Tuesday Tech Watch

A round-up of tech-related news

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.

Facial Recognition Software

IBM will no longer offer, develop, or research facial recognition software

According to this article from The Verge, IBM has written a letter to Congress claiming that they “will no longer offer general purpose facial recognition or analysis software.”

“IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any [facial recognition] technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency,” Krishna said in the letter. “We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies.”

Even though facial recognition’s accuracy has improved over time, “the technology — because it is often provided by private companies with little regulation or federal oversight — has been shown to suffer from bias along lines of age, race, and ethnicity, which can make the tools unreliable for law enforcement and security and ripe for potential civil rights abuses.”

Here’s a link to the article about a 2019 study of the flaws in facial recognition software that lead to racial bias.

Notably missing from the study was Amazon’s Rekognition software. You can read about what their system did here.

Here’s an excerpt from that article:

The American Civil Liberties Union tested Amazon’s facial recognition system — and the results were not good. To test the system’s accuracy, the ACLU scanned the faces of all 535 members of congress against 25,000 public mugshots, using Amazon’s open Rekognition API. None of the members of Congress were in the mugshot lineup, but Amazon’s system generated 28 false matches, a finding that the ACLU says raises serious concerns about Rekognition’s use by police.

“An identification — whether accurate or not — could cost people their freedom or even their lives,” the group said in an accompanying statement. “Congress must take these threats seriously, hit the brakes, and enact a moratorium on law enforcement use of face recognition.”

Reached by The Verge, an Amazon spokesperson attributed the results to poor calibration. The ACLU’s tests were performed using Rekognition’s default confidence threshold of 80 percent — but Amazon says it recommends at least a 95 percent threshold for law enforcement applications where a false ID might have more significant consequences.

Read the entire article here.

As you can see here, this isn’t an impossible scenario.

Surveillance and Privacy Issues

Do police drones foster trust or threaten civil rights and privacy?

Police say unmanned aerial systems can build trust in the community by deescalating incidents such as the one in Chula Vista. Critics warn, however, that drones sow fear and distrust.

“As drones become smaller and quieter and more sophisticated, we are entering a world where there’s no technological limit on the government having cameras everywhere looking down at us,” says Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney with the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Public safety agencies across all 50 states have drones, the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College says in a March 2020 paper, with 70% of disclosed public safety agencies working with drones in law enforcement. A patchwork of state regulations governs their use, and the law is lagging behind. Congress and the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates drone safety, have not set guidelines on the concerns around speech, privacy and discrimination.

Experts predict a police drone case eventually will reach the U.S. Supreme Court, though none was aware of any such cases currently pending at the federal level.

Read the entire article here.

Useful Tech Tools

How to Get Accurate Transcripts of Your Skype Calls

Skype has rolled its new features to better meet the needs of its users. They have introduced the new ‘Meet Now’  feature which enables calls and collaborations even for those who do not have a Skype account.

You can start a meeting and invite even non-Skype users by just clicking the Meet Now button. On top of this newly added feature is the previously launched transcription and translation in Skype Meeting Broadcast, which works real-time. This applies to recorded videos or just audio files.

More of your conversations, for professional and personal use cases, now happen through online calling services. Whether it be for documentation or to share valuable data in the written format, it is essential to transcribe Skype calls/conferences.

Click here to learn how to get an accurate transcript of your Skype calls.

BackBlaze provides a guide on how to download and back up your Google Drive

When I first started using Google Drive I saved everything there. Class projects, presentations for work, notes from meetings, resumes, recipes, and family mailing lists. You name it—all of my files lived in my Google Drive because of how easy it was to access and share them there.

However, the longer I used Google Drive, the more I used it while juggling different accounts (school, personal, and work). So, inevitably, I lost track of where some of my favorite files were located. But then I faced a real challenge: My university announced they would soon be deleting my year’s academic Google Accounts. I realized, as I considered this change, that a lot of important files and emails were on that account that I absolutely needed.

Whether controlled by work, school, or your housemate, Google Accounts are not permanent. Depending on the type of account you have, or who controls it, you may suddenly only have limited access to the account; you might lose your passwords and not have access to the means to reset them; the domain might lapse and get picked up by someone else; or, at the extreme end, your account could be hacked.

So whether you want/need to leave your Google Account for a new service, or you just want to save a copy of all your Google data to a second source, you need to understand how one retrieves and backs up content from a cloud sync service. We’ve outlined some simple steps for you to achieve that, here.

Click here to read the step-by-step guide.

Bits and Bobs

Who knew Snopes had an email list? :)

And this is the very definition of insanity.

And Amazon Ring makes the news again!

BTW, “Facebook doesn’t care”.

Um, yeah. :)