#surveillance industry

[odinsblog]

IN THE FALL OF 2020, GIG WORKERS IN VENEZUELA POSTED A SERIES OF images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles—including some you really wouldn’t want shared on the Internet.

In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sits on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh.

The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot’s Roomba J7 series robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label audio, photo, and video data used to train artificial intelligence.

They were the sorts of scenes that internet-connected devices regularly capture and send back to the cloud—though usually with stricter storage and access controls. Yet earlier this year, MIT Technology Review obtained 15 screenshots of these private photos, which had been posted to closed social media groups.

The photos vary in type and in sensitivity. The most intimate image we saw was the series of video stills featuring the young woman on the toilet, her face blocked in the lead image but unobscured in the grainy scroll of shots below. In another image, a boy who appears to be eight or nine years old, and whose face is clearly visible, is sprawled on his stomach across a hallway floor. A triangular flop of hair spills across his forehead as he stares, with apparent amusement, at the object recording him from just below eye level.

iRobot—the world’s largest vendor of robotic vacuums, which Amazon recently acquired for $1.7 billion in a pending deal—confirmed that these images were captured by its Roombas in 2020.

Ultimately, though, this set of images represents something bigger than any one individual company’s actions. They speak to the widespread, and growing, practice of sharing potentially sensitive data to train algorithms, as well as the surprising, globe-spanning journey that a single image can take—in this case, from homes in North America, Europe, and Asia to the servers of Massachusetts-based iRobot, from there to San Francisco–based Scale AI, and finally to Scale’s contracted data workers around the world (including, in this instance, Venezuelan gig workers who posted the images to private groups on Facebook, Discord, and elsewhere).

Together, the images reveal a whole data supply chain—and new points where personal information could leak out—that few consumers are even aware of.

(continue reading)

[kittyit]

post-entertainment society

[gwllabs]

It’s difficult to talk about technology without also addressing cybersecurity – the two are closely linked since a majority of devices, systems and solutions that people use as part of their personal and business lives are network connected devices.

[carmelasoprano]

Bebe Neuwirth as Avis DeVoto in episode 2x07 of Julia, "Shrimp and Grits"

[zigcarnivorous]

Hello, 👋

I hope you're well.

I humbly ask for your support by reblogging this post on your account to help save my family. As newcomers to Tumblr and GoFundMe, we are in desperate need of your kindness and support. 🙏❤️

My previous account was deleted, and now I'm reaching out, seeking your help to share my new account. Our sole hope is that your generosity can help my family endure this merciless war. 🙏🌹

Thank you sincerely. 🌹

https://gofund.me/e089ccce

Hello @m8hammed , I will do my best to share your campaign 💚 I have shared your pinned post, and I encourage my friends to take a look at your pictures and learn your story. And consider that a high number of notes isn't always a good thing for the tangible goal! Much like how a campaign will stagnate right before its goal, it's as if people see a large number of notes and assume everyone else is helping.

The only way to be sure someone helps is by helping :)

So please be a helpful compassionate soul and follow my friend @m8hammed and learn the names and dreams and hardships of his family.

Move forward in the world with good intention and care and you are always on the right path🙏

I am sorry this world is cruel and stupid. I am sorry you must implore petulant strangers on a cheap web site for relief. Many citizens of the empirical core believe themselves to be benevolent, good people yet have a wicked greedy little heart that only has love for themselves. These are people who complain about the price of gas to a person with a photo of their bombed, burnt car on their wall, man! PLEASE😭

Please feel free to send an ask, I may not always answer them all, but I do try to reblog a post from you when I see them! God be with your family and bless your health and see your goals met with perfect speed my friend🙏🫂💐💝❤️🖤🤍💚

[disease]

CLOSED CIRCUIT | CD, 1994 ELECTRONIC EYE (RICHARD H. KIRK)

[counterintelligenceprogram]

Identities of Counterintelligence Agents Leaked!

You thought all those annoying shitposts on the internet were Russian bots, but you were wrong! They were counterintelligence agents! We have photographic proof of their identities!

[emptyanddark]

Industrial methods of worker control were prefigured on plantations, which sought to maximize the labor of enslaved Black people otherwise unmotivated to produce value for those who kept them captive. While the relationship between industrial and plantation worker control is foundational, it is essential to recognize that there is no easy equivalence between the terror-enforced racialized labor regimes of plantation slavery, and industrial labor processes that drew on technologies developed on plantations.5 Plantation management—and the relations of domination that structured the plantation—was anchored in a view of Black people as commodities, as something-not-quite-human. And the conditions of bondage on the plantation defined the category of “unfreedom” against which white workers could be classified as “free.”

...

In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne demonstrates that power over enslaved people was executed through bureaucratic technologies that divided enslaved workers, prescribed their routines and motions, and calibrated their movements with the goal of managing and controlling “every moment of enslaved life.”11 Her work clarifies the interplay between the strict division and quantification of life and labor on plantations, and how such segmentation served to make enslaved people observable to overseers and managers.12 The fragmentation of production, whether in the field or the factory, shifts power away from those doing the work to owners who benefit from defining and overseeing a coherent view of workers and the labor process. Such a view doesn’t emerge on its own. Rather, it is produced through records, metrics, and standardized assessments—and we must understand the term “record keeping” to be a synonym for “surveillance.” Monitoring and quantification of work and workers was the first, and arguably most important, step in populating plantation records. And these records’ demands for data and information in turn shaped how labor was divided and managed, in service of making work and workers as visible and quantifiable as possible.

...

Iskander illuminates how designations of skill—and the power that capital claims to define what is and is not “skilled”—work to produce and naturalize conditions of bondage, creating a hierarchy of “deservedness” that justifies conditions of precarity and domination for the “unskilled.”20 The concept of skill is also racialized. In a “free” labor context, “skill” is narrated as something (white) workers possess and serves as an index of the wages a worker can deduct from the profits desired by capitalists—a sum they can, in theory, negotiate or refuse. On the plantation, enslaved Black people were not ascribed the capacity for skill. They were narrated as incapable of possessing skill, and any prowess they displayed was attributed to biological differences that nonetheless marked them as inferior—animal capacity, not human ingenuity. Racial categories structure who is deemed able to possess skill to begin with, while marking a lack of skill as a condition of unfreedom and thus a condition of Blackness.21

[mikopol]

Musical inspiration: Apocryphos, "Heartsick " (album "Against Civilization", 2020)

[nando161mando]

"It was thanks to Subject Access Requests that teaching assistants and librarians were able to find out that the UK Department for Education is keeping files on their internet activity.

When the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill is passed, we might not be able to find out about such sinister practices because the Bill will make it easier for the government to refuse our requests to access the data it holds about us."

#DPDI #GDPR #ukpolitics #dataprotection

[kittyit]

x

[clemsfilmdiary]

Brainstorm (1983, Douglas Trumbull)

3/17/24

[shinobicyrus]

We are joined by Antony Loewenstein — author of The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World — to discuss his extensive reporting on the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the policing tactics and surveillance technologies that are tested on Palestinians before sold as part of lucrative global export industry, and how the dynamics of occupation never stay within their cordoned zones but always expand to capture increasingly more people and places.

This came out five months ago, so before the current conflict. It was very enlightening and shattered a lot of the perceptions I had grown up with around Israel. Particularly, Israel's history of coopering with brutal regimes and their selling their skills and technology to the highest bidder. Oftentimes as a middle-man for the United States.

[constructionsafetynetwork]

Best Practices for Protecting Road Construction Workers

Road construction workers operate in an environment where danger is a constant companion. The proximity to moving traffic, the use of heavy machinery, and the exposure to various environmental elements make their workplace one of the more hazardous ones. Therefore, implementing best practices for protecting road construction workers is not just a regulatory requirement but a moral imperative. To…

[joklhops]

i made another thing, tumblr. this is a spoken word industrial piece called 'please turn on location services' it's inspiration is probably obvious. i generated most of the imagery with AI, first time trying that - it's neat. The prison photo is from san quentin prison, unknown date, prisoners gathering for a concert. anyway, hope you dig it.

[bone-dyke]

i love how tech youtube channels uphold the police state