Members of UK Parliament want ‘Immediate Stop’ to Live Facial Recognition
A coalition of 65 members from the House of Commons and House of Lords is calling for a halt to the use of live facial recognition technology after the policing minister announced plans to make UK passports searchable by police.
The joint statement from the Parliament members said: “We hold differing views about live facial recognition surveillance, ranging from serious concerns about its incompatibility with human rights, to the potential for discriminatory impact, the lack of safeguards, the lack of an evidence base, an unproven case of necessity or proportionality, the lack of a sufficient legal basis, the lack of parliamentary consideration, and the lack of a democratic mandate.”
The statement also added: “We call on UK police and private companies to immediately stop using live facial recognition for public surveillance.”
The Parliament members campaign is being spearheaded by the privacy advocate Big Brother Watch with support from 31 additional groups including Liberty, Amnesty International and the Race Equality Foundation.
Tech Wearable ‘Jewelry’ enables Sophisticated Surveillance of You
A new wave of AI-integrated hardware is hitting the market and manufacturers are hoping these wearables will become an indispensable part of your everyday life, even as privacy advocates caution that the biological and verbal data they collect is highly sensitive.
Aimed at taking market share from smartphones, there are pins, glasses, and some odd speaker thingy/pendant that dangles from your neck and records everything you and (probably) those around you say at all times.
Many of the founders behind new ‘Smart Jewelry’ offerings come from the world of Big Tech, as Meta has created the Ray-Ban smart glasses and former Apple employee Imran Chaudhri has co-founded the smart pin that monitors your body and speech.
While time will tell if market share is to be had with wearable smart devices, the current state of AI allows even older, slower machines and speakers to provide similar value for those seeking digital assistance.
Potentially illegal Australian identity checks number in the hundreds of millions
A system for verifying Australian’s identities may have been illegally operating for years due to a lack of legislative framework. The proposed framework from the previous government was abandoned in 2019 after concerns about insufficient privacy safeguards, however, the service still began operating and four years later a new government is attempting to push through legislation that addresses the issue.
Critics of the new legislation feel that there is an undue rush to pass the proposed bill with Lizzie O’Shea, chair of Digital Rights Watch, commenting: “I think there’s a real question about the legality of the scheme, and the haste is about protecting the government from liability.”
Last year in 2022 alone over 140 million queries were submitted to the governments Document Verification Service from about 2,700 public and private sector entities.
When asked about the legality of the identify verification service the attorney’s general department responded vaguely but did state that a legislative framework being in place was “highly desirable”.
AI Impacts Higher Education and Threatens the Value of a Degree
As the pace of technology continues to rapidly advance, lifelong learning and continuing education or “up-skilling” is expected to only become more relevant, at least according to LinkedIn.
During a recent New York conference the professional profile company’s CEO spoke to the nations top recruiters about the growing shift from degree-based competency to “human and people-oriented” skills. Forming the backbone of this wake-up call is data from workers at over 63 million organizations that use LinkedIn.
The main takeaway from the conference for some is that AI will make it very hard for a one-time 4 year degree to provide all the necessary skills and talent required from an evolving workforce that is being rapidly changed by emerging technology.
Meta tests EU Regulator’s Mettle
The old landing page for Meta’s flagship product Facebook used to read “Facebook is free and always will be” but with recent changes to their offerings in Europe, a new paid version of the social media app is coming soon.
The ad-free version of Facebook costs €10 or €13 depending on whether you want web or mobile access respectively. If you don’t want to pay and live in the EU you’ll have to consent to being tracked and targeted with ads, a system that is Meta’s latest answer to the slew of privacy and data regulation crackdowns they’ve been hit with in recent years from the EU.
If you can’t pay the monthly subscription and don’t want your private data processed or used to track you with advertisements you’re out of luck, access to Facebook will no longer be possible.
>X’s AI Plan potentially at odds with US Privacy Laws
X Corp. (formerly Twitter) recently revised their privacy policy and these new updates come on the heels of similar adjustments being rolled out at other major tech companies. The primary changes all focus on the use of customer data for developing custom AI solutions and how X intends to train it’s models with this data.
Following the new updates however, privacy advocates like Suzanne Bernstein, a law fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, have expressed concern about the vague language around the use of biometric data. She stated that “…for the consumer to consent, you really need to understand what you’re consenting to and what risks are attached to that.”
Unfortunately for X users, there is only a single sentence in the new privacy policy that speaks to their intended use of biometric data despite the fact that multiple states, including Texas and Washington have passed regulation controlling the collection, storage and use of this sensitive personal data.
EU Parliament rejects Chat Control and protects Encryption
A proposed law in the EU regarding child pornography has received nearly unanimous support for several amendments intended to balance protecting children and maintaining personal privacy.
The initial law intended to insert backdoors for encrypted messaging and allow companies and law enforcement nearly unlimited access to scan and save private conversations between EU citizens.
The new amendments however promote a different approach that requires the software companies to build more secure and child-protecting applications, perform age verification and only in targeted cases with judicial approval gain access private conversations.