The New York City Wegman’s is collecting biometric information about customers.

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...

This is pretty scary: > Urban VPN Proxy targets conversations across ten AI platforms: ChatGPT, > Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok (xAI), Meta AI. > > For each platform, the extension includes a dedicated “executor” script > designed to intercept and capture conversations. The harvesting is enabled by > default through hardcoded flags in the extension’s configuration. > > There is no user-facing toggle to disable this. The only way to stop the data > collection is to uninstall the extension entirely. > > […] > > The data collection operates independently of the VPN functionality. Whether > the VPN is connected or not, the harvesting runs continuously in the > background...

New report: “The Party’s AI: How China’s New AI Systems are Reshaping Human Rights.” From a summary article: > China is already the world’s largest exporter of AI powered surveillance > technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are > also not likely to simply stay there. By exposing the full scope of China’s AI > driven control apparatus, this report presents clear, evidence based insights > for policymakers, civil society, the media and technology companies seeking to > counter the rise of AI enabled repression and human rights violations, and > China’s growing efforts to project that repression beyond its borders...

The promise of personal AI assistants rests on a dangerous assumption: that we can trust systems we haven’t made trustworthy. We can’t. And today’s versions are failing us in predictable ways: pushing us to do things against our own best interests, gaslighting us with doubt about things we are or that we know, and being unable to distinguish between who we are and who we have been. They struggle with incomplete, inaccurate, and partial context: with no standard way to move toward accuracy, no mechanism to correct sources of error, and no accountability when wrong information leads to bad decisions...

In his 2020 book, “Future Politics,” British barrister Jamie Susskind wrote that the dominant question of the 20th century was “How much of our collective life should be determined by the state, and what should be left to the market and civil society?” But in the early decades of this century, Susskind suggested that we face a different question: “To what extent should our lives be directed and controlled by powerful digital systems—and on what terms?” Artificial intelligence (AI) forces us to confront this question. It is a technology that in theory amplifies the power of its users: A manager, marketer, political campaigner, or opinionated internet user can utter a single instruction, and see their message—whatever it is—instantly written, personalized, and propagated via email, text, social, or other channels to thousands of people within their organization, or millions around the world. It also allows us to individualize solicitations for political donations, elaborate a grievance into a well-articulated policy position, or tailor a persuasive argument to an identity group, or even a single person...

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.”...

This chilling paragraph is in a comprehensive Brookings report about the use of tech to deport people from the US: > The administration has also adapted its methods of social media surveillance. > Though agencies like the State Department have gathered millions of handles > and monitored political discussions online, the Trump administration has been > more explicit in who it’s targeting. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced > a new, zero-tolerance “Catch and Revoke” strategy, which uses AI to monitor > the public speech of foreign nationals and revoke visas...

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...

Long article on the difficulty (impossibility?) of human spying in the age of ubiquitous digital surveillance.