India, the world’s biggest democracy, built a massive database containing information and biometrics of its citizens in the form of Aadhaar back in 2009. Now, it’s planning to build a new database that will continually track the lives of 1.2 billion people living in the country.
Palantir is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data analysis. The company acts as an information management service for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporations like JP Morgan and Airbus, and dozens of other local, state, and federal agencies.
George Wright, America’s most elusive fugitive, ran for forty years. He ran from the cops after escaping from prison. He ran from the feds after the most brazen hijacking in history. He ran from the authorities on three continents, hiding out and blending in wherever he went.
The allure of monitoring people silently from afar has also proved more tempting than many expected. Customers who bought the cameras in hopes of not becoming victims joke that instead they’ve become voyeurs.
Being underestimated had been the theme of Brian Regan’s life, a curse he had borne silently since childhood. But for the mission he had now embarked upon, it was a blessing. No one in the intelligence community could have imagined that he of all people was capable of masterminding a complex espionage plot.
The “smart city” is not an actually existing entity. It’s a misleading euphemism for a corporately controlled urban future. Urban command centers are built primarily for police, not planners, let alone the public.
Amazon’s Ring started from humble roots as a smart doorbell company called “DoorBot.” Now it’s surveilling the suburbs and partnering with police. Although there’s no credible evidence that Ring actually deters or reduces crime, claiming that its products achieve these things is essential to its marketing model.
As cities become ever more packed with cameras that always see, public anonymity could disappear. Can stealth streetwear evade electronic eyes? Is there anything fashion can do to counter the erosion of public anonymity?
Though it’s becoming common around the world, live facial recognition — the practice of matching every face in live security footage against a watchlist — remains highly controversial. But that future is already here for the people of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Xinjiang, northwest China, is in a state of surveillance lockdown. Every message, word and movement is monitored for its extremist potential. A million Uyghur muslims are being held in concentration camps.
Transactions have given rise to a complex data-selling ecosystem. At the heart of it are credit card processing networks, including Visa, American Express, and Mastercard, the latter of which took in $4.1 billion in 2019 for services that include marketing analytics as well as fraud detection.
Your location, your purchases, video and audio from within your home and office, your online searches and every digital wandering, biometric tracking of your face and other body parts, your heart rate and other vital signs, your every communication, recording, and perhaps your deepest thoughts or idlest dreams.
New high-resolution satellites, AIs, and data tools are going to let us study Earth, and ourselves, in greater detail than ever before. That’s going to come with “unthinkable” problems.
