Experience is a great teacher. About ten years ago, someone broke into the trunk of my automobile and stole my business laptop computer while I was dining with friends in a local restaurant.Apparently, it was easy to get into the automobile’s trunk. Scratches on the trunk lid looked like a large screwdriver was used to “pop” the trunk open. I never recovered the laptop computer. Even worse, the thief probably […]
If you have an interest in protecting your personal privacy, you probably will want to read an article by Mary Meehan that has been published in Forbes Magazine‘s web site at: http://bit.ly/2KZJq1E.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security violated the First Amendment when it allegedly tracked and interrogated five journalists between 2018 and 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a lawsuit filed Wednesday. The lawsuit includes accounts by five freelance photojournalists, all of whom are US citizens and were stopped by Customs and Border Protection, an agency within DHS, while traveling to and from Mexico between November 2018 and January […]
US Senator Edward Markey yesterday revealed the results of a months-long investigation into Amazon‘s Ring camera-doorbells and the company’s relationship with law enforcement. The Senator’s press team dubbed the findings “alarming” and called the company’s policies “an open door for privacy and civil liberty violations.” The press release is available at: http://bit.ly/2ObxAnb.
If you are not concerned with facial recognition and its related privacy issues because you believe you have nothing to hide, you NEED to read Steve Ranger’s article in ZDNet: https://www.zdnet.com/article/we-must-stop-smiling-our-way-towards-a-surveillance-state/. “For sure, these technologies can have many benefits, from making it quicker to unlock your phone or recognising criminals in the street. But allowing these technologies to become pervasive without rigorous debate about the need for them, the effectiveness […]
From an article by Tim Cushing in the TechDirt web site: “Building on San Francisco’s first-of-its-kind ban on government face recognition, California this week enacted a landmark law that blocks police from using body cameras for spying on the public. “The state-wide law keeps thousands of body cameras used by police officers from being transformed into roving surveillance devices that track our faces, voices, and even the unique way we walk. Importantly, […]
This statement clearly states why encryption is important to everyone, private citizens, public officials, sports figures, celebrities, and everyone else alike: “… in the midst of the greatest computer security crisis in history, the US government, along with the governments of the UK and Australia, is attempting to undermine the only method that currently exists for reliably protecting the world’s information: encryption. Should they succeed in their quest to undermine […]
Governments are using facial-recognition technology in more ways—and prompting more concerns about privacy and fairness. Ellis Rosen created a cartoon that is available cartooncollections.com that summarizes one of the biggest privacy concerns of today. Because of copyright regulations, I cannot publish the cartoon here but I can legally tell you how you can view it. Click here: https://media.wired.com/photos/5d8a883075be39000827d6df/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/20191008-rosen-total-recall.jpg
Beaverton, Oregon police know exactly what one car prowler suspect looks like, thanks to a dashcam that caught him in the act. The woman whose dashcam recorded the crime noticed one of her car’s doors was hanging wide open on Friday morning. Prowlers appeared to have spent the previous night combing the parking lot, looking for unlocked cars. The woman’s Owlcam motion-activated dashcam caught one prowler completely by surprise, as […]
You can run but you cannot hide from China’s new “Super Camera”! As ABC News reports, the new camera system is being referred to as a “Super Camera” due to the detail it can capture. Developed by Fudan University in conjunction with the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of Chinese Academy of Sciences, the camera is 500 megapixels, meaning it can be positioned in a stadium packed […]
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