Lifeboat Foundation

But no, privacy isn’t dead. A path to reclaiming it — fuzzy and almost too late — is starting to emerge. We just have to be angry enough to demand it.

Trying to get straight answers has been, literally, a full-time job. I’ve digested the legal word salad of privacy policies, interrogated a hundred companies and even hacked into a car dashboard to grab my data back. There are lots of stories about online threats, but it feels different watching your personal information streaming out of devices you take for granted. This year I learned there is no such thing as “incognito.” Just stepping out for an errand, I discovered, lets my car record where I shop, what I listen to and even how much I weigh.

As access to the internet grows, so do the risks associated with being online. Cybersecurity threats are on the rise as data hackers find new ways to breach through firewalls. Earlier this year bad actors were able to gain access to the administrative serves of India’s largest nuclear power plant with a simple phishing email.

The government want to increase its cyber might to ward off such hazards but experts feel some of its policies might do the exact opposite.

2020 will be a busy year for India with the 5G spectrum auction still pending, Personal Data Protection Bill under discussion, and the deadline for social.

Continue reading “5G, AI, data privacy and mass surveillance — 12 biggest tech policy challenges India will have to face in 2020” »

This is the fourth instalment in a four-part series examining the brewing US-China war over the development and deployment of artificial intelligence technology.

China has had success with AI and surveillance, but when it comes to social issues such as education, health care and agriculture, there is still a ways to go.

Continue reading “China dreams of becoming an AI utopia – here’s the reality” »

AI is Pandora’s box, s’ true…

On the one hand we can’t close it and on the other hand our current direction is not good. And this is gonna get worse as AI starts taking its own ‘creative’ decisions… the human overlords will claim it has nothing to do with them if and when things go wrong.

The solution for commercialization is actually quite simple.

Continue reading “Edward Snowden on the Dangers of Mass Surveillance and Artificial General Intelligence” »

A much broader array of stakeholders must engage with the problems that DNA databases present. In particular, governments, policymakers and legislators should tighten regulation and reduce the likelihood of corporations aiding potential human-rights abuses by selling DNA-profiling technology to bad actors — knowingly or negligently. Researchers working on biometric identification technologies should consider more deeply how their inventions could be used. And editors, reviewers and publishers must do more to ensure that published research on biometric identification has been done in an ethical way.

Corporations selling DNA-profiling technology are aiding human-rights abuses. Governments, legislators, researchers, reviewers and publishers must act.

David Opateyibo was 17 years old when he built Nigeria’s first locally-made drone in Lagos.

Opateyibo led a team of Lagos State Polytechnic students to produce the country’s first prototype of a drone, which authorities in Lagos hope to deploy for security surveillance.

Continue reading “At age 17, he built Nigeria’s first locally-made drone and on a mission to build an aircraft” »

Three Square Market was a test case, the first company in the US to offer implants to employees on a public stage. But the highly charged reaction, which linked the devices not only to pernicious surveillance but to a vision of tech-apocalypse, raised a question that Österlund is still grappling with: is the world ready for technology to get under the skin?

As implants grow more common, experts fear surveillance and exploitation of workers. Advocates say the concerns are irrational.

Although mobile devices were not designed to run compute-heavy AI models, in recent years AI-powered features like face detection, eye tracking, and voice recognition have all been added to smartphones. Much of the compute for such services is done on the cloud, but ideally these applications would be light enough to run directly on devices without an Internet connection.

In this spirit of “smaller is better,” Shanghai-based developer “Linzai” (GitHub user name @Linzaer) recently shared a new lightweight model that enables real-time face detection for smartphones. The “Ultra-Light-Fast-Generic-Face-Detector-1MB” is designed for general-purpose face detection applications in low-power computing devices and is applicable to both Android and iOS phones as well as PCs (CPU and GPU). The project has garnered a whopping 3.3k Stars and over 600 forks on GitHub.

Facial recognition technology is widely applied in security monitoring, surveillance, human-computer interaction, entertainment, etc. Detecting human faces in digital images is the first step in facial recognition, and an ideal face detection model can be evaluated by how quickly and accurately it performs.

And yet, in the midst of the greatest computer security crisis in history, the US government, along with the governments of the UK and Australia, is attempting to undermine the only method that currently exists for reliably protecting the world’s information: encryption. Should they succeed in their quest to undermine encryption, our public infrastructure and private lives will be rendered permanently unsafe.

The US, UK and Australia are taking on Facebook in a bid to undermine the only method that protects our personal information.

• Edward Snowden is a US surveillance whistleblower.

Continue reading “Without encryption we will lose all privacy. This is our new battleground” »