Posts tagged "privacy"

• Satellites Track Humans, Now It’s The Animals’ Turn →

  

  Satellite technology is a modern-day “Wonder of the World.” Consider that currently over 1,000 active satellites orbit the Earth, communicating with ground-based transmitters and receivers for a host of applications, such as delivering scientific measurements, weather information, and television programming, to name a few. Since the launch of Sputnik I in 1957, satellite technology has increasingly connected people together, whether in the same town or on opposite sides of the planet, effectively making the world flat.

  satellite future privacy tracking
  2 days ago reblog like 5 notes
• A Stock Exchange for Your Personal Data →

  

  Here’s a job title made for the information age: personal data broker.

  Today, people have no choice but to give away their personal information—sometimes in exchange for free networking on Twitter or searching on Google, but other times to third-party data-aggregation firms without realizing it at all.

  market privacy future data data mining advertising
  2 weeks ago reblog like 3 notes
• FAA Releases Lists of Drone Certificates—Many Questions Left Unanswered →

  This week the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) finally released its first round of records in response to EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for information on the agency’s drone authorization program. The agency says the two lists it released include the names of all public and private entities that have applied for authorizations to fly drones domestically. These lists—which include the Certificates of Authorizations (COAs), issued to public entities like police departments, and the Special Airworthiness Certificates (SACs), issued to private drone manufacturers—show for the first time who is authorized to fly drones in the United States.

  FAA drones robots law legal privacy future
  1 month ago reblog like 7 notes
• Opinion: In the digital age, everyone is becoming a spook →

  

  In a poll published last week by the American magazine Consumer Reports, 71% of adults polled confessed to being very concerned about Internet companies abusing their personal information. But what this poll failed to ask was whether we fear governmental abuse of our online data as much as abuse from private companies.

  future opinion computers Internet privacy
  1 month ago reblog like 6 notes
• Drone use in the U.S. raises privacy concerns

  Unmanned aerial vehicles, a key weapon in the hunt for terrorists overseas, are coming to America. In February, President Barack Obama signed a bill that opens U.S. airspace to thousands of these unmanned aircraft.

  video drones robots future privacy FAA law legal
  1 month ago reblog like 14 notes
• Eye-tracking computer programs and privacy. →

  

  Consider, for a moment, the following list: Republican. Abortion. Democrat. Future. Afghanistan. Health care. Same-sex marriage.

  There is an enormous amount of information reflected in the way you just read that list. Did your eyes pause for a fraction of a second on certain words? Did your pupils dilate, ever so slightly, at any point while you were reading the list? For some words did your eyes blink at a different rate? Did you backtrack to reread any words, and if so, which ones, when, and for how long?

  eye-tracking future computer privacy
  1 month ago reblog like 1 note
• Locator chips keep track of students in Brazil →

  Grade-school students in a northeastern Brazilian city are using uniforms embedded with locator chips that help alert parents if they’re cutting classes, the city’s education secretary said Thursday.

  Twenty thousand students in 25 of Vitoria da Conquista’s 213 public schools started using T-shirts with chips earlier this week, secretary Coriolano Moraes said by telephone.

  By 2013, all of the city’s 43,000 public school students, aged 4 to 14, will be using the chip-embedded T-shirts, he added.

  Brazil future RFID tracking privacy legal law
  1 month ago reblog like 15 notes
• Police Are Making A Scanner To Detect Concealed Weapons 80 Feet Away →

  

  The New York Police Department is working with the Department of Defense to develop a scanning device that would allow them to detect concealed firearms on a person 80 feet away. The scanner detects electromagnetic waves with a frequency in the terahertz range. Terahertz waves sit at the higher frequency end of infrared on the electromagnetic spectrum, just before the microwave range. The device works the same way an infrared detector does. Just as our bodies emit infrared radiation, so do they emit terahertz waves. These waves can pass through non-conducting material such as paper or clothing but are blocked by conducting material such as a piece of metal – or a gun. So if a person has a piece of metal under their jacket, such as a gun, the police will see the telltale outline of the weapon. The waves also pass unperturbed through wood and brick so the device can scan through walls.

  weapons scan future police privacy
  3 months ago reblog like 9 notes
• On the Internet of Things IBM Tracks Your Pork From Farm to Fork. Starting with China →

  

  IBM has set out to prove it can revolutionize the food industry with data, starting with China. Six industrial slaughterhouses and 100 markets in Shandong Province are part of a large scale test in tracking pork from farm to customer. Pigs are marked with ear tags containing unique barcodes, those same barcodes appear on the bins that carry their meat during processing, and on the packages for the pork placed in stores. In the near term, IBM hopes that knowing the history of every piece of meat will enable fast and super accurate recalls in case of contamination. Eventually, this kind of comprehensive tracking could help farmers keep pigs healthier, improve the quality of meat after it is cut, and even place a picture on the store package of the exact pig made into that pork product. Knowledge is power in this new take on the supply chain.

  IBM IoT tracking privacy future
  4 months ago reblog like 12 notes
• Are you ready for ubiquitous surveillance by Big Brother? →

  For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders — every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner. Governments with a history of using all of the tools at their disposal to track and monitor their citizens will undoubtedly make full use of this capability once it becomes available.

  surveillance big brother future privacy law
  5 months ago reblog like 16 notes
• Google Uses AI to Find Where You Live →

  A recent Google research paper outlines how it might use AI to read digits in natural images - specifically Street View photos. Google has a huge database of photographs of the urban (and some not so urban) environments. Apart from its curiosity value, there is a lot of data locked up in the images and clearly getting an AI agent to look though the whole corpus and derive useful information is a great idea.

  Google AI research privacy
  5 months ago reblog like 20 notes
• Mobile ‘Rootkit’ Maker Tries to Silence Critical Android Dev →

  A data-logging software company is seeking to squash an Android developer’s critical research into its software that is secretly installed on millions of phones, but Trevor Eckhart is refusing to publicly apologize for his research and remove the company’s training manuals from his website.

  Though the software is installed on millions of Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones, Carrier IQ was virtually unknown until the 25-year-old Eckhart analyzed its workings, recently revealing that the software secretly chronicles a user’s phone experience, from its apps, battery life and texts. Some carriers prevent users who actually find the software from controlling what information is sent.

  privacy mobile Android
  6 months ago reblog like 9 notes
• Big data: Global good or zero-sum arms race? →

  Last month, Netezza CEO Jim Baum gave a talk at the GigaOM big data event. If I’m honest, I was checking my email and missed most of it, but I do remember tuning in just in time to hear him say something like “big data is going to have a huge economic impact.”

  I spend most of my days considering how the component pieces of this big data transformation will impact the corporate enterprise. Baum’s comment got me thinking, though, about a more meta question: Is “big data” a key to some kind of industrial revolution reboot? Or, is it just going to be expensive table stakes for previously simple-to-understand businesses?

  data computers data-mining research privacy
  1 year ago reblog like 0 notes
• Future Advertising Has Its Eye On You →

  The advertising billboards of the future will not simply promote a product, but analyze the audience and display items that the viewer is more likely to buy.

  It may sound like something out of the future, but Japanese firms have already developed the technology to deliver a more focused message. And that, they hope, will lead to better sales.

  Electronics giant NEC Corp. recently unveiled PanelDirector, an interactive advertising solution that is equipped with a small camera that is able to capture an image of anyone that looks at it.

  privacy advertising future research
  1 year ago reblog like 0 notes
• Intel Outlines An Era of Friendly Surveillance →

  Intel’s CTO Justin Rattner described a coming era of gadgets able to act like smart assistants in his keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in downtown San Francisco today, and also spent a fair amount of it under surveillance himself. It seems that gadget snooping is something we’ll have to get used to if we want our devices to be smarter.

  Intel future surveillance privacy
  1 year ago reblog like 0 notes