facial recognition
Detroit Police Department agrees to new rules around facial recognition tech
As part of a legal settlement, the Detroit Police Department has agreed to new guardrails limiting how it can use facial recognition technology. These new policies prohibit the police from…
Microsoft bans US police departments from using enterprise AI tool for facial recognition
Microsoft has reaffirmed its ban on U.S. police departments from using generative AI for facial recognition through Azure OpenAI Service, the company’s fully managed, enterprise-focused wrapper around OpenAI tech. Language…
Rite Aid banned from using facial recognition software after falsely identifying shoplifters
Rite Aid has been banned from using facial recognition software for five years, after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that the U.S. drugstore giant’s “reckless use of facial surveillance…
Signal’s Meredith Whittaker: AI is fundamentally ‘a surveillance technology’
Why is it that so many companies that rely on monetizing the data of their users seem to be extremely hot on AI? If you ask Signal president Meredith Whittaker…
China’s draft measures demand ‘individual consent’ for facial recognition use
The pervasive use of facial recognition technology across all facets of life in China has elicited both praise for its convenience and backlash around privacy concerns. The widespread adoption has…
House Democrats debut new bill to limit US police use of facial recognition
A group of House Democrats has unveiled a new bill that aims to put limits on the use of facial recognition technologies by law enforcement agencies across the United States.…
TikTok claims it’s not collecting US users’ biometric data, despite what privacy policy says
Last year, TikTok quietly updated its privacy policy to allow the app to collect biometric data on U.S. users, including “faceprints and voiceprints” — a concerning change that the company…
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A huge Chinese database of faces and vehicle license plates spilled online
A massive Chinese database storing millions of faces and vehicle license plates was left exposed on the internet for months before it quietly disappeared in August. While its contents might seem unremarkable for China, where facial recognition is routine and state surveillance is ubiquitous, the sheer size of the exposed…
Selfie scraping Clearview AI hit with another €20M ban order in Europe
Clearview AI has been hit with another sanction for breaching European privacy rules. The Athens-based Hellenic data protection authority has fined the controversial facial recognition firm €20 million and banned…
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A huge data leak of 1 billion records exposes China’s vast surveillance state
A massive store of data containing information on about one billion Chinese residents could be one of the biggest breaches of personal information in history. Portions of the leaked data appeared last week on a known cybercrime forum from someone selling the cache for 10 bitcoins, or about $200,000, and…
An independent review of UK legislation has concluded the country urgently needs new laws to govern the use of biometric technologies and called for the government to come forward with…
The U.K.’s data protection watchdog has confirmed a penalty for the controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI — announcing a fine of just over £7.5 million today for a string…
Clearview AI banned from selling its facial recognition software to most US companies
A company that gained notoriety for selling access to billions of facial photos, many culled from social media without the knowledge of the individuals depicted, faces major new restrictions to…
Good news for archivists, academics, researchers and journalists: Scraping publicly accessible data is legal, according to a U.S. appeals court ruling. The landmark ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit of…
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‘Always on and watching’: A former Xinjiang prisoner describes life inside China’s detention camps
For 10 months in 2018, Ovalbek Turdakun was a prisoner in one of China’s notorious detention camps, where he was tortured, subject to horrific conditions and under constant surveillance. In a makeshift courtroom inside the detention camp he was being held, Turdakun was not permitted to speak and was made…
Just like IRL, the metaverse requires infrastructure. We don’t have it yet
The idea of bringing thousands of people together in a virtual space is not new: Online multiplayer games have been doing that for a long time. So surely it should…
A picture’s worth a thousand words, but this image of Zoom’s newest feature can be summed up in just one: what? Zoom is introducing a feature today that lets you…
Daily Crunch: Hackers leak names, personal details of donors to ‘Freedom Convoy’ protest
Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.
Texas attorney general files lawsuit against Meta over Facebook’s facial recognition technology
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against Meta over Facebook’s facial recognition practices, his office announced on Monday. The news was first reported by The Wall Street…
The IRS won’t make you verify your identity with facial recognition after all
The IRS announced plans Monday to back away from a third-party facial recognition system that collects biometric data from U.S. taxpayers who want to log in to the agency’s online…
What Kai-Fu Lee-backed AInnovation tells us about China’s smart manufacturing
The enthusiasm to find paying customers for artificial intelligence continues in China. AInnovation, a Chinese computer vision and machine learning startup backed by Kai-Fu Lee’s Sinovation Ventures and SoftBank, is…
Metalenz PolarEyes upgrades digital sensing with polarized light
Tech sees differently, and can fuse multiple types of data we can’t even perceive: lidar, IR, ultrasonic and so on. Metalenz, maker of highly compact “2D” cameras for advanced sensing,…
The road to disastrous biometric data collection is paved with good intentions
The time to stop the slide by regulating and eliminating unnecessary biometric data collection, particularly when for-profit corporations are involved, is now.
iProov snaps up $70M for its facial verification technology, already in use by Homeland Security, the NHS and others
Biometrics, and specifically facial recognition, have seen a surge of usage in the last several years, first as a tool to help organizations verify identities digitally against rising waves of…
France latest to slap Clearview AI with order to delete data
Controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI, which has amassed a database of some 10 billion images by scraping selfies off the Internet so it can sell an identity-matching service to…
A not-for-profit set up by a former Uber driver who successfully challenged the ride-hailing giant’s misclassification of drivers’ employment status in the U.K. has published a timely report pressing the…
SenseTime, one of China’s most valuable AI solution providers, is putting its $767 million public listing on hold, the company said Monday. The announcement came three weeks after the Hong…
Europe’s AI Act falls far short on protecting fundamental rights, civil society groups warn
Civil society has been poring over the detail of the European Commission’s proposal for a risk-based framework for regulating applications of artificial intelligence which was proposed by the EU’s executive…
Clearview AI told to stop processing UK data as ICO warns of possible fine
Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI is facing a potential fine in the UK. It has also been handed a provisional notice to stop further processing of UK citizens’ data…
EU’s data protection adviser latest to call for ban on tracking ads
The European Data Protection Board (EDPB), an expert steering body which advises EU lawmakers on how to interpret rules wrapping citizen’s personal data, has warned the bloc’s legislators that a…
