The Big Brother Thread

[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