The Robot Butler Did It!

The good news is that the near future is going to see some rapid, revolutionary changes that could dramatically enhance our lives. The bad news is that the technologies pitched to “become successful and transformative” in the next decade or so are extremely vulnerable to all sorts of back-door, front-door, and side-door compromises.

Augmented Reality Breeds Dysfunction

Players of the first big "augmented reality" game, Pokémon Go, have crashed a car, fallen off a cliff, and hopped a fence in the middle of the night to catch a digital nothing beside a tiger enclosure.  In the process, they have been forced to accidentally get exercise (much to their chagrin), while also blissfully signing away their data to government, law enforcement, and private parties.

Zuckerberg Covers His Webcam

Even experts who don’t cover their cameras think they should. Why doesn’t Matthew Green, an encryption expert at Johns Hopkins University? “Because I’m an idiot,” he told Yadron.

“I have no excuse for not taking this seriously … but at the end of the day, I figure that seeing me naked would be punishment enough.”

Nosey Faces

Facebook's new head of policy and communication is a longtime senior advisor of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

More Spying Makes US More Safe

Despite the fact that the FBI's awareness of Omar Mateen made no substantive difference to his plans, Hillary Clinton has promised to pressure tech companies to comply with intelligence agencies in an intensified program of domestic surveillance.

Your Landlord Needs To See Your Sandwich

Make no mistake: The data will mislead. Among the behaviors that count against your Tenant Assured “credit” percentage — i.e., how confident the company is that you’ll pay rent — are “online retail social logins and frequency of social logins used for leisure activities.” In other words, Tenant Assured draws conclusions about your credit-worthiness based on things such as whether you post about shopping or going out on the weekends.

Belgian Police Warn Against Liking Things

Facebook's helpful new feature allowing users to react with greater nuance has the coincidental effect of providing deeper data on user mental states, allowing algorithms to tailor the selection and placement of advertisements to take advantage of their moods.

Disappearing Migrants Necessitate Better Surveillance

Germany has lost track of 130,000 migrants, so the European Commission must spend £24million on computers to track everyone's faces.  The technology will be ready in four years' time--at which point it will help to bring migration under control, and definitely not be used for any other purpose.

Wellness Monitoring Takes Off

The corporation you work for would like you to wear a tracking device to collect data about your movements, for your health.

They're Listening

In Bentham's Panopticon, a design for a prison, the guard in the tower can see right through the surrounding ring of cells.  The inmates in their cells can't see into the guard tower, so they don't know when they're being watched.  They begin to police themselves, just in case.  They internalise the judging observer, and don't break any rules.

A recent paper suggests that online commenters aware of NSA surveillance, and convinced of its import for national security, will censor themselves from expressing views they believe go against the norm.  The perception of being observed increases conformity, and discourages dissenting opinions.  The need for hectoring collectivism is never even reached.

Computers now know when you're angry

Thanks to advances in modern technology, Jenkins and his colleagues can now gather and process enough data points from your cursor movement to measure those deviations and indicate your emotional state.

British spooks 'could hack into children's toys for spying'

Mr Walker, whose organisation represents 850 UK technology firms, added: “When we start to think, not just about the world today, but the world in five, 10 years' time as the Internet of Things becomes more real, and more pervasive... I think it requires careful thought in terms of where the limits should be."

Europe: Welcome to a United Police State

This leads to a situation in which you might be reported to the police for being critical of Islam, or the so-called refugee issue, when making entries on Facebook or commenting under online articles, through the monitoring of these entries by different ‘pro-democracy foundations’.

Pennsylvania to Become First State to Use “Precrime” Statistics in Criminal Sentencing

"We are discussing whether or not to use statistics on 'potential future crimes' in determining how much time a person will remain involuntarily locked in a cage. Obviously there will be errors, and any error that leads to someone spending more time in prison based on a flawed prediction is ethically indefensible. If you want to use such statistics to only reduce punishment I could be in favor of it, but to use it to justify harsher sentencing seems like a horrible idea."

Churches Are Using Facial Recognition to Track Members

"'I can tell you in general that churches also don't like to be described as privacy invaders,' Greenshpan told me. 'Most of them would like to keep this confidential. We try to encourage churches to make Churchix more visible, so it will become like a checkpoint for registration. Of course, so far we haven’t had great success in doing that.'"

Why NSA surveillance is worse than you’ve ever imagined

"'It does become the problem of one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic,' he replied, 'where today we have the violation of one person's rights is a tragedy and the violation of a million is a statistic. The NSA is violating the rights of every American citizen every day on a comprehensive and ongoing basis. And that can numb us."

India Plans to Build 100 “Smart” Cities for the Elites

"The only problem is, it's not their money. They're doing this at the expense of everyone else. This city is not being funded out of their own pocket, it's being built with tax dollars, and the land will probably be stolen from local residents through eminent domain. This is a classic example of wealthy elites and corrupt politicians working hand it hand to maintain their power and standard of living. They're building their gilded atrocity on the backs of everyday citizens who, make no mistake, will not see any of the benefits."

Ottawa cites hate crime laws when asked about its 'zero tolerance' for Israel boycotters

"'It is the right and duty of citizens in any free state to engage in constructive non-violent peaceful criticism of state actions and behaviours,' says Patti Talbot, a senior staff member at the UCC.

The church sees itself as anti-racist and progressive, which is why it was horrified by the government's description of its advocacy as anti-Semitism, and worried by the declaration of zero tolerance.

'How is [zero tolerance] going to manifest itself?' asks Talbot. 'It could be directed against the United Church, it could be directed at a gamut of individuals in Canadian civil society. People of goodwill.'"

China rates its own citizens - including online behaviour

"'This is the most staggering, publicly announced, scaled use of big data I've ever seen', says Michael Fertik, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author of The Reputation Economy. 'It certainly feels about as Orwellian as your nightmares would have it be. On the other hand, it is probably a fairly inevitable evolution.'"

Turning America into a Battlefield: A Blueprint for Locking Down the Nation

"The problem arises when you start to add Jade Helm onto the list of other troubling developments that have taken place over the past 30 years or more: the expansion of the military industrial complex and its influence in Washington DC, the rampant surveillance, the corporate-funded elections and revolving door between lobbyists and elected officials, the militarized police, the loss of our freedoms, the injustice of the courts, the privatized prisons, the school lockdowns, the roadside strip searches, the military drills on domestic soil, the fusion centers and the simultaneous fusing of every branch of law enforcement (federal, state and local), the stockpiling of ammunition by various government agencies, the active shooter drills that are indistinguishable from actual crises, the economy flirting with near collapse, etc."