DNA face to facial recognition in attempt to find suspect

In an effort to find a suspect in a 1990 murder, there was a police request in 2017 to use a 3-D rendering of a face based on DNA. For Wired, Dhruv Mehrotra reports:

The detective’s request to run a DNA-generated estimation of a suspect’s face through facial recognition tech has not previously been reported. Found in a trove of hacked police records published by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets, it appears to be the first known instance of a police department attempting to use facial recognition on a face algorithmically generated from crime-scene DNA.

This seems like a natural progression, but it should be easy to see how the pairing of the tech could cause all sorts of issues when someone’s face is poorly constructed and then misclassified with facial recognition. What’s the confidence interval equivalent for a face?

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Finding a troll’s identity

A troll kept leaving comments on a woman’s TikTok videos, so she figured out who he was by following bits of information.

@rx0rcist Congrats, daddy. #heybestie #accountability #rx0rcist ♬ Chopin Nocturne No. 2 Piano Mono – moshimo sound design

The sleuthing genre of videos that find something based on digital footprints continues to fascinate. Plus, this one is really satisfying. Although it also makes me wonder about privacy and people using the bits of information for bad things.

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Oddly specific ad profiles

Advertising funds a big chunk of the web, but for advertisers to continue to spend, their placements have to deliver results. So companies collect data about people’s online activity and create profiles based on the behavior. For The Markup, Jon Keegan and Joel Eastwood, dig in to the specificity of these profiles.

Profiles get stuck in segments or groups, and advertisers can choose which segment to put ads in front of. The above are finance-based segments. I’ve always dreamed of being a “Silver Sophisticate” myself.

You can download the data the project is based on here.

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A portrait of your stolen identity in data breaches

You’ve probably heard about big data breaches over the years. They’re in the news or you get an email from a company that kindly reminds you to reset your password, because a few million accounts might have been exposed. Julian Fell, Ben Spraggon, and Matt Liddy for ABC News show how bits of information from all the known breaches can add up to form a complete profile of you.

Enter an email address and see how many breaches it went through, plus what information was stolen. Yay, 14 breaches for me.

Also check out Have I Been Pwned, where the data for the interactive comes from. It provides more background on individual breaches. [Thanks, Matt]

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Data warehouse at the supermarket

Grocery stores with loyalty programs collect data on what and when you buy at their stores. Then they sell that data, because of course they do. For The Markup, Jon Keegan delves into why that matters when two big companies, Kroger and Albertsons, plan to get together:

In October 2022, Kroger and another top supermarket chain, Albertsons, announced plans for a $24.6 billion merger that would combine the top two supermarket chains in the U.S., creating stiff competition for Walmart, the overall top seller of groceries. U.S. regulators and members of Congress are scrutinizing the deal, including by examining its potential to erode privacy: Kroger has carefully grown two “alternative profit business” units that monetize customer information, expected by Kroger to yield more than $1 billion in “profits opportunity.” Folding Albertsons into Kroger will potentially add tens of millions of additional households to this data pool, netting half the households in America as customers.

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Sleuthing for birth dates, with just TikTok profiles as clue

TikTok user notkahnjunior figures out people’s birth dates through the psuedo-privacy of the internet. People give her their TikTok profile, and she takes it from there.

@notkahnjunior Replying to @knoughpe ♬ original sound – kahn

No special tools required. Just web searches coupled with interactions among those who don’t know or care about privacy on the internets. It seems too easy. But it is also entertaining.

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Luxury surveillance

Chris Gilliard, for The Atlantic, describes self-surveillance that people pay for in exchange for small conveniences at the expense of privacy:

The conveniences promised by Amazon’s suite of products may seem divorced from this context: I am here to tell you that they’re not. These “smart” devices all fall under the umbrella of what the digital-studies scholar David Golumbia and I call “luxury surveillance“—that is, surveillance that people pay for and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits. These gadgets are analogous to the surveillance technologies deployed in Detroit and many other cities across the country in that they are best understood as mechanisms of control: They gather data, which are then used to affect behavior. Stripped of their gloss, these devices are similar to the ankle monitors and surveillance apps such as SmartLINK that are forced on people on parole or immigrants awaiting hearings. As the author and activist James Kilgore writes, “The ankle monitor—which for almost two decades was simply an analog device that informed authorities if the wearer was at home—has now grown into a sophisticated surveillance tool via the use of GPS capacity, biometric measurements, cameras, and audio recording.”

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Border enforcement data collection

Drew Harwell, for The Washington Post, reporting on a growing database and who has access to the records:

The rapid expansion of the database and the ability of 2,700 CBP officers to access it without a warrant — two details not previously known about the database — have raised alarms in Congress about what use the government has made of the information, much of which is captured from people not suspected of any crime. CBP officials told congressional staff the data is maintained for 15 years.

Details of the database were revealed Thursday in a letter to CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who criticized the agency for “allowing indiscriminate rifling through Americans’ private records” and called for stronger privacy protections.

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Open cameras and AI to locate Instagram photos

Dries Depoorter recorded video from open cameras for a week and scraped Instagram photos. Then he used AI to identify the people in the photos and their locations. Depoorter calls it The Follower.

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Tracked while reading about being tracked at work

While reading this NYT article, by Jodi Kantor and Arya Sundaram, on the drawbacks of activity and time tracking for work, the article itself tracks your reading behavior. You see counters for the time you spend reading and scrolling, clicks, keystrokes, idle time, and active time. It comes complete with snippy comments and a final grade — and a bitter taste for productivity tracking.

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