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July 3, 2023: Surveillance roundup

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Topics to discuss this evening:

Surveillance spreading

• Barred From Grocery Stores by Facial Recognition (NYT, June 28, 2023): “British merchants are increasingly using the technology to combat shoplifting, raising questions about its spread as artificial intelligence rapidly improves it.”

“. . . In October, a woman buying milk in a supermarket in Bristol, England, was confronted by an employee and ordered to leave. She was told that Facewatch had flagged her as a barred shoplifter. The woman, who asked that her name be withheld because of privacy concerns and whose story was corroborated by materials provided by her lawyer and Facewatch, said there must have been a mistake. When she contacted Facewatch a few days later, the company apologized, saying it was a case of mistaken identity.”

Turns out the woman was on a watch list due to a prior incident that she doesn’t remember: “neither Facewatch nor the store where the incident occurred contacted her to let her know that she was on the watchlist and to ask what had happened. . . . She said she may have walked out after not realizing that her debit card payment failed to go through at a self-checkout kiosk.”

Corporate surveillance decisionmaking = spying on people, then barring people from service, without knowledge or consent or ability to appeal.

A victory against facial recognition

• Artists Boycotting Venues That Use Face-Scanning Technology (Rolling Stone, June 22, 2023): Over 100 artists - including Rage Against the Machine, Wheatus, Jill Sobule, Anti-Flag, Speedy Ortiz, Deerhoof and Boots Riley - have signed a pledge to boycott venues that use facial recognition. (Find the pledge at amazondoesntrock.com, which reports a victory: “After facing enormous pressure from artists, human rights groups, and fans, iconic music venue Red Rocks Amphitheater has ditched Amazon palm scanning as a ‘ticketless’ entry option”).

Voice surveillance opens up new scams

• How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice (by Joseph Cox, Vice, Feb 23, 2023): “I couldn’t believe it — it had worked. I had used an AI-powered replica of a voice to break into a bank account. After that, I had access to the account information, including balances and a list of recent transactions and transfers.”

• The Rise of AI phone scams (Insider, June 28, 2023): "someone had called his house phone from a foreign number. When Eddie’s grandfather picked up, it sounded like Eddie on the phone. This “Eddie” said he had been in a car accident and needed money immediately. Fortunately for Eddie’s family, his father was immediately suspicious of the call. . . . [turns out] it hadn’t been Eddie on the phone. In truth, his family had been the target of a terrifying new scam: The fraudsters used an artificial rendering of Eddie’s voice to try and bilk his loved ones out of cash."

• To protect ourselves from these schemes, now we have to adopt a secret “code word” with family members to identify the call as legitimate. (Or better, just call the family member back when they call you asking for money.)

They're collecting data everywhere

• Surveilling the Gamers: Privacy Impacts of the Video Game Industry (Entertainment Computing, Jan 2023): “With many million users across all age groups and income levels, video games have become the world’s leading entertainment industry. Behind the fun experience they provide, it goes largely unnoticed that modern game devices pose a serious threat to consumer privacy. To illustrate the industry’s potential for illegitimate surveillance and user profiling, this paper offers a classification of data types commonly gathered by video games. Drawing from patents and literature of diverse disciplines, we also discuss how patterns and correlations in collected gameplay data may leak additional information in ways not easily understood or anticipated by the user. This includes inferences about a user’s biometric identity, age and gender, emotions, skills, interests, consumption habits, and personality traits. Based on these findings, we argue that video games need to be brought into the focus of privacy research and discourse.”

• Joan is Awful, the new season opener from Black Mirror, shows what could happen to all the surveillance data the companies are getting on you.

• Microsoft wants to move Windows fully to the cloud (The Verge, June 27, 2023): “Moving ‘Windows 11 increasingly to the cloud’ is identified as a long-term opportunity in Microsoft’s ‘Modern Life’ consumer space, including using ‘the power of the cloud and client to enable improved AI-powered services and full roaming of people’s digital experience.’”

Our economy is built on surveillance

• On the news that Apple just hit $3 trillion, a reminder from Wall Street on Parade (July 3, 2023): “Headlines are sprouting up at various news outlets, touting that the S&P 500 is in a new bull market. But, in fact, almost all of the gains in the S&P 500 Index year-to-date have come from just seven stocks: Apple (ticker AAPL), Alphabet (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, ticker META), Nvidia (NVDA), Microsoft (MSFT), and Tesla (TSLA).”

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