Apple's New "FaceID" Could Be A Powerful Mass Spying Tool
Apple's New "FaceID"
Could Be A Powerful Mass Spying Tool
by Tyler Durden Sep 15, 2017 10:14 PM Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com
On
Tuesday, Apple revealed their newest phone. The new line was anticipated by
Apple users and is another cult favorite. But many are rightly skeptical
of the “FaceID” feature.
FaceID,
is a tool that would use facial recognition to identify individuals and unlock
their phones for use. Unsurprisingly, this has generated some major
anxiety about mass spying and privacy concerns. Retailers already have a
desire for facial recognition technology. They want to monitor consumers,
and without legally binding terms and Apple could use FaceID to track consumer
patterns at its stores or develop and sell data to others.
That seems minor on the
surface, but the
ramifications could be enormous.
It’s also highly
possible that police would be able to more easily unlock phones without consent
by simply holding an individual’s phone up to his or her face, violating the
rights of the person to privacy.
But FaceID should create fear
about another form of government surveillance too. And this one is a rights
violation of every person on earth: mass scans to identify individuals based on
face profiles. Law enforcement is rapidly increasing their use of facial
recognition; one in two American adults are already enrolled in a
law enforcement facial recognition network, and at least one in four police
departments has the capability to run face recognition searches. This could make Apple the target for a new
mass surveillance order.
While Facebook has a
powerful facial recognition system, it doesn’t maintain the
operating systems that control the cameras on phones, tablets, and laptops that
stare at us every day.
Apple’s
new system completely changes that. For the first time, a company
will have a facial recognition system with millions of profiles, and the hardware
to scan and identify faces throughout the world.
According to Wired, this is a system already ripe for government
abuse. The government could issue an order to
Apple with a set of targets and instructions to scan iPhones, iPads, and Macs
to search for specific targets based on FaceID, and then Apple would provide
the government with those targets’ location based on the GPS data of devices’ that
receive a match. Apple has a good record of fighting for
user privacy, but there’s only so much the company could do if its
objections to an order are turned down by the courts. And the government is
already looking into how this could benefit them, but are hiding behind the
guise of “privacy.” On Wednesday Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota) released a letter to
Apple CEO Tim Cook, asking how the company will handle the technology’s
security and privacy implications.
But this type of sleazy
“Big Brother” activity by the government is not new.
Over the last decade the government has
increasingly embraced this type of mass scan method. Edward Snowden’s disclosures
revealed the existence of Upstream, a program under FISA Section 702 (set to expire in
just a few months). With Upstream, the NSA scans all internet
communications going into and out of the United States for
surveillance targets’ emails, as well as IP addresses and what the agency has
called cybersignatures.
And last year Reuters revealed that
Yahoo, in compliance with a government order, built custom software to scan
hundreds of millions of email accounts for content that contained a digital
signature used by surveillance targets. –Wired
Mass facial recognition scans
are unconstitutional and a gross violation of human privacy rights. But that
has yet to stop the overreaching government from its pursuit of an even more
effective method of their goal of dystopian mass surveillance.
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