Free Republic

Parents of students who attend Rutherford County Schools (RCS) must agree not to monitor their child’s online classroom sessions. Officials at all county schools are asking parents to sign forms agreeing not to watch these virtual classes. The Tennessee Star received a copy of such a form this week. “RCS strives to present these opportunities in a secure format that protects student privacy to the greatest extent possible, however because these meetings will occur virtually RCS is limited in its ability to fully control certain factors such as non-student observers that may be present in the home of a student...

Researchers with the University of Chicago's SAND Lab have detailed the development of a new tool called Fawkes that subtly alters images in a way that makes them unusable for facial recognition. The tool comes amid growing concerns about privacy and an editorial detailing the secret scraping of billions of online images to create facial recognition models. Put simply, Fawkes is a cloaking tool that modifies images in ways imperceptible to the human eye. The idea is that anyone can download the tool, which has been made publicly available, to first cloak their images before posting them online. The name...

Desperate to replace the tax revenues lost due to the City’s oppressive response to the COVID pandemic, Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady has authorized a widespread surveillance of social media posts. “There are 22 states whose residents must report for a mandatory 14-day quarantine if they travel to Chicago,” Arwady said. “Very few are voluntarily submitting to this requirement. This forces us to monitor their social media activity. If we spot selfies or other posts sent from known tourist hot spots we check to see whether other posts from the same account were made from one...

Masks are good for concealing a human being. If you live in a drain then masks are what you need. They do give protection and they also hide fear. They are now mandatory in the state of Victoria in Australia. The state premier Daniel Andrews, also known as Dictator Dan, now has 1,000 defence force personnel to help police the people of Victoria. He banned golf and fishing very early in the pandemic but let 10,00 people crowd the streets for a BLM protest. If the police arrest you for sitting in a park its a $1,600 fine. Freedom -...

Over the past few weeks, as the Black Lives Matter movement has grown following outrage over the killing of George Floyd, high school students have leveraged every social media platform to call out their peers for racist behavior.

Amazon says it will place a "one-year pause" on allowing police to use its facial-recognition tool, one day after IBM said that it's exiting the business. While IBM will no longer offer, develop or research the software, Amazon is using a moratorium in the hope that Congress will "put in place appropriate rules for ethical use of facial recognition." Amid crackdowns on protests against police racism and brutality across the country, tech companies are facing increased scrutiny over their contracts with law enforcement agencies, with studies showing that the technology is inferior at identifying the gender of people with darker...

The US Senate voted down an amendment to the USA Patriot Act on Wednesday that would create a tougher standard for government investigators to collect the web search and browsing histories of people in the states. The bipartisan amendment, proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat and Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, a Republican, would've required the Department of Justice to show probable cause when requesting approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect the data for counterterrorism or counterintelligence investigations. Before the vote, Daines told the Senate the bill was necessary to keep the government from...

Facial recognition systems threaten our privacy. They can track where you go and add that information to the massive amount of information already saved about each of us. Big Brother is watching you and enabled by AI. And when it makes a mistake reading your face, you could end up with criminal charges far worse than when the toll tag system misreads your license plate. Here are several methods for fooling and interfering with facial recognition systems.

Coronavirus NSW: Dossier lays out case against China bat virus program China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak in an “assault on international transparency’’ that cost tens of thousands of lives, according to a dossier prepared by concerned Western governments on the COVID-19 contagion. The 15-page research document, obtained by The Saturday Telegraph, lays the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China. It states that to the “endangerment of other countries” the Chinese government covered-up news of the virus by silencing or “disappearing” doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence of it in can also...

Human body activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system. A server may provide a task to a device of a user which is communicatively coupled to the server. A sensor communicatively coupled to or comprised in the device of the user may sense body activity of the user. Body activity data may be generated based on the sensed body activity of the user. The cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the device of the user may verify if the body activity data satisfies one or more conditions set...

Facial recognition systems threaten our privacy. They can track where you go and add that information to the massive amount of information already saved about each of us. Big Brother is watching you and enabled by AI. And when it makes a mistake reading your face, you could end up with criminal charges far worse than when the toll tag system misreads your license plate. Here are several methods for fooling and interfering with facial recognition systems.

Facebook released its first county-by-county maps Monday showing the prevalence of self-reported COVID-19 symptoms based on data it has collected. The maps, which will be updated daily, are meant to help health officials allocate resources and decide where parts of society can be reopened. They use information from a voluntary survey Facebook has been prompting users to take. The survey, operated by the Carnegie Mellon University Delphi Research Center, is designed to help health researchers identify COVID-19 hot spots earlier. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the goal is to give state officials a sense of where they may need to...

BERLIN - A European technology platform to support smartphone apps that can help trace people at risk of infection by the new coronavirus is gaining support from governments, one of its prime movers said on Friday. Seven countries have either formally supported the Pan-European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing initiative or tasked one of its members with developing a national app, German tech entrepreneur Chris Boos told Reuters. PEPP-PT has emerged as a leading proponent of the use of Bluetooth short-range communications between personal devices as a proxy for measuring the risk that a person infected with coronavirus can pass it...

The Trump administration has come out against a proposed digital tracking system that could tell authorities about an individual’s vaccination history. The Orwellian measure has been proposed by technocratic oligarch Bill Gates, who is attempting to exploit the coronavirus pandemic to inch closer toward mandatory vaccinations. “Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it,” Gates said during an “Ask Me Anything” appearance on Reddit about the coronavirus. Attorney General Bill Barr is skeptical of Gates’ idea to tag people with these mark-of-the-beast...

I have not seen this subject brought up anywhere. Is the gov't recording and filing all of these Chinese- Wuhan Virus test, antibody test etc. Tens of millions of these test will be performed, maybe most of the country when it is all over. Are the test being destroyed after checking for the Kung Flu? I would bet our DNA is being stored and cataloged by the gov't for future use. If so what will the gov't do with this info? Demand lifestyle chnages, Social Credit use, sterilize people with genetic defects?

Critics worry about a Patriot Act for health care, raising concerns about patient privacy and civil liberties. White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating a national coronavirus surveillance system to give the government a near real-time view of where patients are seeking treatment and for what, and whether hospitals can accommodate them, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions. The proposed national network could help determine which areas of the country can safely relax social-distancing rules and which should remain vigilant. But it would also...

Americans are going to transit stations, retail and recreation locations and workplaces much less frequently now than they were just a month ago, according to a new mobility project from Google that traces human movements worldwide. The U.S. tech giant said it's creating Community Mobility Reports for nations around the world that detail people's daily movements based on data gathered from its Maps platform and other mobile services. Google said the data are collected in a way that protects individual privacy and gives healthcare officials a view on how the coronavirus pandemic has changed people's movements, routines and habits worldwide....

Paris (AFP) - Google will publish location data from its users around the world from Friday to allow governments to gauge the effectiveness of social distancing measures put in place to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, the tech giant said. The reports on users' movements in 131 countries will be made available on a special website and will "chart movement trends over time by geography," according to a post on one of the company's blogs. Trends will be display "a percentage point increase or decrease in visits" to locations like parks, shops, homes and places of work, not "the absolute number...

The government is preparing to release an app which alerts people if they come too close to someone who has tested positive for COIVD-19, Sky News can reveal. The contact tracking app, which will operate on an opt-in basis, will be released either just before or just after the lockdown is lifted, according to several people with close knowledge of the project. NHS bosses hope the app will attract more than 50% of the population, as large numbers of people using it together will be necessary for it to work effectively. The existence of the app, which was first revealed...

Want to know which California counties are evidently not doing a very good job of obeying the statewide shelter-in-place order that has been in effect for over a week now? The data company Unacast, a firm that collects cell phone location data for private companies, created an interactive map that shows which counties in California and beyond are correctly "socially distancing" by staying at home. Each county and state is graded on an A-F basis on the "change in average mobility," or the decline in distance traveled since quarantine measures were first put in place. "To calculate the actual underlying...