Papua New Guinea bans Facebook for a month, plans local replacement
"Communications Minister Sam Basil said the one-month shutdown would 'allow information to be collected' about people using the site for nefarious purposes."
Amazon urged not to sell facial recognition tool to police
"Last fall Amazon added capabilities that allow it to identify people in videos and follow their movements almost instantly."
Amazon device recorded private conversation, sent it out to random contact
"A private conversation was recorded by Amazon's Alexa -- the voice-controlled smart speaker -- and the recorded audio was sent to the phone of a random person in Seattle, who was in the family’s contact list."
Amazon is selling police departments a real-time facial recognition system
"Rekognition is currently used by police in Orlando and Oregon’s Washington County, often using nondisclosure agreements to avoid public disclosure."
Thousands of Google employees threaten to quit over military drone AI project
"Around a dozen Google employees have already quit over the company's involvement in an artificial intelligence drone program for the Pentagon called Project Maven."
The Creepy Genetics Behind the Golden State Killer Case
"In the end, it wasn’t stakeouts or fingerprints or cell phone records that got him. It was a genealogy website."
Social Media Now Being Used by Police, Intelligence to Collect Biometrics
"Police admitted to using a photo sent through WhatsApp to cull fingerprints for evidence that successfully led to the conviction of 11 individuals for drug crimes. The story further revealed that this was not just a special-use case."
US spy lab hopes to geotag every outdoor photo on social media
"The ability to combine this location data with information about who appears in those photos—and any social media contacts tied to them—would make it possible for government agencies to quickly track terrorist groups posting propaganda photos. (And, really, just about anyone else.)"
A New Backdoor Around the Fourth Amendment: The CLOUD Act
"A dangerous bill called the CLOUD Act would allow police at home and abroad to seize cross-border data without following the privacy rules where the data is stored."
YouTube Is Serving Covert Cryptocurrency Mining Ads
"It’s like someone figured out how to monetize the awful Flash ads everyone used to hate for eating CPU cycles. A true win-win! And now it’s even hitting YouTube. TrendMicro has released an updated report, showing a sharp rise in ads served by Google’s DoubleClick service being infested with mining software. Like other attacks, this one uses a Javascript miner to mine Monero via Coinhive."