• From ********* to EZacces$! Your Browser Extension Could Grab Your Password and Sensitive Info

    When you type a password or credit card number into a website, you expect that your sensitive data will be protected by a system designed to keep it secure. That’s not always the case.

  • Biden Administration Executive Order Tackles AI Risks, but Lack of Privacy Laws Limits Rach

    The comprehensive, even sweeping, set of guidelines for artificial intelligence that the White House unveiled in an executive order on Oct. 30, 2023, show that the U.S. government is attempting to address the risks posed by AI. The order is only a step, however, and it leaves unresolved the issue of comprehensive data privacy legislation.

  • “Surveillance: From Vision to Data” Explores History of Surveillance

    The term surveillance may suggest images of high-tech cameras or George Orwell’s ever-watching Big Brother, but surveillance involves more than watching and being watched. To understand surveillance and its consequences, look to data: who collects it, what information is compiled, how it is interpreted, and ultimately, why it matters.

  • Adtech Surveillance and Government Surveillance are Often the Same Surveillance

    In the absence of comprehensive federal privacy legislation in the United States, the targeted advertising industry, fueled by personal information harvested from our cell phone applications, has run roughshod over our privacy.

  • DHS Must Evaluate and Overhaul its Flawed Automated Systems

    DHS is likely the single largest collector and consumer in the U.S. government of detailed, often intimate, information about Americans and foreigners alike. Rachel Levinson-Waldman and José Guillermo Gutiérrez write that “these systems and the data that powers them operate behind a veil of secrecy, with little meaningful documentation about how they work, and are too often deployed in discriminatory ways that violate Americans’ constitutional rights and civil liberties.”

  • There’s a Cop in My Pocket: Policymakers Need to Stop Advocating Surveillance by Default

    All this year, U.S. leaders have attempted to pass a wave of misguided online security bills, designed to break that encryption and place Americans in a panopticon of surveillance by default. Encryption, cybersecurity, and technology policies, like the RESTRICT and EARN-IT Acts, with nonexistent tradeoffs address symptoms, not problems, and they do it badly.  

  • The Impending Privacy Threat of Self-Driving Cars

    With innovations often come unintended consequences—one of which is the massive collection of data required for an autonomous vehicle to function. The sheer amount of visual and other information collected by a fleet of cars traveling down public streets conjures the threat of the possibility for peoples’ movements to be tracked, aggregated, and retained by companies, law enforcement, or bad actors—including vendor employees.

  • The U.K. Government Is Very Close to Eroding Encryption Worldwide

    The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force backdoors into messaging services, which will destroy end-to-end encryption. If it passes, the Online Safety Bill will be a huge step backwards for global privacy, and democracy itself.

  • A New Way to Look at Data Privacy

    Researchers create a privacy technique that protects sensitive data while maintaining a machine-learning model’s performance. The researchers created a new privacy metric, which they call Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) Privacy, and built a framework based on this metric that can automatically determine the minimal amount of noise that needs to be added.

  • How an “AI-tocracy” Emerges

    Many scholars, analysts, and other observers have suggested that resistance to innovation is an Achilles’ heel of authoritarian regimes. But in China, the use of AI-driven facial recognition helps the regime repress dissent while enhancing the technology, researchers report.

  • U.S. Agencies Buy Vast Quantities of Personal Information on the Open Market – a Legal Scholar Explains Why and What It Means for Privacy in the Age of AI

    The issues pf the protection of personal information in the digital age is increasingly urgent. Today’s commercially available information, coupled with the now-ubiquitous decision-making artificial intelligence and generative AI like ChatGPT, significantly increases the threat to privacy and civil liberties by giving the government access to sensitive personal information beyond even what it could collect through court-authorized surveillance.

  • Tech Mandated by U.K. Online Safety Bill “Could Turn Phones into Surveillance Tools”

    Tech mandated by the U.K. government’s Online Safety Bill could be used to turn millions of phones into facial recognition tools. It would be possible, for example, for governments to use client-side scanning (CSS) to search people’s private messages, for example performing facial recognition, without their knowledge.

  • Appeals Court Should Reconsider Letting the FBI Block Twitter’s Surveillance Transparency Report

    Twitter tried to publish a report bringing much-needed transparency to the government’s use of FISA orders and national security letters, including specifying whether it had received any of these types of requests. However, without going to a court, the FBI told Twitter it could not publish the report as written. Twitter sued, and last month the federal Court of Appeals for Ninth Circuit upheld the FBI’s gag order.

  • “Smart” Tech Coming to a City Near You

    The data-driven smart tech trend extends far beyond our kitchens and living rooms. Will real-time sensors and data offer new solutions to the challenges cities face, or just exacerbate existing inequalities?

  • China and Russia Sharing Tactics on Internet Control, Censorship

    Beijing and Moscow have been sharing methods and tactics for monitoring dissent and controlling the Internet. For a few years now. The two countries have been deepening their ties for the past decade, and controlling the flow of information online has been a focal point of that cooperation since 2013. Since then, that cooperation expanded through a number of agreements and high-level meetings in China and Russia between top officials driven by a shared vision for a tightly controlled Internet.