Source: Daily Maverick https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-09-08-heres-how-johannesburg-security-cameras-track-you/

By Heidi Swart • 8 September 2021

Vumacam is a security company with a rapidly expanding surveillance camera network across Joburg. This includes more than 2,000 automatic licence plate recognition (ALPR) cameras recording the registration number of every passing vehicle — at a rate of 9.68 million per day. Vumacam vehemently denies its system tracks innocent drivers, despite the fact that ALPR cameras are designed to do exactly that. So, what is Vumacam really doing? Read our ALPR guide and decide for yourself.

Heidi Swart is a journalist who reports on surveillance and data privacy. This report was commissioned by the Media Policy and Democracy Project, an initiative of the University of Johannesburg’s Department of Journalism, Film and TV and Unisa’s Department of Communication Science.

For a monthly fee, private security companies can access Vumacam’s footage. Vumacam’s camera network is connected to the internet, allowing it to send footage to security companies’ monitoring rooms. If something untoward comes up, security guards can respond.

By June this year, Vumacam said its network had 2,262 automatic licence plate recognition (ALPR) cameras continually scanning the licence plates of passing cars, looking for people connected to crime. All drivers’ licence plates are thus scanned and civil society has raised privacy concerns. But Vumacam has been clear that it’s “not in the business of tracking movements”.

Yet ALPR cameras are built for tracking. It’s one of the few things that the surveillance industry (SEE here AND here), law enforcement (here ) lawmakers AND here AND here ) and civil society (here AND here AND here ) seem to agree on. Usually, ALPR systems track cars entering and exiting parking lots, and government law enforcement uses them to track criminal suspects.

Read the rest of the article at: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-09-08-heres-how-johannesburg-security-cameras-track-you/

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SCOTT IKEDA, AUGUST 3, 2021

Amazon’s new sleep tracking technology proposes to cast an “electromagnetic bubble” over customers, monitoring their movements throughout the night in an attempt to improve quality of rest. Critics have already raised multiple concerns, from exactly what Amazon intends to do with the data it collects about sleep habits to the amount of radiation it would need to emit to function.

Sleep tracking technology puts corporations in the bedroom

The apparent market demand for Amazon’s new sleep tracking tech stems from reports of common sleep disturbance during the Covid-19 pandemic; studies find that as many as half of all respondents are saying that they have been having trouble getting a full night of rest since early last year.

About two weeks ago, Amazon received Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval to bring sleep tracking devices to the market. The unit has yet to be built, but the proposed plan is to use 60GHZ radar to track body motion across a bed throughout the night. Excessive or unusual movements might then help to pinpoint specific issues causing difficulty in maintaining proper sleep. Google is developing similar sensor technology to be incorporated in its Nest Hub smart device networking system.

Read more at https://tinyurl.com/7u97kkm4

The post Does Amazon’s Sleep Tracking Technology Invade Bedroom Privacy? Concerns Raised About Data Sharing, Opacity of Intentions for Collected Information appeared first on EMFSA.

Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/05/1020376/resist-big-tech-surveillance-data/

by Karen Hao, March 5, 2021

Every day, your life leaves a trail of digital breadcrumbs that tech giants use to track you. You send an email, order some food, stream a show. They get back valuable packets of data to build up their understanding of your preferences. That data is fed into machine-learning algorithms to target you with ads and recommendations. Google cashes your data in for over $120 billion a year of ad revenue.

Increasingly, we can no longer opt out of this arrangement. In 2019 Kashmir Hill, then a reporter for Gizmodo, famously tried to cut five major tech giants out of her life. She spent six weeks being miserable, struggling to perform basic digital functions. The tech giants, meanwhile, didn’t even feel an itch.

Now researchers at Northwestern University are suggesting new ways to redress this power imbalance by treating our collective data as a bargaining chip. Tech giants may have fancy algorithms at their disposal, but they are meaningless without enough of the right data to train on.

In a new paper being presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conference next week, researchers including PhD students Nicholas Vincent and Hanlin Li propose three ways the public can exploit this to their advantage:

• Data strikes, inspired by the idea of labor strikes, which involve withholding or deleting your data so a tech firm cannot use it—leaving a platform or installing privacy tools, for instance.
• Data poisoning, which involves contributing meaningless or harmful data. AdNauseam, for example, is a browser extension that clicks on every single ad served to you, thus confusing Google’s ad-targeting algorithms.
• Conscious data contribution, which involves giving meaningful data to the competitor of a platform you want to protest, such as by uploading your Facebook photos to Tumblr instead.

Read more at: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/05/1020376/resist-big-tech-surveillance-data/

Related

The post How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you appeared first on EMFSA.

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.

“It’s impossible to emerge from the 700 pages of Surveillance Capitalism and not see the devices and applications that we have embraced in our daily lives — fitness trackers, smart thermostats, digital personal assistants — through a wary, more critical lens.”  https://www.cigionline.org/articles/shoshana-zuboff-undetectable-indecipherable-world-surveillance-capitalism

The post The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power appeared first on EMFSA.

We find our speakers through a combination of literature reviews and calls with experts and community leaders. This year, we wanted to share the fruits of that research. Sources written by or featuring our speakers are listed first and are followed by other sources in alphabetical order.

General Historical Background:

In Our Times, “The Poor Laws,” BBC Radio, Dec. 20, 2018.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001m73

Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015).

https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/147/Dark-MattersOn-the-Surveillance-of-Blackness

Matthew Desmond, “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.” The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 14, 2019.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capitalism.html

For more please see the pdf below:

CoS4 Reading List

Snippet:

Automation is coming for truckers. But first, they’re being watched:

https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/11/20/16670266/trucking-eld-surveillance

The post The Color of Surveillance: Monitoring of Poor and Working People Reading List appeared first on EMFSA.

The post Smart Cities Are Creating a Mass Surveillance Nightmare appeared first on EMFSA.

Vumatel to roll out low-cost home fibre in the Cape Flats

A Trojan Horse?

The Lobby Group Right2Know has crossed swords with Vumatel subsidiary, Vumacam, over the legality of its roll-out of more than 15,000 surveillance cameras on the Vumatel fibre network in Johannesburg.

Some have complained that the CCTV cameras, which serve private companies and not the state, are encroaching on the right to privacy.

Right2Know  says the collection and sale of information to third parties without a person’s consent infringes the law.

R2K spokesperson Murray Hunter says there is no oversight over the surveillance and security industry, resulting in poor accountability and transparency:

-“Unchecked surveillance has become a serious threat to democratic principals in the 21st Century.”

-“There’s a city-wide surveillance programme set up by a private company without public engagement”

For the full article and to listen to the in-depth discussion on The Eusebius McKaiser Show :

http://www.702.co.za/articles/339123/vumacam-md-insists-private-cctv-video-feeds-across-jozi-are-in-line-with-the-law

San Francisco has become the first US city to ban the use of facial recognition technology by the police and local government agencies. This is a huge win for those who argue that the tech — which can identify an individual by analyzing their facial features in images, in videos, or in real time — carries risks so serious that they far outweigh any benefits.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/5/16/18625137/ai-facial-recognition-ban-san-francisco-surveillance

https://www.aclunc.org/news/san-francisco-board-supervisors-approves-historic-face-surveillance-ban-and-oversight-law

As EMFSA we prefer fibre over wireless as it is much safer when considering EMF exposure. However, apart form the concerns raised above, in our post below we ask: “Will these Johannesburg ‘camera poles’ be fitted with cellular antenna (Wi-Fi/4G/5G/”small cells”) at a later stage?”

Johannesburg – Security Camera Poles for Public Surveillance Network

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