The “Face” of Privacy: Facial Recognition, Privacy, and Security
Stories from The Atlantic, NBC News, The New York Times, CSO, and more, This Week in Fraud Trends, February 8, 2020.
Privacy is once again in the news this week, as new technologies continue to emerge, and new applications of said technologies are tested. The New York Times reported this week on a new twist to the ongoing use of facial recognition technology:
“The Lockport City School District turned on the technology to monitor who’s on the property at its eight schools, becoming the first known public school district in New York to adopt facial recognition, and one of the first in the nation.”
If you’re interested in a deep theoretical dive into the modern state of privacy, and want to engage with a reasoned point-of-view, consider this article from The Atlantic:
“We must overcome the learned helplessness about the state of our privacy — a helplessness often abetted by technology leaders moving fast and breaking things. Privacy defenders have perhaps inadvertently encouraged the same sense of inevitability by speaking in generic apocalyptic terms. But this fight is not simply about keeping particular facts about people out of the public eye. Privacy now is as much about freedom, the freedom to maintain a boundary between ourselves and those who want to shape us.”
And for a look into how one state’s new privacy laws (California) is provoking a new wave of entrepreneurial innovation, you are encouraged to read this piece from NBC News:
“The California Consumer Privacy Act, which took effect Jan. 1, gives people the right to know what large companies know about them and the right to block the sale of that information to others. In effect, it created a market for privacy expertise and software. A wave of privacy-focused technology startups is offering a variety of services, from personal data scrubbing to business-focused software meant to help companies comply with the law.”
California’s new privacy law is having other impacts as well, including in the courts, as we learned this week from Bloomberg news:
“The hacked data, which was found for sale on the dark web, was hosted by Salesforce on its e-commerce platform, the complaint alleges. The platform was infected with malware that led to the data breach, the complaint claims.”
If, for any reason, you’re of the opinion that privacy concerns are still in the tempest-in-a-teapot phase, this article from CCN might shift your perception a bit:
“While lots of people use Google Photos to back up images and videos stored on their devices, they don’t expect those to become public domain. On Tuesday, the search giant confirmed that users’ private videos uploaded to the service were sent to strangers.”
CSO this week published an intriguing article that connects privacy to hacking, and in doing so, mounts a call for changes to data policymaking:
“Digital privacy is one side of a two-sided policy coin. Virtually all attention to date has been focused on developing legal and regulatory remedies to address this pervasive public concern. But in doing so, they have devoted little attention to the flip side — namely, digital hacking. Although data systems that are thought to be secure from intrusion may be the result of random technological breakdowns or human error, there usually are far less benign explanations for major cybersecurity breaches that expose personal information on a massive scale.”
And with that, we have arrived at the concluding highlight of our article. Yes, it’s time for the …
Tweet of the Week
This one may be a little obscure (unless you’re of a certain generation), but it’s just to perfect too resist, given our conversations today about privacy and security:
Please join us next week for another edition of This Week in Fraud Trends!
