Imagine strolling down a busy city street and snapping a photo of a stranger then uploading it into a search engine that almost instantaneously helps you identify the person.
This isn't a hypothetical. It's possible now, thanks to a website called PimEyes, considered one of the most powerful publicly available facial recognition tools online.
That website is pretty neat. Works well for me with all the pictures of me on the blog, lol.
It turns out that computer security is much more straightforward then you might think. Just use your head, and be aware that people are looking to gain access whenever you are most vulnerable or stressed.
While I should do this more frequently, I finally checked www.annualcreditreport.com, which is the US government’s authorized way to getting your annual credit report for free. No surprises here, but I have to admit I hadn’t checked it in quite a while.
I probably should check it more often – one of my credit cards I’ve had for years was closed last month due to inactivity. Which is fine, but it’s kind of good to know before I tried to use it somewhere. I don’t remember the bank notifying me about the closed account. Which means I now have less credit then probably most dogs in America, and while credit score is in the shitter because I told the bank to give me low credit limit far below was authorized, but I don’t care as I rarely buy things.
I should be more careful. One of my bank accounts passwords were hacked a while back (but stopped by two-way authentication and a call from the bank), and I had that issue with that gun that I tried to buy a few years back at a famously anti-second amendment Big Box retailer that is locally all around and famously shitty to do business. I was denied because I was told that I had previously tried to purchase it somewhere else as labeled a Straw Buyer in NICS over the transaction. I never got any answers on that from the store or the police department, but I think the clerk just entered the wrong store number. Yeah, I’m still bitter about that one.
A data broker has been selling raw location data about individual people to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, EFF has learned. This personal data isn’t gathered from cell phone towers or tech giants like Google — it’s obtained by the broker via thousands of different apps on Android and iOS app stores as part of the larger location data marketplace.
The company, Fog Data Science, has claimed in marketing materials that it has “billions” of data points about “over 250 million” devices and that its data can be used to learn about where its subjects work, live, and associate. Fog sells access to this data via a web application, called Fog Reveal, that lets customers point and click to access detailed histories of regular people’s lives. This panoptic surveillance apparatus is offered to state highway patrols, local police departments, and county sheriffs across the country for less than $10,000 per year.
On February 15, Amnesty International published a report exposing how the New York Police Department has constructed a vast metropolis-spanning surveillance network heavily reliant on highly controversial facial recognition technology (FRT), which serves to “reinforce discriminatory policing against minority communities.”
Once a science fiction staple, the Orwellian technology is quickly becoming normalized, wholeheartedly embraced by police forces up and down the nation. FRT allows police to compare CCTV imagery and other sources with traditional photographic records, as well as databases of billions of headshots, some of which are crudely pulled from individuals’ social media profiles without their knowledge or consent. The NYPD is a particularly enthusiastic user – or, perhaps, abuser – of FRT, with 25,500 cameras spanning the city today.
There is also a clear racial component to FRT deployment in New York – Amnesty found that in areas where the proportion of non-white residents is higher, so too is the concentration of FRT-equipped CCTV cameras. As such, the organization argues it has supplanted traditional ‘stop-and-frisk’ operations by law enforcement.