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July 8, 2019: Dr. Chris Gilliard on surveillance and its effects on marginalized communities

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This week: Chris Gilliard on surveillance and its effects

Tonight, Chris Gilliard on how surveillance affects marginalized communities. His scholarship concentrates on privacy, institutional tech policy, digital redlining, and the re-inventions of discriminatory practices through data mining and algorithmic decision-making, especially as these apply to college students. He holds a PhD from Purdue University’s Rhetoric and Composition Program and currently teaches at Macomb Community College.

Links to Chris Gilliard:

• hypervisible.com, Chris's site

• Twitter: @hypervisible (for example, see this post)

• Privacy's Not an Abstraction (Chris Gilliard in Fast Company, March 25, 2019)

• Friction-Free Racism (Chris Gilliard in Real Life magazine, October 15, 2018)

• There Are No Guardrails on Our Privacy Dystopia (Chris Gilliard and David Golumbia in Vice, March 9, 2018)

• NUSLCLIC Welcomes Dr. Chris Gilliard (Northeastern University, May 2019)

Tech news

• FBI, ICE find state driver’s license photos are a gold mine for facial-recognition searches (Drew Harwell in the Washington Post, July 7): "Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned state driver’s license databases into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through millions of Americans’ photos without their knowledge or consent."

• The Strange Politics of Facial Recognition (Sidney Fussell in the Atlantic, June 28): "these may be the last days of privately owning our own faces."

• Amazon Is Watching (Will Oremus, June 27): "Rekognition [is] a platform that uses machine learning to analyze images and video footage. Among other features, Rekognition offers the ability to match faces found in video recordings to a collection of faces in a database, as well as facial analysis technology that can pick out facial features and expressions. A 2018 report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) highlighted how Amazon has been marketing its face recognition capabilities to law enforcement agencies, and has partnerships under way with police in Orlando, Florida, and Washington County, Oregon."

• Police departments across the US are using video doorbells from Amazon-owned Ring to create an unofficial surveillance network (Business Insider, June 7): "Police departments across the US have partnered with Amazon and its subsidiary, Ring, to offer programs for free or discounted Ring smart doorbell devices to their residents. Some police departments added their own conditions to the programs that allow them to obtain recorded footage from a Ring device upon request." See also the CNet story.

• Amazon's next big thing may redefine big (BBC, June 15) "[Amazon's chief technology officer] Werner Vogels doesn’t feel it's Amazon’s responsibility to make sure Rekognition is used accurately or ethically. 'That’s not my decision to make.'""

• Why airport face scans are a privacy trap (Geoffrey Fowler in the Washington Post, June 10): "What’s face recognition at the airport really about? Immigration policy and efficiency." By the way, the airport facial-rec system was promptly breached.

• Facial Recognition Coming To Delta Gates At MSP (CBS, June 20): "Delta Air Lines announced it will give passengers who fly out of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport the option to use facial recognition to board their flight instead of a standard boarding pass."

• WSJ article (June 20) on biometric technology in the home, what Chris & I discuss as "luxury surveillance." The articles states the tech is "expanding to every corner of the home, using body identifiers to open the door, say hello, unlock the wine cellar and reveal the screening room." Yes: everyone needs facial recognition for their wine cellar!

• When Machine Learning is Facially Invalid (Frank Pasquale - a past guest - in the Communications of the ACM, Sept 2018)

• Facebook lawyer argues you should have ‘no expectation of privacy’ (Graham Cluley, June 3): Facebook counsel Orin Snyder argued, "There is no invasion of privacy at all, because there is no privacy." See also the NYT story.

• IBM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage To Develop Technology That Lets Police Search By Skin Color (The Intercept, Sept 6, 2018)

• Legislation to suspend facial recognition in schools passes [New York] State Assembly (June 20)

• The First Public Schools In The US Will Start Using Facial Recognition Next Week (Davey Alba in Buzzfeed News, May 29): "Testing of the Aegis system begins in the Lockport City School District [in New York State] next week. It will track sex offenders, students and staff who have been suspended from school, and credible threats to student safety."

• America Under Watch (from Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology): Face Surveillance in the United States

• San Francisco Bans Facial Recognition Technology (NYT, May 14)

• Why You Can No Longer Get Lost in the Crowd (Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger in a NYT op-ed, April 17): "Facial recognition technology poses an immense danger to society because it can be used to overcome biological constraints on how many individuals anyone can recognize in real time. If its use continues to grow and the right regulations aren’t instituted, we might lose the ability to go out in public without being recognized by the police, our neighbors and corporations."

• Duke MTMC is a dataset of surveillance camera footage of students on Duke University campus: "Duke MTMC (Multi-Target, Multi-Camera) is a dataset of surveillance video footage taken on Duke University's campus in 2014 and is used for research and development of video tracking systems, person re-identification, and low-resolution facial recognition." See also this story on the project. And see Chris Gilliard's comment.

• Brainwash is a dataset of webcam images taken from the Brainwash Cafe in San Francisco: "The Brainwash dataset is unique because it uses images from a publicly available webcam that records people inside a privately owned business without their consent. No ordinary cafe customer could ever suspect that their image would end up in dataset used for surveillance research and development, but that is exactly what happened to customers at Brainwash Cafe in San Francisco. Although Brainwash appears to be a less popular dataset, it was notably used in 2016 and 2017 by researchers affiliated with the National University of Defense Technology in China for two research projects on advancing the capabilities of object detection to more accurately isolate the target region in an image."

• Microsoft deletes massive 'MC Celeb' facial recognition data set (June 8): "Many of the faces included in the data were not those of public figures or celebrities. Indeed, security journalists and privacy advocates were among those included, such as Shoshana Zuboff, author of [The Age of] Surveillance Capitalism."

• Thread by @halhod (June 28): "Technology is eroding one of the great levees of human society - the ability to move around the physical world anonymously."

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