NYSee Radar

Tag: surveillance

  • 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.