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Video Surveillance Trend 2012: Smartphone Surveillance
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Mobile apps for video surveillance applications (“Video Surveillance Management” software) exist for some time and are usually add-ons to video surveillance products. They basically allow viewing video streams on a mobile device. However, the next trend in video surveillance seems to be using smartphones as video surveillance cameras. Obvious applications are as spy-cams or as baby monitors. However, additionally, this further paves the way for broader use of sousveillance (“inverse surveillance”) technology, where everyone watches everyone, thus actually creating more privacy than less (as argued by David Brin). This is certainly an area of technology to watch.
Check our this really well-done app which can be used for many applications (such as letting your girlfriend choose which tea she would like while lying sick in bed): Airbeam.
Are You a Sex Predator? Think Before Your Write!
(c) Corner Stock Baby Gifts.
You can get the t-shirt from here.
A recent Reuters story about an interview with Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan revealed that Facebook is scanning user profiles for criminal behavior, focusing on sexual predators. By comparing several parameters like friend status, age, mutual friends and relationship between users, a monitoring software determines how likely it is that a Facebook user is a sexual predator. If there is a positive match, a Facebook employee gets a warning and checks the information manually. If the monitoring result seems likely, the police is informed. This actually led to the arrest of a thirty-something man who talked with a 13 year old girl on Facebook about sex and planned to meet her the next day. Because of the fast reaction of Facebook this man was arrested before anything else could happen.
This raises the obvious question if it is ok for Facebook to scan our data. No one knows if the age of a Facebook user is correct. Maybe the girl was actually a 60 year old, fat man … On the other hand finding criminals before they do any (more) harm cannot be a bad thing either.
I, for one, do not want to think if what I write might look criminally relevant to somebody before I post something on Facebook! I hope as much is done to educate 13 year olds on not doing something stupid as to monitor if they do.
Twitter Gov Requests Doubled in 2012
Twitter recently released their first transparency report, outlining how often in the first half of 2012 government or copyright holders requested Twitter account information and how often this information was produced. The majority of information requests (679) came from the United States but also a significant number came from Japan (98). US requests were followed in 75% of the cases while in Japans case only 20% of the requests were fulfilled. Interestingly, only 3 requests to remove a Twitter account by court orders were received (Greece and Turkey) but none of them was followed!
In total, Twitter received in the first half of 2012 as many requests as in all of 2011, which is a much bigger increase than overall Twitter growth (which was at about 20% in the US).
All in all, these numbers do not surprise me that much, taking all of the 140 million active users into account. And it is reassuring that Twitter does not seem eager to give out user data (Twitter already took a stand for an Occupy Wall Street protester at the beginning of this year).
Twitters transparency report is a perfect example on how to build users trust: by making the companies actions transparent. They should be a glowing example for other web companies who basically store all the information of our lives online.
If you are interested in what Facebook sends if they get a subpoena for a user, you can see an example online (it’s 62 pages of Facebook data …).
Flying drones prone to hacking
The US department of homeland security was offering a prize for whoever can hack into a flying drone. Now, a team from the University of Texas actually achieved it by spoofing GPS signals. This way, a drone can literally be steered anywhere the hacker likes and could be crashed into a building like a missile. This is an obvious security threat to drones today, more so if they are used in urban environments. While this simple “hack” can probably be fixed, it is a warning sign that these threats have to be considered when developing and deploying this technology.
Digital Privacy 