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Municipalities around the nation have used ARPA federal dollars to fund community surveillance cameras, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit research and advocacy center. But EPIC warns that once such systems are in place police can access and collect mass surveillance data leading to privacy issues.
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“This type of tracking which occurs entirely outside of the user’s view is just so far outside of what people expect when they use the internet,” Caitriona Fitzgerald, Deputy Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told The Markup in an interview. Fitzgerald said that while users are likely aware that Meta knows what they are doing while they are on Facebook and Instagram, “they don’t expect Meta to know what stores they walk into or what news articles they’re reading or every site they visit online.”
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Fitzgerald echoed these recommendations, saying the problem lies with the fact that the burden is on the consumer to take action to prevent this data collection. Even a “global opt-out” mechanism allowing users to avoid having their data shared is not enough because “that still requires the user to take an action to protect their privacy. A lot of people are not going to have the time or knowledge to do that,” said Fitzgerald.
Vazquez, Meta’s spokesperson, said the company would “continue to invest in data minimization technologies to keep up with evolving expectations. As we cover in our terms, businesses are responsible for getting permission to share people’s information with companies like ours.”
For now, the lack of a federal privacy law leaves consumers in most states with few options. “I think people should be encouraging their elected officials to pass privacy laws that require businesses to change some of these business practices to stop this ubiquitous tracking of our every click and every movement,” said Fitzgerald.
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By: Gary D. Barnett
“The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.”
~ Friedrich August von Hayek
The single idea of ‘immigration’ is one of the most misunderstood subjects argued today. It is downright embarrassing to witness and listen to all the whining, bawling, complaining, preaching, blaming, political maneuvering, and stupidity, that consumes the so-called ‘immigration’ problem. Real immigration is not and has never been the problem; all government, all rule, and private property destruction are the problems. By focusing on just the headlines and minutia instead of the State-plotted outcome, without regard for all the underlying agendas, is not only ignorant, incorrect, and asinine, it plays perfectly into the hands of those perpetrating this egregious assault on society, so that the end result and those wanting a better life are demonized, while the plot to destroy the people goes forward unabated. In the case of the U.S. and other western countries, considering the voluntary support and acceptance of rule, the people exhibit fault without having a clue about their complicity or about the big picture concerning this subject matter.
Hmm, I bet I hit more than a few nerves with my opening remarks, but then, hitting nerves is my objective, as truth and honesty is avoided at all cost by the duped servants of the State, so blunt and brutal candor is sometimes necessary in order to awaken the sleeping and indifferent minds of the pathetic sheeplike masses, whose primary objective in life today seems to be hiding from reality instead of facing it head-on. These attitudes are devastating to liberty, as they promote open tyranny meant to assist the master class in its efforts to control, while muddling the argument with targeted and divisive propaganda.
Obviously, every country’s situation is different, and as properly pointed out by Ryan McMaken of the Mises Institute, small and large countries have unique situations concerning immigration, just as do wealthy and poverty stricken countries. All face distinct problems, but the real enemy is still always the State. This fact is often, almost always actually, left out of any discussion of immigration, and this can only lead to illogical, inconclusive, and disastrous assumptions. This is exactly what is sought by the evil governments that control nation-states, who are the same criminals in governments who control borders. So long as the blame is placed on the immigrants themselves, on outside countries, or on one side or the other political faction, the State’s adverse immigration agendas (and all others) are most everywhere achieved.
The arguments surrounding immigration in the U.S., are largely concentrated in conversations about how many are coming into the country, who they are, where they are coming from, the jobs they are supposedly taking away from Americans, the ‘illegality’ of the ‘alien’ invader, the criminal and terroristic possibilities, and whether or not to build a wall to lock out these ‘aliens’,…
EPIC Executive Director and President Alan Butler will testify before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology in a hearing regarding “Safeguarding Americans’ Communications: Strengthening Cybersecurity in a Digital Era.”
“Securing our nation’s communications systems is essential to protect national security, public safety, consumers, and our economy,” Butler will tell members of the Subcommittee. “This Subcommittee has the opportunity to promote important legislation to establish privacy and data security protections that are desperately needed across the digital ecosystem. And there is a range of other important work ahead to implement the National Security strategy and develop strong cybersecurity standards, to properly align industry incentives to invest in robust cybersecurity practices, and to better secure the devices and systems that play such an essential role in our day-to-day lives.”
Butler will advocate for the enactment of a strong and comprehensive privacy and data security law like the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA). Watch the hearing at 10 AM ET here.
Mr. Butlerreleased the following statement about the hearing:
“Americans are facing a barrage of attacks on their personal data, their private communications, and their identities. Our communications networks and services are vulnerable, and breaches of those systems fuel identity theft, threats to public safety, and risks to national security. This is an urgent problem and we are glad to see the subcommittee take this up, especially given the committee’s prior work on comprehensive privacy legislation and the opportunity to take that up in 2024.”
EPIC has previously written about the need for a comprehensive privacy law as well as the role privacy principles like data minimization and data security must play in the White House’s National Cybersecurity Strategy.
In this week’s column, I’d like to raise two questions suggested by David Beito’s excellent book The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights, which I reviewed last week. First, how can it be that Franklin Roosevelt has acquired a reputation among leftist historians as a champion of liberty, with his internment of Japanese Americans during World War II regarded as an aberration, in the face of the manifold violations of civil liberties that occurred during his administration? Second, given Roosevelt’s authoritarian proclivities, why wasn’t he successful in imposing the complete regime of censorship he wanted?
The answer to the first question is that Roosevelt preferred in most cases to work behind the scenes, aiding and abetting others to do his work. We see this in the activities of Hugo Black and Sherman Minton, both senators and later Supreme Court justices, whom Roosevelt assiduously encouraged and promoted.
Black, who from 1935 chaired the US Senate Special Subcommittee to Investigate Lobbying Activities, subpoenaed a vast number of telegrams from opponents of the New Deal, putting their activities under surveillance in an effort to intimidate them. As Beito explains,
The committee monitored private communications on a scale previously unrivaled in US history, at least in peacetime. Working in tandem with the Federal Communications Commission and the Roosevelt administration, it examined literally millions of private telegrams with virtually no supervision or constraint. Those singled out for this surveillance were anti–New Deal critics, including activists, journalists, and lawyers.
In acting in this fashion, Black was doing what Roosevelt wanted.
The committee’s most powerful champion was Roosevelt himself, though he carefully avoided tipping his hand in public. . . . Roosevelt responded to [Raymond] Moley with “a long discourse of how Black’s invasion of privacy had ample precedent.” The inference drawn by Moley was that for Roosevelt “the end justified the means.” The conversation left Moley “with the harrowing intimation that Roosevelt was looking forward to nothing more than having the opposition of his ‘enemies’—the newspapers, the bankers, the businessmen—reelect him.” . . . The Black Committee was first and foremost a creature of Roosevelt’s wish to establish a congressional committee to discredit opponents. After the president had made that decision, he sought out Black, a loyal political foot soldier, to take charge.
Roosevelt appointed Black to a vacancy on the Supreme Court in 1936, knowing that he could count on that stalwart New Dealer to uphold all his unconstitutional programs. When it became public knowledge the next year that Black had, in the words of Charles Tansill, “hidden his face beneath the hooded robes of a Klansman,” there was a clamor for Black to resign, but Roosevelt did not join it, even though Black admitted having been a KKK member. Many years later, Black ironically earned a reputation as a “free speech” absolutist, although he still defended his vote in Korematsu v. United States upholding Roosevelt’s order to intern Japanese Americans in concentration camps. According to Beito, “Black . . . was unrepentant. In 1971, he asserted that ‘[p]eople…
DHS publicly released the 2021 Data Mining Report after EPIC submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in June 2023 seeking the “2020 DHS Data Mining Report and all subsequent DHS data mining reports.” According to the DHS Data Mining Report page, DHS published the report in August 2023—two months after EPIC requested the document. DHS only informed EPIC of the release last week. The 2021 report also covers the year 2020 because according to DHS, “The DHS 2020 Data Mining Report to Congress was not submitted as planned.” The 2021 report is dated August 2022 suggesting DHS did not move to release the report until EPIC requested it.
The Federal Agency Data Mining Reporting Act of 2007 requires DHS to publish a report on its data mining activities on an annual basis. The reports are required to describe the data mining activity and technology used, the data sources, and the impact on privacy and civil liberties among other things. In the 2021 report, DHS identified a new data mining program: “Continuous Immigration Vetting for Operation Allies Welcome, utilizing ATS, conducted by CBP.” EPIC will continue to seek the data mining report for 2022, which still has not been released to the public.
“The significance of it would be it takes the sole burden of protecting privacy off the consumer and instead says to businesses, ‘You need to think about whether you need the data that you are collecting,’” said Caitriona Fitzgerald, deputy director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
EPIC, a privacy rights nonprofit, developed model state privacy legislation last year based on the federal American Data Privacy and Protection Act, which earned bipartisan support but hasn’t been passed by Congress.
Read more here.
Disney properties’ rights state that they are allowed to “photograph, film, videotape, record or otherwise reproduce the image and/or voice of any person who enters.” And while CCTV cameras are commonplace throughout theme parks, this kind of tech would take in-person surveillance to new heights, said Calli Schroeder, senior counsel and global privacy counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
This tech could be applicable for security surveillance or watching for “pressure or frustration points” in the park, Schroeder said, such as places where people struggle to find ride entrances or bathrooms that they could optimize park layouts. But it still implies a certain level of AI-based emotion recognition, she said, which can often be inaccurate for myriad reasons.
Everyone emotes differently, she noted. And since Disney’s system bases its predictions off a set of behaviors it deems “normal,” it may be set off by the emotional expression of people from different cultures or those who are neurodivergent.
“The use of the word ‘normal’ is a red flag already,” said Schroeder. “There may be some (guest behaviors) that are more common than others, but setting a threshold for normal is a little concerning.”
In addition, a large part of Disney’s clientele includes children and minors, said Schroeder, so the potential tracking and use of their data by and for this system’s deep learning models is concerning in and of itself.
“Incorporating AI into these systems, it’s going to be learning and trying to detect patterns from what they pick up,” she said. “You’re using this information in a way that these people very likely are unaware of.”
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In comments to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, EPIC expressed support for the CFPB’s proposed Personal Financial Data Rights Rule and recommended ways to strengthen the rule’s privacy and data security requirements. The proposed rule would ensure that consumers can more readily access their data held by financial institutions while limiting the extent to which authorized third parties can collect, use, retain, and share that same data.
“EPIC urges the CFPB to promulgate rules that will empower consumers in their interactions with the financial services industry,” EPIC wrote. “The final rule should facilitate frictionless access by consumers to their financial information, enable consumers to understand and control who has access to their personal information and for what purposes they may use it, and prohibit third parties from collecting, using, or retaining personal information beyond what is reasonably necessary to provide the product or service requested by the consumer.”
EPIC highlighted ways the proposed rule could be strengthened with respect to data minimization, consumer rights, account verification, data security, and industry standards. In particular, EPIC urged the CFPB to “limit third parties’ collection, use, and retention of sensitive personal information to what is strictly necessary to provide the product or service the consumer requests, and only consistent with the reasonable expectations of the consumer.”
EPIC routinely calls on the CFPB to strengthen privacy protections for consumers. EPIC filed comments at a previous stage of the CFPB’s Personal Financial Data Rights Rulemaking. EPIC also filed comments supporting the CFPB’s proposed revisions to Fair Credit Reporting Act rules, which among other changes would clarify that data brokers must comply with FCRA.
There are additional concerns about AI, that go beyond just generative AI. Consumer advocates say governments should curb algorithmic feeds on social media, while some researchers warn that large language models pose a range of risks for consumer data and child safety. (In the UK, regulators recently sent a letter to Snap about how the company vetted its “My AI” chatbot to make sure it’s safe for kids to use.)
Last year, at least 10 states in the U.S. added new AI regulations inside of broader consumer privacy laws, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center. More will likely be introduced in 2024 at both the state and local level.
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