Search
Content type: Examples
13th November 2019
A woman was killed by a spear to the chest at her home in Hallandale Beache, Florida, north of Miami, in July. Witness "Alexa" has been called yet another time to give evidence and solve the mystery. The police is hoping that the smart assistance Amazon Echo, known as Alexa, was accidentally activated and recorded key moments of the murder. “It is believed that evidence of crimes, audio recordings capturing the attack on victim Silvia Crespo that occurred in the main bedroom … may be found on…
Content type: Examples
4th December 2018
In May 2018, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement abandoned the development of machine learning software intended to mine Facebook, Twitter, and the open Internet to identify terrorists. The software, announced in the summer of 2017, had been a key element of president Donald Trump's "extreme vetting" programme and expected to flag at least 10,000 people a year for investigation. ICE decided instead to opt for a contractor who could provide training, management, and human personnel to do the…
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
12th August 2019
In November 2016 the UK Information Commissioner's Office issued an enforcement notice against London's Metropolitan Police, finding that there had been multiple and serious breaches of data protection law in the organisation's use of the Gangs Violence Matrix, which it had operated since 2012. The ICO documented failures of oversight and coherent guidance, and an absence of basic data protection practices such as encryption and agreements covering data sharing. Individuals whose details are…
Content type: Examples
13th August 2019
In February 2019 Gemalto announced it would supply the Uganda Police Force with its Cogent Automated Biometric Identification System and LiveScan technology in order to improve crime-solving. LiveScan enables police to capture biometric data alongside mugshots and biographical data. CABIS speeds up the biometric matching process by mapping distinctive characteristics in fingerprints, palm prints, and facial images. The Ugandan police will also pilot Gemalto's Mobile Biometric Identification…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
A new generation of technology has given local law enforcement officers in some parts of the US unprecedented power to peer into the lives of citizens. The police department of Frenso California uses a cutting-edge Real Time Crime Center that relies on software like Beware.
As officers respond to calls, Beware automatically runs the address. The program also scoures billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and the man’s social…
Content type: Examples
25th March 2020
According to information collected by Le Temps, telco Swisscom will use SIM card geolocation data to communicate to federal authorities when more than 20 phones are detected in an 100 square meters area. Gathering of more than 5 people are forbidden in Switzerland since March 21.
Data collected by the telco should theoretically only come from public areas and not private building. This data will be anonymised and aggregate before being passed to the health authorities (Office fédéral de la…
Content type: Examples
26th March 2020
The new Singaporean app, TraceTogether, developed by the Government Technology Agency in collaboration with the Ministry of Health was launched on March 20 after eight weeks of development. The app, which can be downloaded by anyone with a Singapore mobile number and a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone, asks users to turn on Bluetooth and location services, and enable push notifications. The app works by exchanging short-distance Bluetooth signals between phones to detect other users within two…
Content type: Examples
26th March 2020
Russian prime minister Mikhail Mishustin has ordered the country's Communications Ministry to develop a system, to be built on analysing specific individuals' geolocation data from telecommunications companies that can track people who have come into contact with those who have tested positive for the novel coronavirus. The data will also be passed to regional-level task forces fighting the virus's spread; officials are also tasked with finding a way to notify those who may have come into…
Content type: Examples
12th July 2019
The 90-year old suspect when to his stepdaughter's house at San Jose, California for a brief visit. Five days later, his stepdaugter's body, Karen was discovered by a co-worker in her house with fatal lacerations on her head and neck. The police used the data recorded by the victim's Fitbit fitness tracker to determine the time of the murder. It was been reported that the Fitbit data showed that her heart rate had spiked significantly around 3:20 p.m. on September 8, when her stepfather was…
Content type: Examples
12th July 2019
A man from Middletown, Ohio, was indicted in January 2017 for aggravated arson and insurance fraud for allegedly setting fire to his home in September 2016. Ohio authorities decided and succeeded to obtain a search warrant for the data recorded on the pacemaker after identifying inconsistencies in the suspect’s account of facts. Ohio authorities alleged that the data showed that the accused was awake when he claimed to be sleeping. It has been reported that a cardiologist, examining data from…
Content type: Examples
30th March 2020
Together with Norwegian company Simula the Norwegian Institute of Public Health is developping a voluntary app to track users geolocation and slow the spread of Covid-19. Running in the background, the app will collect GPS and Bluetooth location data and store them on a server for 30 days. If a user is diagnosed with the virus, its location data can be user to trace all the phones that have been in close contact with the person. Authorities will use this data to send an SMS only to those phones…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
A new generation of technology has given local law enforcement officers in some parts of the US unprecedented power to peer into the lives of citizens. In Fresno, California, the police department's $600,000 Real Time Crime Center is providing a model for other such centres that have opened in New York, Houston, and Seattle over the decade between 2006 and 2016. The group of technologies used in these centres includes ShotSpotter, which uses microphones around the city to triangulate the…
Content type: Examples
17th May 2019
In yet another murder case, a New Hampshire judge ordered Amazon to turn over two days of Amazon Echo recordings in a double murder case in November 2018.
Prosecutors believe that recordings from an Amazon Echo in the Farmington home where two women were murdered in January 2017 may yield further clues as to who their killer might be. Though the Echo was seized when police secured the crime scene, the recordings are stored on Amazon servers.
Timothy Verrill, of Dover, New Hampshire, was…
Content type: Examples
12th August 2019
VeriPol, a system developed at the UK's Cardiff University, analyses the wording of victim statements in order to help police identify fake reports. By January 2019, VeriPol was in use by Spanish police, who said it helped them identify 64 false reports in one week and was successful in more than 80% of cases. The basic claim is that AI can find patterns that are common to false statements; among the giveaways experts say that false statements are likely to be shorter than genuine ones, focus…
Content type: Examples
1st December 2017
In 2017, an anonymous whistleblower sent a letter to Green party peer Jenny Jones alleging that a secretive Scotland Yard unit was illegally monitoring the private emails of campaigners and journalists. The letter included a list of ten people and the passwords to their email accounts and claimed the police were using an India-based operation that did the work of hacking emails, shredding documents, and using sex as a method of infiltration. Jones's background includes a decade on the…
Content type: Examples
22nd April 2020
While the agency that manages residence permits, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, is closed, Israel has instructed Palestinians seeking to verify whether their permits to remain in Israel are still valid to download the app Al Munasiq, which grants the military access to their cellphone data. The app would allow the army to track the Palestinians' cellphone location, as well as access their notifications, downloaded and saved files, and the device's camera.
Source…
Content type: Examples
12th July 2019
On 14 May 2018, the husband of the victim, a pharmacist living in Linthorpe in Middlesbrough, subdued his wife with insulin injection before straggling her. He then ransacked the house to make it appear as a burglary. The data recorded by the health app on the murder’s phone, showed him racing around the house as he staged the burglary, running up and down the stairs. The victim’s app showed that she remained still after her death apart from a movement of 14 paces when her husband moved her…
Content type: Examples
22nd March 2020
Hong Kong is issuing electronic tracker wristbands to people under compulsory home quarantine to ensure they do not go out. The wristbands are accompanied by a mandatory smartphone app that shares their location with the government via messaging platforms such as WeChat and WhatsApp. Upon arriving at the place where they are quarantined, users walk around the corners so the technology can track the space in which they are confined.
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/hong-kong-uses-…
Content type: Examples
26th March 2020
Technology such as Hong Kong's electronic monitoring bracelets, used to ensure that people do not break their mandated quarantine, may appear reasonable during a pandemic, but could be problematic if deployed widely and used to identify those who have joined anti-government protests. The same applies to emergency legislation such as that passed by the UK government granting the government extraordinary new powers to shut down airports and ban gatherings. History provides examples: temporary…
Content type: Examples
1st December 2017
In 2015 Hong Kong's Face of Litter campaign used DNA samples taken from street litter and collected from volunteers to create facial images that were then posted on billboards across the city. The campaign, conceived by PR firm Ogilvy & Mather and organised by online magazine Ecozine and the Nature Conservancy, was intended to give a face to anonymous Hong Kong litterbugs and raise awareness of the extent of littering in the city and encourage people to change their behaviour. For…
Content type: Examples
5th May 2018
Police investigating the 2016 rape and murder of a 19-year-old medical student were unable to search the iPhone of suspect Hussein Khavari, an Afghan refugee who declined to give them his password. The investigators gained access to the phone via a private company in Munich, and went through Apple's health app data to discern what kinds of activities Khavari participated in on the day of the murder. The app identified the bulk of his activity as "climbing stairs". An investigator of similar…
Content type: Examples
3rd December 2017
A US House of Representatives oversight committee was told in March 2017 that photographs of about half of the adult US population are stored in facial recognition databases that can be accessed by the FBI without their knowledge or consent. In addition, about 80% of the photos in the FBI's network are of non-criminals and come from sources such as passports. Eighteen states supply driver's licences under arrangement with the FBI. In response, privacy advocates and politicians called for…
Content type: Examples
3rd December 2017
A 2009 paper by the US National Academy of Sciences found that among forensic methods only DNA can reliably and consistency match evidence to specific individuals or sources. While it's commonly understood that techniques such as analysis of blood spatter patterns are up for debate, other types of visual evidence have been more readily accepted. In 2015 the FBI announced that virtually all of its hair analysis testing was scientifically indefensible, and in 2016 the Texas Forensic Science…
Content type: Examples
20th May 2020
At least 27 countries are using data from cellphone companies to track the movements of their citizens, and at least 30 have developed smartphone apps for the public to download. Fewer objections have been raised in countries with greater levels of success in containing the virus. However, although Turkey has one of the worst outbreaks there has been little pushback against the surveillance even though the government is forcibly tracking people over 65, who are not allowed to leave their homes…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
In 2016 researchers in China claimed an experimental algorithm could correctly identify criminals based on images of their faces 89% of the time. The research involved training an algorithm on 90% of a dataset of 1,856 photos of Chinese males between 18 and 55 with no facial hair or markings. Among them were 730 ID pictures of convicted criminals or suspects wanted by the Ministry of Public Security. However, criminology experts warned that the results may merely reflect bias in the criminal…
Content type: Examples
22nd March 2020
Among the Chinese companies making efforts to help the country respond to the coronavirus are the technology giants Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent, Xiaomi, and Foxconn. In order to fight misinformation, Baidu created a map layer on top of its standard Map App that shows real-time locations of confirmed and suspected cases of the virus so that people can avoid hot spots. Qihoo 360 has launched a platform travellers can use to check if anyone on their recent train or plane trips has since…
Content type: Examples
21st March 2020
Technology entrepreneurs within Belgium would like to introduce a health code app similar to China's Alipay Health Code that would control individuals' movements based on their health status. The government has engaged privacy experts from the Belgian data protection authority and Ghent University to consider the possibility, despite the country's strict privacy laws, which have no equivalent in China..
Source: https://www.apache.be/gastbijdragen/2020/03/18/hoe-het-coronavirus-ook-onze-…
Content type: Examples
12th July 2019
The body of a 57-year-old was found in the laundry room of her home in Valley View, Adelaide, in September 2016. Her daughter-in-law who was in the house at the time of the murder claimed that she was tied up by a group of men who entered the house and managed to escape when they left. However, the data from the victim's smartwatch did not corroborate her story.The prosecution alleged that the watch had recorded data consistent with a person going into shock and losing consciousness. "The…
Content type: Examples
17th May 2019
In 2015, James Bates (of Arkansas, United States) was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Victor Collins. Collins was found floating face down in Bates’ hot tub in November 2015, police said. Amazon Echo entered the murder case because someone present on the night of Collins’ death recalled hearing music streaming through the device. It was widely reported that Amazon fought the prosecution’s request to hand over data recorded by the device that night. Eventually, the argument…