The Big Brother Thread

[davidbfpo]

A good article on the problems with this new technology, although I recall several reports of deployment over ten years ago. Perhaps it is only now being released to "ordinary" police work? A 90% failure rate at one event and in London at least one false arrest. Read on.

Link:http://www.wired.co.uk/article/face-...-hill-carnival

[davidbfpo]

A typical long article from 'The Economist' on policing with the joys of more data and surveillance. It cites many different systems, nearly always with an American context and ends calling for a wider public debate - which at least here in the UK has yet to emerge.
Link:https://www.economist.com/technology...-05-02/justice

[davidbfpo]

A 'long read' article, the full title of which is: 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism. The book's title is: The Age of Surveillance Capital.

The article acts as an introduction and has a ten question Q&A with the author Shoshana Zuboff, of Harvard Business School. It is a large tome (600 pgs), so it will take a long time to become a best seller.

Here is a helpful passage that explains:

The name Zuboff has given to the new variant is “surveillance capitalism”. It works by providing free services that billions of people cheerfully use, enabling the providers of those services to monitor the behaviour of those users in astonishing detail – often without their explicit consent. “Surveillance capitalism,” she writes, “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data. Although some of these data are applied to service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioural surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence’, and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace that I call behavioural futures markets. Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are willing to lay bets on our future behaviour.”

How about this from the author herself:

This antidemocratic and anti-egalitarian juggernaut is best described as a market-driven coup from above: an overthrow of the people concealed as the technological Trojan horse of digital technology. On the strength of its annexation of human experience, this coup achieves exclusive concentrations of knowledge and power that sustain privileged influence over the division of learning in society.

Link:https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...oogle-facebook

[Bill Moore]

A 'long read' article, the full title of which is: 'The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism. The book's title is: The Age of Surveillance Capital.

The article acts as an introduction and has a ten question Q&A with the author Shoshana Zuboff, of Harvard Business School. It is a large tome (600 pgs), so it will take a long time to become a best seller.

Here is a helpful passage that explains:

How about this from the author herself:
Link:https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...oogle-facebook

I loved this quote:

We are trapped in an involuntary merger of personal necessity and economic extraction, as the same channels that we rely upon for daily logistics, social interaction, work, education, healthcare, access to products and services, and much more, now double as supply chain operations for surveillance capitalism’s surplus flows.

[davidbfpo]

The use of Automated Facial Recognition (abbreviated to AFR) Technology has become a public issue here, sometimes with references to China's use and the implications for liberty, human rights etc. By a odd quirk of media reporting, judging by Twitter traffic, a BBC TV film clip showing an incident in London when the police used AFR and a man covered his face - the police stopped him, he was abusive and was given an on the spot fine.
Link to the film clip via a campaign group:https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/all-m...ring-his-face/

My Twitter feed a few days ago provided this police-commissioned academic report; the full title is: 'Evaluating the Use of Automated Facial Recognition Technology in Major Policing Operations'.

Two key passages IMHO:

The study found that while AFR can enable police to identify persons of interest and suspects where they would probably not otherwise have been able to do so, considerable investment and changes to police operating procedures are required to generate consistent results.
The report suggests that it is more helpful to think of AFR in policing as 'Assisted Facial Recognition' rather than a fully 'Automated Facial Recognition' system. ‘Automated’ implies that the identification process is conducted solely by an algorithm, when in fact, the system serves as a decision-support tool to assist human operators in making identifications. Ultimately, decisions about whether a person of interest and an image match are made by police operators. It is also deployed in uncontrolled environments, and so is impacted by external factors including lighting, weather and crowd flows.

I have not read the full report, that caveat aside read on:https://crimeandsecurity.org/feed/afr