Privacy risk: Report says India among 75 nations with AI surveillance tools

Even as right to privacy has been declared a fundamental right, India does not have a personal data protection law yet.

BS : India is gradually opening up to the threat of mass surveillance and cyber snooping by the state as well as rogue actors, as modern technology makes its way into the country in a landscape of weak privacy laws.

A report by foreign policy think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) has said India is among 75 countries in the world with access to modern AI surveillance technology— putting it in the same list as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia. The study was published in September.

“Many governments in the Gulf, East Asia, and South/Central Asia are procuring advanced analytic systems, facial recognition cameras, and sophisticated monitoring capabilities,” said Steven Feldstein, a Carnegie Endowment fellow and the author of the report.

These systems are used to surveil citizens “to accomplish a range of policy objectives—some lawful, others that violate human rights, and many of which fall into a murky middle ground,” he said, without detailing their use in specific countries.

Governments in autocratic and semi-autocratic countries are more prone to abuse AI surveillance than governments in liberal democracies, the report noted. Some autocratic governments like those in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia are exploiting AI technology for mass surveillance, while others with dismal human rights records are using it to reinforce repression.

On the technology front, the capabilities are strong. Modern systems can create 360-degree profiles of citizens by stitching together data from street cameras, card transactions and social media profiles. These systems can snoop on private interactions on the smartphone and monitor real-time location of the target.

According to the report, the biggest supplier of AI surveillance solutions is China with Huawei being the biggest exporter.

India is still far from being a victim of mass state-sponsored snooping but concerns loom over some new-age technology systems being implemented.

To be sure, not all the technologies are used for illegitimate purposes —cameras on streets prevent traffic violations, while facial recognition entry-management systems are common-place at offices for their sheer ease. A lot of advanced tech is being deployed as part of the government’s Smart City project for sewer management to reducing traffic congestion.

Facebook, Tesla want to read your mind: here's why you should be worried

If mind-reading devices become the normal way to interact with computers, we may end up with little choice but to use them in order to keep up with more productive colleagues.

Not content with monitoring almost everything you do online, Facebook now wants to read your mind as well. The social media giant recently announced a breakthrough in its plan to create a device that reads people’s brainwaves to allow them to type just by thinking. And Elon Musk wants to go even further. One of the Tesla boss’ other companies, Neuralink, is developing a brain implant to connect people’s minds directly to a computer.

Musk admits that he takes inspiration from science fiction, and that he wants to make sure humans can “keep up” with artificial intelligence. He seems to have missed the part of sci-fi that acts as a warning for the implications of technology.

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These mind-reading systems could affect our privacy, security, identity, equality and personal safety. Do we really want all that left to companies with philosophies such as that of Facebook’s former mantra, “move fast and break things”?

Though they sound futuristic, the technologies needed to make brainwave-reading devices are not that dissimilar to the standard MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and EEG (electroencephalography) neuroscience tools used in hospitals all over the world. You can already buy a kit to control a drone with your mind, so using one to type out words is, in some ways, not that much of a leap. The advance will likely be due to the use of machine learning to sift through huge quantities of data collected from our brains and find the patterns in neuron activity that link thoughts to specific words.

A brain implant is likely to take a lot longer to develop, and it’s important to separate out the actual achievements of Neuralink from media hype and promotion. But Neuralink has made simultaneous improvements in materials for electrodes and robot-assisted surgery to implant them, packaging the technology neatly so it can be read via USB.

Facebook and Neuralink’s plans may build on established medical practice. But when companies are collecting thoughts directly from our brains, the ethical issues are very different.

Any system that could collect data directly from our brains has clear privacy risks. Privacy is about consent. But it is very difficult to give proper consent if someone is tapping directly into our thoughts. Silicon Valley companies (and governments) already surreptitiously gather as much data on us as they can and use it in ways we’d rather they didn’t. How sure can we be that our random and personal thoughts won’t be captured and studied alongside the instructions we want to give the technology

Why breaking up Facebook is not enough to heal the underlying rot

The overriding questions that nag at me: What problems are we trying to solve, and does a breakup really address them?

It's impossible to root for Facebook Inc. It's like rooting for the New England Patriots. (Sorry, Pats fans.) Besides partisans and kooks, who could side with an organization that is successful beyond belief, skirts the rules and is led by an all-powerful boss facing serious legal questions? And unlike the sports team, Facebook wields enormous influence over how the world thinks and interacts

I don't root for the Patriots, or Facebook. But I’m uneasy about the growing calls for Facebook to be split into pieces, including the op-ed Thursday from Chris Hughes, one of Facebook’s co-founders. The overriding questions that nag at me: What problems are we trying to solve, and does a breakup really address them?

I don't have the answers. But I worry that "break up Facebook" has become a catchall, soothing solution to the feeling that Facebook is bad and something should be done about it. A breakup may be the right approach. But I want advocates to start by uniting people around the root problems and working backward to possible fixes before we all back a Standard Oil-style dismantlement.

Here are three problems I have with Facebook, and how a breakup might affect them:

Facebook has huge treasure troves of personal information

Facebook has vast knowledge about how the world spends its time on and off its internet hangouts, and in the real world. It hasn't always been a reliable steward of that information, and Facebook hasn't adequately justified why it needs all of it in the first place.

Let's say Facebook is split into multiple companies – the core Facebook social network, Instagram and WhatsApp, as Hughes suggests. Does a core Facebook with perhaps 1 billion users have less ability to harvest information such as people's web-surfing habits and physical locations as they roam around with smartphones? No, it doesn't.

It's true that a stand-alone Facebook wouldn't know what people are doing on an independent Instagram and an independent WhatsApp, just as Facebook isn't harvesting specific information now from people’s use of YouTube and Snapchat. I don't know, however, that those limits would blunt Facebook's aggressive data-harvesting machine.

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Facebook unveils redesign plan as it tries to move past privacy scandals

Move is the most visible signal of how the social media giant is starting to emphasise private communications.

Mark Zuckerberg declared in March that he planned to shift Facebook away from being a public town square and to private communications. Now, the chief executive is rolling out the first in a series of changes to achieve that.

On Tuesday at its annual developer conference, Facebook unveiled a redesign of its mobile app and desktop site. The revisions add new features to promote group-based communications instead of News Feed, where people publicly post a cascade of messages and status updates.

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With the changes, users can more easily message one another and share news and other items with members of private groups on the site, the company said. Zuckerberg is working to integrate and encrypt Facebook’s different messaging services, which include WhatsApp and Messenger. The company also plans to continue emphasising its Stories product, which allows people to post updates that disappear after 24 hours. And it unveiled a spare, stark white look for Facebook, a departure from the site’s largely blue-tinted design.

The features, when combined, “will end up creating a more trustworthy platform,” Zuckerberg said in an interview. “Everywhere you can see and connect with friends, you’ll be able to see and connect with groups; it’s going to be woven into the fabric of Facebook.”

The redesign is the most tangible sign of how the privacy scandals and user-data issues that have roiled Facebook are forcing change at the company. The social network has spent the past three years grappling with criticism that it did not properly protect its users’ information, that it spread false news and other toxic content and that it was used as a tool for election interference. Last week, it said it expected to be fined up to $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations, in what would be a record penalty against a technology company by the United States.

Facebook is also playing catch-up with people’s shifting social media behaviour. Questions about the benefits of social media and more recognition of its ills have prompted many to turn toward methods of private communications, such as messaging apps.

“By far, the three fastest-growing areas of online communication are private messaging, groups and Stories,” Zuckerberg said. “In 2019, we expect the amount of Stories that are shared to outnumber the amount of Feed posts that are shared.”

Eventually, he said, Facebook plans to roll out dozens of small product updates across its four main apps of WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook itself.

Facebook's new Portal device: It is meant to bring people closer together

The great thing about these devices is that they are stationary and always on.

Facebook’s new gadgets, Portal and Portal Plus, are meant to bring people closer together.

So we — Mike Isaac and Farhad Manjoo, two technology writers for The New York Times — took the $199 and $349 devices for a test run over the last week to see if they could make us feel more connected to each other.

We both installed the Portal, which starts shipping on Thursday, in our homes (our bedrooms, to be exact). The devices are video-calling machines that people can use to talk through a screen to other Facebook users. They have a 12-megapixel camera with high-definition video and artificial intelligence software; the camera follows people about as they move around.

The Portal has raised some privacy concerns, especially since Facebook has been scrutinized for how much information it already has on users.

Were we worried about what these always-on devices might collect on us? Here’s how it played out.

Mike: Why, hello, Farhad! It’s been a while since we last shared a column together.

Farhad: I’ve had the time of my life not talking to you. Then last week, I learned I’d be getting Facebook’s new video-calling machine so you could call me up whenever you felt like it. Oh, boy.

Do you know how The Times has been running ads showing all the hazards reporters have to go through to get important stories? I think agreeing to install a Facebook-designed machine that puts me on speed dial for Mike Isaac should get me a starring role in one of those spots.

Mike: You should be so lucky.

So I have to say, waking up next to you in my bedroom was, uh, quite an experience. I put my Portal Plus on the desk that sits bedside. The screen saver cycled through my photo albums on Facebook and Instagram — and also occasionally your face.

Farhad: I’m guessing you loved this thing.

Mike: Er, not exactly.

What was your experience like initially? The unboxing process was funny to me. It felt like an Apple design moment; every piece of plastic and “pull here” tab was carefully placed, with the intentionality that Apple usually saves for its device packaging, but with a very Facebook-y twist on things. There was an iconic Facebook thumb on my power cord holder, for example.... Read More

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