NYSee Radar

Tag: surveillance

  • Digital Threat Modeling Under Authoritarianism

    Schneier on Security

    The mighty Bruce Schneier breaking down the existing data about us, how it’s collected, how it’s used and what you personally might want to consider given your situation.

    Compute technology is constantly spying on its users—and that data is being used to influence us. Companies like Google and Meta are vast surveillance machines, and they use that data to fuel advertising. A smartphone is a portable surveillance device, constantly recording things like location and communication.

    …

    What’s different in a techno-authoritarian regime is that this data is also shared with the government, either as a paid service or as demanded by local law. Amazon shares Ring doorbell data with the police. Flock, a company that collects license plate data from cars around the country, shares data with the police as well.

    …

    Imagine there is a government official assigned to your neighborhood, or your block, or your apartment building. It’s worth that person’s time to scrutinize everybody’s social media posts, email, and chat logs.

  • Retailers Secretively Using Face Recognition to Spot “Persons of Interest” — Including For the Government

    Jay Stanley · ACLU

    the incorporation of “BOLO” (“Be On the Look Out for”) alerts by companies on behalf of law enforcement has the potential to become — and may already be becoming — a powerful nationwide government surveillance dr­agnet.

    Cute move Rite Aid:

    In 2023 the FTC investigation found that “Rite Aid specifically instructed employees not to reveal Rite Aid’s use of facial recognition technology to consumers or the media.”

    We know the technology makes false positives all the time, and that there’s typically no human in the loop.

    If such sharing networks emerge — much as blacklists of “troublemakers” (i.e., labor organizers) were shared among companies in the 20th century — someone who is falsely accused might find themselves unjustly banned from a significant number of retail stores.

    This article collects a lot of scattered details concerning the issue, so would be a decent jumping off point for your exploration.

  • How CAPTCHAs work | What does CAPTCHA mean?

    Cloudflare Learning Center

    How does reCAPTCHA work without any user interaction?

    The latest versions of reCAPTCHA are able to take a holistic look at a user’s behavior and history of interacting with content on the Internet. Most of the time, the program can decide based on those factors whether or not the user is a bot, without providing the user with a challenge to complete. If not, then the user will get a typical reCAPTCHA challenge.

    If I were stopped and asked on the street to choose a CAPTCHA, image recognition reCAPTCHAs are by far my fav CAPTCHA. I consider it a success on my part whenever I’m confronted with these. Don’t get me wrong, these are annoying af, but it signals to me that they know little about me, something I go to great lengths, and forfeit a lot of convenience to achieve.

    CAPTCHA me if you can.