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Category Archives: E-Records

How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco

Wired: “…In San Francisco there’s always another video. New York and London are known for being blanketed with government-run CCTV coverage, but surveillance here is different: It is as privatized as it is pervasive, a culture of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, at scale. In the city where Nextdoor’s offices sit right in the gritty Tenderloin, sharing Ring cam footage of porch thieves is a bonding exercise between neighbors who’ve never met. All over town, local nonprofits oversee neighborhood-wide networks of cameras funded in part by donations from crypto entrepreneur Chris Larsen. (“That’s the winning formula,” Larsen told The New York Times in 2020. “Pure coverage.”) Platoons of Waymo self-driving cars circulate the streets like Pac-Man ghosts, gathering up videofeeds that cops snag for evidence. You can watch a resident’s live cam to see who’s on the corner of Hyde and Ellis, right now. True-crime video has become San Francisco’s civic language, the common vocabulary of local TV news broadcasts, the acid punch line to a million social media posts. The feeds intensified during the pandemic, when commuterless streets erupted with synthetic opioid use and property crime. Since then, the city has found itself hobbled through successive breakdowns—a police shortage, a 34 percent office vacancy rate, a federal injunction severely limiting the city from clearing homeless camps. No one seems to be solving San Francisco’s problems, the feeling goes, so by G-d, people are going to film the dysfunction and post the footage…”

We Should Get Paid for Our Online Data

TIME: “Since January 2023, the United States Department of Justice along with the Attorneys General of California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia, have been in court pursuing a civil antitrust suit against Google. And on Sept. 26, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general filed a… Continue Reading

The Maryland Motherlode: Births, Marriages, Deaths, and Naturalizations

“We at Reclaim The Records are so proud to finally announce one of our largest record acquisitions to date: millions of vital records spanning over one hundred years of history for the state of Maryland. These records include both the name/date indices as well as full vital records certificates, covering more than a century of… Continue Reading

Data Removal Guide

IntelTechniques: “This is the third step of a four-step process to request, freeze, and remove your personal information from within data broker, credit reporting, and password exposure services. 1: Data Request Guide 2: Credit Freeze Guide 3: Data Removal Guide 4: Credential Exposure Removal Guide The online removal process of your personal information, such as… Continue Reading

A History of Bookmaking, From Scrolls to Scrolling

HyperAllergic: “If you’re shopping for the bibliophile on your list this holiday season (or you are said bibliophile), look no further! The Book by Design: The Remarkable Story of the World’s Greatest Invention (2023, University of Chicago Press) is an ambitious compendium that seeks to catalog and analyze the history of the book in myriad… Continue Reading

Using FOIA Libraries to Your Advantage

Via LLRX – Using FOIA Libraries to Your Advantage – This presentation by Lisa DeLuca, Assistant Dean/Associate Professor Seton Hall University Libraries, South Orange, NJ is an actionable resource for training colleagues and other professionals on how to locate FOIA documents as well as to navigate and effectively execute Freedom of Information Act requests. Continue Reading

Survey and Diary of Consumer Payment Choice

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta: “Together, the Survey and Diary of Consumer Payment Choice create a comprehensive picture of US consumers’ payment preferences and behavior. The Survey and Diary fills a gap in knowledge about the role of consumers in the transformation of payments from paper to electronic. Payments data is collected in the context… Continue Reading

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, November 25, 2023

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, November 25, 2023 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex… Continue Reading

Unclassified Documents Contain Troubling Information About Dragnet Phone Surveillance Program

“Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., called on Attorney General Merrick Garland [Read the full letter to Attorney General Garland here] to make public documents related to the Hemisphere phone surveillance program, which allows federal, state, local and Tribal law enforcement agencies to request searches of trillions of U.S. phone records, usually without warrants. Although the documents… Continue Reading

Criminals Can Steal Your Phone Number

How To Geek: Here’s How to Stop Them: “Key Takeaways Criminals are stealing phone numbers through “port out scams” by pretending to be the owner and transferring the number to another phone, gaining access to security codes and sensitive accounts. Port-out scams pose a major threat as phone numbers are often used for two-factor authentication,… Continue Reading

10 Things You Should Never Share on Social Media

MakeUseOf: “Key Takeaways Don’t share your travel plans or photos while on a trip to avoid advertising that you’re away from home and potentially inviting theft. Disable location data and delete photo metadata before posting to protect your physical address and sensitive information. Avoid sharing personally-identifying information, such as your full date of birth or… Continue Reading