The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday sued the facial recognition start-up Clearview AI (alternative source), which claims to have helped hundreds of law enforcement agencies use online photos to solve crimes, accusing the company of “unlawful, privacy-destroying surveillance activities.” The New York Times reports: In a suit filed in Illinois, the A.C.L.U. said that Clearview violated a state law that…
Tag: biometric
Quantum Security Goes Live With Samsung Galaxy
Samsung and South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom have debuted the Galaxy A Quantum 5G smartphone, sporting a quantum random number generation (RNG) chipset. It’s the first commercialization of quantum technology for mobile phones, and it will serve as a significant bellwether for full quantum encryption’s chances of going mainstream. Threatpost reports: Quantum encryption in general has been touted as being…
Parolees Are Being Forced To Download Telmate’s Guardian App That Listens and Records Every Move
XXongo writes: Monitoring parolees released from prison by an app on their smartphone sounds like a good idea, right? The phone has facial recognition and biometric ID, and a GPS system that knows where it is. But what if the app doesn’t work? In a story on Gizmodo, the [Telmate Guardian] app’s coding is “sloppy” and “irresponsible” and its default privacy…
Silicon Valley Legends Launch ‘Beyond Identity’ To Eliminate All Passwords
SecurityWeek editor wiredmikey shares new that Jim Clark and Tom Jermoluk (past founders of Netscape, Silicon Graphics and @Home Network) “have launched a phone-resident personal certificate-based authentication and authorization solution that eliminates all passwords.” Security Week reports:
The technology used is not new, being based on X.509 certificates and SSL (invented by Netscape some 25 years ago and still the bedrock of…
World’s First Opioid Vending Machine Opens In Vancouver
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A vending machine for powerful opioids has opened in Canada as part of a project to help fight the Canadian city’s overdose crisis. The MySafe project, which resembles a cash machine, gives addicts access to a prescribed amount of medical quality hydromorphone, a drug about twice as powerful as heroin. Don Durban,…
Police Say Amazon’s Ring Isn’t Much of a Crime Fighter
Ring’s promotional video includes the police chief of the small Florida suburb of Winter Park saying “we understand the value of those cameras in helping us solve crimes.” But over the last 22 months, their partnership with Ring hasn’t actually led to a single arrest, reports NBC News. The only crime it solved was a 13-year-old boy who opened two delivered…
Kenya’s High Court Delays National Biometric ID Program
Kenya’s high court last week temporarily suspended the country’s new national biometric identity program until the government enacts laws to protect the security of the data and prevent discrimination against minorities. From a report: The government had said the IDs would be required for all Kenyan citizens and foreign residents to access a broad range of rights and services, including health…
Facebook To Pay $550 Million To Settle Facial Recognition Suit
Facebook has agreed to pay $550 million to settle a class-action lawsuit (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) over its use of facial recognition technology in Illinois, “giving privacy groups a major victory that again raised questions about the social network’s data-mining practices,” reports The New York Times. From the report: The case stemmed from Facebook’s photo-labeling service, Tag Suggestions,…
Worker Fired For Declining a Face Scan Awarded $23,200
Iwastheone shares a report from Stuff.co.nz: Christchurch electrician Tim Fensom has been awarded $23,200 after he was fired for refusing to use a face scanning system. Fensom worked for construction company KME Services for eight months as a lead electrician during the construction of Christchurch’s new hospital before he was fired on October 30, 2018, the Employment Relations Authority said in…
African Countries Are Struggling To Build Robust Identity Systems
The first thing that visitors to the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg see is a wall of identity cards– the pieces of paper that determined where people could live and work and whom they could love. From the outset, the apartheid regime’s ability to discriminate against “nie-blankes” (non-whites) depended on having a robust system of identifying people. The opposite problem confronts most…