By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 5:47pm
A roundup of some items that caught our eye recently, but we haven’t had a chance to write about.
San Francisco’s MUNI train system is installing new “intelligent” cameras that will track and monitor commuters, raising an alarm when it spots “anomalous activities,” which it will identify by learning over time what is “normal.” It always surprises me when cutting-edge surveillance technologies are introduced in the Bay Area (see BART, phone cutoffs in, and bar cameras). Don’t people know that Northern California is home to perhaps the most tech-savvy and privacy-aware population in the country?
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 2:24pm
Yesterday I posted about the debate over profiling Muslims at the airport, and how Bruce Schneier persuasively argued that the concept, which seems so intuitively sensible to so many Americans, is a terrible idea even just from a security point of view. He also commented on the other, less tangible costs that such a scheme would impose, such as the alienation of Muslims from American life, and the corruption of our values.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:09am
On Friday I posted about an ongoing effort by the DEA to put automatic license plate reading (ALPR) devices on public interstates, where they will sweep up records of Americans’ travel and store it for two years. The agency is now pushing to deploy them in Utah and has already done so in states along the southern U.S. border.
By Ben Wizner, Director, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 1:53pm
A few weeks ago, Jay Stanley posted here about some of the dangers of “Big Data,” a sanitized term for data mining. When it’s employed by government security agencies in the search for terrorists, Jay wrote, there’s a substantial risk “that people will be tagged and suffer adverse consequences without due process, the ability to fight back, or even knowledge that they have been discriminated against.”
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:03pm
I was at a Target store recently and threw a bottle of wine in my cart to bring as a gift to a party. Later, when I got to the register, the cashier asked to see my ID. That in itself was silly, because it’s safe to say I’m a few years past the point where anyone might mistake me for someone under 21. But whatever; alcohol age-enforcement has gotten bureaucratic beyond all reason.
I held the ID up for her to see. Before I could react, she took my license from my fingers, held it up to a scanner, and BEEP!
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 8:43am
In a prior post I alluded to the fact that the buzzword “Big Data” is just a new term for “data mining.” The potential for big data analytics to discover new things about us is frightening from a privacy perspective, as I discussed. But, it can also be—let’s be honest—very cool.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:46am
Last week I posted about “Big Data” and how it is being used to discover new facts about people, to sift and sort them based on subtle patterns, to flag them as “risks” in this field or that, to predict their behavior, and to manipulate them for maximum profit.
Of course, humans are not sheep, and we don’t sit still when things like this happen to us. We perceive what is happening, and we change our behavior in response. We react. The effects of Big Data on privacy and society will be a game of three-dimensional chess, not checkers.
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:06pm
The idea of “Big Data” is in the air. At the South by Southwest Interactive conference last month, it was probably the hot topic, dominating or surfacing in numerous panels, including one on which I spoke, on “Big Data: Privacy Threat or Business Model?”
