COVID-19 Could Provide Cover for Surveillance Expansion

mood · Nov 15, 2020

mood said: ↑

Students Are Rebelling Against Eye-Tracking Exam Surveillance Tools
Invasive test-taking software has become mandatory in many places
September 24, 2020
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/...-against-eye-tracking-exam-surveillance-tools
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Cheating-detection companies made millions during the pandemic. Now students are fighting back.
November 13, 2020
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/c...ic-now-students-are-fighting-back/ar-BB1aX8Qa

When North Carolina A&T State University junior Arielle G. Brown took her International Marketing exam in September, a cheating-detection program analyzed her behavior through a computer webcam the entire time. After the test, her associate professor fired off a furious email ripping into her class for some “negative behavior” the software had flagged.

“A STUDENT IN 6 MINUTES HAD 776 HEAD AND EYE MOVEMENTS,” she wrote, adding later, “I would hate to have to write you up.”
But Brown and her classmates weren’t about to take the shaky accusations of cheating lying down. They quickly lit up a group chat — “How the hell are we [supposed] to control our eyes,” one student wrote — and Brown shared the email in a tweet that quickly got administrators’ attention, as well as more than 100,000 “likes.”
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“Online proctoring” companies saw in coronavirus shutdowns a chance to capitalize on a major reshaping of education, selling schools a high-tech blend of webcam-watching workers and eye-tracking software designed to catch students cheating on their exams.
They’ve taken in millions of dollars, some of it public money, from thousands of colleges in recent months.

A student can be flagged for finishing the test too quickly, or too slowly, clicking too much, or not enough.
If the camera sees someone else in the background, a student can be flagged for having “multiple faces detected.”
Room too noisy, Internet too spotty, camera on the fritz? Flag, flag, flag.
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Mass school closures in the wake of the coronavirus are driving a new wave of student surveillance
‘Somebody was watching me just lose my mind’
The companies, with names like ProctorU, Respondus and Honorlock, advertise a wide range of cheater-nabbing tech that can lock down students’ Web browsers, track their computer activity or connect their microphones and webcams to large call centers of “proctors” paid to watch the students take their tests.
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mood · Nov 23, 2020

Living with COVID-19 creates a privacy dilemma for us all
November 22, 2020
https://www.zdnet.com/article/living-with-covid-19-creates-a-privacy-dilemma-for-us-all/

This piece comes to you from the mostly coronavirus-free shores of Australia. But the virus is still not eliminated; various places can have an extended run of virus-free days, which can then turn into weeks and months, before the virus suddenly comes back.

The way to suppress a surge in cases is to make sure those with the virus can have their recent close contacts traced, thereby getting those identified into quarantine and tested. This is in the hopes that the virus can be prevented from spreading further into the community. Key to all of this is having quick access to data.
Enter initiatives such as Australia's COVIDSafe app, which has been far from successful and only identified a small number of unique cases.

"There is scarce evidence on the effectiveness of digital or automated contact tracing," the report said.
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"In addition to the disadvantage of not having a centralised database for contact tracers to interrogate the data, many of these apps are requesting unnecessary information from customers that adds significantly to the time taken to register, and is sometimes used for marketing purposes," the report said.
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mood · Nov 29, 2020

Why facial recognition thermometers are raising privacy concerns during the pandemic
November 27, 2020
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/facial-recognition-thermometers/

Thermal imaging thermometers are popping up all over the country as a method of trying to mitigate COVID-19, but data and privacy concerns have been raised as some of the devices scan individual’s faces to check their temperature.

Restaurants, hotels, and office buildings are implementing what are essentially facial recognition thermometers. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published several recommendations for the use of telethermographic devices in April.
The front facing camera shows individuals where to stand and look. The device then locates the correct area on the body to check temperature as it varies throughout the human body.

But, some devices—like ones that were used in schools, according to Wired—also come with facial recognition technology.
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“In airports, workplaces, grocery stores, concert venues, or other areas where you are trying to screen large groups of people for mass fever screening, diagnostic testing may be too difficult because of the time and costs needed to screen and get results,” the FDA states.
So, why are thermal imaging systems being used?

“[...] invasive technologies that make the public feel as if they are being protected despite a lack of evidence that they were,” he said.
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mood · Dec 9, 2020

EPIC Files D.C. Consumer Protection Complaint Against Online Test Proctoring Firms
December 9, 2020
https://epic.org/2020/12/epic-files-dc-consumer-protect.html

EPIC has filed a complaint with the D.C. Attorney General alleging that five providers of online test proctoring tools have routinely violated students' privacy and engaged in unfair and deceptive trade practices. EPIC's complaint charges that Respondus, ProctorU, Proctorio, Examity, and Honorlock have collected excessive personal data from proctored students, have relied on opaque and unreliable AI tools to flag alleged signs of cheating, and have made deceptive statements about their products.

"The rapid growth of online test proctoring has all but forced many students to trade away their privacy rights in order to meet their academic obligations," EPIC explained.
"These systems routinely collect sensitive data from students that is not necessary to administer an exam and subject test-takers to secret, unproven algorithms that can effectively accuse them of cheating with no legitimate basis."
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EPIC has also highlighted the privacy risks posed by the adoption of online tools in the COVID-19 era and has previously used D.C.'s consumer protection law to force changes to Accuweather's collection of personal data.
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mood · Dec 9, 2020

Some States Balk After C.D.C. Asks for Personal Data of Those Vaccinated
December 8, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/us/politics/cdc-vaccine-data-privacy.html

The Trump administration is requiring states to submit personal information of people vaccinated against Covid-19 — including names, birth dates, ethnicities and addresses, raising alarms among state officials who fear that a federal vaccine registry could be misused.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is instructing states to sign so-called data use agreements that commit them for the first time to sharing personal information in existing registries with the federal government. Some states, such as New York, are pushing back, either refusing to sign or signing while refusing to share the information.
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At issue is the delicate balance between a patient’s right to privacy and the government’s right to invoke its expansive authority in the name of ending the deadliest pandemic in more than a century.
In the meantime, states are grappling with how — and to what extent — they should participate in the data-gathering effort. Some states have laws that preclude them from sharing identifiable health information.

“It’s an awful lot to ask 50 states to sign the data use agreement and to send potentially identifiable data into a cloud,” said Claire Hannan, the executive director of Association of Immunization Managers. “The experience that states have had with data around Covid in the federal government has not been ideal.”
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mood · Dec 26, 2020

COVID-19 and Surveillance Tech: Year in Review 2020
December 24, 2020
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/covid-19-and-surveillance-tech-year-review-2020

Location tracking apps. Spyware to enforce quarantine. Immunity passports. Throughout 2020, governments around the world deployed invasive surveillance technologies to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.
In the United States, EFF and other digital rights advocates turned back some of the worst proposals. But they’ll be back in 2021. Until the pandemic ends, we must hold the line against ill-considered surveillance technologies.
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Automated contact tracing apps
Contact tracing is a common public health response to contagious disease.
Some proposals would be simultaneously privacy-invasive and ineffective.
Surveillance to enforce quarantine
Some countries have used surveillance technologies to enforce home quarantine. These include compulsion to wear GPS-linked shackles, to download government spyware into personal phones, and to send the government selfies with time and place stamps.
Immunity passports
Some have proposed “immunity passports” to screen people for entry to public places.
Moreover, the display or transmission of credentials at doorways would create new infosec vulnerabilities.
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Processing our COVID-related data
While some of the worst ideas did not gain traction in 2020, the news is not all good. Governments and corporations are processing all manner of our COVID-related data, and existing laws do not adequately secure it.

Businesses are also expanding their surveillance of workers. This occurs at job sites, in the name of tracking infection, and in socially distant home offices, in the name of tracking productivity.
Next steps
As pandemic fatigue sets in, the temptation will grow to try something—anything—even if it is unlikely to contain the virus and highly likely to invade our digital rights.
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mood · Dec 28, 2020

In Spain a "register" for those who refuse the vaccine: "It will be shared with EU countries"
December 28, 2020
https://www.unionesarda.it/en/artic...-il-vaccino-sara-condiviso-c-137-1098221.html

The news was in the air for days, now it's official.
In Spain there will be a register of people who refuse the Covid vaccine.

The document - another clarification of the minister - "will not be public" and will be compiled "in full respect of privacy".
Not to mention the fact that Spain's decision could pave the way for similar measures in other European countries.
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mood · Jan 4, 2021

Singapore Police Force can obtain TraceTogether data for criminal investigations: Desmond Tan
January 4, 2021
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/new...n-obtain-tracetogether-data-covid-19-13889914

The Singapore Police Force (SPF) can obtain TraceTogether data for criminal investigations, said Minister of State for Home Affairs Desmond Tan in Parliament on Monday (Jan 4).

A privacy statement on the TraceTogether website had earlier said the data would only be used “for contact tracing purposes”.
The site was updated on Jan 4 which "clarified how the Criminal Procedure code applies to all data under Singapore's jurisdiction".

"TraceTogether data may be used in circumstances where citizen safety and security is or has been affected," it wrote.
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stapp · Jan 12, 2021

Apple and Google provide Covid Lockdown compliance info figures for England via 'mobility data'

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/55626008

Dermot7 · Jan 15, 2021

Vaccine passports, which would allow people with immunity to Covid to prove they were at low risk of spreading the disease, are being investigated by companies and countries around the world. But the proposals have also raised fears among critics that they could underpin an oppressive digital ID system, and put sensitive medical records in the hands of authorities and employers.
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https://www.theguardian.com/society...are-they-and-do-they-pose-a-danger-to-privacy

hawki · May 9, 2021

mood said: ↑

Are Schools Forcing Students To Install Spyware That Invades Their Privacy As A Result Of The Coronavirus Lockdown?
April 24, 2020
https://www.forbes.com/sites/seanla...ult-of-the-coronavirus-lockdown/#726a6d47638d
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"Online Cheating Charges Upend Dartmouth Medical School

The university accused 17 students of cheating on remote exams, raising questions about data mining and sowing mistrust on campus...turning the pastoral Ivy League campus into a national battleground over escalating school surveillance during the pandemic...

At the heart of the accusations is Dartmouth’s use of the Canvas system [its learning management system] to retroactively track student activity during remote exams without their knowledge. In the process, the medical school may have overstepped by using certain online activity data to try to pinpoint cheating, leading to some erroneous accusations...

...the coronavirus has accelerated colleges’ reliance on technology, normalizing student tracking in ways that are likely to endure after the pandemic...

...experts said, it would be difficult for a disciplinary committee to distinguish cheating from noncheating based on the data snapshots that Dartmouth provided to accused students. And in an analysis of the Canvas software code, The Times found instances in which the system automatically generated activity data even when no one was using a device..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/technology/dartmouth-geisel-medical-cheating.html

mood · Jul 13, 2021

Facial recognition tech fights coronavirus in Chinese city
July 13, 2021
https://japantoday.com/category/tech/facial-recognition-tech-fights-coronavirus-in-chinese-city

Facial recognition tech linked to personal health codes has been rolled out in a Chinese city bordering Myanmar as authorities seek to squash a coronavirus outbreak.

Surveillance has been widely used to combat COVID-19 in China, which was the first country to adopt a QR code system to log test results and track contacts.

But this is the first publicly reported instance of facial recognition being used to track a person's movements and health status as they enter and exit residential areas, supermarkets, transport hubs and other public places.

"Everyone who comes in and out needs to have their (health) code and face scanned to pass," officials in Ruili, in Yunnan province, told reporters on Saturday.
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mood · Aug 9, 2021

Big Tech call center workers face pressure to accept home surveillance
August 8, 2021
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-n...ce-pressure-accept-home-surveillance-n1276227

Colombia-based call center workers who provide outsourced customer service to some of the nation’s largest companies are being pressured to sign a contract that lets their employer install cameras in their homes to monitor work performance, an NBC News investigation has found.

Six workers based in Colombia for Teleperformance, one of the world’s largest call center companies, which counts Apple, Amazon and Uber among its clients, said that they are concerned about the new contract, first issued in March.

“The contract allows constant monitoring of what we are doing, but also our family,” said a Bogota-based worker on the Apple account who was not authorized to speak to the news media. “I think it’s really bad. We don’t work in an office. I work in my bedroom. I don’t want to have a camera in my bedroom.”
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The concerns of the workers, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, highlight a pandemic-related trend that has alarmed privacy and labor experts: As many workers have shifted to performing their duties at home, some companies are pushing for increasing levels of digital monitoring of their staff in an effort to recreate the oversight of the office at home.
The issue is not isolated to Teleperformance’s workers in Colombia.

“Surveillance at home has really been normalized in the context of the pandemic,” said Veena Dubal, a labor law professor at the University of California, Hastings.
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mood · Aug 21, 2021

Using 'AI-based software like Proctorio and ProctorU' to monitor online exams is a really bad idea, says uni panel
August 20, 2021
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/20/ai_proctoring_software/

A committee at the University of Texas in Austin has advised against using AI software to oversee students' online tests, citing the psychological toll on students and the financial toll on academic institutions.

AI-based software to watch over remote students as they take online tests – "academic surveillance software" to detractors – has flourished during the COVID-19 pandemic. Large numbers of students have been studying remotely and schools believe they need a way to prevent cheating.
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But the software that's been deployed has been widely criticized by students and privacy advocates. The concern centers around the inability to audit the software source code and the possibility that these systems rely on flawed algorithms and biased or arbitrary signals to label students cheaters.

Such criticism last year led UC Berkeley [PDF] and Baruch College in New York to stop using remote proctoring products. In February, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said it will drop Proctorio after this summer due to "significant accessibility concerns."
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The UT Austin committee began working on its report after student councils in the spring of 2021 asked the university to get rid of AI proctoring software, which was used widely during the 2020-2021 academic year.

"The invasive nature of the tools as well as the warnings that the tools may send to the screen during the exam cause high levels of anxiety," the report says.
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