Almost three quarters of Americans say they will not submit their privacy to contact tracing apps, with Europeans also rejecting the notion outright because they do not trust government to keep their information safe and refrain from misusing it.
A study from Avira reveals that the vast majority of Americans are against contact tracing apps, with 71 percent saying they will not download them, and 75% believing their digital privacy is at risk from the technology.
Image: Avira
The poll found that only 14 percent believe the government would protect their data effectively.
When asked if they would trust big tech more than the government, 32 percent said they would feel safe giving Apple or Google their data.
The study also noted that those working in Government and Healthcare are the least-likely to download the technology, with 84% of people from these sectors saying they will not use the apps.
Image: Avira
Travis Witteveen, CEO of Avira commented “We believe these survey results send a clear signal to both app creators and the government. COVID contact tracing apps could fail before they launch if developers don’t communicate to the public how they plan to protect people’s privacy.”
Meanwhile, in Germany people are also rejecting the contact tracing technology owing to privacy concerns.
The amount of people willing to use the apps has fallen to 42 percent, according to polling data from Forschungsgruppe Wahlen.
Statista notes that the latest data indicates a 6 percentage point drop since April:
Amnesty International has warned that contact tracing apps like Norway’s are “most alarming mass surveillance tools”. The organisation’s assessment did not include the US contact tracing app.
DHS Sought To Assign Social Credit Style “Risk Scores” To Social Media Users
Newly-obtained documents reveal.
Published
3 months ago
on
9 June, 2023
Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net
Arkadiusz Warguła / Getty Images
In a sharp spotlight on the interplay between national security and individual privacy, newly disclosed documents have unveiled that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) entered into a contract with the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in 2018 to develop a project, dubbed “Night Fury,” designed to analyze and assign “risk scores” to social media accounts.
The Brennan Center for Justice procured these documents through a public records request, and Motherboard was the first to report on them. Project Night Fury aimed at utilizing automation to detect and evaluate social media accounts for connections to terrorism, illegal opioid distribution, but also disinformation campaigns.
The DHS document stated, “The Contractor shall develop these attributes to create a methodology for developing a ranking, or ‘Risk Score,’ associated with the identified accounts.”
source: Motherboard
Project Night Fury had also planned on incorporating involvement from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to provide “cross-mission operational context,” according to one of the documents.
Experts had warned DHS about the inherent difficulties and biases involved in automated judgment for these matters, citing that characteristics like being “pro-terrorist” have no concrete definition.
Notably, DHS terminated Project Night Fury in 2019. However, it underscores the agency’s continued interest in social media as a resource for analysis. This comes in the wake of earlier reports of CBP utilizing an AI-powered tool, Babel X, for analyzing travelers’ social media at US borders.
While Night Fury’s focus was initially on “counter-terrorism, illegal opioid supply chain, transnational crime, and understanding/characterizing/identifying the spread of disinformation by foreign entities,” the documents indicate that UAB’s work was intended to “scale to other DHS domains” and “build next generation capabilities.”
Like, Totally Orwellian: Nearly A Third Of GenZ Favors ‘Government Surveillance Cameras In Every Household’
Published
4 months ago
on
7 June, 2023
Zero Hedge
Getty Images / boonchai wedmakawand
Nearly one-third of Generation Z says they’d be just fine with government-installed surveillance cameras in every household under the guise of reducing domestic violence and other illegal activity.
“Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity?” asks a new survey from the Cato Institute. Of the responses, 29% of those aged 18-29 said yes.
In 1791, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed building a “panopticon” in which people’s behavior could be monitored at all times.
But Bentham’s panopticon was meant to be a prison. A sizable segment of Generation Z would like to call it home.
When it comes to other age brackets, 20% of millennials (between the ages of 30 and 44) also want everyone watched.
Then, wisdom appears to kick in – as just 6% ofAmericans aged 45 and older were OK with government surveillance in every home.
Broken down by politics, 19% of liberals and 18% of centrists agreed that our daily lives should be monitored by the government for our own safety, while 9 – 11% of those who identify as conservative, very conservative, or very liberal agreed in what appears to be a “horseshoe” issue that unites both ends of the political spectrum.
It’s the middle that has the ethic of old East German secret police — or the KGB.
Maybe that’s not surprising considering the way respectable liberal institutions now run themselves.
From Ivy League campuses to the publishing industry and the digital domains of Facebook,there is an Orwellian sense of perpetual emergency, an irrational fear that misinformation and hate speech will overwhelm society unless every utterance is subject to a censor’s scrutiny.
Even Orwell didn’t imagine Newspeak would require new pronouns. -NY Post
Broken down by race, 33% of black Americans said they’re fine with government in-home surveillance, as did 25% of hispanics, 11% of whites, and 9% of asians respectively.
The question was asked as part of the Cato Institute’s survey on American attitudes on the prospect of a ‘central bank digital currency.’ What’s interesting about that is that 53% of Americans who support a CBDC also support in-home surveillance cameras.
Notably, Americans who support a CBDC stood out in how they think about in‐home government surveillance cameras. A majority (53%) of Americans who support a CBDC support the government installing in‐home surveillance cameras to reduce abuse and other illegal activity. This suggests that some of the psychology behind support for a CBDC springs from an above average comfort level with trading some personal autonomy and privacy for societal order and security. -Cato Institute
What’s more, those who view the Federal Reserve favorably are more likely to support a CBDC (duh).