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Your Home is Your…Snitch? When your appliances work as police informants – By Daniel Zwerdling – The Marshall Project Justice Lab column examines the science, social science and technology of criminal justice. “Police records in Bentonville, Arkansas show that James Bates called 911 on Sunday morning just before Thanksgiving 2015, and reported chilling news: he’d …
Washington Post – An Amazon Echo recorded a family’s conversation, then sent it to a random person in their contacts, report says… Bloomberg – This Is How Alexa Can Record Private Conversations – “…Amazon explained the series of events that triggered the episode in an emailed statement. The Echo woke after hearing a word in …
Motherboard: This story is part of When Spies Come Home, a Motherboard series about powerful surveillance software ordinary people use to spy on their loved ones. “The Internet Archive’s goal, according to its website, is “universal access to all knowledge.” As part of that mission, the non-profit runs the Wayback Machine, an online tool that …
The Verge: “Documents obtained by the ACLU of Northern California have shed new light on Rekognition, Amazon’s little-known facial recognition project. Rekognition is currently used by police in Orlando and Oregon’s Washington County, often using nondisclosure agreements to avoid public disclosure. The result is a powerful real-time facial recognition system that can tap into police …
60 Minutes reports on the power of Google, a company whose critics say has stifled competition – “This past week the Federal Trade Commission was asked to investigate the data collected by Google on its Android operating system, which powers most of the world’s smartphones. It was a tiny blip in the news cycle but another …
Via Dave Pell NextDraft: We Got Fooled Again – “In the early days of the internet, we rooted for web upstarts to disintermediate and disrupt the world’s biggest companies that we felt had conspired against consumers in an increasingly centralized system. Well, here comes the new boss. Same as the old boss (except the new …
“The Internet Safety Strategy looks at how we can ensure Britain is the safest place in the world to be online. The Strategy considers the responsibilities of companies to their users, the use of technical solutions to prevent online harms and government’s role in supporting users. The consultation covered various aspects of online safety including: …
NBC News4 I-Team – Washington, DC – “The technology can be as small as a suitcase, placed anywhere at any time, and it’s used to track cell phones and intercept calls. The News4 I-Team found dozens of potential spy devices while driving around Washington, D.C., Maryland and Northern Virginia “While you might not be a target …
Washington Post – “Technology has made the repo man ruthlessly efficient, allowing this familiar angel of financial calamity to capitalize on a dark corner of the United States’ strong economy: the soaring number of people falling behind on their car payments.” “…Derek Lewis works for Relentless Recovery, the largest repo company in Ohio and its …
Business Insider: “Confidential mode is available to users with personal accounts who opted into the new version of Gmail last month, when Google announced the latest changes to its email application. Some of the new Gmail features were available right from the start, but others — like confidential mode — are rolling out more slowly. …
Quartz: “It won’t surprise you to hear that robocalls—those insanely annoying pre-recorded messages that are blowing up our phones—have become an epidemic. In the United States, more than 8.5 billion robocalls are made each month, but it’s a global problem in more ways than one. How did we get here? It’s a tangled tale of …
Ovum: “Globally, the native digital assistant installed base is set to exceed 7.5 billion active devices by 2021, which is more than the world population according to the US Census Bureau on May 1, 2017. But fear not – Skynet, from the popular Terminator movies, does not feature among the leading digital assistants. Instead, Google Assistant …
