“Surveillance Society”

Nine Scottish elementary schools have embraced a pilot plan to deploy facial recognition technology to verify children’s school lunch payments, insisting the system is faster and more hygienic, while dodging the privacy issue.

A group of nine schools in North Ayrshire has begun scanning students’ faces to record school lunch payments, praising the new high-tech system for speeding up the transaction process and minimizing physical contact between individuals. The program officially began on Monday, replacing the schools’ previous system of card-swiping and fingerprint scanning.

Singapore has trialled patrol robots that blast warnings at people engaging in “undesirable social behaviour”, adding to an arsenal of surveillance technology in the tightly controlled city-state that is fuelling privacy concerns.

From vast numbers of CCTV cameras to trials of lampposts kitted out with facial recognition tech, Singapore is seeing an explosion of tools to track its inhabitants.

The U.S. government is using ‘keyword warrants’ to uncover the identity of anyone who searches Google and other search engines for certain search terms that may be related to a crime, according to a new report.

The controversial practice, which is already drawing civil liberties concerns about sweeping government overreach, was revealed on Tuesday in ‘accidentally unsealed’ court documents obtained by Forbes.

Keyword warrants — which have been secretly employed for at least several years — are drawing backlash as many argue they violate an individual’s constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

The Canadian government is considering new rules to regulate how social media platforms moderate potentially harmful user-generated content. Already, the proposed legislation has been criticized by internet scholars — across the political spectrum — as some of the worst in the world.

Oddly, the proposed legislation reads like a list of the most widely condemned policy ideas globally. Elsewhere, these ideas have been vigorously protested by human rights organizations and struck down as unconstitutional. No doubt, the federal government’s proposed legislation presents a serious threat to human rights in Canada.

An expansive federal law proposal to combat harmful online content is not only “fundamentally flawed” but also violates Canadians’ freedom of expression and privacy rights, warn internet law experts, who are calling on the Liberals to overhaul their approach.

The main problem with the so-called “online harms” proposal lies in its ability to filter content and block websites, which endangers the “survival of a free and open internet in Canada and beyond,” reads a submission to the Department of Canadian Heritage by the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law.

Restaurant patrons who’ve grown accustomed during the pandemic to whipping out their phones to access menus using QR codes should understand the implications for their personal data, say privacy and cyber-security experts.

That’s especially important given some restaurant owners are finding electronic menus efficient and cost effective, and that they may hold onto the practice even after COVID-19 is more contained.

The Los Angeles police department (LAPD) has directed its officers to collect the social media information of every civilian they interview, including individuals who are not arrested or accused of a crime, according to records shared with the Guardian.

Copies of the “field interview cards” that police complete when they question civilians reveal that LAPD officers are instructed to record a civilian’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media accounts, alongside basic biographical information. An internal memo further shows that the police chief, Michel Moore, told employees that it was critical to collect the data for use in “investigations, arrests, and prosecutions”, and warned that supervisors would review cards to ensure they were complete.

And… Facebook pays contractors to read your ‘encrypted’ WhatsApp messages, shares info with prosecutors – reports

Ask questions or post content about COVID-19 that runs counter to the Biden administration’s narrative and find yourself censored on social media.

That’s precisely what data analyst and digital strategist Justin Hart says happened to him. And so last week the Liberty Justice Center, a public-interest law firm, filed a suit on his behalf in California against Facebook, Twitter, President Joe Biden and United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy for violating his First Amendment right to free speech.