#masssurveillance

[azspot]

The vast surveillance apparatus these campaigners decry is often not one owned and controlled by government. In fact, it was developed and rolled out by the private companies cyberlibertarians championed up until very recently, and sometimes still find themselves defending. The internet has enabled the creation of the most intrusive and comprehensive global surveillance system in the history of humanity, as companies developed business models based on mass data collection to shape advertising and other means of targeting users. It’s an infrastructure that has increasingly moved into physical space as well, and one that everyone from hackers to intelligence agencies have been able to use to all manner of nefarious ends.

Reclaiming sovereignty in the digital age

[azspot]

Covenant Eyes is part of a multimillion-dollar ecosystem of so-called accountability apps. These apps are marketed to both churches and parents as tools to police online activity, and they charge a monthly fee to do so. Some of these apps monitor everything their users see and do on their devices, even taking screenshots (at least one per minute, in the case of Covenant Eyes) and eavesdropping on web traffic, WIRED found. The apps then report a feed of all of the users’ online activity directly to a chaperone—an “accountability partner,” in the apps’ parlance. When WIRED presented its findings to Google, however, the company determined that two of the top accountability apps—Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You—violate its policies.

The omniscience of Covenant Eyes soon weighed heavily on Hao-Wei Lin, who has since left Gracepoint. Within a month of installing the app, he started receiving accusatory emails from his church leader referencing things he had viewed online. “Anything you need to tell me?” reads one email Hao-Wei Lin shared with WIRED. Attached was a report from Covenant Eyes that detailed every single piece of digital content Hao-Wei Lin had consumed the prior week. It was a trail of digital minutiae accumulated from nights spent aimlessly browsing the internet, things Hao-Wei Lin could barely remember having seen—and would have forgotten about had a member of his Church not confronted him. The church leader zeroed in on a single piece of content that Covenant Eyes had flagged as “Mature”: Hao-Wei Lin had searched “#Gay” on a website called Statigr.am, and the app had flagged it.

Gracepoint, which focuses on colleges, claims to “serve students” on more than 70 campuses across the United States. According to emails between a Covenant Eyes representative and a former Gracepoint church leader that WIRED reviewed, the company said that in 2012 as many as 450 Gracepoint Church members were signed up to be monitored through Covenant Eyes.

“I wouldn’t quite call it spyware,” says a former member of Gracepoint who was asked to use Covenant Eyes and spoke on the condition of anonymity, due to privacy concerns. “It’s more like ‘shameware,’ and it’s just another way the church controls you.”

[renovatio06]

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Source: NEOM: Saudi Prince MBS China Deals Reveal Dark Side of Mega-City Plan THE LINE will be an architectural marvel running in a straight line from the mountains of NEOM to the Red Sea. A city built to deliver a new future for humanity.#TheLINE #NEOM pic.twitter.com/5v9NhqFe2p— NEOM (@NEOM) July 25, 2022 Twitter posting announcing NEOM I always thought that saying “I got nothing to hide” was…

[statelyassetprotection]

“The annual World Economic Forum (WEF) gathering has always been a testing ground for some bizarre ideas, which nonetheless serve a purpose: to introduce, and if possible normalize all kinds of mass surveillance and sometimes extremely privacy-invasive technologies.” #wef #brainimplant #masssurveillance #technology #thecheatcode #securitycheatcode https://www.instagram.com/p/CoDJxxoOTPu/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[shaquanrod]

#mmiw #Durangocide #EndlessNatureWalkandGiftShop #nativetiktok #indigen...

[mikelitt222]

[azspot]

Mass surveillance fundamentally changed the nature of surveillance. Because all the data is saved, mass surveillance allows people to conduct surveillance backward in time, and without even knowing whom specifically you want to target. Tell me where this person was last year. List all the red sedans that drove down this road in the past month. List all of the people who purchased all the ingredients for a pressure cooker bomb in the past year. Find me all the pairs of phones that were moving toward each other, turned themselves off, then turned themselves on again an hour later while moving away from each other (a sign of a secret meeting).

Spying has always been limited by the need for human labor. A.I. is going to change that.