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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
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 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…
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…
Content type: Examples
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…
Content type: Examples
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…
Content type: Examples
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…
Content type: Examples
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
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
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…
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…
Content type: Examples
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
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…
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…
Content type: Examples
In 2015, the Royal Parks conducted a covert study of visitors to London's Hyde Park using anonymised mobile phone signals provided by the network operator EE to analyse footfall. During the study, which was conducted via government-funded Future Cities Catapult, the Royal Parks also had access to aggregated age and gender data, creating a detailed picture of how different people used the park over the period of about a year. The study also showed the percentage of EE subscribers who visited…
Content type: Examples
The Japanese electronics giant NEC introduced one of its facial recognition systems for the first time in a sports arena in Colombia. The soccer stadium in Medellin has a capacity of 45,000 people and occasionally suffers from hooligans. The operator of the arena takes photos of such hooligans when they are detained, and has compiled a "blacklist" so they can be identified if they return to the stadium. NEC's facial recognition systems are in place in about 40 countries.
Writer: Jiro Yoshino…
Content type: Examples
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,…
Content type: Examples
A 2016 study from the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation found that in 95% of cases it takes as few as four of the apps users have installed on their smartphones to reidentify them within a dataset. Based on a study of 54,893 Android users over seven months, the researchers found that just two apps were sufficient to reidentify users about 75% of the time. However, the list of apps an individual uses is more revealing than that: it can predict traits like…
Content type: Examples
In 2016, Danish researchers Emil Kirkegaard and Julius Daugbjerg Bjerrekær released a dataset onto the Open Science Framework that included details of almost 70,000 users of the online dating site OkCupid. The researchers created the dataset themselves by using software to scrape information from OkCupid's site including user names (though not real names), ages, gender, religion, and personality traits, along with the answer to the questions the sites asks new users in order to help identify…
Content type: Examples
In 2015, Chinese hackers stole sensitive information including social security numbers and residency, employment, educational, and medical histories concerning more than 21 million people from the US Office of Personnel Management. OPM houses this information about all federal employees along with others such as their spouses and co-habitants. The breach affected anyone who had undergone a background check as long previously as 2000.Also stolen were the user names and passwords used to fill out…
Content type: Examples
In 2015, researchers at Harvard University found vulnerabilities in the anonymisation procedures used for health care data in South Korea that enabled them to de-anonymise patients with a 100% success rate and to decrypt the Resident Registration Numbers included with prescription data relating to deceased South Koreans. The unique 13-digit codes enabled full reidentification. In the UK, medical information is held on the NHS Personal Demographics Service is identified by the patient's ten-…
Content type: Examples
In 2016, Nguyen Phong Hoang, a security researcher in Kyoto, Japan demonstrated that the location of users of gay dating apps such as Grindr, Hornet, and Jack'd can be pinpointed even when they have turned on features intended to obscure it - a dangerous problem for those have not come out publicly as LGBT or who live in a hostile location. The technique is known as trilateration and relies on the fact that these apps display images of nearby users in order of proximity. That ordering…
Content type: Examples
In 2015, the DNA testing company 23andMe revealed it had sold access to the DNA information it had collected from the 1.2 million people who had paid for genetic testing to more than 13 drug companies. One of these was Genentech, which paid $10 million to look at the genes of people with Parkinson's Disease. At that point, 23andMe had the world's largest database that combined DNA samples with extensive, voluntarily-submitted personal and health information, connections that are valuable to…
Content type: Examples
In March 2016, a hacker group identifying itself as Anonymous Philippines defaced the website of the Philippine Commission on the Elections (Comelec), leaving a message that accused Comelec of not doing enough to secure the voting machines due to be used in the general election the following month. That same day, LulzSec Piliphinas, a different but related hacker group, posted online a link to a 338GB database it claimed was the entire electoral register of 54.36 million Filipinos. Trend Micro…
Content type: Examples
In 2016, Spanish Jose Carlos Norte, the chief technology officer at Telefonica subsidiary EyeOS, used the scanning software Shodan to find thousands of publicly exposed telematics gateway units. TGUs are small radio-enabled devices that are attached to industrial vehicles so their owners can track their location, petrol usage, and other parameters. At least one of these TGUs, made by the French company Mobile Devices, had no password protection. Norte was able to look up the location of…
Content type: Examples
A new generation of technology has given local law enforcement officers in some parts of the US unprecedented power to peer into the lives of citizens. In Fresno, California, the police department's $600,000 Real Time Crime Center is providing a model for other such centres that have opened in New York, Houston, and Seattle over the decade between 2006 and 2016. The group of technologies used in these centres includes ShotSpotter, which uses microphones around the city to triangulate the…