I requested documents from the HK govt on what facial recognition tech it’s already using as protests get more tense here. Here’s what I found out: https://t.co/J6UTKqCdnp
China paradox in Australia? Take a look. Pro-China protestors in the country enjoying democratic freedoms – including speech and assembly – by harassing pro-#HongKong protestors who want to protect own similar democratic freedoms in Hong Kong. 🤷🏽♂️🤷🏽♂️🤷🏽♂️ #HongKongProtests#antiELABhttps://t.co/yDBpA5rG02
Chinese government uses WeChat to spy on everyone who uses it, and they use it in the same way Facebook uses fake news to mobilize far right groups. Hong Kong protestors avoid it like the plague https://t.co/KIvK7FyUHP
New York’s Lockport City School District, which is using public funds from a Smart Schools bond to help pay for a reported $3.8 million security system that uses facial recognition technology to identify individuals who don’t belong on campus
the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF), a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C., published an animated video that illustrates the possible harm that surveillance technology can cause to children and the steps schools should take before making any decisions, such as identifying specific goals for the technology and establishing who will have access to the data and for how long.
My note: same considerations were relayed to the SCSU SOE dean in regard of the purchase of Premethean and its installation in SOE building without discussion with faculty, who work with technology. This information was also shared with the dean: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/10/31/students-data-privacy/
The increasing availability of these kinds of tools raise concerns and questions for Doug Levin, founder of EdTech Strategies.acial-recognition police tools have been decried as “staggeringly inaccurate.”
acial-recognition police tools have been decried as “staggeringly inaccurate.”School web filters can also impact low-income families inequitably, he adds, especially those that use school-issued devices at home. #equity.
Social-Emotional Learning: The New Surveillance?
Using data to profile students—even in attempts to reinforce positive behaviors—has Cerda concerned, especially in schools serving diverse demographics. #equity.
As in the insurance industry, much of the impetus (and sales pitches) in the school and online safety market can be driven by fear. But voicing such concerns and red flags can also steer the stakeholders toward dialogue and collaboration.
Between the creation of a social rating system and street cameras with facial recognition capabilities, technology reports coming out of China have raised serious concerns for privacy advocates. These concerns are only heightened as Chinese investors turn their attention to the United States education technology space acquiring companies with millions of public school users.
A particularly notable deal this year centers on Edmodo, a cross between a social networking platform and a learning management system for schools that boasts having upwards of 90 million users. Net Dragon, a Chinese gaming company that is building a significant education division, bought Edmodo for a combination of cash and equity valued at $137.5 million earlier this month.
Edmodo began shifting to an advertising model last year, after years of struggling to generate revenue. This has left critics wondering why the Chinese firm chose to acquire Edmodo at such a price, some have gone as far as to call the move a data grab.
as data becomes a tool that governments such as Russia and China could use to influence voting systems or induce citizens into espionage, more legislators are turning their attention to the acquisitions of early-stage technology startups.
NetDragon officials, however, say they have no interest in these types of activities. Their main goal in acquiring United States edtech companies lies in building profitability, says Pep So, NetDragon’s Director of Corporate Development.
In 2015, the firm acquired the education technology platform, Promethean, a company that creates interactive displays for schools. NetDragon executives say that the Edmodo acquisition rounds out their education product portfolio—meaning the company will have tools for supporting multiple aspects of learning including; preparation, instructional delivery, homework, assignment grading, communication with parents students and teachers and a content marketplace.
NetDragon’s monetization plan for Edmodo focuses on building out content that gets sold via its platform. Similar to tools like TeachersPayTeachers, So hopes to see users putting up content on the platform’s marketplace, some free and others for a fee (including some virtual reality content), so that the community can buy, sell and review available educational tools.
As far as data privacy is concerned, So notes that NetDragon is still learning what it can and cannot do. He noted that the company will comply with Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), a federal regulation created in order to protect the privacy of children online, but says that the rules and regulations surrounding the law are confusing for all actors involved.
Historically, Chinese companies have faced trust and branding issues when moving into the United States market, and the reverse is also true for U.S. companies seeking to expand overseas. Companies have also struggled to learn the rules, regulations and operational procedures in place in other countries.
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Iran and Huawei top agenda as Pompeo meets Merkel for 45 minutes in Berlin
It will be eons before AI thinks with a limbic brain, let alone has consciousness
AI programmes themselves generate additional computer programming code to fine-tune their algorithms—without the need for an army of computer programmers. In AI speak, this is now often referred to as “machine learning”.
An AI programme “catastrophically forgets” the learnings from its first set of data and would have to be retrained from scratch with new data. The website futurism.com says a completely new set of algorithms would have to be written for a programme that has mastered face recognition, if it is now also expected to recognize emotions. Data on emotions would have to be manually relabelled and then fed into this completely different algorithm for the altered programme to have any use. The original facial recognition programme would have “catastrophically forgotten” the things it learnt about facial recognition as it takes on new code for recognizing emotions. According to the website, this is because computer programmes cannot understand the underlying logic that they have been coded with.
Irina Higgins, a senior researcher at Google DeepMind, has recently announced that she and her team have begun to crack the code on “catastrophic forgetting”.
As far as I am concerned, this limbic thinking is “catastrophic thinking” which is the only true antipode to AI’s “catastrophic forgetting”. It will be eons before AI thinks with a limbic brain, let alone has consciousness.
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Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind
By Rory Cellan-JonesTechnology correspondent,2 December 2014
Facebook has moved more than 1.5 billion users out of reach of European privacy law, despite a promise from Mark Zuckerberg to apply the “spirit” of the legislation globally.
Privacy researcher Lukasz Olejnik disagreed, noting that the change carried large ramifications for the affected users. “Moving around one and a half billion users into other jurisdictions is not a simple copy-and-paste exercise,” he said.
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Facebook To Offer Users Opt-Outs That Comply With New European Privacy Rules
As we reported earlier this week, a federal judge in California ruled that Facebook could be sued in a class-action lawsuit brought by users in Illinois who say the social media company improperly used facial recognition to upload photographs.
Also on Wednesday, TechCrunch reports that Facebook is investigating a security research report showing that its user data is vulnerable to third-party JavaScript trackers embedded on websites offering the “Login With Facebook” feature.
As online education expands, students are bringing old-fashioned cheating into the digital age
According to the latest report from Babson Survey Research Group, nearly 6.5 million American undergraduates now take at least one course online
1. Listen to students and faculty. Every college, university, or online-learning provider has a different approach to online learning. At Indiana University, where more than 30 percent of students take at least one online course, the online education team has launched Next.IU, an innovative pilot program to solicit feedback from the campus community before making any major edtech decision. By soliciting direct feedback from students and faculty, institutions can avoid technical difficulties and secure support before rolling out the technology campus-wide.
2. Go mobile. Nine in 10 undergraduates own a smartphone, and the majority of online students complete some coursework on a mobile device. Tapping into the near-ubiquity of mobile computing on campus can help streamline the proctoring and verification process. Rather than having to log onto a desktop, students can use features like fingerprint scan and facial recognition that are already integrated into most smartphones to verify their identity directly from their mobile device.
For a growing number of students, mobile technology is the most accessible way to engage in online coursework, so mobile verification provides not only a set of advanced security tools, but also a way for universities to meet students where they are.
3. Learn from the data. Analytical approaches to online test security are still in the early stages. Schools may be more susceptible to online “heists” if they are of a certain size or administer exams in a certain way, but institutions need data to benchmark against their peers and identify pain points in their approach to proctoring.
In an initial pilot with 325,000 students, for instance, we found that cheating rose and fell with the seasons—falling from 6.62 percent to 5.49 percent from fall to spring, but rising to a new high of 6.65 percent during the summer.
Apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Viber
Felix Krause described in 2017 that when a user grants an app access to their camera and microphone, the app could do the following:
Access both the front and the back camera.
Record you at any time the app is in the foreground.
Take pictures and videos without telling you.
Upload the pictures and videos without telling you.
Upload the pictures/videos it takes immediately.
Run real-time face recognition to detect facial features or expressions.
Livestream the camera on to the internet.
Detect if the user is on their phone alone, or watching together with a second person.
Upload random frames of the video stream to your web service and run a proper face recognition software which can find existing photos of you on the internet and create a 3D model based on your face.
For instance, here’s a Find my Phone application which a documentary maker installed on a phone, then let someone steal it. After the person stole it, the original owner spied on every moment of the thief’s life through the phone’s camera and microphone.
The government
Edward Snowden revealed an NSA program called Optic Nerves. The operation was a bulk surveillance program under which they captured webcam images every five minutes from Yahoo users’ video chats and then stored them for future use. It is estimated that between 3% and 11% of the images captured contained “undesirable nudity”.
Hackers can also gain access to your device with extraordinary ease via apps, PDF files, multimedia messages and even emojis.
An application called Metasploit on the ethical hacking platform Kali uses an Adobe Reader 9 (which over 60% of users still use) exploit to open a listener (rootkit) on the user’s computer. You alter the PDF with the program, send the user the malicious file, they open it, and hey presto – you have total control over their device remotely.
Once a user opens this PDF file, the hacker can then:
Install whatever software/app they like on the user’s device.
Use a keylogger to grab all of their passwords.
Steal all documents from the device.
Take pictures and stream videos from their camera.
Capture past or live audio from the microphone.
Upload incriminating images/documents to their PC, and notify the police.
And, if it’s not enough that your phone is tracking you – surveillance cameras in shops and streets are tracking you, too
You might even be on this website, InSeCam, which allows ordinary people online to watch surveillance cameras free of charge. It even allows you to search cameras by location, city, time zone, device manufacturer, and specify whether you want to see a kitchen, bar, restaurant or bedroom.
a need for new techniques to handle the problem in online environments. To achieve zero cheating is hard (or impossible) without repelling not only cheaters but also those students who do not cheat, where a zero ‐ tolerance emphasis also would risk inhibiting students’ intrinsic motivation. Several studies indicate that existing virtual learning environments do not provide the features needed to control that the intended student is the one taking the online exam. Biometric Belt and Braces for Authentication in Distance Education.
One approach to prevent student’s dishonesty is the university code of honour. This is a set of rules describing what actions are not permitted and the consequences for students taking such actions. Another way of preventing cheating is the use of proctors during written exams. Even while using such codes of honour and proctors, universities still have found many students to cheat. Biometric Belt and Braces for Authentication in Distance Education.
Neutralisation is the phenomenon when a person rationalises his or her dishonest behaviour with arguments like “I can do this because the work load within this course is just too overwhelming” or “I can do this because I have a half ‐ time job on the side which gives me less study time than the other students have”. By doing so the student puts the blame for cheating on external factors rather than on himself, and also protects himself from the blame of others (Haines et al. 1986). This neutralises the behavior in the sense that the person’s feelings of shame are reduced or even eliminated. Haines et al. (1986 Biometric Belt and Braces for Authentication in Distance Education.
Simply asking participants to read a code of honour when they had the opportunity to cheat reduced dishonesty. Also whether one signed the code of honour or just read it influenced cheating. The Shu et al. (2011) study suggests that opportunity and knowledge of ethical standards are two factors that impact students’ ethical decision about cheating. This is in line with the results in (McCabe, Trevino and Butterfield 2001), showing that if students regularly are reminded of the university’s code of honour, they are less likely to cheat Biometric Belt and Braces for Authentication in Distance Education.
For an online course setting, Gearhart (2001) suggest that teachers should develop a guideline for “good practices”.
In online examination there are reports of students hiring other persons to increase their scores (Flior & Kowalski, 2010) and there is a need for new enhanced authentication tools (Ullah, Xiao & Lilley, 2012). For companies and Internet environments the process of authentication is often completed through the use of logon identification with passwords and the assumption of the password to guarantee that the user is authentic (Ramzan, 2007), but logins and passwords can be borrowed (Bailie & Jortberg, 2009). The discussion on how to provide enhanced authentication in online examination has led to many suggested solutions; four of them are: Biometric Belt and Braces for Authentication in Distance Education.
Challenge Questions: with questions based on third ‐ party data
Face ‐ to ‐ Face Proctored Exam: with government or institution issued identification
Web Video Conference Proctor: audio and video conference proctoring via webcam and screen monitoring service with live, certified proctors
Biometrics and Web Video Recording: with unique biometrics combined with the recording of student in exam via webcam
An idea for online courses is that assessment should not only be a one way process where the students get grades and feedback. The examination process should also be a channel for students’ feedback to teachers and course instructors (Mardanian & Mozelius, 2011). New online methods could be combined with traditional assessment in an array of techniques aligned to the learning outcomes (Runyon and Von Holzen, 2005). Examples of summative and formative assessment in an online course could be a mix of: Biometric Belt and Braces for Authentication in Distance Education.
Multiple choice questions (MCQ) tests, automatically corrected in a virtual learning environment
Term papers or essays analysed by the course instructors
Individual or group assignments posted in digital drop ‐ boxes
Oral or written tests conducted in the presence of the instructor or through videoconferences (Dikli, 2003)
Authors’ suggestion is a biometric belt and braces model with a combination of scanned facial coordinates and voice recognition, where only a minimum of biometric data has to be stored. Even if the model is based on biometrics with a medium to low grade of uniqueness and permanence, it would be reliable enough for authentication in online courses if two (or more) types of biometrics are combined with the presented dialogue based examination using an interaction/obser ‐ vation process via web cameras. Biometric Belt and Braces for Authentication in Distance Education.