Free Republic

Although Chinese laws forbid kids to play video games at night, minors have been using different tricks to bypass these restrictions. However, they probably won’t be able to do it anymore with the deployment of Tencent’s new facial recognition system. According to the Chinese website Sixth Tone, Tencent has officially launched its controversial facial recognition system on July 6. The initiative, which was previously dubbed “Midnight Patrol,” uses AI and big data to detect kids who try to bypass the restrictions. “We will conduct a face screening for accounts registered with real names and that have played for a certain...

Uploading personal photos to the internet can feel like letting go. Who else will have access to them, what will they do with them—and which machine-learning algorithms will they help train? The company Clearview has already supplied US law enforcement agencies with a facial recognition tool trained on photos of millions of people scraped from the public web. But that was likely just the start. Anyone with basic coding skills can now develop facial recognition software, meaning there is more potential than ever to abuse the tech in everything from sexual harassment and racial discrimination to political oppression and religious...

The MTA on Thursday abruptly halted a program to test new security cameras on subway cars — a day after the Daily News raised questions about the ties the company providing the technology has to a Chinese firm that specializes in facial recognition technology. Transit managers last week sent a memo to subway crews alerting them of new video cameras installed on a four-car G line train. The new tech is part of a years-long effort by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to improve security and put more eyes underground. The test program installed four cameras in each of the cars,...

Tech firms funded by the British government are developing facial recognition systems that could be used by private businesses, such as pubs, as coronavirus vaccine passports. The scheme being developed by the tech companies iProov and Mvine — which have received a £75,000 government grant — would see companies employ software that would cross-reference the face of British patrons to vaccination and coronavirus testing databases before entering their establishment. The chief executive of iProov, Andrew Bud, told The Times that other vaccine passport systems are ineffective compared to facial recognition technology.

Amazon delivery drivers nationwide have to sign a "biometric consent" form this week that grants the tech behemoth permission to use AI-powered cameras to access drivers' location, movement, and biometric data. If the company's delivery drivers, who number around 75,000 in the United States, refuse to sign these forms, they lose their jobs. The form requires drivers to agree to facial recognition and other biometric data collection within the trucks they drive.

Plus: Check if your Flickr photos are in facial recognition engines and and the list of NSFW words for AICanada’s privacy watchdog has found Clearview AI in “clear violation” of the country’s privacy laws, and has told the facial-recognition startup to stop scraping images of Canadians and delete all existing photos it has on those citizens. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada launched an official investigation into the upstart’s practices, and as a result Clearview stopped selling its software to Canadian police. “Clearview's massive collection of millions of images without the consent or knowledge of individuals for the...

Clearview AI’s controversial facial-recognition app has seen a spike in use... ....First reported by the New York Times, Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That confirmed to Gizmodo that the app saw a 26% jump in search volume on Jan. 7 compared to its usual weekday averages.... ... Roughly 2,400 polices agencies nationwide have contracts to use Clearview’s facial recognition software, according to the company, and several of them have reportedly been turning to it to assist federal investigators.

Trump supporters say that antifa members disguised as one of them infiltrated the protesters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. A retired military officer told The Washington Times that the firm XRVision used its software to do facial recognition of protesters and matched two Philadelphia antifa members to two men inside the Senate. The source provided the photo match to The Times. One has a tattoo that indicates he is a Stalinist sympathizer. antifa promotes anarchy through violence and wants the end of America in favor of a Stalinist-state. “No more USA at all” is a protest chant. XRVision...

We’re hearing Gestapo thrown around a lot lately. It’s almost as though the legions of easily-propagandized ignorants wore out the constant mis-use of Nazi, Fascist and Hitler. Most of the Gestapo iterations of this are complete nonsense. Most. Not all. The Chinese Communist government’s police state apparatus is the modern day equivalent of the Gestapo. A report leaked to the Washington Post shows that the Chinese Communist government has tested, and is presumably using, AI facial recognition software developed by Huawei to identify the Muslim ethnic minority of Uighurs and alert police — read, Gestapo. The Post story reports: “The...

Ever since Kamenya Omoto, a Tokyo-based specialty mask maker and store, announced its intention to buy the rights to people’s faces for 40,000 yen ($380) a pop, it’s been overwhelmed with offers. The company wants to reproduce people’s faces in the form of hyper-realistic masks and sell them for an estimated ($940). If a mask proves popular with clients, the person whose appearance inspired it stands to earn a percentage of the profits as well. The controversial project, named “That Face”, reportedly aims to give a sci-fi twist to the idea of buying and selling faces. Anyone over 20-years-old and...

Looking at the Strike Force Extreme with a steel cover as I want a low profile discreet setup attached to the top of our yard gate which is 6 feet in height. (Link and URL are to the Browning Strike Force shown on Amazon.) Adjacent property owner is trespassing in our front yard and deliberately destroying our lawn along his driveway, extending out to five feet of our lawn. This was suggested to me by a sergeant major with the county sheriff's office. He said to install a camera because their experience was its presence would alter this person's behavior...

Officials lauded 'first in the nation' ban, which prohibits private use 'in places of public accommodation' City Council members voted unanimously on Wednesday to prohibit the public – and, in some cases, private – use of facial recognition technology, making it the most stringent ban of this kind nationwide, according to multiple reports. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty introduced the bans, which immediately took effect for city agencies, and will be effective on Jan. 1 for private businesses, The Oregonian and Oregon Public Broadcasting reported. The ordinances bar the use of facial recognition technology by...

(CNN Business)The city of Portland, Oregon, on Wednesday banned the use of facial-recognition technology by city departments — including local police — as well as public-facing businesses such as stores, restaurants and hotels. Portland joins a growing number of places in the United States, such as San Francisco, Oakland, and Boston, that have outlawed city use of the surveillance technology, which is meant to identify a person from an image of their face. But its decision to prevent both local government and businesses from employing the technology appears to be the most sweeping ban yet by an individual city. Facial...

YECHANG, China - There are many challenges to applying facial recognition technology to animals: Pigs don't have distinguishing features and cows often want to lick the cameras. But there is an advantage: Farmyard inhabitants tend not to complain about impingements on their civil liberties. Having mastered facial recognition for humans to an alarmingly precise degree, even picking out wanted criminals from huge crowds, Chinese tech whizzes are turning their attention to furrier faces. "We've been using it for sheep, pigs and cows," said Zhao Jinshi, who studied at Cornell University and founded Beijing Unitrace Tech, a company developing software for...

Researchers with the University of Chicago's SAND Lab have detailed the development of a new tool called Fawkes that subtly alters images in a way that makes them unusable for facial recognition. The tool comes amid growing concerns about privacy and an editorial detailing the secret scraping of billions of online images to create facial recognition models. Put simply, Fawkes is a cloaking tool that modifies images in ways imperceptible to the human eye. The idea is that anyone can download the tool, which has been made publicly available, to first cloak their images before posting them online. The name...

Police forces in the European Union are planning to establish an interconnected bloc-wide network of facial recognition databases, leaked documents have revealed. An EU Council report, first obtained by The Intercept, circulated among 10 member states last November, details measures led by Austria to legislate for the building of a network of facial recognition databases that could be used and accessed by police forces across the bloc. EurActiv saw a copy of the leaked documents, which find that certain member states in the EU lag behind in the implementation of their facial recognition databases for networking purposes, and states that...

If Hoan Ton-That is feeling the pressure, he isn't showing it. Over the last month, fears about facial recognition technology and police surveillance have intensified, all thanks to Ton-That's startup, Clearview AI. First came a front-page investigation in The New York Times, revealing Clearview has been working with law enforcement agencies to match photos of unknown faces to people's online images. Next, cease-and-desist letters rolled in from tech giants Twitter, Google and Facebook. Lawmakers made inquiries and New Jersey enacted a statewide ban on law enforcement using Clearview while it looks into the software. But during an interview at CNN's...

The more we talk about freedom (of speech, of assembly, to carry guns, religion) in the world today occupied and controlled by everything progressive, the more we hear the chains rattling I wrote before about the 2006 Oscar winner for the best Foreign Language Film, “Das Leben des Anderen” (The Lives of Others), a German drama that describes in painful detail life in the communist East Berlin of 1984, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, how ordinary and not so ordinary citizens were spied upon by their government, using agents of the infamous Stasi, the German Democratic Republic’s secret...

Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos. Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it...

Conference goers now have to be wary that robots will identify them everywhere they go. Corporations can now rent Chinese-made CloudMinds robots that can identify everyone on the conference floor. (To learn more about CloudMinds and China click here & here.) CloudMinds mission is to “make helpful robot services possible and to make them safe, secure and affordable.” While their hidden mission is to help governments identify everyone. According to CloudMinds “About Us” page, their so-called values are to convince employees, moms, dads and their children to trust rentable emotion and facial recognition robots. We make helpful robot Their rent-a-robot...