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I've gotten a few FReepmails asking for email services recommendations and I don't have the technical background to either warn against or recommend such services. One FReeper said Google is soon going to implement facial recognition or thumbprint ID etc. - is there anything out there still 'reasonably' private and not shifting to biometrics...yet? PS: Yes, I'm logged in. ;D

Satisfied with IAM systems after a six-team trial last season, the U.S. National Football League appears ready to go league-wide with biometric ID verification. The pilot came at the end of 3.5 years of digital IAM testing by the NFL. No sports leagues like to lose money when people get unpaid-for stadium access, but NFL owners are particularly upset by it compared to others. League owners are expected to set up a centralized facial recognition IAM service based on its Express Access authentication platform in the 2024 season. That would be for all 30 stadiums for the 32 teams, beginning...

Murphy, a grandfather who grew up in Texas, was in Sacramento, California when two armed men stormed into the Sunglass Hut on West Gray in Houston. uring the investigation, officers received a call from Anthony Pfleger, the head of loss prevention for EssilorLuxottica. Pfleger said he worked with Macy’s loss prevention to determine that the person who robbed the store was Murphy. 'Using artificial intelligence and facial recognition software, EssilorLuxottica and Macy’s took the video from the robbery and determined that Murphy was the robber,' the lawsuit states. 'The video was recorded by Kimco’s poor low-quality cameras.'

The FTC reached a settlement with Rite Aid over its AI-powered surveillance system that agency said lacked consumer safeguards In a complaint filed in federal court, the FTC argued that Rite Aid used AI-based facial recognition tools to identify customers who may have engaged in shoplifting or other problematic behavior. The agency said that Rite Aid failed to put in place safeguards to protect employees who were falsely accused of wrongdoing because the facial recognition technology mistakenly flagged them as matching someone previously identified as a shoplifter or other troublemaker. The FTC said the facial recognition system "generated thousands of...

n the summer of 2022, with a spike in violent crime hitting New Orleans, the city council voted to allow police to use facial-recognition software to track down suspects — a technology that the mayor, police and businesses supported as an effective, fair tool for identifying criminals quickly. A year after the system went online, data show that the results have been almost exactly the opposite. Records obtained and analyzed by POLITICO show that computer facial recognition in New Orleans has low effectiveness, is rarely associated with arrests and is disproportionately used on Black people. The first facial recognition search...

The Detroit Board of Police Commissioners came out blasting facial recognition systems for being racist Thursday night. It is the latest fallout for the false arrest of a pregnant woman for a carjacking she had nothing to do with, leading to a current lawsuit. A vote to ban facial recognition for the Detroit police failed tonight, which would have kept the department from using it for a year. "This technology appears to be 'techno-racism,' it’s the new Jim Crow that’s falsely arresting innocent people here in Detroit," said Commissioner Willie Burton."This is the third incident here in the city of...

An Upper West Side supermarket is using facial recognition technology to bust thieves as a wave of shoplifting slams the city — but some customers say it’s an invasion of privacy akin to “Big Brother.” Fairway on Broadway and West 74th Street is collecting customers’ personal information — such as eye scans and voice prints — in an effort to stop the scourge of shoplifters wreaking havoc on the market, according to the firm. “This technology is helping our stores reduce retail crime, an industry-wide challenge that has increased dramatically over the last few years,” the firm said in a...

China’s Orwellian social credit controls are in full force at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, where a New Jersey woman was removed from a Rockettes show after facial recognition tagged and ID’d her as an employee of a certain law firm. Security guards “knew my name before I told them,” Kelly Conlon said to NBC New York. “They knew the firm I was associated with before I told them. And they told me I was not allowed to be there.” ... Social credit schemes armed with facial recognition work just as instantly as unlocking an iPhone using Face ID....

A Long Island attorney says he was kicked out of a Knicks game after getting flagged by facial recognition technology at Madison Square Garden — the same system the company used to boot another lawyer from a Rockettes show. “I was upset — we had a whole night planned out that got botched,” said lawyer Alexis Majano, 28. “I said, ‘This is ridiculous.'” Majano — whose law firm has a pending lawsuit against Madison Square Garden Entertainment in an unrelated matter — was headed into the game against the Celtics with pals on Nov. 5 when he was stopped on...

TSA has put some important constraints on its use of facial recognition — but its current programs are just the beginning. No, you don’t have to participate in facial recognition at the airport. Whether you’ll feel like you have a real choice is a separate question. This system is for general passenger security screening. You step up to the travel document checker kiosk and stick your ID into a machine. Then you look into a camera for up to five seconds and the machine compares your live photo to the one it sees on your ID. They call this a...

Walking past the countless photos of Holocaust survivors and victims at Warsaw’s POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in 2016, New York-native Daniel Patt was haunted by the possibility that he was passing the faces of his own relatives without even knowing it. For Patt, a 40-year-old software engineer now working for Google, that sort of conundrum presented the potential for a creative solution. And so he set to work creating and developing From Numbers to Names (N2N), an artificial intelligence-driven facial recognition platform that can scan through photos from prewar Europe and the Holocaust, linking them to...

Mastercard is piloting new technology that lets shoppers make payments with just their face or hand at the checkout point. The company on Tuesday launched a program for retailers to offer biometric payment methods, like facial recognition and fingerprint scanning. At checkout, users will be able to authenticate their payment by showing their face or the palm of their hand instead of swiping their card.

Ukraine uses facial recognition to identify dead Russian soldiers, minister says By Paresh Dave March 25, 2022 12:32 AM GMT+9 Last Updated 10 hours ago OAKLAND, Calif., March 23 (Reuters) - Ukraine is using facial recognition software to identify the bodies of Russian soldiers killed in combat and to trace their families to inform them of their deaths, Ukraine's vice prime minister told Reuters. Reuters exclusively reported that Ukraine's Ministry of Defense this month began using technology from Clearview AI, a New York-based facial recognition provider that finds images on the web that match faces from uploaded photos. It was...

Ukraine's defense ministry on Saturday began using Clearview AI’s facial recognition technology, the company's chief executive told Reuters, after the U.S. startup offered to uncover Russian assailants, combat misinformation and identify the dead. Ukraine is receiving free access to Clearview AI’s powerful search engine for faces, letting authorities potentially vet people of interest at checkpoints, among other uses, added Lee Wolosky, an adviser to Clearview and former diplomat under U.S. presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden....

The IRS will soon make taxpayers upload a selfie to access certain tax tools. “Starting in summer 2022, if you need to login to the IRS’s website to access the Child Tax Credit Update Portal, get your tax transcript or view a payment agreement with the agency, you will need to create an account with third-party identity verification company ID.me,” CNBC reported. “A simple username and password will no longer suffice: You will need to provide a government document with a photo, such as a driver’s license, state ID or passport, and take a video selfie with your smartphone or...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will soon require taxpayers to submit a scan of their face in order to access certain features and tax records. The change, first reported on by Krebs on Security, will force users to sign into the IRS website through an account with third-party firm ID.me, and provide a government identification document with their photo alongside a selfie to verify their identity, according to the IRS website. The IRS first announced its partnership with ID.me in November, arguing the arrangement would “improve accessibility” and security for users.

Data has been shared with third parties without people having the option to opt out or without even being made aware that this is happening”.. As if the liberty erasing connotations of vaccine passports were not enough on their own, it has been revealed that the Scottish government has allowed data from the scheme to be shared with private companies including Amazon. The Daily Record reports, “We have learned the NHS mobile phone app which presents the personal medical information in the form of a QR Code shares data with companies including Amazon, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Royal Mail and an AI...

In the 18th century, Jeremy Bentham, an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer, introduced the idea of the Panopticon, a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. Each cell is flooded with light, which creates an environment in which prisoners are under constant watch. Even if no guard is on duty, a prisoner will always feel as if they are being watched. Bentham described it as “[a] new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind.” The Panopticon is the optimal prison; it enables an unprecedented...

The U.N. human rights chief is calling for a moratorium on the use of artificial intelligence technology that poses a serious risk to human rights, including face-scanning systems that track people in public spaces. Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, also said Wednesday that countries should expressly ban AI applications which don’t comply with international human rights law. Applications that should be prohibited include government “social scoring” systems that judge people based on their behavior and certain AI-based tools that categorize people into clusters such as by ethnicity or gender. AI-based technologies can be a force for...

"We would go into villages and enrol people into this biometric data system," US Marine Special Operations Command veteran Peter Kiernan recalls. "You had a device about 12 inches by six inches wide. It would scan their fingerprints, it would scan their retina, it would also take a picture of them." A United Nations document recently seen by the BBC says the Taliban are intensifying their hunt for people who worked for, and collaborated with, Nato and US forces. And the giant stores of biometric data collected by both the US military and the Afghan government could, some argue, pose...