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+13 +1
Big Brother isn't just watching: workplace surveillance can track your every move
How can an employer make sure its remote workers aren’t slacking off? In the case of talent management company Crossover, the answer is to take photos of them every 10 minutes through their webcam. The pictures are taken by Crossover’s productivity tool, WorkSmart, and combine with screenshots of their workstations along with other data – including app use and keystrokes – to come up with a “focus score” and an “intensity score” that can be used to assess the value of freelancers.
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Documents: Texas National Guard Installed Cellphone Spying Devices on Surveillance Planes
The Texas National Guard last year spent more than $373,000 to install controversial cellphone eavesdropping devices in secretive surveillance aircraft. Maryland-based Digital Receiver Technology Inc., or DRT, installed two of its DRT 1301C “portable receiver systems” in National Guard aircraft in partnership with the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to a contract between the Texas National Guard and the company.
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+32 +1
Artificial intelligence is going to supercharge surveillance
What happens when digital eyes get the brains to match?
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+14 +1
Facial Scanning Now Arriving At U.S. Airports
Airlines say taking a picture of your face speeds boarding, and Homeland Security says it stops fraud. Critics worry about privacy and bias.By Brian Naylor.
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+21 +1
Edward Snowden: Facebook is a surveillance company rebranded as 'social media'
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden ripped Facebook in a tweet Saturday after the social media giant suspended Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm which worked worked for President Trump’s campaign. Facebook accused the firm on Friday of not deleting data it had improperly harvested from Facebook users, which number in the tens of millions, but Snowden pinned the blame squarely on Facebook and lumped in other social media companies for being just as reckless.
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'Utterly horrifying': ex-Facebook insider says covert data harvesting was routine
Hundreds of millions of Facebook users are likely to have had their private information harvested by companies that exploited the same terms as the firm that collected data and passed it on to Cambridge Analytica, according to a new whistleblower.
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+16 +1
A Brief History of Surveillance in America
With wiretapping in the headlines and smart speakers in millions of homes, historian Brian Hochman takes us back to the early days of eavesdropping.
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+16 +1
The Woman Making Art out of the FBI's Surveillance of Her Black Panther Father
Civil rights activist Rodney Barnette was under government surveillance for over 10 years. Now his daughter, Sadie, has turned his 500-page FBI file into art.
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+15 +1
Police can download your phone's data in minutes with NO warrant
Within minutes, officers can use a machine to extract location data, conversations and encrypted apps, according to Privacy International, a registered charity based in London.
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+12 +1
China is monitoring employees' brain waves and emotions — and the technology boosted one company's profits by $315 million
Employees' brain waves are reportedly being monitored in factories, state-owned enterprises, and the military across China. The technology works by placing wireless sensors in employees' caps or hats which, combined with artificial intelligence algorithms, spot incidents of workplace rage, anxiety, or sadness. Employers use this "emotional surveillance technology" by then tweaking workflows, including employee placement and breaks, to increase productivity and profits.
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+22 +1
Hundreds of Apps Can Empower Stalkers to Track Their Victims
KidGuard is a phone app that markets itself as a tool for keeping tabs on children. But it has also promoted its surveillance for other purposes and run blog posts with headlines like “How to Read Deleted Texts on Your Lover’s Phone.” A similar app, mSpy, offered advice to a woman on secretly monitoring her husband. Still another, Spyzie, ran ads on Google alongside results for search terms like “catch cheating girlfriend iPhone.”
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+8 +1
The ‘golden age of electronic surveillance’ is ending, says former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden
At America’s intelligence agencies, there are three ways to “steal secrets,” says former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden: Humans, signals and imagery. And for nearly two decades, signals were abundant as technology proliferated around the world. “When I became the director of NSA in 1999, we were moving into the digital age,” Hayden said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “What we saw, and we said this to ourselves at NSA — ‘It’s going to be hard to keep up
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EFF and 23 Civil Liberties Organizations Demand Transparency on NSA Domestic Phone Record Surveillance
This week, 24 civil liberties organizations, including EFF and the ACLU, urged Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats to report—as required by law—statistics that could help clear up just how many individuals are burdened by broad NSA surveillance of domestic telephone records.
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+15 +1
Life Inside China’s Total Surveillance State
China has turned the northwestern region of Xinjiang into a vast experiment in domestic surveillance. WSJ investigated what life is like in a place where one's every move can be monitored with cutting-edge technology.
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Walmart patents tech that would allow it to eavesdrop on cashiers
Walmart has patented surveillance technology that would allow it to spy on employees’ conversations with customers and use the audio to measure workplace performance. The patent for “sound sensors” that could be installed at checkout is the latest example of controversial workplace surveillance technology and automated systems that purport to quantify and increase employees’ productivity. The filing comes at a time in which the US retail giant is facing growing competition from Amazon, which completed a $14bn acquisition of Whole Foods last year.
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+19 +1
Your Phone Is Listening and it's Not Paranoia
A couple years ago, something strange happened. A friend and I were sitting at a bar, iPhones in pockets, discussing our recent trips in Japan and how we’d like to go back. The very next day, we both received pop-up ads on Facebook about cheap return flights to Tokyo. It seemed like just a spooky coincidence, but then everyone seems to have a story about their smartphone listening to them. So is this just paranoia, or are our smartphones actually listening?
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Big Brother is being increasingly outsourced to Silicon Valley, says report
The federal and local governments have long relied on private companies for defense and law enforcement technologies, from Lockheed Martin jetfighters to Booz Allen Hamilton data analysis. But increasingly, the government is expanding beyond the usual defense contractors to the company that also provides free shipping and online TV.
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Search engine for CCTV lets you find people from their description
Finding someone in a surveillance video could soon be as easy as Googling them. Descriptions of people of interest, such as a suspect or a missing person, are normally given in terms of their height, gender or clothing. But using this information to find a short woman wearing a red jacket in a video, say, often requires scanning hours of footage manually, which is no easy task. But a new search tool can do it automatically.
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Personal Panopticons
A key product of ubiquitous surveillance is people who are comfortable with it. By L. M. Sacasas.
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+40 +1
The Snowden Legacy, part one: What’s changed, really?
In our two-part series, Ars looks at what Snowden's disclosures have wrought politically and institutionally.
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