Yesterday, Waterfront Toronto unanimously approved the continuation of Sidewalk Labs’s plans for “Quayside,” a privatised, surveillance-oriented “smart city” that has been mired in controversy since its earliest days, including secret bullying campaigns, mass resignations of privacy advisors, lies that drastically understated the scope of the project, civil liberties lawsuits, and denunciations by the indigenous elders who were consulted on the project.
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Tag: citizen scores
EU expert panel calls for a ban on AI-based risk-scoring and limits on mass surveillance
The EU Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on AI (AI HLEG) has tabled its Policy and investment recommendations for trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, recommending a ban on the use of machine learning technologies to generate Chinese-style Citizen Scores and limits on the use of the technology in monitoring and analyzing mass surveillance data.
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Patronscan wants cities to require bars to scan your ID with its service so it can maintain a secret, unaccountable blacklist
Patronscan is the leading provider of ID-scanning/verification services to bars and restaurants, and one of its selling points is that it allows its customers to create shared blacklists of undesirable customers who can then be denied services at every other establishment that uses its services.
Chinese AI traffic cam mistook a bus ad for a human and publicly shamed the CEO it depicted for jaywalking
China’s war on jaywalking went to the next level last spring when AI-based facial recognition systems were integrated into some crosswalks, to punish jaywalkers by squirting them with water, sending them texts warning them about legal consequences of jaywalking, and/or publicly shaming them by displaying their pictures and names on large digital billboards.
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DHS plans to use credit-scores to judge who may become a citizen
The US Department of Homeland Security has published a new proposed rule that would make people ineligible for US citizenship if their credit-scores were poor.
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Apple’s fine-print reveals a secret program to spy on Iphone users and generate “trust scores”
Buried in the new Apple Iphone and Apple TV privacy policy is an unannounced program that uses “information about how you use your device, including the approximate number of phone calls or emails you send and receive…to compute a device trust score when you attempt a purchase.”
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China’s pervasive “social credit” scheme is still in development, but already profoundly shaping public behavior
Since its first stirrings in 2015, the Chinese social credit schemes have sprouted a confusing and frightening garden of strange growths, from spraying and shaming jaywalkers to blacklisting millions from flying or using high-speed rail, including journalists and other critics of the Chinese state.
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Chinese jaywalkers are identified and shamed by facial recognition, and now they’ll get warnings over text message
Last April, the industrial capital of Shenzhen installed anti-jaywalking cameras that use facial recognition to automatically identify people crossing without a green pedestrian light; jaywalkers are shamed on a public website and their photos are displayed on large screens at the intersection,
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It could happen here: How China’s social credit system demonstrates the future of social control in smart cities
Adam Greenfield (previously) is one of the best thinkers when it comes to the social consequences of ubiquitous computing and smart cities; he’s the latest contributor Ian Bogost’s special series on “smart cities” for The Atlantic (previously: Bruce Sterling, Molly Sauter).
Continue reading “It could happen here: How China’s social credit system demonstrates the future of social control in smart cities”