The Washington Post reports on possible privacy questions surrounding new technology featured at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas:

The thousands of devices debuting Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show here demonstrate how tech companies are poised to gather unprecedented insights into consumers’ lives — how much they eat, whether they exercise, when they are home and who they count as friends. [...]

Coming soon are Internet connected refrigerators, washing machines and other appliances that may be able to deliver information to third parties, such as utilities.

All that has some tech experts and lawmakers concerned that consumers, in their rush to snap up the latest gadgets, may be sacrificing privacy. Read more »

The Department of Homeland Security’s Privacy Office has released a privacy impact assessment, “Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST)/Passive Methods for Precision Behavioral Screening, DHS/S&T/PIA-012(a)” (DHS pdf; archive pdf); this is an update to a Privacy Impact Assessment (pdf) released in 2008. FAST, which I wrote about four years ago, seeks to divine an individual’s criminal or benign intent from a bio scan, and members of Congress have raised privacy questions concerning the technology.

According to DHS, “FAST seeks to improve the screening process at transportation and other critical checkpoints by developing physiological and behavior-based screening techniques that will provide additional indicators to screeners to enable them to make more informed decisions. FAST is not intended to provide ―probable cause for law enforcement processes, nor would the technology replace or pre-empt the decisions of human screeners.”

Now, according to the new PIA:

The FAST research is adding a new type of research, the Passive Methods for Precision Behavioral Screening (hereinafter FAST/Passive). The purpose of the FAST/Passive study is to build upon existing FAST research using volunteers and increase the performance of FAST primary screening procedures and to increase the ability to differentiate malintent through the inclusion of passive stimuli. The aim of the FAST/Passive study is to devise passive stimuli that will evoke malintent cues and incorporate these stimuli into the FAST screening project. [...] Read more »

Here are a few stories of interest concerning biometrics, social networking and advertising that were posted in the last couple of weeks.

USA Today: Facebook agrees to privacy changes in Europe

BERLIN – Facebook has agreed to make several changes to its services to improve transparency and better protect the personal data of its millions of users outside of the U.S., following an in-depth audit of its international headquarters that was released Wednesday.

The social media company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., agreed to changes including asking European users if they wanted to partake in its Facial Recognition, reworking its policies of retaining and deleting private data, reducing the amount of information collected about people who are not logged into Facebook, the company said in response to a report of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner.

Facebook’s international headquarters are based in Dublin, Ireland, a member of the European Union. This means the company is required to comply with European data privacy laws, which are more stringent than those that apply in the United States, particularly regarding how long data can be retained. [...]

The company has agreed to present its results in a follow-up to the report in July. [...] Read more »

There have been increasing privacy and civil liberty questions raised as the use facial recognition technology has increased in companies’ advertising and criminal investigations. As identification technology becomes cheaper and more prevalent, it could easily unmask people and track their movements. Those who were previously part of the unnamed crowd could be singled out for identification.

I’ve discussed before the increasing use of facial recognition technology in advertising, especially in “digital signage.” Most people have heard of the term connected with billboards or other screens that have cameras (and facial-recognition technology) to watch people watching ads in order to improve their marketing. The digital signs log data such as gender, approximate age and how long someone looks at an advertisement. This is supposed to help build a better billboard — one that is tailored specifically to the individual standing in front of it. However, the data-gathering and surveillance practices raise substantial privacy questions. (Disclosure: The Center for Democracy and Technology has released a set of privacy guidelines for digital signage, which I consulted on and contributed to, in the report “Building the Digital Out-Of-Home Privacy Infrastructure.”)

There are also civil liberty questions of government use of the technology. See this previous post for a discussion about the First Amendment right to free speech and how widespread identification technologies can affect that. More of my thoughts on facial recognition in this older GCN interview.

The Federal Trade Commission, which recently held a workshop of facial recognition technology, is now seeking public comment about the use of this biometric technology. The deadline for filing is Jan. 31. Here’s more from the FTC press release: Read more »

The tracking of consumers’ shopping habits (online and offline) for targeted behavioral advertising and other types of marketing is not new. There have been numerous news stories about this surveillance issue. For example, after the Wall Street Journal reported that credit-card companies Visa and MasterCard “are pushing into a new business: using what they know about people’s credit-card purchases for targeting them with ads online,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, wrote to both MasterCard and Visa asking about the report. Also, the consumers have become interested in opt-out and Do-Not-Track remedies, including browser tools. (Read more about targeted behavioral advertising and privacy issues connected with it in a previous post.) Here are a few recent stories about the tracking of consumers’ browsing and purchases:

BusinessWeek: Big Brother Is Watching You Shop

On the Web, every click and jiggle of the mouse helps e-tailers customize sites and maximize the likelihood of a purchase. Brick-and-mortar stores have long wanted to track consumers in a similar fashion, but following atoms is a lot harder than following bits. [...]

To get a better understanding of their customers in real time, mall operators are monitoring shoppers’ behavior with devices that track mobile-phone signals, while retailers including Montblanc (CFRUY), T-Mobile (DTEGF), and Family Dollar Stores (FDO) are finding new uses for old tools such as in-store security cameras. The goal is to divine which variables affect a purchase, then act with Web-like nimbleness to deploy more salespeople, alter displays, or put out red blouses instead of blue. [...]

T-Mobile employs similar technology from San Francisco’s 3VR, a maker of security systems. Two years ago, 3VR executives realized that its cameras could be used to gather consumer data, according to the company’s CEO, Al Shipp. He says T-Mobile, in Bellevue, Wash., uses 3VR’s technology in some of its retail stores to track how people move around, how long they stand in front of displays, and which phones they pick up and for how long. T-Mobile declined to comment. Now 3VR is testing facial-recognition software that can identify shoppers’ gender and approximate age. [...] Read more »

The Vancouver Sun reports on a border security deal between the United States and Canada, and a columnist in the paper raises privacy questions. The Vancouver Sun reports:

Canada and the United States unveiled plans Wednesday for an unprecedented joint approach to border protection aimed at developing common practices to screen travellers and cargo, with both governments promising the measures will better guard against terrorism and speed up cross-border traffic.

The much-touted border-security deal, unveiled Wednesday at the White House by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and U.S. President Barack Obama, comes 10 months after both leaders launched negotiations to strike an accord.

The result of those talks is a two-part “action plan” that maps out efforts to harmonize regulations across a spectrum of trade goods while increasing the amount of information shared between the two countries about both legitimate and suspect travelers. [...]

The reforms — many of them involving pilot projects that might not see full implementation for years — aim to integrate programs for Canada-U.S. perimeter security and to streamline the flow of goods between the two countries through pre-inspection and pre-clearance. [...] Read more »