American Civil Liberties Union

A group of privacy researchers (including some responsible for the excellent privacy studies done by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology) have an interesting paper out this week in the Harvard Law & Policy Review on behavioral advertising. In the paper, the authors (Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Ashkan Soltani, Nathaniel Good, Dietrich J. Wambach, and Mika D. Ayenson) argue against the idea that privacy-protecting regulations somehow take choice away from consumers who are grown-up enough to fend for themselves. Such arguments are currently being thrown around in an attempt to forestall Do Not Track from being implemented (as I discussed here).

On July 30, the Privacy Commissioner of British Columbia announced a review of license plate scanning programs by law enforcement in the province. If the United States had an analogous institution embodying /enforcing our privacy values, maybe we’d see something like that here instead of untrammeled expansion and retention of license data. We’re still waiting for the “missing in action” Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) to turn into something real. From 2007 until late 2011, neither President Bush nor President Obama even nominated anyone to fill the independent oversight board; we finally now have four members—but still no chair.

One of the central elements in last week's Trapwire story involves the application of “behavioral recognition,” also known as “video analytics,” to camera feeds. What are we to make of this technology?

In essence, video analytics is a form of artificial intelligence that tries to automatically derive meaning from a video feed. Face recognition, license plate recognition, and red light cameras are each examples of the automated extraction of meaning from a video feed, but what I’m focused on here are technologies that aim to offer more general analysis of behaviors that are taking place in a camera’s field of view. Examples include the tracking of people throughout an area, zone or perimeter protection, determination of (and detection of deviations from) “normal” patterns of movement in an area, and the detection of abandoned objects. (This article at EE Times offers an extensive introduction to the technology.) 

The New York Times has an interesting story on the police seizure of witnesses’ cell phones after the shooting of a knife-wielding man in Times Square on Saturday. I wrote about that issue a few weeks ago, and how the DC police department issued a first-of-its-kind policy on how officers should deal with evidence in citizens’ phones.