A hundred child abductions a week? | The Cat Herder, Volume 5, Issue 20

If you can't trust a cutesy duck then who can you trust? Can you trust the Gardaí to reponsibly use f   May 29 · Issue #182 · View online If you can’t trust a cutesy duck then who can you trust? Can you trust the Gardaí to reponsibly use facial recognition when it seems even the Gardaí don’t trust the Gardaí with their personal data? 😼 “For non-search tracker blocking (eg in our browser), we block most third-party trackers,” he said. “Unfortunately our Microsoft search syndication agreement prevents us from doing more to Microsoft-owned properties. However, we have been continually pushing and expect to be doing more soon.” DuckDuckGo faces widespread backlash over tracking deal with Microsoft thenextweb.com – Share DuckDuckGo has confirmed that is has a deal with Microsoft that allows the Redmond company to bypass a block on trackers. The Minister for Justice rocked up to the Garda Representative Association’s AGM during the week with a special treat. A big bag of facial recognition for the lads! The announcement had next to no detail about how this sytem would work. It did, however, contain information about what the Minister thinks it isn’t (“not about mass surveillance”) and also immediately leaned into the traditional ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ argument. Rather than include this in the Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) Bill before that Bill went through pre-legislative scrutiny beginning last September the Minister has opted to tack this on at as amendments at committee stage, and announced it before the proposed amendments have been published. You can draw your own conclusions as to why the government has decided to take this approach. It’s less than two weeks since the EDPB published draft guidelines on the use of facial recognition technology in the area of law enforcement, which are open for public comment until the 27th June. Of course it’s impossible to see if the Department of Justice’s proposal is in line with these guidelines because no detail about how the department’s system is going to work has been provided. The Minister for Justice gamely attempted to explain it on the News At One on Wednesday but was remarkably short on specifics and very long on wild non sequiturs. According to the minister child abduction or child sexual abuse - it isn’t clear which - has apparently “increased by about 6,000% in recent years”. By my calculations this would mean that if there was a baseline of one child abduction in a not-so-recent year then in the most recent year there must have been close to 6,000 child abductions. That’s over a hundred a week. The only safeguard mentioned by the minister is a code of conduct. Which her department is writing. Which, like the amendment, has not yet been published. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties is agin this. If you are too there’s a petition you can sign editorially at least. Dr Róisín Costello had a good opinion piece in the Irish Times yesterday. what is most striking about the move towards using facial recognition technologies in this jurisdiction is how out of step it is with practice in other countries where similar mechanisms are being rapidly limited or abandoned over fears that they exacerbate discriminatory patterns in policing and are, fundamentally, ineffective. Why is the Government bucking the trend on facial recognition for policing? – The Irish Times www.irishtimes.com – Share Well-founded concern says use of AI in policing is discriminatory, ineffective and infringes on fundamental rights of citizens Also yesterday, nothing to fear, nothing to hide eh? Gardaí leaving GPS radios at home amid ‘big brother’ fears – The Irish Times www.irishtimes.com – Share Gardaí are leaving their radios at home to prevent senior management from keeping tabs on them, a study has found. — Patrick Breyer #JoinMastodon @echo_pbreyer 🇬🇧Entire German government now opposes EU #ChatControl #CSAM proposal to scan all private communications for suspicious content. Source of quote: https://t.co/hu4u3zmohS Photo: https://t.co/IgjUkDIJLj Read on: https://t.co/fta5P7Riva https://t.co/rD4zKyGLeZ 8:45 AM - 23 May 2022 What the researchers found was alarming: nearly 90 percent of the educational tools were designed to send the information they collected to ad-technology companies, which could use it to estimate students’ interests and predict what they might want to buy. Researchers found that the tools sent information to nearly 200 ad-tech companies, but that few of the programs disclosed to parents how the companies would use it. Some apps hinted at the monitoring in technical terms in their privacy policies, the researchers said, while many others made no mention at all. Remote learning apps shared children’s data at a ‘dizzying scale’ www.washingtonpost.com – Share The educational tools used by students during the pandemic also shared their information with advertisers and data brokers that could track them around the Web, an international investigation found. →text-only version Context Of the 164 EdTech products reviewed, 146 (89 percent) appeared to engage in data practices that risked or infringed on children’s rights. These products monitored or had the capacity to monitor children, in most cases secretly and without the consent of children or their parents, in many cases harvesting personal data such as who they are, where they are, what they do in the classroom, who their family and friends are, and what kind of device their families could afford for them to use. Governments Harm Children’s Rights in Online Learning | Human Rights Watch www.hrw.org – Share Governments of 49 of the world’s most populous countries harmed children’s rights by endorsing online learning products during Covid-19 school closures without adequately protecting children’s privacy. The FTC fined Twitter $150 million for using phone numbers and email addresses it had collected from individuals for security purposes to target ads. — The ICO “fined Clearview AI Inc more than £7.5m for using images of people in the UK, and elsewhere, that were collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition.” — The Belgian DPA fined publishing group Roularta €50,000 for dropping cookies without obtaining valid consent. Original (in French) | Machine translation “What is needed is not more self-regulation but true regulation, meaning objective and knowable standards adopted democratically, enforced by democratically appointed institutions like my office that can ensure organizations are truly accountable. While disruptive technologies have many benefits, what does not need disruption is the idea that democratic government must maintain the capacity to protect the fundamental rights and values of its citizens. That capacity is lessened when organizations have almost complete liberty to set the rules under which they will interact with their clients, and where they can set the terms of their accountability.” From ‘The state of privacy as I end my term’, remarks made by outgoing Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien. “Some of GDPR’s impact is also hidden—the law isn’t just about fines and ordering companies to change—and it has improved company behaviors. “If you compare the awareness about cybersecurity, about data protection, about privacy, as it looked like 10 years ago and it looks today, these are completely different worlds,” says Wojciech Wiewiórowski, the European Data Protection Supervisor, who oversees GDPR cases against European institutions, such as Europol.” From ‘How GDPR Is Failing’ by Matt Burgess for Wired. “Progressive MEPs also managed to include in the DSA a ban on advertising based on the profiling of users that employs sensitive data as defined under the GDPR. This concept includes political views, religious beliefs, sexual orientation and racial information. The proposal was initially resisted by some member states that believe users should be able to choose whether they could get targeted on these bases or not. However, lawmakers insisted on a ban since requesting consent is already covered in the GDPR.” From ‘Digital advertising in the crossfire of upcoming EU regulations’ by Luca Bertuzzi for the IAPP. — Endnotes & Credits The elegant Latin bon mot “Futuendi Gratia” is courtesy of Effin’ Birds. As always, a huge thank you to Regina Doherty for giving the world the phrase “mandatory but not compulsory”. The image used in the header is by Krystian Tambur on Unsplash. Any quotes from the Oireachtas we use are sourced from KildareStreet.com. They’re good people providing a great service. If you can afford to then donate to keep the site running. Digital Rights Ireland have a storied history of successfully fighting for individuals’ data privacy rights. You should support them if you can. Find us on the web at myprivacykit.com and on Twitter at @PrivacyKit. Of course we’re not on Facebook or LinkedIn. If you know someone who might enjoy this newsletter do please forward it on to them. Did you enjoy this issue? In order to unsubscribe, click here. If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here. Powered by Revue Privacy Kit, Made with 💚 in Dublin, Ireland

If you can’t trust a cutesy duck then who can you trust? Can you trust the Gardaí to reponsibly use facial recognition when it seems even the Gardaí don’t trust the Gardaí with their personal data?

😼

DuckDuckGo has confirmed that is has a deal with Microsoft that allows the Redmond company to bypass a block on trackers.

The Minister for Justice rocked up to the Garda Representative Association’s AGM during the week with a special treat. A big bag of facial recognition for the lads!

The announcement had next to no detail about how this sytem would work. It did, however, contain information about what the Minister thinks it isn’t (“not about mass surveillance”) and also immediately leaned into the traditional ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ argument.

Rather than include this in the Garda Síochána (Recording Devices) Bill before that Bill went through pre-legislative scrutiny beginning last September the Minister has opted to tack this on at as amendments at committee stage, and announced it before the proposed amendments have been published. You can draw your own conclusions as to why the government has decided to take this approach.

It’s less than two weeks since the EDPB published draft guidelines on the use of facial recognition technology in the area of law enforcement, which are open for public comment until the 27th June. Of course it’s impossible to see if the Department of Justice’s proposal is in line with these guidelines because no detail about how the department’s system is going to work has been provided.

The Minister for Justice gamely attempted to explain it on the News At One on Wednesday but was remarkably short on specifics and very long on wild non sequiturs. According to the minister child abduction or child sexual abuse - it isn’t clear which - has apparently “increased by about 6,000% in recent years”. By my calculations this would mean that if there was a baseline of one child abduction in a not-so-recent year then in the most recent year there must have been close to 6,000 child abductions. That’s over a hundred a week.

The only safeguard mentioned by the minister is a code of conduct. Which her department is writing. Which, like the amendment, has not yet been published.

The Irish Council for Civil Liberties is agin this. If you are too there’s a petition you can sign editorially at least.

Dr Róisín Costello had a good opinion piece in the Irish Times yesterday.

Well-founded concern says use of AI in policing is discriminatory, ineffective and infringes on fundamental rights of citizens

Also yesterday, nothing to fear, nothing to hide eh?

Gardaí are leaving their radios at home to prevent senior management from keeping tabs on them, a study has found.

—

The educational tools used by students during the pandemic also shared their information with advertisers and data brokers that could track them around the Web, an international investigation found.

→text-only version

Context

Governments of 49 of the world’s most populous countries harmed children’s rights by endorsing online learning products during Covid-19 school closures without adequately protecting children’s privacy.

The FTC fined Twitter $150 million for using phone numbers and email addresses it had collected from individuals for security purposes to target ads.

—

The ICO “fined Clearview AI Inc more than £7.5m for using images of people in the UK, and elsewhere, that were collected from the web and social media to create a global online database that could be used for facial recognition.”

—

The Belgian DPA fined publishing group Roularta €50,000 for dropping cookies without obtaining valid consent. Original (in French) | Machine translation

• “What is needed is not more self-regulation but true regulation, meaning objective and knowable standards adopted democratically, enforced by democratically appointed institutions like my office that can ensure organizations are truly accountable. While disruptive technologies have many benefits, what does not need disruption is the idea that democratic government must maintain the capacity to protect the fundamental rights and values of its citizens. That capacity is lessened when organizations have almost complete liberty to set the rules under which they will interact with their clients, and where they can set the terms of their accountability.” From ‘The state of privacy as I end my term’, remarks made by outgoing Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien.
• “Some of GDPR’s impact is also hidden—the law isn’t just about fines and ordering companies to change—and it has improved company behaviors. “If you compare the awareness about cybersecurity, about data protection, about privacy, as it looked like 10 years ago and it looks today, these are completely different worlds,” says Wojciech Wiewiórowski, the European Data Protection Supervisor, who oversees GDPR cases against European institutions, such as Europol.” From ‘How GDPR Is Failing’ by Matt Burgess for Wired.
• “Progressive MEPs also managed to include in the DSA a ban on advertising based on the profiling of users that employs sensitive data as defined under the GDPR. This concept includes political views, religious beliefs, sexual orientation and racial information. The proposal was initially resisted by some member states that believe users should be able to choose whether they could get targeted on these bases or not. However, lawmakers insisted on a ban since requesting consent is already covered in the GDPR.” From ‘Digital advertising in the crossfire of upcoming EU regulations’ by Luca Bertuzzi for the IAPP.

—

Endnotes & Credits

• The elegant Latin bon mot “Futuendi Gratia” is courtesy of Effin’ Birds.
• As always, a huge thank you to Regina Doherty for giving the world the phrase “mandatory but not compulsory”.
• The image used in the header is by Krystian Tambur on Unsplash.
• Any quotes from the Oireachtas we use are sourced from KildareStreet.com. They’re good people providing a great service. If you can afford to then donate to keep the site running.
• Digital Rights Ireland have a storied history of successfully fighting for individuals’ data privacy rights. You should support them if you can.

Find us on the web at myprivacykit.com and on Twitter at @PrivacyKit. Of course we’re not on Facebook or LinkedIn.

If you know someone who might enjoy this newsletter do please forward it on to them.