404 Media has the story: > Unlike many of Flock’s cameras, which are designed to capture license plates > as people drive by, Flock’s Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras > designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set > to automatically zoom in on people’s faces as they walk through a parking lot, > down a public street, or play on a playground, or they can be controlled > manually, according to marketing material on Flock’s website. We watched > Condor cameras zoom in on a woman walking her dog on a bike path in suburban > Atlanta; a camera followed a man walking through a Macy’s parking lot in > Bakersfield; surveil children swinging on a swingset at a playground; and film > high-res video of people sitting at a stoplight in traffic. In one case, we > were able to watch a man rollerblade down Brookhaven, Georgia’s Peachtree > Creek Greenway bike path. The Flock camera zoomed in on him and tracked him as > he rolled past. Minutes later, he showed up on another exposed camera > livestream further down the bike path. The camera’s resolution was good enough > that we were able to see that, when he stopped beneath one of the cameras, he > was watching rollerblading videos on his phone...

Mother Jones has a long article on surveillance arms manufacturers, their wares, and how they avoid export control laws: > Operating from their base in Jakarta, where permissive export laws have > allowed their surveillance business to flourish, First Wap’s European founders > and executives have quietly built a phone-tracking empire, with a footprint > extending from the Vatican to the Middle East to Silicon Valley. > > It calls its proprietary system Altamides, which it describes in promotional > materials as “a unified platform to covertly locate the whereabouts of single > or multiple suspects in real-time, to detect movement patterns, and to detect > whether suspects are in close vicinity with each other.”...

The company Flok is surveilling us as we drive: > A retired veteran named Lee Schmidt wanted to know how often Norfolk, > Virginia’s 176 Flock Safety automated license-plate-reader cameras were > tracking him. The answer, according to a U.S. District Court lawsuit filed in > September, was more than four times a day, or 526 times from mid-February to > early July. No, there’s no warrant out for Schmidt’s arrest, nor is there a > warrant for Schmidt’s co-plaintiff, Crystal Arrington, whom the system tagged > 849 times in roughly the same period. > > You might think this sounds like it violates the Fourth Amendment, which > protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures without > probable cause. Well, so does the American Civil Liberties Union. Norfolk, > Virginia Judge Jamilah LeCruise also agrees, and in 2024 she ruled that > plate-reader data obtained without a search warrant couldn’t be used against a > defendant in a robbery case...

Russia is proposing a rule that all foreigners in Moscow install a tracking app on their phones. > Using a mobile application that all foreigners will have to install on their > smartphones, the Russian state will receive the following information: > > * Residence location > * Fingerprint > * Face photograph > * Real-time geo-location monitoring This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this. Qatar did it in 2022 around the World Cup: > “After accepting the terms of these apps, moderators will have complete > control of users’ devices,” he continued. “All personal content, the ability > to edit it, share it, extract it as well as data from other apps on your > device is in their hands. Moderators will even have the power to unlock users’ > devices remotely.” ...

Lukasz Olejnik writes about device fingerprinting, and why Google’s policy change to allow it in 2025 is a major privacy setback.

This feels important: > The Secret Service has used a technology called Locate X which uses location > data harvested from ordinary apps installed on phones. Because users agreed to > an opaque terms of service page, the Secret Service believes it doesn’t need a > warrant.

Way back in 2018, people noticed that you could find secret military bases using data published by the Strava fitness app. Soldiers and other military personal were using them to track their runs, and you could look at the public data and find places where there should be no people running. Six years later, the problem remains. Le Monde has reported that the same Strava data can be used to track the movements of world leaders. They don’t wear the tracking device, but many of their bodyguards do.