Interconnectedness
Getting accustomed to a world where any data can be used for anything
Happy Friday, readers! I’m Anna Baydakova and this is your weekly portion of digital surveillance and censorship news.
The most mind-blowing story of this week for me was that the geospatial data Pokemon Go players gathered years ago may soon power military drones. In the grand scheme of things, it shouldn’t be surprising: technology tends to expand across domains and use cases, especially now, when artificial intelligence is capable of connecting and matching all kinds of data at its disposal.
But we are still used to a relatively compartmentalized view of the world where there are parts of our lives dedicated to matters serious and non-serious, work and play, and boundaries between them, although porous, give us a certain sense of freedom while we’re in the “non-serious” domain.
But the kind of super-connected world where things said, written, and done for pleasure on one side of the globe can be used for politics, diplomacy, and war on the other side is dawning on us, mixing and matching parts of our reality we couldn’t imagine combined.
It makes me think about the chats we’re having with AI agents. With this universal answering machine at our service 24/7, it’s tempting to discuss the most private parts of our life with it, but where does this data end up? One person complaining about a partner is a curious story at most, but a million people dissecting their romantic choices – that kind of data can feed anything from a new business to a political manipulation machine.
We are truly moving towards the singularity now, so it’s genuinely hard to predict what the world of tomorrow – and our privacy in it – will look like. But some steps can still be taken today, and some people took matters into their own hands this week to protect themselves from warrantless surveillance.
So let’s get into it!
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Biometrics briefing
AI-powered facial recognition technology will be deployed during the World Cup games at stadiums in Boston, Miami, and Atlanta. – Wired
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has revived the plan to provide local police departments with its facial recognition app, Mobil Fortify. – 404 Media
UK police are expanding their use of live facial recognition technology in Essex County. – Echo News
Well played, Pokemon
Remember 2016, when people went crazy about the augmented reality game Pokemon Go? Players around the world wandered around their cities trying to catch fantastic creatures visible on the city landscape through the game interface – and gathering unique geolocation data for Niantic, a company with roots in Google that created Pokemon Go.
Years later, Niantic Spatial, an AI spin-off of Niantic, is finding buyers for that data, and it may end up, among other things, helping military drones. Niantic Spatial has partnered with Vantor, a U.S. company making detection software for drones and holding a $217 million contract with the Pentagon, The Guardian reports.
Joining forces, the two companies will be able to enhance drones’ ability to navigate places where GPS signals are unreliable. The benefit of having this kind of geodata produced on the ground and not dependent on satellite signal had earlier helped Niantic Spatial secure another partner – the delivery robot startup Coco.
“We had a million-plus locations around the world where we can locate you precisely. We know where you’re standing within several centimeters of accuracy and, most importantly, where you’re looking,” Brian McClendon, CTO of Niantic Spatial, told MIT Technology Review in March.
Pokemon Go was a unique experiment in collecting this kind of data around the world at scale, but today, you don’t need humans running around with smartphones to do that anymore: we now have robots that can move around semi-autonomously, capturing everything they “see” with their cameras.
In some cities, you can already see delivery robots, and police robots seem to be on their way: some are already being deployed at several World Cup venues in the U.S. and Mexico, Wired writes in an overview of surveillance during the FIFA games this year.
This world is bound to get thoroughly digitized, for peaceful reasons and otherwise.
Life through the lens of ALPR
Automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, have become a heated topic in the U.S. recently. License-plate reading cameras have been a familiar element of traffic safety monitoring on the roads for years, however, new AI capabilities are turning such systems into real-time, high-precision surveillance networks.
The new administration’s aggressive anti-immigration crackdown has put these systems into sharp focus as federal authorities have massively expanded surveillance capabilities, tracking both immigrants and citizens protesting the new policies. A group of upstate New York residents decided that things had gone way too far and sued Westchester County for the way it deployed ALPRs.
In the complaint, first reported by the Associated Press, the residents accuse the county of warrantless surveillance as the cameras record their cars constantly while “they travel to work, political organizing events, medical appointments, protests, reproductive health clinics, and religious services across Westchester County and the surrounding areas.”
The system used by the Westchester County Police Department, provided by a company named Rekor, makes hundreds of millions of recordings every year and keeps them for at least two years, the complaint reads. The software allows police to perform complex searches to “reconstruct, analyze, and make inferences about the routines, habits, and lives of people who drive in Westchester,” the plaintiffs say.
The system can show which cars pass certain locations frequently, which vehicles travel together, and who is traveling routes deemed “suspicious” – although there is no public information on what would make a route suspicious. The police departments allegedly spent almost half a million dollars on this system between 2022 and 2024, according to the complaint.
The residents filed public records requests with the police about their vehicles being recorded and found out their cars had been recorded hundreds of times. The plaintiffs are politically active citizens, they fear that the information about them attending protest rallies, observing ICE raids and canvassing can be easily inferred from their travel data and used by the government for retaliation, according to the document.
ALPRs has been infamously used by U.S. immigration agencies for tracking down immigrants, and by police for dubious causes like surveilling protests or tracking a woman after a self-administered abortion, as well as by police officers stalking their partners. Most of the time, a company named Flock made these kinds of headlines. Rekor is Flock’s competitor used by Westchester police.
In the meantime, competition is pushing ALPR companies to turn their products into even more complex surveillance systems: a firm called Leonardo is advertising a technology that will allow license plate reading cameras to also register unique identifiers of mobile phones, RFID cards, Bluetooth- and WiFi-connected devices in the car, 404 Media reports. This would allow not only tracking vehicles but also identifying passengers. Leonardo currently has contracts with U.S. Special Operations Command and the General Services Administration.
Meta rolls back
Meta has deleted the sleeping facial recognition code for its smart glasses after an exposure by Wired. Last week, the outlet reported that the company has quietly embedded the code into its Meta AI companion app, which has been downloaded to over 50 million phones.
The company was apparently getting ready to launch the facial recognition function for its smart glasses, and the code had been deployed no later than January, according to tech experts who analysed the code. The New York Times reported on the plans in February, citing a leaked corporate memo, in which company leadership suggested using the “dynamic political environment” in the U.S. to ship the feature while civil rights groups are distracted.
The plan did not work out as the civil rights organizations paid attention and asked Mark Zuckerberg and Meta not to launch a controversial feature, which would turn the Meta smart glasses into a portable biometric surveillance device.
After Wired revealed the presence of the facial recognition elements in the Meta AI app, the company said it was only “exploring” the feature, and deleted the code one day later, the outlet reports.
Surveillance capabilities of smart glasses have raised some brows across the ocean, too: European regulators are now looking into the privacy implications of the device, Politico reports. According to the outlet, the European Data Protection Board has ordered a report into smart glasses and it’s expected to be completed this summer. Lawmakers in Brussels are also prodding the European Commission to look into the issue.
For those who are worried about being recorded by people wearing smart glasses, German researcher Yves Jeanrenaud has created an app called Nearby Glasses, which scans the area around you for the Bluetooth signatures of smart glasses and shows whether there are any in your vicinity.
Nudes control
The UK wants to protect kids from pornography by enabling automated content monitoring on their phones.
“Big Tech companies like Apple and Google must activate built-in features or implement technical solutions on smartphones and tablets to detect and block nude images for children,” the government announced this week. So far, the cooperation is supposed to be voluntary, but “if companies do not act within 3 months, the government will bring forward legislation to force them to activate the technology.”
The idea is that nude pictures should be blocked not only in specific apps but across all apps and functions of a device that a minor uses. To avoid these limitations, users would need to confirm their age.
Signal, the company behind the popular encrypted messaging app, reacted with its own statement, warning that requiring everyone “to prove their age and/or have all their content scanned” may open the door to massive-scale government surveillance and censorship.
“We know that mass surveillance and censorship capabilities, however sincere-sounding the promises of those who initiate them are, never remain narrowly scoped. Once created, they will be expanded, forming a dangerous tool that will be wielded both in the UK and abroad to censor and surveil whatever they might consider ‘threats’ or ‘harmful content,’” Signal said.
The scope of monitoring, the company argues, “will be defined by the whims and proscriptions of the government to detect nudity today and political speech tomorrow.”
Apple and Google already have safety regimes for children that restrict nudity, which are supposed to be set up by parents. However, the UK government wants this to be the default mode for any device, unless users verify their ages.
Another face-palm for facial recognition
This newsletter’s author is on a mission to gather the ultimate collection of egregious facial recognition failures – and I’m getting there, one story at a time.
A Florida crabber got arrested for a crime in a town he had never even been to. Does this sound familiar? For those who’ve been following me for a while – yes: last year, a 50-year-old Tennessee woman was arrested for fraud committed in North Dakota, where she’d never been. Years earlier, an Oklahoma mother was wrongfully charged with a crime committed in Maryland, which she also never visited.
Robert Dillon, a 52-year-old resident of Fort Myers, Florida, is suing the Jacksonville Beach Police Department for wrongful arrest in August 2024, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyers representing him.
Dillon, who lives in Fort Myers with his wife and daughter and catches crabs for living, was arrested and accused of trying to lure a child at a McDonald’s in Jacksonville Beach.
Dillon was arrested despite the police having automatic license plate reader data (that notorious surveillance system, remember?) showing that Dilon’s car hadn’t been anywhere near the location in the days around the crime. Also, his match with the photo of the perpetrator was only 93%. Ultimately, the charges were dropped.
Unlike some other victims of the facial-recognition mistakes, Dillon only spent one night in jail, however, he still lost income while the investigation was conducted, and his mugshot remained online long after the charges were dropped.
A North Carolina resident spent three months in jail due to a faulty facial recognition match last year, losing his family home and his car while he was incarcerated. A facial recognition system matched him with someone who stole a car in Florida with just 85% accuracy.
Imagine having your entire life turned upside down and torn apart because the police chose to trust the shiny new tech more than any other evidence? Often, in such cases, facts contradicting the facial recognition matches are easily available to police but ignored.
Take last summer’s case in New York: an Amazon delivery driver was arrested for allegedly flashing a woman, although at the time of the incident he was driving miles away.
Or a case in the UK, where a software engineer was arrested for a burglary that occurred 100 miles away from his home, even though police officers themselves admitted he didn’t look much like the suspect – curly hair and dark skin were probably the only similar traits.
According to the ACLU, 15 people have been wrongfully arrested in the U.S. because of erroneous facial recognition matches. The technology is notoriously inaccurate with non-white faces in particular.
Watch the watchers: NSO is at it again
Some news from the world of commercial spyware: WhatsApp says that NSO Group, an Israeli company behind the infamous Pegasus spyware, has defied last year’s court order and targeted WhatsApp users again.
“We successfully disrupted NSO-linked social engineering attempts, after investigating user reports. They tried to trick people into clicking on malicious links to drive them to external websites outside of WhatsApp, similar to previously reported 1-click phishing campaigns linked to NSO. We also caught them creating test accounts and groups on WhatsApp, which we took down,” the company said in an announcement.
Last May, Meta won a landmark lawsuit against NSO for exploiting a bug in WhatsApp and infecting users’ phones with spyware in 2019. The spyware maker was ordered to pay Meta almost $168 million.
However, the company keeps targeting WhatsApp users, Meta says, so the social media giant is asking the court to hold NSO in contempt of last year’s order.
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And that’s all from me for this week, guys.
Stay vigilant!
Anna