Police & private companies are using facial recogntion technology to spy on you
Joseph J. Atick cased the floor of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington as if he owned the place. In a way, he did. He was one of the organizers of the event, a conference and trade show for the biometrics security industry. A number of the wares on display, like an airport face-scanning checkpoint, could trace their lineage to his work.
A physicist, Dr. Atick is one of the pioneer entrepreneurs of modern face recognition. Having helped advance the fundamental face-matching technology in the 1990s, he went into business and promoted the systems to government agencies looking to identify criminals or prevent identity fraud. “We saved lives,” he said during the conference in mid-March. “We have solved crimes.”
Thanks in part to his boosterism, the global business of biometrics — using people’s unique physiological characteristics, like their fingerprint ridges and facial features, to learn or confirm their identity — is booming. It generated an estimated $7.2 billion in 2012, according to reports by Frost & Sullivan.
Making his rounds at the trade show, Dr. Atick, greeted industry representatives at their exhibition booths. Once he was safely out of earshot, however, he worried aloud about what he was seeing. What were those companies’ policies for retaining and reusing consumers’ facial data? Could they identify individuals without their explicit consent? Were they running face-matching queries for government agencies on the side?
Now an industry consultant, Dr. Atick finds himself in a delicate position. While promoting and profiting from an industry that he helped foster, he also feels compelled to caution against its unfettered proliferation. He isn’t so much concerned about government agencies that use face recognition openly for specific purposes — for example, the many state motor vehicle departments that scan drivers’ faces as a way to prevent license duplications and fraud.
What troubles him is the potential exploitation of face recognition to identify ordinary and unwitting citizens as they go about their lives in public. Online, we are all tracked. But to Dr. Atick, the street remains a haven, and he frets that he may have abetted a technology that could upend the social order.
Face-matching today could enable mass surveillance, “basically robbing everyone of their anonymity,” he says, and inhibit people’s normal behavior outside their homes. Pointing to the intelligence documents made public by Edward J. Snowden, he adds that once companies amass consumers’ facial data, government agencies might obtain access to it, too.
Face recognition to them is no different from a car, a neutral technology whose advantages far outweigh the risks. The conveniences of biometrics seem self-evident: Your unique code automatically accompanies you everywhere. They envision a world where, instead of having to rely on losable ID cards or on a jumble of easily forgettable — not to mention hackable — passwords, you could unlock your smartphone or gain entry to banks, apartment complexes, parking garages and health clubs just by showing your face.
The technology needs a large data set, called an image gallery, containing the photographs or video stills of faces already identified by name. Software automatically converts the topography of each face in the gallery into a unique mathematical code, called a faceprint. Once people are faceprinted, they may be identified in existing or subsequent photographs or as they walk in front of a video camera.
The technology is already in use in law enforcement and casinos. In New York, Pennsylvania and California, police departments with face-recognition systems can input the image of a robbery suspect taken from a surveillance video in a bank, for instance, and compare the suspect’s faceprint against their image gallery of convicted criminals, looking for a match. And some casinos faceprint visitors, seeking to identify repeat big-spending customers for special treatment. In Japan, a few grocery stores use face-matching to classify some shoppers as shoplifters or even “complainers” and blacklist them.
Dr. Atick sees convenience in these kinds of uses as well. But he provides a cautionary counterexample to make his case. Just a few months back, he heard about NameTag, an app that, according to its news release, was available in an early form to people trying out Google Glass. Users had only to glance at a stranger and NameTag would instantly return a match complete with that stranger’s name, occupation and public Facebook profile information. “We are basically allowing our fellow citizens to surveil us,” Dr. Atick told me on the trade-show floor.
(His sentiments were shared by Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota and chairman of the Senate subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law. Concerned that NameTag might facilitate stalking, Mr. Franken requested that its public introduction be delayed; in late April, the app’s developer said he would comply with the request. Google has said that it will not approve facial recognition apps on Google Glass.)
Dr. Atick is just as bothered by what could be brewing quietly in larger companies. Over the past few years, several tech giants have acquired face-recognition start-up businesses. In 2011, Google bought Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, a computer vision business developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2012, Facebook bought Face.com, an Israeli start-up.
Facebook and Google Plus automatically suggest name tags for members or their friends in photographs.
Google has applied for a patent on a method to identify faces in videos and on one to allow people to log on to devices by winking or making other facial expressions. Facebook researchers recently reported how the company had developed a powerful pattern-recognition system, called DeepFace, which had achieved near-human accuracy in identifying people’s faces.
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?mostRecent=&gid=62979&trk=my_groups-tile-flipgrp
Federal ‘Biosurveillance’ plan will allow Big Brother to spy on our private medical records
Our government (NSA/DHS) is piecing together a sweeping national “biosurveillance” system that will give bureaucrats near real-time access to Americans’ private medical information in the name of national security, according to Twila Brase, a public health nurse and co-founder of the Citizens Council for Health Freedom.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response is currently seeking public comment on a 52-page draft of the proposed “National Health Security Strategy 2015-2018”
“Health situational awareness includes biosurveillance and other health and non-health inputs (e.g., lab/diagnostics, health service utilization, active intelligence, and supply chain information), as well as systems and processes for effective communication among responders and critical health resource monitoring and allocation,” the draft states.
But Brase warns that the NHSS proposal would allow the federal government to monitor an individual’s behavior before, during and after any government-defined health “incident” – which could be anything from a local outbreak of the flu to a terrorist anthrax attack.
“It’s very broad. It doesn’t seem to have any limits, except they say something about, you know, properly protecting the data. But from our perspective, if the government gets access to this kind of data, [and] is allowed to do research with the data…then our privacy has already been compromised. The government has already said that our data is their data for their purposes of national health security,” Brase told CNSNews.com.
“It’s very clear to us that really the government is moving toward real-time access, toward close collaboration of government and doctors for ready access to the electronic medical record and then to conduct research and analysis.”
Brase noted that the information collected by the government will be “all-encompassing” and include “what our health status is, whether we exercise, how often we get a cold, or what kind of medications we’re taking. They’re also looking at the climate, and the economic condition of the country, as all being a party of this National Health Security Strategy.”
“In other words, anything and everything could become a health threat by the government’s standards,” she said.
“We’re of the mind that the Fourth Amendment actually means something, so you can’t access everybody’s patient’s medical record just because you say there is a security threat or just because you say it’s good for the American public,” she told CNSNews.com.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/federal-biosurveillance-plan-seeking-direct-access-americans
Fitness tracking apps are just another way for companies & big brother to spy on you
Fitness tracking apps and devices have gone from an early adopter novelty to a staple of many users' exercise routines during the past few years -- helping users set goals and measure progress over time. Some employers even offer incentives, including insurance discounts, when workers sign up.
Private fitness companies, insurance companies and you can bet DHS will be spying on everything we do from the moment you wake up to when you go to bed!
Privacy advocates warn that consumers aren't always aware of how sensitive the data the apps collect can be or what privacy protections exist. And changes in the privacy policy of Moves, a fitness tracking app recently acquired by Facebook, have only amplified those fears.
"This is really, really a privacy nightmare," says Deborah Peel, the executive director of Patient Privacy Rights, who claims that the vast majority, if not all, of the health data collected by these types of apps have effectively "zero" protections, but is increasingly prized by online data mining and advertising firms.
The Moves "Activity Diary of Your Life" app changed its privacy policy within weeks of its acquisition by Facebook. The app uses motion sensors built into smartphones and GPS information to keep a record of users' locations and activities. Algorithms developed for the app are able to tell the difference between different types of exercise -- like biking, or running -- and calculate distances traveled and calories burned.
The app's privacy policy went from stating the company would not "disclose an individual user’s data to third parties" without consent to "we may share information, including personally identifying information, with our Affiliates (companies that are part of our corporate groups of companies, including but not limited to Facebook) to help provide, understand, and improve our Services," as first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
"In order to support the provision and operation of the Moves app, Facebook will need to have access to the Moves data," she told the Post in a statement via e-mail. She further said that Moves would continue as a "standalone experience" rather than being directly integrated into the larger Facebook platform.
But a person familiar with the matter told the Post the acquisition is "about talent and tech," suggesting that Facebook may be planning to use Moves to make a bigger splash in the health and fitness space.
And Facebook isn't the only tech giant interested in the fitness and health tracking business. Reuters reported that Apple is on a "medical tech hiring spree" -- possibly in anticipation of the long rumored iWatch. The company also met with FDA officials about mobile medical apps last December, as reported by the New York Times.
With its foray into wearable tech with Google Glass, Google also appears in a good position to do more work on health tracking. And elsewhere in the company's experimental lab, Google has been working on other medical related products like contacts that tell diabetics their glucose levels. (Oh, and there is that whole other company Google CEO Larry Page created to work on combating death.)
Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy said, the tech industry's pivot to health and fitness tracking "is all part of a much wider system of data collection."
"The next frontier is local, and they know that health apps and other kind of apps related to recreation and lifestyle will be an economic bonanza," he says. "They literally want to know your movements in a much more granular way and they've created business models based on this kind of intrusive hyper-local data tracking."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/05/19/privacy-advocates-warn-of-nightmare-scenario-as-tech-giants-consider-fitness-tracking/?tid=hpModule_1728cf4a-8a79-11e2-98d9-3012c1cd8d1e