August 15, 2021
UnSafeGraph | The Cat Herder, Volume 4, Issue 31
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| August 15 · Issue #144 · View online |
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Surveillance and tracking and more surveillance and yet more tracking. Also a sports club which felt the need to fingerprint all of its customers and staff. 😼
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Six workers based in Colombia for Teleperformance, one of the world’s largest call center companies, which counts Apple, Amazon and Uber among its clients, said that they are concerned about the new contract, first issued in March. The contract allows monitoring by AI-powered cameras in workers’ homes, voice analytics and storage of data collected from the worker’s family members, including minors. Teleperformance employs more than 380,000 workers globally, including 39,000 workers in Colombia.
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Big Tech call center workers face pressure to accept home surveillance
Big Tech call center workers face pressure to accept home surveillance.
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You can’t but love the reassuring names these lads create for their surveillance outfits.
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SafeGraph collected at least some of its location data by having app developers embed the company’s code, or software development kit (SDK), into their own apps. Those apps would then track the physical location of their users, which SafeGraph would repackage and then sell to other parties. Google confirmed to Motherboard it told app developers in early June they had seven days to remove SafeGraph’s SDK from their apps. If they didn’t do this, Google told Motherboard the apps may face enforcement. This can mean removal from the Play Store itself.
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Google Bans Location Data Firm Funded by Former Saudi Intelligence Head
SafeGraph sells smartphone location data to essentially anyone. Google banned the company in June.
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Google has agreed to “major privacy improvements” following a threat to ban the use of Google Workspace in education by the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA). In March, Privacy Company concluded that eight out of 10 high privacy risks in Google’s productivity suite, Workspace, remained. The Dutch educational institutions then asked the Dutch DPA for advice. At the end of May the DPA warned schools and universities to stop using Google Workspace for Education before the start of the new school year. |
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The Lithuanian DPA fined a sports club €20,000 for “processing of biometric data without voluntary consent of the data subjects and a failure to ensure other requirements for the valid consent, improper implementation of the data subjects’ right to be informed of data processing; it has also been determined that the company has not carried out an assessment of the impact of data processing on data protection, has failed to maintain records of activities.”
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“More profoundly, though, Agre wrote in the paper that the mass collection of data would change and simplify human behavior to make it easier to quantify. That has happened on a scale few people could have imagined, as social media and other online networks have corralled human interactions into easily quantifiable metrics, such as being friends or not, liking or not, a follower or someone who is followed. And the data generated by those interactions has been used to further shape behavior, by targeting messages meant to manipulate people psychologically. In 2001, he wrote that “your face is not a bar code,” arguing against the use of facial recognition in public places. In the article, he predicted that, if the technology continues to develop in the West, it would eventually be adopted elsewhere, allowing, for instance, the Chinese government to track everyone inside its country within 20 years.” From ‘He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen?’ by Reed Albergotti for the Washington Post.
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‘“Smart city” technology is steeped in solutionism, and its rhetoric and promotional materials are often couched in the promise of what it could solve rather than what it has demonstrably solved in similar instances. “Smart city” sales pitches argue that with more data collection, processes can inherently be made more efficient and thus solved. These claims don’t take into consideration failures in models or theories of change or the many externalities that impact a city … Procuring technology and data collection systems is expensive and costly to obtain, manage, secure, and upgrade. While data can help you identify problems you were unaware of or hone in on efficiencies, these efficiencies can be dwarfed by the costs to collect more data. For example, with better traffic data collection, cities would still need policy interventions like congestion pricing or infrastructure interventions like new thruways or medians to reduce congestion or accidents; the data only helps to outline the problem, which the community is likely already aware of.’ From ‘Whose Streets? Our Streets! (Tech Edition): 2020-2021 “Smart City” Cautionary Trends & 10 Calls to Action to Protect and Promote Democracy’ by Rebecca Williams, published by the Harvard Belfer Center. Online version | PDF version
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“Following his remarks, even MOI and Serbian police changed their version of events, claiming that they did not use such a software because there was yet no legal basis to do so. "So now they have to explain that they have bought something that they have no right to use, as they say”, Danilo Krivokapić, Director of SHARE Foundation, a Belgrade-based digital rights organisation, which has monitored the implementation of the Safe City project from the beginning, says.“ From ‘Serbia’s smart city has become a political flashpoint’ by Alessandra Briganti for Wired.
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Privacy Kit, Made with 💚 in Dublin, Ireland
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Surveillance and tracking and more surveillance and yet more tracking. Also a sports club which felt the need to fingerprint all of its customers and staff.
😼
Big Tech call center workers face pressure to accept home surveillance.
You can’t but love the reassuring names these lads create for their surveillance outfits.
SafeGraph sells smartphone location data to essentially anyone. Google banned the company in June.
The Register: ‘Dutch education IT crisis averted as Google agrees to 'major privacy improvements’‘
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The Lithuanian DPA fined a sports club €20,000 for “processing of biometric data without voluntary consent of the data subjects and a failure to ensure other requirements for the valid consent, improper implementation of the data subjects’ right to be informed of data processing; it has also been determined that the company has not carried out an assessment of the impact of data processing on data protection, has failed to maintain records of activities.”
EDPB: ‘Lithuanian DPA: Fine Imposed on a Sports Club for Infringements of the GDPR in Processing of Fingerprints of the Customers and Employees’
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NOYB filed 422 formal complaints relating to cookie banners to a range of DPAs.
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“More profoundly, though, Agre wrote in the paper that the mass collection of data would change and simplify human behavior to make it easier to quantify. That has happened on a scale few people could have imagined, as social media and other online networks have corralled human interactions into easily quantifiable metrics, such as being friends or not, liking or not, a follower or someone who is followed. And the data generated by those interactions has been used to further shape behavior, by targeting messages meant to manipulate people psychologically. In 2001, he wrote that “your face is not a bar code,” arguing against the use of facial recognition in public places. In the article, he predicted that, if the technology continues to develop in the West, it would eventually be adopted elsewhere, allowing, for instance, the Chinese government to track everyone inside its country within 20 years.” From ‘He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen?’ by Reed Albergotti for the Washington Post.
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‘“Smart city” technology is steeped in solutionism, and its rhetoric and promotional materials are often couched in the promise of what it could solve rather than what it has demonstrably solved in similar instances. “Smart city” sales pitches argue that with more data collection, processes can inherently be made more efficient and thus solved. These claims don’t take into consideration failures in models or theories of change or the many externalities that impact a city … Procuring technology and data collection systems is expensive and costly to obtain, manage, secure, and upgrade. While data can help you identify problems you were unaware of or hone in on efficiencies, these efficiencies can be dwarfed by the costs to collect more data. For example, with better traffic data collection, cities would still need policy interventions like congestion pricing or infrastructure interventions like new thruways or medians to reduce congestion or accidents; the data only helps to outline the problem, which the community is likely already aware of.’ From ‘Whose Streets? Our Streets! (Tech Edition): 2020-2021 “Smart City” Cautionary Trends & 10 Calls to Action to Protect and Promote Democracy’ by Rebecca Williams, published by the Harvard Belfer Center. Online version | PDF version
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“Following his remarks, even MOI and Serbian police changed their version of events, claiming that they did not use such a software because there was yet no legal basis to do so. "So now they have to explain that they have bought something that they have no right to use, as they say”, Danilo Krivokapić, Director of SHARE Foundation, a Belgrade-based digital rights organisation, which has monitored the implementation of the Safe City project from the beginning, says.“ From ‘Serbia’s smart city has become a political flashpoint’ by Alessandra Briganti for Wired.
Endnotes & Credits
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