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AI system resorts to blackmail if told it will be removed

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AI system resorts to blackmail if told it will be removed

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AI system resorts to blackmail if told it will be removed

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In a fictional scenario, the model was willing to expose that the engineer seeking to replace it was having an affair.

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Dystopian Futures: How Climate Change and Surveillance Are Reshaping Our Imaginations

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Dystopian Futures: How Climate Change and Surveillance Are Reshaping Our Imaginations

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Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says

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Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says

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Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says

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Exclusive: Research finds sharp rise in models evading safeguards and destroying emails without permission

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Here’s Why AI May Be Extremely Dangerous--Whether It’s Conscious or Not

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Here’s Why AI May Be Extremely Dangerous--Whether It’s Conscious or Not

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Artificial intelligence algorithms will soon reach a point of rapid self-improvement that threatens our ability to control them and poses great potential risk to humanity

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Here’s Why AI May Be Extremely Dangerous--Whether It’s Conscious or Not

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Artificial intelligence algorithms will soon reach a point of rapid self-improvement that threatens our ability to control them and poses great potential risk to humanity

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Hong Kongers Are Purging the Evidence of Their Lost Freedom

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Hong Kongers Are Purging the Evidence of Their Lost Freedom

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As Beijing cracks down, Hong Kongers are purging evidence of their lost liberties.

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Opinion | Hong Kongers Are Purging the Evidence of Their Lost Freedom (Published 2024)

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As Beijing cracks down, Hong Kongers are purging evidence of their lost liberties.

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America's Ring doorbell camera obsession highlights the scourge of mass surveillance

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America's Ring doorbell camera obsession highlights the scourge of mass surveillance

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Why plastering cheap, internet-connected surveillance cameras on everything we own isn't fun or funny — and makes everyone less safe.

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Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future and Anna Bonesteel, strategic response manager at Fight for the Future

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Opinion | The dark side of America’s doorbell camera obsession

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Why plastering cheap, internet-connected surveillance cameras on everything we own isn’t fun or funny — and makes everyone less safe.

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Parkland school turns to experimental surveillance software that can flag students as threats

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Parkland school turns to experimental surveillance software that can flag students as threats

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The specter of student violence is pushing school leaders across the country to turn their campuses into surveillance testing grounds.

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Facial Recognition Moves Into a New Front: Schools

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Facial Recognition Moves Into a New Front: Schools

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A district in New York has adopted the technology in the name of safety. Opponents cite privacy and bias concerns.

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A district in New York has adopted the technology in the name of safety. Opponents cite privacy and bias concerns.

Lockport High School in Lockport, N.Y., has adopted a facial recognition system for security. Credit... Libby March for The New York Times

LOCKPORT, N.Y. - Jim Shultz tried everything he could think of to stop facial recognition technology from entering the public schools in Lockport, a small city 20 miles east of Niagara Falls. He posted about the issue in a Facebook group called Lockportians. He wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times. He filed a petition with the superintendent of the district, where his daughter is in high school.

But a few weeks ago, he lost. The Lockport City School District turned on the technology to monitor who's on the property at its eight schools, becoming the first known public school district in New York to adopt facial recognition, and one of the first in the nation.

The district, said Mr. Shultz, 62, "turned our kids into lab rats in a high-tech experiment in privacy invasion."

The decision underscores how facial recognition is spreading across the country and being deployed in new ways in the United States, as public officials turn to the technology in the name of public safety.

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A few cities, like San Francisco and Somerville, Mass., have barred their governments from using the technology, but they are exceptions. More than 600 law enforcement agencies started using the technology of one company, Clearview AI, in just the past year. Airports and other public venues, like Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, have adopted it as well.

Schools are a newer front, and the debate that took place in Lockport encapsulates the furor surrounding the technology. Proponents call it a crucial crime-fighting tool, to help prevent mass shootings and stop sexual predators. Robert LiPuma, the Lockport City School District's director of technology, said he believed that if the technology had been in place at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., the deadly 2018 attack there may never have happened.

"You had an expelled student that would have been put into the system, because they were not supposed to be on school grounds," Mr. LiPuma said. "They snuck in through an open door. The minute they snuck in, the system would have identified that person."

But opponents like Mr. Shultz say the concerns about facial recognition - namely privacy, accuracy and racial bias - are even more worrisome when it comes to children.

"Subjecting 5-year-olds to this technology will not make anyone safer, and we can't allow invasive surveillance to become the norm in our public spaces," said Stefanie Coyle, deputy director of the Education Policy Center for the New York Civil Liberties Union. "Reminding people of their greatest fears is a disappointing tactic, meant to distract from the fact that this product is discriminatory, unethical and not secure."

The debate in Lockport has unfolded over nearly two years. The school district initially announced its plans to install a facial recognition security system, called Aegis, in March 2018. The district spent $1.4 million, with money it had been awarded by the state, to install the technology across 300 cameras.

But when administrators wanted to do a test run last May, the State Education Department told them to hold off, partly in response to mounting public concerns over student privacy. The state wanted Lockport to make sure that students' data would be properly protected, and demanded a policy that would forbid the use of student data, including their photos.

By June, Lockport officials said they had adjusted their policies, and they began testing parts of the system. In late November, the State Education Department said the district's revised policy addressed its concerns. In January, the school board unanimously approved the latest policy revision.

When the system is on, Mr. LiPuma said, the software looks at the faces captured by the hundreds of cameras and calculates whether those faces match a "persons of interest" list made by school administrators.

That list includes sex offenders in the area, people prohibited from seeing students by restraining orders, former employees who are barred from visiting the schools and others deemed "credible threats" by law enforcement.

If the software detects a person on the list, the Aegis system sends an alert to one of 14 rotating part- and full-time security personnel hired by Lockport, Mr. LiPuma said. The human monitor then looks at a picture of the person in the database to "confirm" or "reject" a match with the person on the camera.

If the operator rejects the match, the alert is dismissed. If the match is confirmed, another alert goes out to a handful of district administrators, who decide what action to take.

The technology will also scan for guns. The chief of the Lockport Police Department, Steven Abbott, said that if a human monitor confirmed a gun that Aegis had detected, an alert would automatically go to both administrators and the Police Department.

If the Aegis system sent an alert to the department and the police could not reach anyone at the school to confirm the threat, Chief Abbott said, "it would be treated as a live situation."

Days after the district announced that the technology had been turned on, some students said they had been told very little about how it worked.

"I'm not sure where they are in the school or even think I've seen them," said Brooke Cox, 14, a freshman at Lockport High School. "I don't fully know why we have the cameras. I haven't been told what their purpose is."

Others, like Tina Ni, 18, said the new technology and the news coverage of her school were "cool."

Critics of the technology, including Mr. Shultz and the New York Civil Liberties Union, point to the growing evidence of racial bias in facial recognition systems. In December, the federal government released a study, one of the largest of its kind, that found that most commercial facial recognition systems exhibited bias, falsely identifying African-American and Asian faces 10 to 100 times more than Caucasian faces. Another federal study found a higher rate of mistaken matches among children.

In Lockport, black students are disproportionately disciplined. In the 2015-16 school year, 25 percent of suspended students in the district were black even though enrollment was only 12 percent black, according to data from the federal Department of Education.

Mr. LiPuma, the director of technology, said he believed that Lockport's system was accurate. He also said he, as well as some other school officials, would like to add suspended students to the watch list in the future, despite the State Education Department's recent directive that Lockport make it clear in its policy that it is "never" to use the system "to create or maintain student data." Most school shootings in the last decade, Mr. LiPuma said, were carried out by students.

"The frustration for me as a technology person is we have the potential" to prevent a school shooting, he said. "If something happens, I'm not going to feel any better about that, but it wasn't my decision. That's on State Ed."

Jason Nance, a law professor at the University of Florida who focuses on education law and policy, warned that listing students as "persons of interest" could have unintended consequences.

"If suspended students are put on the watch list, they are going to be scrutinized more heavily," he said, which could lead to a higher likelihood that they could enter into the criminal justice system.

Jayde McDonald, a political science major at Buffalo State College, grew up as one of the few black students in Lockport public schools. She said she thought it was too risky for the school to install a facial recognition system that could automatically call the police.

"Since the percentages for the false matches are so high, this can lead to very dangerous and completely avoidable situations," Ms. McDonald said.

She added that she believed police officers would "do whatever it takes in order to stop a suspicious person," even if that person was a young student in school.

Opponents of the new technology now pin their hopes on state lawmakers. In April, Assemblywoman Monica Wallace, a Democrat from Lancaster, introduced a bill that would force Lockport to halt the use of facial recognition for a year while the State Education Department studied the technology. The bill easily passed in the Assembly but was not taken up by the Senate.

Ms. Wallace said she intended to make passing the bill a priority in this new legislative session.

"We all want to keep our children safe in school," she said. "But there are more effective, proven ways to do so that are less costly."

She said school districts could, for instance, take smaller steps like upgrading entrances and exits, hiring school resource officers, and investing in counselors and social workers.

Mr. Shultz said he would keep making his case.

"Hopefully, other districts around the country will learn from Lockport's dumb mistakes," he said. "A decision to bring facial recognition and artificial intelligence into our schools ought to be the subject of a serious conversation."

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Facial Recognition Moves Into a New Front: Schools (Published 2020)

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A district in New York has adopted the technology in the name of safety. Opponents cite privacy and bias concerns. LOCKPORT, N.Y. - Jim Shultz tried everything he could think of to stop facial recognition technology from entering the public schools in Lockport, a small city 20 miles east of Niagara Falls.

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Business analysts opines about the benefits of AI, despite societal fear. DATE PUBLISHED: 31 July 2024

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Machines are no match for the human brain.

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Amazon’s Alexa Never Stops Listening to You. Should You Worry?

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Amazon’s Alexa Never Stops Listening to You. Should You Worry?

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The fact is that your Echo, Dot, or Show is always eavesdropping. This is and isn’t as creepy as it sounds.

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Amazon’s Alexa Never Stops Listening to You. Should You Worry?

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Amazon’s Alexa smart speakers may be your favorite smart-home device, but you should know what you’re trading for convenience.

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Opinion: Police are using surveillance tech to stalk love interests. Dystopia, here we come 

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Opinion: Police are using surveillance tech to stalk love interests. Dystopia, here we come 

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Police are using surveillance tech to stalk love interests. Dystopia, here we come | Arwa Mahdawi

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The tech company Flock has 80,000 cameras across the US – and a report finds some officers are taking advantage

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‘We Know You Live Right Here’: No Secrets in America’s New Surveillance Dragnet

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‘We Know You Live Right Here’: No Secrets in America’s New Surveillance Dragnet

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How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did

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How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did

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Target has got you in its aim with its surveillance.

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Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. , for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into your womb, to figure out whether you have a baby on the way long before you need to start buying diapers.

Charles Duhigg outlines in the New York Times how Target tries to hook parents-to-be at that crucial moment before they turn into rampant -- and loyal -- buyers of all things pastel, plastic, and miniature. He talked to Target statistician Andrew Pole -- before Target freaked out and cut off all communications -- about the clues to a customer's impending bundle of joy. Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they've bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources. Using that, Pole looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past. From the NYT:

[Pole] ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole's colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

Or have a rather nasty infection...

As Pole's computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a "pregnancy prediction" score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

One Target employee I spoke to provided a hypothetical example. Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There's, say, an 87 percent chance that she's pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August.

via How Companies Learn Your Secrets - NYTimes.com.

And perhaps that it's a boy based on the color of that rug?

So Target started sending coupons for baby items to customers according to their pregnancy scores. Duhigg shares an anecdote -- so good that it sounds made up -- that conveys how eerily accurate the targeting is. An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager:

"My daughter got this in the mail!" he said. "She's still in high school, and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?"

The manager didn't have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man's daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

(Nice customer service, Target.)

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. "I had a talk with my daughter," he said. "It turns out there's been some activities in my house I haven't been completely aware of. She's due in August. I owe you an apology."

What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.

"If we send someone a catalog and say, 'Congratulations on your first child!' and they've never told us they're pregnant, that's going to make some people uncomfortable," Pole told me. "We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you're following the law, you can do things where people get queasy. "

Bold is mine. That's a quote for our times.
Subscribe to Forbes's The Premise tech news digest today.
So Target got sneakier about sending the coupons. The company can create personalized booklets; instead of sending people with high pregnancy scores books o' coupons solely for diapers, rattles, strollers, and the "Go the F*** to Sleep" book, they more subtly spread them about:

"Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We'd put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We'd put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

"And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on, she'll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don't spook her, it works."

via How Companies Learn Your Secrets - NYTimes.com.

So the Target philosophy towards expecting parents is similar to the first date philosophy? Even if you've fully stalked the person on and beforehand, pretend like you know less than you do so as not to creep the person out.

Duhigg suggests that Target's gangbusters revenue growth -- $44 billion in 2002, when Pole was hired, to $67 billion in 2010 -- is attributable to Pole's helping the retail giant corner the baby-on-board market, citing company president Gregg Steinhafel boasting to investors about the company's "heightened focus on items and categories that appeal to specific guest segments such as mom and baby."

Target was none too happy about Duhigg's plans to write this story. They refused to let him go to Target headquarters. When he flew out anyway, he discovered he was on a list of prohibited visitors.

I think most readers of the excellent piece will find it both unsettling and unsurprising. With all the talk these days about the data grab most companies are engaged in, Target's collection and analysis seem as expected as its customers' babies. But with their analysis moving into areas as sensitive as pregnancy, and so accurately, who knows how else they might start profiling Target shoppers? The store's bulls-eye logo may now send a little shiver of fear down the closely-watched spines of some, though I can promise you that Target is not the only store doing this. Those people chilled by stores' tracking and profiling them may want to consider going the way of the common criminal -- and paying for far more of their purchases in cash.

A must read: How Companies Learn Your Secrets [New York Times] drawn from Charles Duhigg's forthcoming book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

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How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did

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Target has perfected the technique of analyzing consumers' shopping habits to figure out who's pregnant. How can they send customers congratulatory coupons without freaking them out?

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Ōura CEO insists they’ll never sell your data as customers publicly ditch rings over privacy fears tied to Defense Department and Palantir

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Ōura CEO insists they’ll never sell your data as customers publicly ditch rings over privacy fears tied to Defense Department and Palantir

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Ōura CEO insists they'll never sell your data as customers publicly ditch rings over privacy fears tied to Defense Department and Palantir | Fortune

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CEO Tom Hale said the company will never sell its customers' data.