Monthly Archives: October 2021

Commercial and Military Applications and Timelines for Quantum Technology | RAND

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This report provides an overview of the current state of quantum technology and its potential commercial and military applications. The author discusses each of the three major categories of quantum technology: quantum sensing, quantum communication, and quantum computing. He also considers the likely commercial outlook over the next few years, the major international players, and the potential national security implications of these emerging technologies. This report is based on a survey of the available academic literature, news reporting, and government-issued position papers.

Most of these technologies are still in the laboratory. Applications of quantum sensing could become commercially or militarily ready within the next few years. Although limited commercial deployment of quantum communication technology already exists, the most-useful military applications still lie many years away. Similarly, there may be niche applications of quantum computers in the future, but all known applications are likely at least ten years away. China currently leads the world in the development of quantum communication, while the United States leads in the development of quantum computing.

Key Findings

Quantum technology is grouped into three broad categories: quantum sensing, quantum communication, and quantum computing

  • Quantum sensing refers to the ability to use quantum mechanics to build extremely precise sensors. This is the application of quantum technology considered to have the nearest-term operational potential.
  • The primary near-term application of quantum communication technology is security against eavesdroppers, primarily through a method known as quantum key distribution (QKD). Longer-term applications include networking together quantum computers and sensors.
  • Quantum computing refers to computers that could, in principle, perform certain computations vastly more quickly than is fundamentally possible with a standard computer. Certain problems that are completely infeasible to solve on a standard computer could become feasible on a quantum computer.

Every subfield of quantum technology potentially has major implications for national security

  • Some of the primary applications for quantum sensing include position, navigation, and timing and possibly intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.
  • Quantum communication technology could use QKD to protect sensitive encrypted communications against hostile interception, although some experts consider other security solutions to be more promising.
  • Quantum computing could eventually have the most severe impact on national security. A large-scale quantum computer capable of deploying Shor’s algorithm on current encryption would have a devastating impact on virtually all internet security.

There is no clear overall world leader in quantum technology

  • The United States, China, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada all have specific national initiatives to encourage quantum-related research.
  • The United States and China dominate in overall spending and the most-important technology demonstrations, but Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union also lead in certain subfields.
  • China is the world leader in quantum communication, and the United States is the world leader in quantum computing.

The highest-impact quantum technologies are still many years away

  • Applications of quantum sensing could become commercially or militarily ready within the next few years.
  • Limited commercial deployment of quantum communication technology already exists, but the most-useful military and commercial applications still lie many years away.
  • There may be niche applications of quantum computers over the next few years, but all currently known applications are likely at least ten years away.

Source: Commercial and Military Applications and Timelines for Quantum Technology | RAND

Google pays fines to Russia over banned content – because fine is paltry

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 U.S. tech giant Google has paid Russia more than 32 million roubles ($455,079) in fines for failing to delete content Moscow deems illegal, the company and a Russian lawmaker said after talks on Monday.

[…]

In 2020, Google’s compliance with requests to delete content was 96.2%, Pancini said, and in the first half of this year, it removed over 489,000 videos, but Russia said too much banned content still remained available.

Piskarev said last week that this included child pornography. Russia has ordered other foreign tech firms to delete posts promoting drug abuse and dangerous pastimes, information about homemade weapons and explosives, as well as ones by groups it designates as extremist or terrorist.

Around 2,650 pieces of illegal content on Google’s internet resources remained undeleted as of the start of October, the RIA news agency cited Piskarev as saying.

“Work has been carried out, as we see, however it is still very far from ideal,” he said.

Piskarev said Pancini had cited technical difficulties for Google’s failure to remove all the banned content.

Source: Google pays fines to Russia over banned content

As soon as you hear about child pornography alarm bells should be ringing – someone is trying to do something else which is totally unacceptable

5 notable Facebook fuckups in the recent relevations

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The Facebook Papers are based on leaks from former Facebook staffer Frances Haugen and other inside sources. Haugen has appeared before US Congress, British Parliament, and given prominent television interviews. Among the allegations raised are that Facebook:

  • Knows that its algorithms lead users to extreme content and that it employs too few staff or contractors to curb such content, especially in languages other than English. Content glorifying violence and hate therefore spreads on Facebook – which really should know better by now after the The New York Times in 2018 reported that Myanmar’s military used Facebook to spread racist propaganda that led to mass violence against minority groups;
  • Enforces its rules selectively, allowing certain celebrities and websites to get away with behavior that would get others kicked off the platform. Inconsistent enforcement means users don’t get the protection from harmful content Facebook has so often promised, implying that it prioritises finding eyeballs for ads ahead of user safety;
  • Planned a special version of Instagram targeting teenagers, but cancelled it after Haugen revealed the site’s effects on some users – up to three per cent of teenage girls experience depression or anxiety, or self-harm, as a result of using the service;
  • Can’t accurately assess user numbers and may be missing users with multiple accounts. The Social Network™ may therefore have misrepresented its reach to advertisers, or made its advertising look more super-targeted than it really is – or both;
  • Just isn’t very good at spotting the kind of content it says has no place on its platform – like human trafficking – yes, that means selling human beings on Facebook. At one point Apple was so upset by the prevalence of Facebook posts of this sort it threatened to banish Zuckerberg’s software from the App Store.

Outlets including AP News and The Wall Street Journal have more original reporting on the leaks.

Source: Facebook labels recent revelations unfair • The Register

Google deliberately throttled ad load times to promote AMP, locking advertisers into it’s own advertising market place

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More detail has emerged from a 173-page complaint filed last week in the lawsuit brought against Google by a number of US states, including allegations that Google deliberately throttled advertisements not served to its AMP (Accelerated Mobile) pages.

The lawsuit – as we explained at the end of last week – was originally filed in December 2020 and concerns alleged anti-competitive practice in digital advertising. The latest document, filed on Friday, makes fresh claims alleging ad-throttling around AMP.

Google introduced AMP in 2015, with the stated purpose of accelerating mobile web pages. An AMP page is a second version of a web page using AMP components and restricted JavaScript, and is usually served via Google’s content delivery network. Until 2018, the AMP project, although open source, had as part of its governance a BDFL (Benevolent Dictator for Life), this being Google’s Malte Ubl, the technical lead for AMP.

In 2018, Ubl posted that this changed “from a single Tech lead to a Technical Steering Committee”. The TSC sets its own membership and has a stated goal of “no more than 1/3 of the TSC from one employer”, though currently has nine members, of whom four are from Google, including operating director Joey Rozier.

According to the Friday court filing, representing the second amended complaint [PDF] from the plaintiffs, “Google ad server employees met with AMP employees to strategize about using AMP to impede header bidding.” Header bidding, as described in our earlier coverage, enabled publishers to offer ad space to multiple ad exchanges, rather than exclusively to Google’s ad exchange. The suit alleges that AMP limited the compatibility with header bidding to just “a few exchanges,” and “routed rival exchange bids through Google’s ad server so that Google could continue to peek at their bids and trade on inside information”.

The lawsuit also states that Google’s claims of faster performance for AMP pages “were not true for publishers that designed their web pages for speed”.

A more serious claim is that: “Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a ‘nice comparative boost’. Throttling non-AMP ads slows down header bidding, which Google then uses to denigrate header bidding for being too slow.”

The document goes on to allege that: “Internally, Google employees grappled with ‘how to [publicly] justify [Google] making something slower’.”

Google promoted AMP in part by ranking non-AMP pages below AMP pages in search results, and featuring a “Search AMP Carousel” specifically for AMP content. This presented what the complaint claims was a “Faustian bargain,” where “(1) publishers who used header bidding would see the traffic to their site drop precipitously from Google suppressing their ranking in search and re-directing traffic to AMP-compatible publishers; or (2) publishers could adopt AMP pages to maintain traffic flow but forgo exchange competition in header bidding, which would make them more money on an impression-by-impression basis.”

The complaint further alleges that “According to Google’s internal documents, [publishers made] 40 per cent less revenue on AMP pages.”

A brief history of AMP

AMP was controversial from its first inception. In 2017 developer Jeremy Keith described AMP as deceptive, drawing defensive remarks from Ubl. Keith later joined the AMP advisory committee, but resigned in August saying that “I can’t in good faith continue to advise on the AMP project for the OpenJS Foundation when it has become clear to me that AMP remains a Google product, with only a subset of pieces that could even be considered open source.”

One complaint is that the AMP specification requires a link to Google-hosted JavaScript.

In May 2020 Google stated it would “remove the AMP requirement from Top Stories eligibility”.

This was confirmed in April 2021, when Google posted about an update to its “page experience” whereby “the Top Stories carousel feature on Google Search will be updated to include all news content, as long as it meets the Google News policies. This means that using the AMP format is no longer required.” In addition, “we will no longer show the AMP badge icon to indicate AMP content.” Finally, Google Search signed exchanges, which pre-fetches content to speed page rendering on sites which support the feature, was extended to all web pages where it was previously restricted to AMP pages.

This is evidence that Google is pulling back from its promotion of AMP, though it also said that “Google continues to support AMP”.

As for the complaint, it alleges that Google has an inherent conflict of interest. According to the filing: “Google was able to demand that it represent the buy-side (i.e., advertisers), where it extracted one fee, as well as the sell-side (i.e., publishers), where it extracted a second fee, and it was also able to force transactions to clear in its exchange, where it extracted a third, even larger, fee.”

The company also has more influence than any other on web standards, thanks to the dominant Chrome browser and Chromium browser engine, and on mobile technology, thanks to Android.

That Google would devise a standard from which it benefited is not surprising, but the allegation of deliberately delaying ads on other formats in order to promote it is disturbing and we have asked the company to comment.

Source: Google deliberately throttled ad load times to promote AMP, claims new court document • The Register

Monopolies eh!

UK government hands secret services cloud contract to AWS

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The UK’s intelligence services are to store their secret files in the AWS cloud in a deal inked earlier this year, according to reports.

The GCHQ organisation (electrical/radio communications eavesdropping), MI5 (domestic UK intelligence matters), MI6 (external UK intel) and also the Ministry of Defence (MoD) will access their data in the cloud, albeit in UK-located AWS data centres.

The news was first reported in the Financial Times newspaper (paywall), which said GCHQ drove the deal that was signed earlier this year, and the data will be stored in a high-security way. It is claimed by unknown sources that AWS itself will not have access to the data.

Apparently the three agencies plus the MoD will be able to access information faster and share it more quickly when needed. This is presumably in contrast to each agency storing its own information on its own on-premises computer systems.

[…]

The US’s CIA signed a $600m AWS Cloud contract in 2013. That contract was upgraded in 2020 and involved AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle in a consortium.

Of course, for the US, AWS is a domestic firm. The French government is setting up its own sovereign public cloud called Bleu for sensitive government data. This “Cloud de Confiance” will be based on Microsoft’s Azure platform – and will include Microsoft 365 – but will apparently be “delivered via an independent environment” that has “immunity from all extraterritorial legislation and economic independence” from within an “isolated infrastructure that uses data centres located in France.”

In GCHQ’s reported view, no UK-based public cloud could provide the scale or capabilities needed for the security services data storage requirements.

[….]

Source: UK government hands secret services cloud contract to AWS • The Register

Hackers steal $130 million from Cream Finance; the company’s 3rd hack this year

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Hackers have stolen an estimated $130 million worth of cryptocurrency assets from Cream Finance, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that allows users to loan and speculate on cryptocurrency price variations.

The incident, detected earlier today by blockchain security firms PeckShield and SlowMist, was confirmed by the Cream Finance team earlier today.

The attackers are believed to have found a vulnerability in the platform’s lending system —called flash loaning— and used it to steal all of Cream’s assets and tokens running on the Ethereum blockchain, according to blockchain security firm BlockSec, which also posted an explanation of the security flaw on Twitter earlier today.

A breakdown of the stolen funds is available below, courtesy of the SlowMist team.

CreamFinance-hack-SlowMist
Image: SlowMist

Roughly six hours after the attack, Cream Finance said it fixed the bug exploited in the hack with the help of cryptocurrency platform Yearn.

Even if the attacker’s initial wallet, used to exfiltrate a large chunk of the funds, has been identified, the funds have already been moved to new accounts, and there appears to be a small chance the stolen crypto can be tracked down and returned to the platform.

Third time’s a charm

Today’s hack marks the third time Cream Finance has been hacked this year after the company lost $37 million in February and another $29 million in August.

All attacks were flash loan exploits, a common way through which most DeFi platforms have been hacked over the past two years.

DeFi related hacks have accounted for 76% of all major hacks in 2021, and users have lost more than $474 million to attacks on DeFi platforms this year, CipherTrace said in a report in August.

Similarly, DeFi hacks also made up 21% of all the 2020 cryptocurrency hacks and stolen funds after being almost inexistent a year before, in 2019, the same CipherTrace said in a report last year.

The Cream heist also marks the second-largest cryptocurrency hack this year after DeFi platform Poly Network lost $600 million in August. However, the individual behind the Poly hack eventually returned all the stolen funds two weeks later on the promise the company won’t seek charges.

Source: Hackers steal $130 million from Cream Finance; the company’s 3rd hack this year – The Record by Recorded Future

Ultraleap launches its 5th Gen hand tracking platform Gemini

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Ultraleap’s fifth-generation hand tracking platform, known as Gemini, is fully available on Windows. The most robust, flexible hand tracking ever, it’s already powering amazing experiences from Varjo, been integrated into Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 platform, and is bringing touchless technology to self-service solutions around the world. 

The Gemini Windows release is the first step in making the world’s best hand tracking easier to access and more flexible for multiple platforms, camera systems and third-party hardware.

Ultraleap have rebuilt their tracking engine from the ground up to be able to improve hand tracking across various aspects including:

  1. Improved two-handed interaction
  2. Faster initialization and hand detection
  3. Improved robustness to challenging environmental conditions
  4. Better adaptation to hand anatomy

Ultraleap have also made significant changes to the tracking platform to able to extend hand-tracking to different platforms and hardware. Varjo’s XR-3 and VR-3 headsets and Qualcomm’s XR2 chipset are two variations already announced, with more in the pipeline.

[…]

Meet Ultraleap Gemini – the best hand tracking ever. Fast initialization, interaction with two hands together, tracks diverse hand sizes, works in challenging environments.

Hand tracking will be to XR what touchscreens were to mobile

The Windows release is the first time full Gemini has been made available to all and the first full hand tracking release from the company in three years. Since a preview of the release went out earlier in the year, Ultraleap have been further refining the software ahead of full launch.

[…]

Source: Ultraleap launches its 5th Gen hand tracking platform – Gemini | Ultraleap

Giant, free index to world’s research papers released online

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In a project that could unlock the world’s research papers for easier computerized analysis, an American technologist has released online a gigantic index of the words and short phrases contained in more than 100 million journal articles — including many paywalled papers.

The catalogue, which was released on 7 October and is free to use, holds tables of more than 355 billion words and sentence fragments listed next to the articles in which they appear. It is an effort to help scientists use software to glean insights from published work even if they have no legal access to the underlying papers, says its creator, Carl Malamud. He released the files under the auspices of Public Resource, a non-profit corporation in Sebastopol, California, that he founded.

[….]

Computer scientists already text mine papers to build databases of genes, drugs and chemicals found in the literature, and to explore papers’ content faster than a human could read. But they often note that publishers ultimately control the speed and scope of their work, and that scientists are restricted to mining only open-access papers, or those articles they (or their institutions) have subscriptions to. Some publishers have said that researchers looking to mine the text of paywalled papers need their authorization.

And although free search engines such as Google Scholar have — with publishers’ agreement — indexed the text of paywalled literature, they only allow users to search with certain types of text queries, and restrict automated searching. That doesn’t allow large-scale computerized analysis using more specialized searches, Malamud says.

[…]

Michael Carroll, a legal researcher at the American University Washington College of Law in Washington DC, says that distributing the index should be legal worldwide because the files do not copy enough of an underlying article to infringe the publisher’s copyright — although laws vary by country. “Copyright does not protect facts and ideas, and these results would be treated as communication of facts derived from the analysis of the copyrighted articles,” he says.

The only legal question, Carroll adds, is whether Malamud’s obtaining and copying of the underlying papers was done without breaching publishers’ terms. Malamud says that he did have to get copies of the 107 million articles referenced in the index to create it; he declined to say how,

 

Source: Giant, free index to world’s research papers released online

It is sad indeed that much research – lots of it probably paid for by tax payers and all of it eventually subsidised by customers of the companies who paid for it – is impossible or very hard for scientists to look up: because of copyright. This is a clear impediment to growth of wealth and knowledge and it’s not very strange to understand why countries like China who don’t allow people to sit on their copyrighted arses but make them innovate for a living are doing much better at growth than the legally quagmired west.

Location Data Firm Got GPS Data From Apps Even When People Opted Out

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Huq, an established data vendor that obtains granular location information from ordinary apps installed on people’s phones and then sells that data, has been receiving GPS coordinates even when people explicitly opted-out of such collection inside individual Android apps, researchers and Motherboard have found.

The news highlights a stark problem for smartphone users: that they can’t actually be sure if some apps are respecting their explicit preferences around data sharing. The data transfer also presents an issue for the location data companies themselves. Many claim to be collecting data with consent, and by extension, in line with privacy regulations. But Huq was seemingly not aware of the issue when contacted by Motherboard for comment, showing that location data firms harvesting and selling his data may not even know whether they are actually getting this data with consent or not.

“This shows an urgent need for regulatory action,” Joel Reardon, assistant professor at the University of Calgary and the forensics lead and co-founder of AppCensus, a company that analyzes apps, and who first flagged some of the issues around Huq to Motherboard, said in an email. “I feel that there’s plenty wrong with the idea that—as long as you say it in your privacy policy—then it’s fine to do things like track millions of people’s every moment and sell it to private companies to do what they want with it. But how do we even start fixing problems like this when it’s going to happen regardless of whether you agree, regardless of any consent whatsoever.”

[…]

Huq does not publicly say which apps it has relationships with. Earlier this year Motherboard started to investigate Huq by compiling a list of apps that contained code related to the company. Some of the apps have been downloaded millions or tens of millions of times, including “SPEEDCHECK,” an internet speed testing app; “Simple weather & clock widget,” a basic weather app; and “Qibla Compass,” a Muslim prayer app.

Independently, Reardon and AppCensus also examined Huq and later shared some of their findings with Motherboard. Reardon said in an email that he downloaded one app called “Network Signal Info” and found that it still sent location and other data to Huq after he opted-out of the app sharing data with third parties.

[…]

Source: Location Data Firm Got GPS Data From Apps Even When People Opted Out

5-Day Brain Stimulation Treatment Highly Effective Against Depression, Stanford Researchers Find

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Stanford researchers think they’ve devised an effective and quick-acting way to treat difficult cases of depression, by improving on an already approved form of brain stimulation. In a new trial published this week, the researchers found that almost 80% of patients improved after going through treatment—a far higher rate than those who were given a sham placebo.

Brain stimulation has emerged as a promising avenue for depression, particularly depression that hasn’t responded to other treatments. The basic concept behind it is to use electrical impulses to balance out the erratic brain activity associated with neurological or psychiatric disorders. There are different forms of stimulation, which vary in intensity and how they interact with the body. Some require permanent implants in the brain, while others can be used noninvasively, like repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). As the name suggests, rTMS relies on magnetic fields that are temporarily applied to the head.

[…]

the Stanford neuromodulation therapy (SNT), relies on higher-dose magnetic pulses delivered over a quicker, five-day schedule, meant to mimic about seven months of standard rTMS treatment. The treatment is also personalized to each patient, with MRI scans used beforehand to pick out the best possible locations along the brain to deliver these pulses.

[…]

Last year, Williams and his team published a small study of 21 patients who were given SNT, showing that 90% of people severely affected by their depression experienced remission—in other words, that they no longer met the criteria for an acute depressive episode. Moreover, people’s feelings of suicidal ideation went away as well. The study was open label, though, meaning that patients and doctors knew what treatment was being given. Confirming that any drug or treatment actually works requires more rigorous tests, such as a double-blinded and placebo-controlled experiment. And that’s what the team has done now, publishing the results of their new trial in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

[…]

This time, about 78% of patients given genuine SNT experienced remission, based on standard diagnostic tests, compared to about 13% of the sham group. There were no serious side effects, with the most common being a short-lasting headache. And when participants were asked to guess which treatment they took, neither group did better than chance, indicating that the blinding worked.

[…]

Source: 5-Day Brain Stimulation Treatment Highly Effective Against Depression, Stanford Researchers Find

Scientists discover new phase of water, known as “superionic ice,” inside planets

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Scientists have discovered a new phase of water — adding to liquid, solid and gas — know as “superionic ice.” The “strange black” ice, as scientists called it, is normally created at the core of planets like Neptune and Uranus.

In a study published in Nature Physics, a team of scientists co-led by Vitali Prakapenka, a University of Chicago research professor, detailed the extreme conditions necessary to produce this kind of ice. It had only been glimpsed once before, when scientists sent a massive shockwave through a droplet of water, creating superionic ice that only existed for an instant.

In this experiment, the research team took a different approach. They pressed water between two diamonds, the hardest material on Earth, to reproduce the intense pressure that exists at the core of planets. Then, they used the Advanced Photon Source, or high-brightness X-ray beams, to shoot a laser through the diamonds to heat the water, according to the study.

“Imagine a cube, a lattice with oxygen atoms at the corners connected by hydrogen when it transforms into this new superionic phase, the lattice expands, allowing the hydrogen atoms to migrate around while the oxygen atoms remain steady in their positions,” Prakapenka said in a press release. “It’s kind of like a solid oxygen lattice sitting in an ocean of floating hydrogen atoms.”

Using an X-ray to look at the results, the team found the ice became less dense and was described as black in color because it interacted differently with light.

“It’s a new state of matter, so it basically acts as a new material, and it may be different from what we thought,” Prakapenka said.

What surprised the scientists the most was that superionic ice was created under a much lighter pressure than they’d originally speculated. They had thought that it would not be created until the water was compressed to over 50 gigapascals of pressure — the same amount of pressure inside rocket fuel as it combusts for lift-off — but it only took 20 gigapascals of pressure.

[…]

Superionic ice doesn’t exist only inside far-away planets — it’s also inside Earth, and it plays a role in maintaining our planet’s magnetic fields. Earth’s intense magnetism protects the planet’s surface from dangerous radiation and cosmic rays that come from outer space.

[…]

Source: Scientists discover new phase of water, known as “superionic ice,” inside planets – CBS News

What Else Do the Leaked ‘Facebook Papers’ Show? Angry face emojis have 5x the weight of a like thumb emoji… and more other stuff

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The documents leaked to U.S. regulators by a Facebook whistleblower “reveal that the social media giant has privately and meticulously tracked real-world harms exacerbated by its platforms,” reports the Washington Post.

Yet it also reports that at the same time Facebook “ignored warnings from its employees about the risks of their design decisions and exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content.”

And in addition, the whistleblower also argued that due to Mark Zuckberg’s “unique degree of control” over Facebook, he’s ultimately personally response for what the Post describes as “a litany of societal harms caused by the company’s relentless pursuit of growth.” Zuckerberg testified last year before Congress that the company removes 94 percent of the hate speech it finds before a human reports it. But in internal documents, researchers estimated that the company was removing less than 5 percent of all hate speech on Facebook…

For all Facebook’s troubles in North America, its problems with hate speech and misinformation are dramatically worse in the developing world. Documents show that Facebook has meticulously studied its approach abroad, and is well aware that weaker moderation in non-English-speaking countries leaves the platform vulnerable to abuse by bad actors and authoritarian regimes. According to one 2020 summary, the vast majority of its efforts against misinformation — 84 percent — went toward the United States, the documents show, with just 16 percent going to the “Rest of World,” including India, France and Italy…

Facebook chooses maximum engagement over user safety. Zuckerberg has said the company does not design its products to persuade people to spend more time on them. But dozens of documents suggest the opposite. The company exhaustively studies potential policy changes for their effects on user engagement and other factors key to corporate profits.

Amid this push for user attention, Facebook abandoned or delayed initiatives to reduce misinformation and radicalization… Starting in 2017, Facebook’s algorithm gave emoji reactions like “angry” five times the weight as “likes,” boosting these posts in its users’ feeds. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook’s business. The company’s data scientists eventually confirmed that “angry” reaction, along with “wow” and “haha,” occurred more frequently on “toxic” content and misinformation. Last year, when Facebook finally set the weight on the angry reaction to zero, users began to get less misinformation, less “disturbing” content and less “graphic violence,” company data scientists found.
The Post also contacted a Facebook spokeswoman for their response. The spokewoman denied that Zuckerberg “makes decisions that cause harm” and then also dismissed the findings as being “based on selected documents that are mischaracterized and devoid of any context…”

Responding to the spread of specific pieces of misinformation on Facebook, the spokeswoman went as far to acknowledge that at Facebook, “We have no commercial or moral incentive to do anything other than give the maximum number of people as much of a positive experience as possible.”

She added that the company is “constantly making difficult decisions.”

Source: What Else Do the Leaked ‘Facebook Papers’ Show? – Slashdot

‘A Mistake by YouTube Shows Its Power Over Media’ – and Kafka-esque arbritration rules

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“Every hour, YouTube deletes nearly 2,000 channels,” reports the New York Times. “The deletions are meant to keep out spam, misinformation, financial scams, nudity, hate speech and other material that it says violates its policies.

“But the rules are opaque and sometimes arbitrarily enforced,” they write — and sometimes, YouTube does end up making mistakes. (Alternate URL here…) The gatekeeper role leads to criticism from multiple directions. Many on the right of the political spectrum in the United States and Europe claim that YouTube unfairly blocks them. Some civil society groups say YouTube should do more to stop the spread of illicit content and misinformation… Roughly 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute globally in different languages. “It’s impossible to get our minds around what it means to try and govern that kind of volume of content,” said Evelyn Douek, senior research fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “YouTube is a juggernaut, by some metrics as big or bigger than Facebook.”

In its email on Tuesday morning, YouTube said Novara Media [a left-leaning London news group] was guilty of “repeated violations” of YouTube’s community guidelines, without elaborating. Novara’s staff was left guessing what had caused the problem. YouTube typically has a three-strikes policy before deleting a channel. It had penalized Novara only once before… Novara’s last show released before the deletion was about sewage policy, which hardly seemed worthy of YouTube’s attention. One of the organization’s few previous interactions with YouTube was when the video service sent Novara a silver plaque for reaching 100,000 subscribers…

Staff members worried it had been a coordinated campaign by critics of their coverage to file complaints with YouTube, triggering its software to block their channel, a tactic sometimes used by right-wing groups to go after opponents…. An editor, Gary McQuiggin, filled out YouTube’s online appeal form. He then tried using YouTube’s online chat bot, speaking with a woman named “Rose,” who said, “I know this is important,” before the conversation crashed. Angry and frustrated, Novara posted a statement on Twitter and other social media services about the deletion. “We call on YouTube to immediately reinstate our account,” it said. The post drew attention in the British press and from members of Parliament.

Within a few hours, Novara’s channel had been restored. Later, YouTube said Novara had been mistakenly flagged as spam, without providing further detail.
“We work quickly to review all flagged content,” YouTube said in a statement, “but with millions of hours of video uploaded on YouTube every day, on occasion we make the wrong call ”

But Ed Procter, chief executive of the Independent Monitor for the Press, told the Times that it was at least the fifth time that a news outlet had material deleted by YouTube, Facebook or Twitter without warning.

Source: ‘A Mistake by YouTube Shows Its Power Over Media’ – Slashdot

So if you have friends in Parliament you can get YouTube to have a look at unbanning you, but if you only have a few hundred thousand followers you are fucked.

It’s a bit like Amazon, except more people depend on the Amazon marketplace for a living:

At Amazon, Some Brands Get More Protection From Fakes Than Others

Dirty dealing in the $175 billion Amazon Marketplace

Amazon’s Alexa Collects More of Your Data Than Any Other Smart Assistant

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Our smart devices are listening. Whether it’s personally identifiable information, location data, voice recordings, or shopping habits, our smart assistants know far more than we realize.

[…]

All five services collect your name, phone number, device location, and IP address; the names and numbers of your contacts; your interaction history; and the apps you use. If you don’t like that information being stored, you probably shouldn’t use a voice assistant.

[…]

data collection

Keep in mind that no voice assistant provider is truly interested in protecting your privacy. For instance, Google Assistant and Cortana maintain a log of your location history and routers, Alexa and Bixby record your purchase history, and Siri tracks who is in your Apple Family.

[…]

If you’re looking to take control of your smart assistant, you can stop Alexa from sending your recordings to Amazon, turn off Google Assistant and Bixby, and manage Siri‘s data collection habits.

Source: Amazon’s Alexa Collects More of Your Data Than Any Other Smart Assistant

Intel open-sources AI-powered tool to spot bugs in code

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Intel today open-sourced ControlFlag, a tool that uses machine learning to detect problems in computer code — ideally to reduce the time required to debug apps and software. In tests, the company’s machine programming research team says that ControlFlag has found hundreds of defects in proprietary, “production-quality” software, demonstrating its usefulness.

[…]

ControlFlag, which works with any programming language containing control structures (i.e., blocks of code that specify the flow of control in a program), aims to cut down on debugging work by leveraging unsupervised learning. With unsupervised learning, an algorithm is subjected to “unknown” data for which no previously defined categories or labels exist. The machine learning system — ControlFlag, in this case — must teach itself to classify the data, processing the unlabeled data to learn from its inherent structure.

ControlFlag continually learns from unlabeled source code, “evolving” to make itself better as new data is introduced. While it can’t yet automatically mitigate the programming defects it finds, the tool provides suggestions for potential corrections to developers, according to Gottschlich.

[…]

AI-powered coding tools like ControlFlag, as well as platforms like Tabnine, Ponicode, Snyk, and DeepCode, have the potential to reduce costly interactions between developers, such as Q&A sessions and repetitive code review feedback. IBM and OpenAI are among the many companies investigating the potential of machine learning in the software development space. But studies have shown that AI has a ways to go before it can replace many of the manual tasks that human programmers perform on a regular basis.

Source: Intel open-sources AI-powered tool to spot bugs in code | VentureBeat

Internet Service Providers Collect, Sell Horrifying Amount of Sensitive Data, Government Study Concludes

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The new FTC report studied the privacy practices of six unnamed broadband ISPs and their advertising arms, and found that the companies routinely collect an ocean of consumer location, browsing, and behavioral data. They then share this data with dodgy middlemen via elaborate business arrangements that often aren’t adequately disclosed to broadband consumers.

“Even though several of the ISPs promise not to sell consumers personal data, they allow it to be used, transferred, and monetized by others and hide disclosures about such practices in fine print of their privacy policies,” the FTC report said.

The FTC also found that while many ISPs provide consumers tools allowing them to opt out of granular data collection, those tools are cumbersome to use—when they work at all. 

[…]

The agency’s report also found that while ISPs promise to only keep consumer data for as long as needed for “business purposes,” the definition of what constitutes a “business purpose” is extremely broad and varies among broadband providers and wireless carriers.

The report repeatedly cites Motherboard reporting showing how wireless companies have historically sold sensitive consumer location data to dubious third parties, often without user consent. This data has subsequently been abused from everyone from bounty hunters and stalkers to law enforcement and those posing as law enforcement.

The FTC was quick to note that because ISPs have access to the entirety of the data that flows across the internet and your home network, they often have access to even more data than what’s typically collected by large technology companies, ad networks, and app makers.


That includes the behavior of internet of things devices connected to your network, your daily movements, your online browsing history, clickstream data (not only which sites you visit but how much time you linger there), email and search data, race and ethnicity data, DNS records, your cable TV viewing habits, and more.

In some instances ISPs have even developed tracking systems that embed each packet a user sends over the internet with an individual identifier, allowing monitoring of user behavior in granular detail. Wireless carrier Verizon was fined $1.3 million in 2016 for implementing such a system without informing consumers or letting them opt out.

“Unlike traditional ad networks whose tracking consumers can block through browser or mobile device settings, consumers cannot use these tools to stop tracking by these ISPs, which use ‘supercookie’ technology to persistently track users,” the FTC report said.

[…]

Source: Internet Service Providers Collect, Sell Horrifying Amount of Sensitive Data, Government Study Concludes

Researchers design antibodies that destroy old cells, slowing down aging

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No one knows why some people age worse than others and develop diseases -such as Alzheimer’s, fibrosis, type 2 diabetes or some types of cancer- associated with this aging process. One explanation for this could be the degree of efficiency of each organism’s response to the damage sustained by its cells during its life, which eventually causes them to age. In relation to this, researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and the University of Leicester (United Kingdom) have developed a new method to remove old cells from tissues, thus slowing down the aging process.

Specifically, they have designed an antibody that acts as a smart bomb able to recognize specific proteins on the surface of these aged or senescent . It then attaches itself to them and releases a drug that removes them without affecting the rest, thus minimizing any potential side effects.

[…]

“We now have, for the first time, an antibody-based drug that can be used to help slow down in humans,” noted Salvador Macip, the leader of this research and a doctor and researcher at the UOC and the University of Leicester.

“We based this work on existing cancer therapies that target specific proteins present on the surface of cancer cells, and then applied them to senescent cells,” explained the expert.

All have a mechanism known as “cellular senescence” that halts the division of damaged cells and removes them to stop them from reproducing. This mechanism helps slow down the progress of cancer, for example, as well as helping model tissue at the embryo development stage.

However, in spite of being a very beneficial biological mechanism, it contributes to the development of diseases when the organism reaches old age. This seems to be because the immune system is no longer able to efficiently remove these senescent cells, which gradually accumulate in tissues and detrimentally affect their functioning.

[…]

The drug designed by Macip and his team is a second-generation senolytic with high specificity and remote-controlled delivery. They started from the results of a previous study that looked at the “surfaceome,” the proteins on the cell’s surface, to identify those proteins that are only present in senescent cells. “They’re not universal: some are more present than others on each type of aged cell,” said Macip.

In this new work, the researchers used a monoclonal antibody trained to recognize senescent cells and attach to them. “Just like our antibodies recognize germs and protect us from them, we’ve designed these antibodies to recognize old cells. In addition, we’ve given them a toxic load to destroy them, as if they were a remote-controlled missile,” said the researcher, who is the head of the University of Leicester’s Mechanisms of Cancer and Aging Lab.

Treatment could start to be given as soon as the first symptoms of the disease, such as Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s, arthritis, cataracts or some tumors, appear. In the long term, the researchers believe that it could even be used to achieve healthier aging in some circumstances.

Source: Researchers design antibodies that destroy old cells, slowing down aging

Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined

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[…]

while the EV battery recycling industry is starting to take off, getting carmakers to use recycled materials remains a hard sell. “In general, people’s impression is that recycled material is not as good as virgin material,” says Yan Wang, a professor of mechanical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “Battery companies still hesitate to use recycled material in their batteries.”

A new study by Wang and a team including researchers from the US Advanced Battery Consortium (USABC), and battery company A123 Systems, shows that battery and carmakers needn’t worry. The results, published in the journal Joule, shows that batteries with recycled cathodes can be as good as, or even better than those using new state-of-the-art materials.

The team tested batteries with recycled NMC111 cathodes, the most common flavor of cathode containing a third each of nickel, manganese, and cobalt. The cathodes were made using a patented recycling technique that Battery Resourcers, a startup Wang co-founded, is now commercializing.

[…]

The researchers made 11 Ampere-hour industry-standard pouch cells loaded with materials at the same density as EV batteries. Engineers at A123 Systems did most of the testing, Wang says, using a protocol devised by the USABC to meet commercial viability goals for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He says the results prove that recycled cathode materials are a viable alternative to pristine materials.

[…]

“We are the only company that gives an output that is a cathode material,” he says. “Other companies make elements. So their value added is less.”

Their technology involves shredding batteries and removing the steel cases, aluminum and copper wires, plastics, and pouch materials for recycling. The remaining black mass is dissolved in solvents, and the graphite, carbon and impurities are filtered out or chemically separated. Using a patented chemical technique, the nickel, manganese and cobalt are then mixed in desired ratios to make cathode powders.

[…]

[…]

Source: Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined – IEEE Spectrum

Client-Side Scanning Is An Insecure Nightmare Just Waiting To Be Exploited By Governments or companies. Apple basically installing spyware under a nice name.

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In August, Apple declared that combating the spread of CSAM (child sexual abuse material) was more important than protecting millions of users who’ve never used their devices to store or share illegal material. While encryption would still protect users’ data and communications (in transit and at rest), Apple had given itself permission to inspect data residing on people’s devices before allowing it to be sent to others.

This is not a backdoor in a traditional sense. But it can be exploited just like an encryption backdoor if government agencies want access to devices’ contents or mandate companies like Apple do more to halt the spread of other content governments have declared troublesome or illegal.

Apple may have implemented its client-side scanning carefully after weighing the pros and cons of introducing a security flaw, but there’s simply no way to engage in this sort of scanning without creating a very large and slippery slope capable of accommodating plenty of unwanted (and unwarranted) government intercession.

Apple has put this program on hold for the time being, citing concerns raised by pretty much everyone who knows anything about client-side scanning and encryption. The conclusions that prompted Apple to step away from the precipice of this slope (at least momentarily) have been compiled in a report [PDF] on the negative side effects of client-side scanning, written by a large group of cybersecurity and encryption experts

[…]

Only policy decisions prevent the scanning expanding from illegal abuse images to other material of interest to governments; and only the lack of a software update prevents the scanning expanding from static images to content stored in other formats, such as voice, text, or video.

And if people don’t think governments will demand more than Apple’s proactive CSAM efforts, they haven’t been paying attention. CSAM is only the beginning of the list of content governments would like to see tech companies target and control.

While the Five Eyes governments and Apple have been talking about child sex-abuse material (CSAM) —specifically images— in their push for CSS, the European Union has included terrorism and organized crime along with sex abuse. In the EU’s view, targeted content extends from still images through videos to text, as text can be used for both sexual solicitation and terrorist recruitment. We cannot talk merely of “illegal” content, because proposed UK laws would require the blocking online of speech that is legal but that some actors find upsetting.

Once capabilities are built, reasons will be found to make use of them. Once there are mechanisms to perform on-device censorship at scale, court orders may require blocking of nonconsensual intimate imagery, also known as revenge porn. Then copyright owners may bring suit to block allegedly infringing material.

That’s just the policy and law side. And that’s only a very brief overview of clearly foreseeable expansions of CSS to cover other content, which also brings with it concerns about it being used as a tool for government censorship. Apple has already made concessions to notoriously censorial governments like China’s in order to continue to sell products and services there.

[…]

CSS is at odds with the least-privilege principle. Even if it runs in middleware, its scope depends on multiple parties in the targeting chain, so it cannot be claimed to use least-privilege in terms of the scanning scope. If the CSS system is a component used by many apps, then this also violates the least-privilege principle in terms of scope. If it runs at the OS level, things are worse still, as it can completely compromise any user’s device, accessing all their data, performing live intercept, and even turning the device into a room bug.

CSS has difficulty meeting the open-design principle, particularly when the CSS is for CSAM, which has secrecy requirements for the targeted content. As a result, it is not possible to publicly establish what the system actually does, or to be sure that fixes done in response to attacks are comprehensive. Even a meaningful audit must trust that the targeted content is what it purports to be, and so cannot completely test the system and all its failure modes.

Finally, CSS breaks the psychological-acceptability principle by introducing a spy in the owner’s private digital space. A tool that they thought was theirs alone, an intimate device to guard and curate their private life, is suddenly doing surveillance on behalf of the police. At the very least, this takes the chilling effect of surveillance and brings it directly to the owner’s fingertips and very thoughts.

[…]

Despite this comprehensive report warning against the implementation of client-side scanning, there’s a chance Apple may still roll its version out. And once it does, the pressure will be on other companies to do at least as much as Apple is doing to combat CSAM.

Source: Report: Client-Side Scanning Is An Insecure Nightmare Just Waiting To Be Exploited By Governments | Techdirt

CSAM is like installing listening software on a device. Once anyone has access to install whatever they like, there is nothing stopping them from listening in to everything. Despite the technically interesting name CSAM basically it’s talking about the manufacturer installing spyware on your device.

‘Flight Simulator: GOTY Edition’ adds new aircraft and locations on November 18th

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Microsoft is spicing up Flight Simulator with an expanded re-release, although this one may be more ambitious than some. It’s releasing Flight Simulator: Game of the Year Edition on November 18th with both a heaping of new content as well as some meaningful feature upgrades. To start, there are five new stand-out aircraft, including the F/A-18 Super Hornet — you won’t have to wait until the Top Gun expansion to buzz the tower in a fighter jet. You’ll also get to fly the VoloCity air taxi, PC-6 Porter short-takeoff aircraft, the bush flying-oriented NX Cub and the single-seat Aviat Pitts Special S1S.

The GOTY upgrade adds eight airports, including Marine Corps Air Station Miramar and Patrick Space Force Base. Eight cities will get photogrammetry detail upgrades, such as Helsinki, Nottinghm and Utrecht. There are accordingly new tutorials (such as bush flying and IFR) and Discovery Flights.

The update adds useful features, too. You’ll have early access to DirectX 12 features, an improved weather system and a developer mode replay system, among other improvements.

Most notably, you won’t have to pay for any of this as a veteran player— existing Flight Simulator owners will receive a free update on both Windows PCs and Xbox Series X/S. The paid GOTY release exists chiefly to entice first-timers. For everyone else, this is billed as a “thank you” upgrade that could keep them coming back.

Source: ‘Flight Simulator: GOTY Edition’ adds new aircraft and locations on November 18th | Engadget

Facial recognition scheme in place in some British schools – more to come

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Facial recognition technology is being employed in more UK schools to allow pupils to pay for their meals, according to reports today.

In North Ayrshire Council, a Scottish authority encompassing the Isle of Arran, nine schools are set to begin processing meal payments for school lunches using facial scanning technology.

The authority and the company implementing the technology, CRB Cunninghams, claim the system will help reduce queues and is less likely to spread COVID-19 than card payments and fingerprint scanners, according to the Financial Times.

Speaking to the publication, David Swanston, the MD of supplier CRB Cunninghams, said the cameras verify the child’s identity against “encrypted faceprint templates”, and will be held on servers on-site at the 65 schools that have so far signed up.

[…]

North Ayrshire council said 97 per cent of parents had given their consent for the new system, although some said they were unsure whether their children had been given enough information to make their decision.

Seemingly unaware of the controversy surrounding facial recognition, education solutions provider CRB Cunninghams announced its introduction of the technology in schools in June as the “next step in cashless catering.”

[…]

Privacy campaigners voiced concerns that moving the technology into schools merely for payment was needlessly normalising facial recognition.

“No child should have to go through border style identity checks just to get a school meal,” Silkie Carlo of the campaign group Big Brother Watch told The Reg.

“We are supposed to live in a democracy, not a security state. This is highly sensitive, personal data that children should be taught to protect, not to give away on a whim. This biometrics company has refused to disclose who else children’s personal information could be shared with and there are some red flags here for us. “Facial recognition technology typically suffers from inaccuracy, particularly for females and people of colour, and we’re extremely concerned about how this invasive and discriminatory system will impact children.”

[…]

Those concerned about the security of schools systems now storing children’s biometric data will not be assured by the fact that educational establishments have become targets for cyber-attacks.

In March, the Harris Federation, a not-for-profit charity responsible for running 50 primary and secondary academies in London and Essex, became the latest UK education body to fall victim to ransomware. The institution said it was “at least” the fourth multi-academy trust targeted just that month alone. Meanwhile, South and City College Birmingham earlier this year told 13,000 students that all lectures would be delivered via the web because a ransomware attack had disabled its core IT systems.

[…]

Source: Facial recognition scheme in place in some British schools • The Register

The students probably gave their consent because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t get any lunch. The problem with biometrics is that they don’t change. So if someone steals yours, then it’s stolen forever. It’s not a password you can reset.

Hacker steals government ID database for Argentina’s entire population

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A hacker has breached the Argentinian government’s IT network and stolen ID card details for the country’s entire population, data that is now being sold in private circles.

The hack, which took place last month, targeted RENAPER, which stands for Registro Nacional de las Personas, translated as National Registry of Persons.

The agency is a crucial cog inside the Argentinian Interior Ministry, where it is tasked with issuing national ID cards to all citizens, data that it also stores in digital format as a database accessible to other government agencies, acting as a backbone for most government queries for citizen’s personal information.

Lionel Messi and Sergio Aguero data leaked on Twitter

The first evidence that someone breached RENAPER surfaced earlier this month on Twitter when a newly registered account named @AnibalLeaks published ID card photos and personal details for 44 Argentinian celebrities.

This included details for the country’s president Alberto Fernández, multiple journalists and political figures, and even data for soccer superstars Lionel Messi and Sergio Aguero.

A day after the images and personal details were published on Twitter, the hacker also posted an ad on a well-known hacking forum, offering to look up the personal details of any Argentinian user.

Argentina-DB
Image: The Record

Faced with a media fallback following the Twitter leaks, the Argentinian government confirmed a security breach three days later.

In an October 13 press release, the Ministry of Interior said its security team discovered that a VPN account assigned to the Ministry of Health was used to query the RENAPER database for 19 photos “in the exact moment in which they were published on the social network Twitter.”

Officials added that “the [RENAPER] database did not suffer any data breach or leak,” and authorities are now currently investigating eight government employees about having a possible role in the leak.

Hacker has a copy of the data, plans to sell and leak it

However, The Record contacted the individual who was renting access to the RENAPER database on hacking forums.

In a conversation earlier today, the hacker said they have a copy of the RENAPER data, contradicting the government’s official statement.

The individual proved their statement by providing the personal details, including the highly sensitive Trámite number, of an Argentinian citizen of our choosing.

[…]

Source: Hacker steals government ID database for Argentina’s entire population – The Record by Recorded Future

Yet again we see how centralised databases are such a good idea. And if countries are so terrible at protecting extremely sensitive data, how do you think weakening protections by allowing countries master key type access to encrypted data is going to make anything better for anyone?

Cybercrime Group Has Hacked Telecoms All Over the World since at least 2016

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[…]A hacker gang, […] has been infiltrating telecoms throughout the world to steal phone records, text messages, and associated metadata directly from carrier users.

That’s according to a new report from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which published a technical analysis of the mysterious group’s hacking campaign on Tuesday. The report, which goes into a significant amount of detail, shows that the hackers behind the campaign have managed to infiltrate 13 different global telecoms in the span of just two years.

Researchers say that the group, which has been active since 2016, uses highly sophisticated hacking techniques and customized malware to infiltrate and embed within networks. Reuters reports that this has included exfiltrating “calling records and text messages” directly from carriers. Earlier research on the group suggests it has also been known to target managed service providers as an entry point into specific industries—such as finance and consulting.[…]

Source: Cybercrime Group Has Been Hacked Telecoms All Over the World

Facebook fined GBP 50m by UK for not supplying correct info on giphy takeover

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The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has smacked Facebook with a £50m ($68.7m) fine for “deliberately” not giving it the full picture about its ongoing $400m acquisition of gif-slinger Giphy.

The move  – fingered by the CMA as a “major breach” – comes just weeks after the antisocial network dismissed the UK’s regulator’s initial findings as being based on “fundamental errors” and just hours after the US Dept of Justice and its Department of Labor announced separate agreements with the firm in which it will fork over $14.25m to settle allegations of discriminatory hiring practices.

Facebook first announced its intention to buy the image platform, which hosts a searchable database of short looping soundless animated GIFs – many of which are sourced from reality TV and films – in May last year. Giphy also hosts MP4 looped video clips (so users can “enjoy” audio), which it also unaccountably calls gifs. Pinterest, Reddit and Salesforce’s comms firm Slack have all integrated Giphy into their platforms so you can “react” to friends and colleagues. Facebook’s acquisition values the company at $400m.

[…]

Bamford said companies were not required to seek the CMA’s approval before they completed an acquisition but noted that “if they decide to go ahead with a merger, we can stop the companies from integrating further if we think consumers might be affected and an investigation is needed.”

He added: “We warned Facebook that its refusal to provide us with important information was a breach of the order but, even after losing its appeal in two separate courts, Facebook continued to disregard its legal obligations.

“This should serve as a warning to any company that thinks it is above the law.”

[…]

Source: Facebook fined by UK competition body • The Register

Why does dutch supermarket Albert Heijn have camera’s looking at you at the self check out?

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The Party for the Animals (PvdD) wants clarity from outgoing minister Dekker for Legal Protection about a camera on Albert Heijn’s self-scanner. It concerns the PS20 from manufacturer Zebra. According to this company, the camera on the self-scanner supports facial recognition to automatically identify customers. PvdD MPs Van Raan and Wassenberg want to know whether facial recognition is used in Albert Heijn stores in any way. The minister must also explain what legal basis Albert Heijn or other supermarket chains can rely on if they decide to use facial recognition. Finally, the PvdD MPs want to know what Minister Dekker can do to prevent supermarkets from using facial recognition now or in the future.

Source: PvdD wil opheldering over camera op zelfscanner van Albert Heijn – Emerce