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Content type: Examples
20th December 2018
In 2018 a report from the Royal United Services Institute found that UK police were testing automated facial recognition, crime location prediction, and decision-making systems but offering little transparency in evaluating them. An automated facial recognition system trialled by the South Wales Police incorrectly identified 2,279 of 2,470 potential matches. In London, where the Metropolitan Police used facial recognition systems at the Notting Hill Carnival, in 2017 the system was wrong 98% of…
Content type: Examples
16th July 2018
In 2013, Edward Snowden, working under contract to the US National Security Agency for the consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton, copied and leaked thousands of classified documents that revealed the inner workings of dozens of previously unknown surveillance programs. One of these was PRISM, launched in 2007, which let NSA use direct access to the systems of numerous giant US technology companies to carry out targeted surveillance of the companies' non-US users and Americans with foreign contacts by…
Content type: Examples
2nd May 2018
A new examination of documents detailing the US National Security Agency's SKYNET programme shows that SKYNET carries out mass surveillance of Pakistan's mobile phone network and then uses a machine learning algorithm to score each of its 55 million users to rate their likelihood of being a terrorist. The documents were released as part of the Edward Snowden cache. The data scientist Patrick Ball, director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, which produces scientifically…
Content type: Examples
4th May 2018
The Japanese electronics giant NEC introduced one of its facial recognition systems for the first time in a sports arena in Colombia. The soccer stadium in Medellin has a capacity of 45,000 people and occasionally suffers from hooligans. The operator of the arena takes photos of such hooligans when they are detained, and has compiled a "blacklist" so they can be identified if they return to the stadium. NEC's facial recognition systems are in place in about 40 countries.
Writer: Jiro Yoshino…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
In 2015, a series of interviews with Moshe Greenshpan, the founder and CEO of the Israeli company Skakash, revealed the existence of the company's facial recognition software Churchix. The software is intended to help churches keep track of who attends services and other events by matching reference photos provided by new congregants to images captured on cameras within the church. Greenshpan claimed that an added benefit is to enable churches to identify criminals and sex offenders by adding…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
Because banks often decline to give loans to those whose "thin" credit histories make it hard to assess the associated risk, in 2015 some financial technology startups began looking at the possibility of instead performing such assessments by using metadata collected by mobile phones or logged from internet activity. The algorithm under development by Brown University economist Daniel Björkegren for the credit-scoring company Enterpreneurial Finance Lab was built by examining the phone records…