The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites
without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list.
Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.
And it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.
Clearview has shrouded itself in secrecy, avoiding debate about its boundary-pushing technology. When I began looking into the company in November, its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent Manhattan address as its place of business. The company’s one employee listed on LinkedIn, a sales manager named “John Good,” turned out to be Mr. Ton-That, using a fake name. For a month, people affiliated with the company would not return my emails or phone calls.
Clearview’s app carries extra risks because law enforcement agencies are uploading sensitive photos to the servers of a company whose ability to protect its data is untested.
Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir.
One of the odder pitches, in late 2017, was to Paul Nehlen — an anti-Semite and self-described “pro-white” Republican running for Congress in Wisconsin — to use “unconventional databases” for “extreme opposition research,” according to a document provided to Mr. Nehlen and later posted online. Mr. Ton-That said the company never actually offered such services.
Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police forces, offering free trials and annual licenses for as little as $2,000. Mr. Schwartz tapped his political connections to help make government officials aware of the tool,
The company’s main contact for customers was Jessica Medeiros Garrison, who managed Luther Strange’s Republican campaign for Alabama attorney general.
One reason that Clearview is catching on is that its service is unique. That’s because Facebook and other social media sites prohibit people from scraping users’ images — Clearview is violating the sites’ terms of service.
“A lot of people are doing it,” Mr. Ton-That shrugged. “Facebook knows.”
Mr. Thiel, the Clearview investor, sits on Facebook’s board. Mr. Nancarrow declined to comment on Mr. Thiel's personal investments.
Clearview also hired Paul D. Clement, a United States solicitor general under President George W. Bush, to assuage concerns about the app’s legality.
Mr. Clement, now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote that the authorities don’t have to tell defendants that they were identified via Clearview, as long as it isn’t the sole basis for getting a warrant to arrest them. Mr. Clement did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
“It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math,” said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School. “Absent a very strong federal privacy law, we’re all screwed.”
if your profile has already been scraped, it is too late. The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are later deleted or taken down
“We’ve relied on industry efforts to self-police and not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because there is so much money on the table,”
bill is designed to prevent dominant online platforms—like Apple and Facebook and, especially, Google and Amazon—from giving themselves an advantage over other businesses that must go through them to reach customers. As one of two antitrust bills voted out of committee by a strong bipartisan vote (the other would regulate app stores), it may be this Congress’ best, even only, shot to stop the biggest tech companies from abusing their gatekeeper status. according to the tech giants and their lobbyists and front groups, the bill, which was introduced by Amy Klobuchar and Chuck Grassley, respectively the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, would be a disaster for the American consumer. In an ongoing publicity push against it, they have claimed that it would ruin Google search results, bar Apple from offering useful features on iPhones, force Facebook to stop moderating content, and even outlaw Amazon Prime. It’s all pretty alarming. Is any of it true?
The legislation’s central idea is that a company that controls a marketplace shouldn’t be able to set special rules for itself within that marketplace, because competitors who object don’t have any realistic place to go. No business can afford to be left out of Google’s search index, and few online retailers can make a living if they’re not listed on Amazon. So the Klobuchar-Grassley bill, broadly speaking, prohibits self-preferencing by platforms that hit certain size thresholds, like monthly active users or annual revenue. To take a simple example, it would mean Amazon can’t give its in-house branded products a leg up over other brands when someone is shopping on its site, and Google can’t choose to give YouTube links when someone does a video search unless those links are objectively the most relevant. The bill would impose other constraints on Amazon, like preventing it from using data gleaned from third-party sellers to improve the sales of its own brands. (Last month, the House Judiciary Committee asked the DOJ to investigate Amazon executives for allegedly lying to Congress about whether the company does this.) But Mitchell, who supports the bill, says it doesn’t go far enough. She thinks a breakup is needed “Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls ‘direct answers,’ which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent.” Keeping users on Google properties means more opportunities to show ads and more ways to take a cut of a transaction
Salauddin is neither a powerful politician nor an affluent business tycoon. An Uber driver by profession, over the last three years, Salauddin has become a quasi-celebrity as a gig industry organizer: spearheading strikes, engaging with policymakers, and highlighting issues in the media to help improve the working conditions of his peers. Walking alongside Salauddin sent a strong message to Gandhi’s supporters: He is serious about India’s unemployment issues. In 2019, Salauddin co-founded the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT), a coalition of unions that now has over 36,000 members. He currently serves as the federation’s national general secretary. In 2020, he also launched the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union (TGPWU), which now has over 10,000 members, including cab drivers, food and grocery delivery workers, and e-commerce delivery persons from the southern state. Salauddin, who has a degree in computer studies, switches between Hindi and English smoothly. He speaks confidently about the “unfair practices of platforms,” and frequently refers to “the algorithm” when talking about why gig workers suffer due to apps. Unlike many other union leaders in India, Salauddin is extremely tech- and media-savvy. He regularly keeps in touch with local and foreign journalists, sharing screenshots and press releases via WhatsApp. He’s articulate and knows how to build a story.
public research suggests that encrypted material may eventually be unlocked by powerful computers.. Shor’s algorithm would make a quantum computer exponentially faster than a classical one at cracking an encryption system based on large prime numbers — called RSA after the initials of its inventors — as well as some other popular cryptography techniques, which currently protect online privacy and security. But implementing Shor’s technique would require a much larger quantum computer than the prototypes available. The size of a quantum computer is measured in quantum bits, or qubits; researchers say it might take a million or more qubits to crack RSA. The largest quantum machine available today — the Osprey chip announced in November by IBM — has 433 qubits.
In the paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, they claim that it could break strong RSA keys — numbers with more than 600 decimal digits — using just 372 qubits. In an email to Nature on behalf of all the authors, Guilu Long, a physicist at Tsinghua University in China, cautioned that having many qubits is not enough, and that current quantum machines are still too-error prone to do such a large computation successfully. “Simply increasing the qubit number without reducing the error rate does not help.”
while Shor’s algorithm is guaranteed to break encryption efficiently when (and if) a large-enough quantum computer becomes available, the optimization-based technique could run on a much smaller machine, but it might never finish the task.
An investigation by The Markup and STAT found 49 out of 50 telehealth websites sharing health data via Big Tech’s tracking tools
Virtual care websites were leaking sensitive medical information they collect to the world’s largest advertising platforms.
URLs users visited:49 sites
Personal info (e.g. full name, email, phone):35 sites
When user initiated checkout:19 sites
User's answers to questionnaires:13 sites
When user added to the cart:11 sites
When user created an account:9 sites
On 13 of the 50 websites, we documented at least one tracker—from Meta, Google, TikTok, Bing, Snap, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest—that collected patients’ answers to medical intake questions.
Health privacy experts and former regulators said sharing such sensitive medical information with the world’s largest advertising platforms threatens patient privacy and trust and could run afoul of unfair business practices laws. They also emphasized that privacy regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) were not built for telehealth. That leaves “ethical and moral gray areas” that allow for the legal sharing of health-related data
Google:47 sites
Facebook:44 sites
Bing:27 sites
TikTok:23 sites
Snapchat:15 sites
Pinterest:11 sites
Linkedin:9 sites
Twitter:7 site
Rather than providing care themselves, telehealth companies often act as middlemen connecting patients to affiliated providers covered by HIPAA. As a result, information collected during a telehealth company’s intake may not be protected by HIPAA, while the same information given to the provider would be.
Together, the companies in this analysis reflect an increasingly competitive—and lucrative—direct-to-consumer health care market. The promise of a streamlined, private prescription process has helped telehealth startups raise billions as they seek to capitalize on a pandemic-driven boom in virtual care.
The industry’s rapid growth has been enhanced by its ability to use data from tools like pixels to target advertisements to increasingly specific patient populations and to put ads in front of users who have visited their site before.
“It’s a pure monetization play,” said Eric Perakslis, chief science and digital officer at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. “And yes, everybody else is doing it, it’s the way the internet works.… But I think that it’s out of step with medical ethics, clearly.”
The increased attention reflects growing fears about how health data may be used once it enters the black boxes of corporate data warehouses—whether it originates from a hospital, a location tracker, or a telehealth website.
“The health data market just continues to kind of spiral out of control, as you’re seeing here,” said Perakslis.
But thanks to their business structures, many of the companies behind telehealth websites appear to be operating on the outskirts of health privacy regulations.
The telehealth companies that responded to our detailed queries said their data-sharing practices adhered to their privacy policies. Those kinds of policies commonly include notice that some—but not all—health data shared with the site is subject to HIPAA. Many companies responded that they were careful to ensure that data shared via third-party tools was not considered protected health information.
But the structure of those companies’ businesses—and the inscrutable language in their privacy policies and terms of use—make it difficult for consumers to know what data would qualify as protected, and when.
Further complicating decisions for patients, at least 12 of the direct-to-consumer companies we examined promise on their websites that they are “HIPAA-compliant.” That could encourage users to think all the data they share is protected and lead them to divulge more, said Hartzog. Yet the regulations apply to the websites’ data use only in limited cases.
Facebook’s transparency tool..did not provide details about the specific data Facebook ingested during those interactions. A TikTok pixel collected some of that same information from RexMD, but TikTok’s report on our “usage data from third-party apps and websites” had just one line: “You have no data in this section.”
On some websites, users’ data was also being collected by “custom events,” meaning that a website owner deliberately created a custom tracking label that could have a phrase such as “checkout” in it but wouldn’t necessarily show up in the tech platforms’ transparency tools.
Without updated laws and regulations, experts said patients are left to the whims of rapidly evolving telehealth companies and tech platforms, who may choose to change their privacy policies or alter their trackers at any time.
Conlon is an associate with the New Jersey based law firm, Davis, Saperstein and Solomon, which for years has been involved in personal injury litigation against a restaurant venue now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment.
"MSG instituted a straightforward policy that precludes attorneys pursuing active litigation against the Company from attending events at our venues until that litigation has been resolved.
They had identified and zeroed in on her, as security guards approached her right as he got into the lobby.
"It was pretty simultaneous, I think, to me, going through the metal detector, that I heard over an intercom or loudspeaker," she told NBC New York. "I heard them say woman with long dark hair and a grey scarf."
they knew she was an attorney.
They knew my name before I told them. They knew the firm I was associated with before I told them.
A sign says facial recognition is used as a security measure to ensure safety for guests and employees. Conlon says she posed no threat
"This whole scheme is a pretext for doing collective punishment on adversaries who would dare sue MSG in their multi-billion dollar network,"
apple creates fake union run by managers to trick employees into thinking they have their needs represented.
According to a recent complaint by the Communications Workers of America, Apple illegally created a work group driven by managers to try to stop union organizing efforts.
In a filing on December 16 with the US National Labor Relations Board, the Communications Workers of America accused Apple of "soliciting employees to join an employer-created / employer-dominated labor organization as a means of stifling union activities." This kind of action is forbidden under US federal labor law.
The CWA also accused Apple of holding mandatory anti-union meetings, something the company has been accused of before. During the sessions, store management reportedly claimed that Apple would be legally barred from negotiating on specific topics if workers unionized, which is false.
Behind the scenes, however, another big industry also had stakes in the standoff: Big Oil. Coal companies, chemical companies, and oil and gas backed rail majors in lobbying Congress to block the workers’ strike.
In early November, the American Chemistry Council, which counts BP, ExxonMobil, and Chevron among its members, put out a report warning that a rail strike could “pull $160 billion out of the economy” and lead to 700,000 job losses. Then last week, 400 business groups sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to use their authority from a 1926 law to impose the controversial, rejected contract in the absence of a voluntary agreement. In addition to retailers, agriculturists, and car manufacturers, signatories included the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group for drillers, the National Mining Association, and the Renewable Fuels Association, representing ethanol. All of these industries rely on freight rail to make and ship their products.
In the end, rail companies and fossil fuel interests were joined by President Joe Biden, who urged Congress to avert the strike over fears of economic breakdown.
Research from 2019 showed how, over the past 30 years, BNSF Railway, Norfork Southern, Union Pacific, and CSX, the four largest rail companies in the U.S., joined other coal-dependent companies such as electric utilities in pouring *tens of millions of dollars into denying climate science and opposing climate policy.*
“It shows that the rail companies were actually funding more climate denialism organizations than even the oil industry,” said Justin Mikulka, a research fellow at the energy transition think tank New Consensus who formerly covered the rail industry as a journalist. “Coal has been such a huge part of rail – it was in their interest to deny that coal was part of the problem.”
Beyond writing letters to block the most recent strike, oil and gas companies have a history of collaborating with the rail industry to avoid freight regulation. In 2013, after a series of high-profile oil train explosions, regulatory agencies spent years trying to implement oil-by-train safety policies, including speed limits for trains, improved braking systems, and requirements to condition oil to make it safer to put in tank cars. “At every meeting by one of the regulatory agencies, the person at the head of the table was someone from the American Petroleum Institute [or API],” said Mikulka, who wrote a book about how freight and oil companies blocked regulations in the years after a runaway train filled with crude oil derailed in Quebec, exploding and killing 47 people.
UPS workers across the country have told me the same thing. When the new year turned, the six-day weeks dragged on, taking a physical and mental toll on workers, who struggled to have a life outside of work; to make dentist appointments; to see their spouses and children without the fatigue of 12-hour workdays. Without sufficient staffing, the barely tolerable seasonal crunch at UPS transformed into an intolerable chronic squeeze. “It’s been nonstop,” said Steve Dumont, a 12-year veteran of “Big Brown” in Williston, Vermont. “It’s literally been like Christmas peak season for the last three years.”
Next year, however, these workers may finally win some relief. The collective bargaining agreement, or CBA, between UPS and its workers, who are unionized with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, is set to expire at the end of July, and forced or excessive overtime will be a central issue. The UPS national CBA is the largest private sector labor contract in the country. And with a militancy in the union not seen since the 1990s, the Teamsters leadership has warned UPS that it isn’t afraid to call a strike. With a nearly 350,000 strong workforce, it would be the largest strike against a single company in U.S. history. Transporting 6 percent of the country’s GDP, these logistics workers have incredible leverage.
In 2023, UPS workers will demand higher pay for part-time employees, as well as the elimination of the two-tier system introduced in their last contract from 2018, under which package car drivers in the lower tier receive inferior wages and fewer benefits. But they will also fight against forced overtime, rampant harassment by supervisors, and dangerous working conditions. With forced overtime, “it’s not about the money,” Hamil said. “It’s a quality-of-life issue where we can go home and we’re not totally exhausted.”
Since the pandemic began, the dismal working conditions across American workplaces have come under greater scrutiny, particularly by workers themselves. “The pandemic exposed this gap,” said Barry Eidlin, an associate professor of sociology at McGill University who studies class and labor movements, “between rhetoric and reality of these workers being considered essential but then being overworked, underpaid, and disrespected.”
Attendance and sick leave policies have led to widespread anger and frustration among rank-and-file railroad workers on major freight lines
One of the largest railroad unions narrowly voted to reject a contract deal brokered by the White House, bringing the country once again closer to a rail strike that could paralyze much of the economy ahead of the holidays, union officials announced on Monday.
The union SMART Transportation Division voted the deal down by 50.9 percent, the union said. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, which represents engineers, announced 53.5 percent of members voted to ratify the deal. The two are considered among the most politically powerful of the 12 rail unions in contract discussions.
The move highlights months of tension between unions and companies across a variety of sectors, as companies have been dealing with labor shortages and workers have taken advantage of more leverage in the workplace to press for better working conditions, more sick pay and more flexible schedules in the aftermath of the pandemic.
The rejection of the contract adds new pressure to the White House, which had been closely involved in negotiating the contract between the unions and rail companies. A shutdown of the nation’s transportation infrastructure heading into the holiday season would spell a political disaster.
Already seven of 12 unions have voted to approve their contracts. But in recent weeks, three of the smaller unions have also rejected their contracts and are back in negotiations.
The main sticking points for rank-and-file members have been points-based attendance policies that penalize workers for taking time off when they are sick or for personal time, and contribute to grueling, unpredictable schedules that weigh on workers’ mental and physical health, they say. In June, a 51-year-old union engineer put off a doctor’s visit, and died of a heart attack on a train weeks later, his family said.
the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees and the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, have rejected their contracts and would be allowed to strike or companies would be able to impose a lockout even sooner, right after midnight Dec. 5, unless Congress intervenes.
If those unions strike on Dec. 5, all of the unions would likely move in solidarity, provoking an industry-wide work stoppage.
In late September, with less than 48-hours to spare before a railroad shut down, Biden and other top administration officials helped negotiate a last-minute agreement. Points-based attendance policies had been at the heart of that dramatic showdown.
The deal struck included a 24 percent pay increase by 2024 — the largest for railroad workers in more than four decades — and, for the first time, flexibility for workers to take time off when they are hospitalized or to attend three routine doctor’s appointments a year without penalty. The deal also included a single additional paid day off. Currently conductors and engineers do not receive a single paid sick day, but carriers have said their attendance policy allows workers “to take time off when needed.”
But discontent among rail workers continued to brew. They say these concessions did not meaningfully change the points-based attendance policies that carriers began rolling out in 2020 to maintain staffing levels that they said they needed to keep trains running during the pandemic. Union members say the changes have come at the expense of their health.
The financial details emerged in a newly unredacted copy of a lawsuit that "Fortnite" video game maker Epic Games first filed against Google in 2020. It alleged anticompetitive practices related to the search giant's Android and Play Store businesses.
*Epic [Games] last year mostly lost a similar case against Apple Inc (AAPL.O), the other leading app store provider. An appellate ruling in that case is expected next year.*
The Google agreements with developers are part of an internal effort known as "Project Hug" and were described in earlier versions of the lawsuit without the exact terms.
The remuneration includes payments for posting to YouTube and credits toward Google ads and cloud services.
Google at the time forecast billions of dollars in lost app store sales if developers fled to alternative systems.
Twitter employees say the company is eliminating workers without enough notice in violation of federal and California law, the report said.
The NFF president, Fiona Simson, said considering benefits including food in approving workplace pay deals would be “transparent” and ensure “they are considered upfront, and everybody is very clear about the intention of that arrangement”.
Simson told Guardian Australia that farm employers offer a range of non-monetary benefits to workers including accommodation, electricity, food and fuel.
“It just makes sense to be making sure you can contemplate the particular nature of the farming business and the benefits that are provided to the workforce [in bargaining]."
“There’s a lot of opportunities there, particularly with the cost of living at the moment, those sorts of expenses can be very high for people.
“Providing those things as benefits or part of salaries is something that makes sense to consider for people working in rural and regional Australia.”
The Australian Workers Union national secretary, Daniel Walton, said “the days of vulnerable workers being ‘paid’ with food instead of money should be long behind us … if you work in Australia you deserve the Australian minimum wage and not a cent less”.
Walton acknowledged some jobs in remote locations required employers to provide accommodation and other essentials but “at no point” should these “be considered some kind of ‘service’ for which workers are expected to forgo pay”.
Tesla violated US labor law by implicitly banning employees from wearing shirts with union insignias, the National Labor Relations Board ruled yesterday.
the employer has the burden to establish special circumstances that make the rule necessary to maintain production or discipline,"
Also.. An earlier decision said Walmart violated the law by enforcing its policy in areas other than the selling floor, but that it had legitimate justifications for maintaining the policy in customer-facing areas.
Tesla violated federal labor law in several ways, including by banning employees from distributing union literature. Tesla CEO Elon Musk was found to have violated labor law with a tweet that indicated employees would lose stock options if they voted to unionize.
if contributions arent being used efficiently . Or there’s not transparency. Or if fluid charitable value is of the wrong form or should be non-fluid. Fluid being… money or time. Non-fluid being… direct effort to achieve goals with overall reliable success.
I am not necessarily talking about ethics.
I like the idea.
I often wonder how much value and potential, informal citizen journalism could achieve.
Wikipedia launched Wikitribune. It struck me as an attractive idea of employing volunteers at the street level to go out an interview persectives from the community and publish them. Great for low level stuff. Maybe not so much for high level stuff.
Theres the question of wether people will be willing to put in the work for the indirect reward of more independant society.
an offline version of the internet would be cool.
and i think it’s very possible for like-minded people to create a quality subset.
but to duplicate the whole trash dump of mostly spam… yeah that’s gonna require more storage capacity than most people have. [except maybe on the cloud]
so, to conclude:
i think it’s totally possible!
it just needs to be highly selective for community curated quality content.
if people would host topic specialized instances of yacy then we’d be all set.
unfortunately, reliability and resource demands are problems that casual yacy hosters would suffer from.
something like tantivy would be much more reliable for topic specialized instances but it doesn’t make use of peer2peer resource sharing.
what if we just had a lem community where people request quality information from a query/question/subject?
frequently, users configure their about:config for privacy or minimalism
settings such as disabling dom storage can cause websites to stop working.
what are some common or uncommon about:config settings that can be toggled to fix a website if it is acting dysfunctional?
Thailand India and France were most critical.
Australia, Canada, US, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan were least critical of capitalism harms.
most kinds of tracking will real a thing or two about what a person is thinking. literal brain tracking is the threshold of where people become concerned.