Friday, June 6, 2025
Supermarket Facial Recognition: "Attention. Miscreant in Asile 5."
The trial covered 25 supermarkets in which more than 225.9 million faces were scanned ... the system was effective at reducing harmful behavior, especially reducing serious violent incidents...The system only identified people who have engaged in seriously harmful behavior, while people under 18 or deemed vulnerable were not included on the list.
The Privacy Commissioner’s Office is currently working on New Zealand’s first code of practice for regulating biometric data, slated to be released by mid-2025. more
Monday, October 7, 2024
Harvard Hackers Turned Meta's Smart Glasses into Creepy Stalker Specs
A few weeks ago, Meta announced the ability to use its new Ray-Ban Meta glasses to get information about your surroundings. Innocent things, like identifying flowers.
Well, two Harvard students just revealed how easy it is to turn these new smart glasses into a privacy nightmare.
Here’s what happened: students Anhphu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio cooked up an app called I-XRAY that turns these Ray-Bans into a doxxing machine. We're talking name, address, phone number—all from looking at someone with the glasses.
Here's how it works:
The Ray-Bans can record up to three minutes of video, with a privacy light that's about as noticeable as a firefly in broad daylight.
This video is streamed to Instagram, where an AI monitors the feed.
I-XRAY uses PimEyes (a facial recognition tool) to match these faces to public images, then unleashes AI to dig up personal details from public databases.
Their demo had strangers freaking out when they realized how easily identifiable they were from public online info.
How to Remove Your Information
Fortunately, it is possible to erase yourself from data sources like Pimeyes and FastPeopleSearch, so this technology immediately becomes ineffective. We are outlining the steps below so that you and those you care about can protect themselves.
Removal from Reverse Face Search Engines:
The major, most accurate reverse face search engines, Pimeyes and Facecheck.id, offer free services to remove yourself.
Removal from People Search Engines
Most people don’t realize that from just a name, one can often identify the person’s home address, phone number, and relatives’ names. We collected the opt out links to major people search engines below:
Preventing Identity Theft from SSN data dump leaks
Most of the damage that can be done with an SSN are financial. The main way to protect yourself is adding 2FA to important logins and freezing your credit below:
Extensive list of data broker removal services
Thursday, February 1, 2024
"There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met." - TSA
Friday, October 13, 2023
Stores Silently Deploying Facial Recognition to Spy on Shoppers
Cameras are being used not just to catch persistent shoplifters, but also to monitor shoppers and analyze their emotions, so that stores can deliver personalized adverts on screens inside the store, George warned...
‘But it’s also being used for marketing purposes, they are gathering information on shoppers and seeing what they are buying and not buying - and using AI tools to analyse the emotions of shoppers and see what sort of ads to direct at them.’ more
Sunday, May 9, 2021
PimEyes: Cool New PI Tool or Privacy Alert - You Decide
You probably haven't seen PimEyes, a mysterious facial-recognition search engine, but it may have spotted you... Anyone can use this powerful facial-recognition tool — and that's a problem.
If you upload a picture of your face to PimEyes' website, it will immediately show you any pictures of yourself that the company has found around the internet. You might recognize all of them, or be surprised (or, perhaps, even horrified) by some; these images may include anything from wedding or vacation snapshots to pornographic images.
PimEyes is open to anyone with internet access. more
Monday, April 13, 2020
How Not to be Seen - Evading CCTV Surveillance

Right now, you're more than likely spending the vast majority of your time at home. Someday, however, we will all be able to leave the house once again and emerge, blinking, into society to work, travel, eat, play, and congregate in all of humanity's many bustling crowds.
The world, when we eventually enter it again, is waiting for us with millions of digital eyes—cameras, everywhere, owned by governments and private entities alike. Pretty much every state out there has some entity collecting license plate data from millions of cars—parked or on the road—every day. Meanwhile all kinds of cameras—from police to airlines, retailers, and your neighbors' doorbells—are watching you every time you step outside, and unscrupulous parties are offering facial recognition services with any footage they get their hands on.
In short, it's not great out there if you're a person who cares about privacy, and it's likely to keep getting worse. In the long run, pressure on state and federal regulators to enact and enforce laws that can limit the collection and use of such data is likely to be the most efficient way to effect change. But in the shorter term, individuals have a conundrum before them: can you go out and exist in the world without being seen?
Bottom line as of now...
All of the digital simulations run on the cloak worked with 100-percent effectiveness, he added. But in the real world, "the reliability degrades." The tech has room for improvement.
"How good can they get? Right now I think we're still at the prototype stage," he told Ars. "You can produce these things that, when you wear them in some situations, they work. It's just not reliable enough that I would tell people, you know, you can put this on and reliably evade surveillance." more
Thursday, March 19, 2020
Face Masks v. Facial Recognition - China has it Covered
Huang Lei, the company’s chief technical officer, said that even before the new virus was widely known about, he had begun to get requests...to update its software to recognize nurses wearing masks...
The company now says its masked facial recognition program has reached 95 percent accuracy in lab tests, and even claims that it is more accurate in real life, where its cameras take multiple photos of a person if the first attempt to identify them fails. more
Saturday, February 1, 2020
FutureWatch: You've Probably Been Photo-Napped by an App
The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants...
The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw...
Searching someone by face could become as easy as Googling a name. Strangers would be able to listen in on sensitive conversations, take photos of the participants and know personal secrets. Someone walking down the street would be immediately identifiable — and his or her home address would be only a few clicks away. It would herald the end of public anonymity. more
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
FutureWatch: The Demise of the Common Spies
WTF happened? Quite a bit...
9/11, for one. It's not so easy to fly under the radar these days.
In 2014, U.S. spies were exposed when the Office of Personnel Management was hacked. About 22 million fingerprints, security clearance background information, and personnel records allegedly fell into Chinese hands. In 2015 it happened again.
One can be fairly sure this isn't just a problem for U.S. spies. Other countries get hacked, too. You just don't hear about it.
If all this wasn't bad enough, a spy's best friend turned on him in the 2000's. Technology.
Video cameras are planted everywhere, and facial recognition is becoming more accurate every day. It is being used at airports, in buildings, and with in conjunction with city surveillance cameras. This list will grow, of course.
The latest advancement is analysis of video streams using artificial intelligence logarithms. Suspicious movements, packages left unattended, predictions of future movements and crimes are analyzed by mindless machines 24/7, waiting to trigger an alert.
On the communications side spyware is a concern. Smartphone and GPS tracking don't help spies hide either.
It has been reported that some countries are compiling real-time databases which incorporate the above-mentioned speed bumps with: taxis, hotel, train, airline, credit card, customs and immigration information. As soon as one enters the country, they know where you are—minute by minute. And, if one takes too long going between locations, or a dual timeline appears (being in different places at the same time), a security alert is generated.
Couple all this with countries sharing information, e.g. EU, being a spy who needs to make in-person contacts becomes nearly impossible.
Think staying out of view is a good spy strategy? For now, perhaps. However, progress is being made by constructing a person's face by the sound of their voice.
The future of spying (no, it won't go away) will be radically different out of necessity. One can only guess how, but I understand they are working very hard on mind-reading.
Be seeing you.
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
Court: Authorities Can't Force Technology Unlocks with Biometric Features
Magistrate Judge Kandis Westmore, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, made the ruling as investigators tried to access someone's property in Oakland.... (however)
The judge in her ruling stated the request was "overbroad" because it was "neither limited to a particular person nor a particular device." The request could be resubmitted if authorities specify particular people whose devices they'd like to unlock. more
Tuesday, January 1, 2019
Happy New Year! It's 1984 ...in 2019
The uniforms allow school officials, teachers, and parents to keep track of the exact times that students leave or enter the school, Lin Zongwu, principal of the No. 11 School of Renhuai in Guizhou Province, told the state-run newspaper Global Times on Dec. 20.
If students skip school without permission, an alarm will be triggered.
If students try to game the system by swapping uniforms, an alarm also will sound, as facial-recognition equipment stationed at the school entrance can match a student’s face with the chip embedded in the uniform. more
FutureWatch: Chips embedded in the students.
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
FutureWatch: Spy Technology of the Future
1. Real-Time Facial Surveillance That Doesn't Require Clear, Unobstructed Images
2. Tools That Detect Activity Based on a Phone's Characteristics
3. Increased Uses for Artificial Intelligence
4. Technology to Detect Suspicious Body Language
Although it's not possible to know exactly how espionage experts will depend on the things on this list and others, it's evident that technology will help spies achieve their missions. It may also allow them to diversify their responsibilities as tech takes care of past tasks. more
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Facial Recognition Technology – Not Ready for PRIME Time

Security Scrapbook Flashback to 2008.