Joint Investigation of Clearview AI, Inc. by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada...

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"The Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC)... commenced a joint investigationFootnote 1 to examine whether Clearview AI, Inc.’s ('Clearview') collection, use and disclosure of the personal information by means of its facial recognition tool complied with federal and provincial privacy laws applicable to the private sector.

...the Offices determined that Clearview collected, used and disclosed the personal information of individuals in Canada for inappropriate purposes, which cannot be rendered appropriate via consent. We found that the mass collection of images and creation of biometric facial recognition arrays by Clearview, for its stated purpose of providing a service to law enforcement personnel, and use by others via trial accounts, represents the mass identification and surveillance of individuals by a private entity in the course of commercial activity. We found Clearview’s purposes to be inappropriate where they: (i) are unrelated to the purposes for which those images were originally posted; (ii) will often be to the detriment of the individual whose images are captured; and (iii) create the risk of significant harm to those individuals, the vast majority of whom have never been and will never be implicated in a crime. Furthermore, it collected images in an unreasonable manner, via indiscriminate scraping of publicly accessible websites."

Creepy ways Companies are Spying: New Privacy International Database Reveals Disturbing Details
"Human rights advocacy group Privacy International (PI) has launched a new searchable database that aims to map and highlights all the creepy technology solutions being sold around the world to enable surveillance on citizens, the companies that sell these solutions and the agencies they are selling them to.

The Surveillance Industry Index database, co-developed with pro-transparency software group Transparency Toolkit, features information on over 520 surveillance companies in the world, together with more than 1,500 brochures on surveillance technology solutions.

There are also 600 reports detailing where specific surveillance technologies were exported to that have been compiled by activists, journalists and researchers from looking at open source records, as well as investigative and technical reports, and government licensing data."

CISA: the dirty deal between Google and the NSA that no one is talking about http://t.co/QidLU3dx2j

— Crim Library UTL (@CrimLib) July 30, 2015

The Governance of Telecommunications Surveillance: How Opaque and Unaccountable Practices and Policies Threaten Canadians
"The Telecom Transparency Project investigates how telecommunications data is monitored, collected, and analyzed for commercial, state security, and intelligence purposes.  The Project is associated with the Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto....

Core to the Telecom Transparency Project's work is interrogating the practices of telecommunications service providers (e.g., AT&T, Vodafone, and Bell Canada) that route data traffic between communicating parties and the mechanisms that third parties use to access the digital information that is endlessly flowing through telecommunications service providers' networks.  Rendering telecommunications processes transparent will help citizens, politicians, and businesses understand how private or public, and how secure or vulnerable, their communications are to service provider-linked communications interferences and data disclosure."

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Related Article:  How We Sold Our Souls - and More - to the Internet Giants 

Rampant Telecom Surveillance Conducted with little Transparency, Oversight
"Canadian telecommunications providers have been handing over vast amounts of customer information to law enforcement and government departments and agencies with little transparency or oversight, a new report says.

'We conclude that serious failures in transparency and accountability indicate that corporations are failing to manage Canadians' personal information responsibly,' says the report released by Citizen Lab today that examines how Canadian telecommunications data is monitored, collected and analyzed by groups such as police, intelligence and government agencies."

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Google's Rapidly Expanding Political Activity and Information Collection Systems Present Cause for Concern
"Google is so rapidly expanding both its information-collecting capabilities and its political clout that it could become too powerful to be held accountable, a new Public Citizen report finds.

'Mission Creep-y: Google Is Quietly Becoming One of the Nation’s Most Powerful Political Forces While Expanding Its Information-Collection Empire' looks at the ways Google is accruing power both in terms of the information it collects about the public and the sway it has over federal and state governments, as well as civil society.

Privacy experts say only the National Security Agency (NSA) rivals Google in terms of information gathering, and a recent survey showed that Americans are more concerned about companies like Google than the NSA. But Public Citizen documents that Google has not always warned the public before collecting or combining users’ information in new ways – and some of its collection practices have pushed the boundaries of the law. This is cause for concern as Google expands into new technological developments and acquisitions that collect information beyond what people do on the Internet."

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Related Report:  Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era

American Privacy Is Vanishing as the Government and Corporations Raid Our Online Lives

 Was 2013 the year online privacy died? Or was it the year that people paying attention realized that their online lives—and all their data and communications—was low-hanging fruit that was being picked and parsed by big government and big business.
  
Edward Snowden’s theft of what’s now said to be 1.7 million files showed the world that America’s spymasters were grabbing everything that passed between smart phones, Wi-Fi signals, laptops, and those devices’ contents: account log-ins, passwords, etc. As 2014 began, The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency was building “a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.”

Read on...

The Other Police State -- The Private Intel Industry Grows

 On November 20th, the Center for Corporate Policy, a Washington, DC, good-government group, issued a revealing study, “ Spooky Business: A New Report on Corporate Espionage Against Non-profits.”  Written by Gary Ruskin, it confirms one’s worst suspicions about the ever-expanding two-headed U.S. security state

One “head” of this apparatus consists of the formal law-enforcement, security juggernaut.  It includes the vast network of federal, state and local entities that are duly, “legally,” constituted to maintain law and order.  It maintains state power.

The second “head” consists of a parallel “police” force, local and national corporate entities that use legal — and often questionable — practices to undermine democracy, most notably a citizen’s right to object to what s/he perceives as an unjust business practice.  It maintains corporate power.

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America's Spy State: How the Telecoms Sell Out Your Privacy

Your seemingly private information is a public commodity, subject to the dictates of the security state and market opportunists. 

You need to know one simple truth: you have no privacy with regard to your electronic communications.

Nothing you do online, via a wireline telephone or over a wireless device is outside the reach of government security agencies and private corporations. Your ostensible personal communication -- whether a phone call, an email, a search, visiting a website, a credit card purchase, a 140 character Tweet, a movie download or a Facebook friending -- is a public commodity, subject to the dictates of the security state and market opportunists.

Corporate surveillance has begun to raise consumer, Congressional and regulatory concerns – a major case, Amnesty v. Clapper, is now before the Supreme Court. One can only wonder why it is not an issue in this year’s election?

Corporate spying takes a variety of forms. GPS tracking over a wireless device is widespread. Google’s efforts to commercialize its users’ keystrokes resulted in a $25,000 fine from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Potentially more consequential, a growing chorus of criticism over its recently introduced data-harvesting program seems to have contributed to a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation of Google; the FTC retained Beth Wilkinson, a high-powered outside counsel, to oversee a possible anti-trust prosecution of the company. On March 1st, Google introduced a new program that collects user data from its 60 services. Google stores “cookies” (i.e., code that compiles a record of an individual’s web browsing history) on a growing number of communications devices, whether a home PC, tablet, smartphone and a growing number of TV sets. These cookies track every website a person visits or function s/he uses. As the New York Times wrote, “The case has the potential to be the biggest showdown between regulators and Silicon Valley since the government took on Microsoft 14 years ago.

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