Bay Area camera company hack reaches schools, gyms, prisons
Drew Harwell, The Washington Post
March 10, 2021
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In one video, a woman in a hospital room watches over someone sleeping in an intensive-care-unit bed. In another, a man and three children celebrate one Sunday afternoon over a completed puzzle in a carpeted playroom.
The private moments would have, in some other time, been constrained to memory. But something else had been watching: an internet-connected camera managed by the San Mateo, Calif.-based security start-up Verkada, which sells cameras and software that customers can use to watch live video from anywhere across the Web.
A breach of the camera start-up Verkada "should be a wake-up call to the dangers of self-surveillance,” one expert said. “Our desire for some fake sense of security is its own security threat.”
Can auditing eliminate bias from algorithms?
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For more than a decade, journalists and researchers have been writing about the dangers of relying on algorithms to make weighty decisions: who gets locked up, who gets a job, who gets a loan â even who has priority for COVID-19 vaccines.
Rather than remove bias, one algorithm after another has codified and perpetuated it, as companies have simultaneously continued to more or less shield their algorithms from public scrutiny.
The big question ever since: How do we solve this problem? Lawmakers and researchers have advocated for algorithmic audits, which would dissect and stress-test algorithms to see how they work and whether theyâre performing their stated goals or producing biased outcomes. And there is a growing field of private auditing firms that purport to do just that. Increasingly, companies are turning to these firms to review their algorithms, particularly when theyâve faced criticism for biased outcomes
Don t scrape the faces of our citizens for recognition, Canada tells Clearview AI – delete those images
Plus: Check if your Flickr photos are in facial recognition engines and and the list of NSFW words for AI
Katyanna Quach Mon 8 Feb 2021 // 11:01 UTC Share
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Canada’s privacy watchdog has found Clearview AI in “clear violation” of the country’s privacy laws, and has told the facial-recognition startup to stop scraping images of Canadians and delete all existing photos it has on those citizens.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada launched an official investigation into the upstart’s practices, and as a result Clearview stopped selling its software to Canadian police.
Here s a way to learn if facial recognition systems used your photos
5 Feb, 2021 05:00 AM
7 minutes to read
A mosaic of about 50,000 images from the MegaFace dataset, which includes over 3.5 million. Photo / Adam Harvey via The New York Times
A mosaic of about 50,000 images from the MegaFace dataset, which includes over 3.5 million. Photo / Adam Harvey via The New York Times
New York Times
By: Cade Metz and Kashmir Hill
An online tool targets only a small slice of what s out there, but may open some eyes to how widely artificial intelligence research fed on personal images. When tech companies created the facial recognition systems