights abuses in the conflict in Sudan. Conceived by former Clinton administration State department staffer John Prendergast and the actor George Clooney, the system collectively orbits the Earth 45 times a day and by using eight different spectral bands can "see" through both darkness and clouds. By 2011, the ability…
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In 2014, DataKind sent two volunteers to work with GiveDirectly, an organisation that makes cash donations to poor households in Kenya and Uganda. In order to better identify villages with households that are in need, the volunteers developed an algorithm that classified village roofs in satellite images as iron or thatch - because there is a strong correlation between the number of roofs in a village that are iron and the village's relative wealth.
http://www.datakind.org/blog/using-satellite…
Content Type: Examples
In 2015, security contractors at Kryptowire discovered that some cheap Android phones came with pre-installed software that monitors where users go, whom they communicate with and the contents of the text messages they write. Written by the China-based company Shanghai Adups Technology Company, the software transmitted call logs, contact lists, location information, and other data to a Chinese server. Its presence was not notified to users. The company explained that the software was not…
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A 2015 study by The Learning Curve found that although 71% of parents believe technology has improved their child's education, 79% were worried about the privacy and security of their child's data, and 75% were worried that advertisers had access to that data. At issue is the privacy and security threats posed by the amount of data collected by the growing education technology ("ed-tech") industry on the basis that it's necessary in order to deliver personalised learning. Mathematician and…
Content Type: Examples
By 2020, digital ad spending on political campaigns, which was about $22 million in 2008, is projected to reach $3.3 billion. Broadcast audiences in 2016 were about a quarter the size they were in the 1980s, and they are continuing to shrink, while half of US broadcast radio stations are expected to be gone in the next decade. Going with it is the national coherence that came with mass audiences. In 2009, the company Audience partners began deploying voter targeting technology that allowed…
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FindFace compares photos to profile pictures on social network Vkontakte and works out identities with 70% reliability. Some have sounded the alarm about the potentially disturbing implications. Already the app has been used by a St Petersburg photographer to snap and identify people on the city’s metro, as well as by online vigilantes to uncover the social media profiles of female porn actors and harass them.
External Link to Story
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/17/findface-…
Content Type: Explainer
“Smart city” is a marketing term used to define the use of technology – and in particular data collection – to improve the functioning of cities. The idea behind smart cities is that the more local governments know about city inhabitants the better the services they deliver will be. However, the reality is that the term means different things to different actors from companies to governments.
The World Bank suggests two possible definitions of smart cities. The first one is “a technology-…
Content Type: Examples
Many people fail to recognise the sensitivity of the data collected by fitness tracking devices, focusing instead on the messages and photographs collected by mobile phone apps and social media. Increasingly, however, researchers are finding that the data collected by these trackers - seemingly benign information such as steps taken and heart rate - can be highly revealing of such intimate information as sexual dysfunction. In one Swedish study in 2015, researchers found a correlation between…
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As part of its Smart Nation programme, in 2016 Singapore launched the most extensive collection of data on everyday living ever attempted in a city. The programme involved deploying myriad sensors and cameras across the city-state to comprehensively monitor people, places, and things, including all locally registered vehicles. The platform into which all this data will be fed, Virtual Singapore, will give the government the ability to watch the country's functioning in real time. The government…
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On July 1, 2015 Kuwait's National Assembly passed a new counter-terrorism law that included the requirement that all 1.3 million Kuwaiti citizens and 2.9 million foreign residents provide DNA samples, which will be stored in a database maintained and operated by the Interior Ministry. The law, which was a response to the June 2015 suicide bombing of the Imam Sadiq Mosque, which killed 27 people and wounded 227. The law provides for a penalty of up to one year in prison and fines of up to $33,…