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June 30, 2025: Compulsory surveillance and other threats

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Today: Compulsory surveillance and other threats

Surveillance technologies are now becoming deeply woven into everyday life. Mattel toys announced new embedded AI. ICE agents are now using handheld facial recognition on the street to identify anyone in their field of vision. Google is spying even more on you. And Musk’s rocket parts are raining down on Mexico.

• RFK Jr. Wants Every American to Be Sporting a Wearable Within Four Years (by Ed Cara in Gizmodo, June 24, 2025)

• ICE Is Using a New Facial Recognition App to Identify People, Leaked Emails Show (by Joseph Cox in 404 Media, June 26, 2025): “The new tool, called Mobile Fortify, uses the CBP system which ordinarily takes photos of people when they enter or exit the U.S., according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. Now ICE is using it in the field.”

• Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb to verify users (by Reed Albergotti in Semafor, June 20, 2025):

Reddit is considering using World ID, the verification system based on iris-scanning Orbs whose parent company was co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

According to two people familiar with the matter, World ID could soon become a way for Reddit users to verify that they are unique individuals while remaining anonymous on the platform.

• Google Sends Out Bizarre Email Saying AI Will Now Control Your Phone's Apps (Futurism, June 27, 2025): “Android users have begun receiving ominous emails warning that Gemini, Google’s proprietary large language model (LLM), will soon be able to ‘help you’ with apps like Phone, Messages, and WhatsApp. Crucially, the emails note that Gemini will be able to ‘help’ users regardless of ‘whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off’ — which prompted some understandable anxiety.”

    --> The announcement says:

We’ve made it easier for Gemini to interact with your device
We’re updating how Gemini interacts with some of the apps on your Android device.
What’s changing:
Gemini will soon be able to help you use Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities on your phone, whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.

• Meta Invents New Way to Humiliate Users With Feed of People’s Chats With AI (by Jason Koebler in 404 Media, June 17, 2025). “here is what the ‘Discover’ tab is: The Meta AI app, which is the company’s competitor to the ChatGPT app, is posting users’ conversations on a public ‘Discover’ page where anyone can see the things that users are asking Meta’s chatbot to make for them.”

In several minutes last week, I saved a series of these chats . . . These included:
- entire conversations about “my current medical condition,” which I could tie back to a real human being with one click
- details about someone’s life insurance plan
- details about a situationship gone wrong after a woman did not like a gift
- an older disabled man wondering whether he could find and “afford” a young wife in Medellin, Colombia on his salary (“I'm at the stage in my life where I want to find a young woman to care for me and cook for me. I just want to relax. I'm disabled and need a wheelchair, I am severely overweight and suffer from fibromyalgia and asthma. I'm 5'9 280lb but I think a good young woman who keeps me company could help me lose the weight.”)

• Surveillance is inequality’s stabilizer (by Cory Doctorow, June 26, 2025):

There’s many reasons that Congress failed to act on privacy. Obviously, they face immense pressure from lobbyists for the commercial surveillance industry – but they also face covert and powerful pressure from public safety agencies, cops, and spies, who rely on private sector data as a source of off-the-books, warrantless, ubiquitous surveillance.

. . . Each advance in surveillance tech makes worse forms of oppression, misgovernance and corruption possible, by making it cheaper to counter the destabilizing effect of destroying the lives of the populace, through identifying the bravest, angriest, and most effective opposition figures so they can be targeted for harassment, violence, arrest, or kidnapping.

• Can We See Our Future in China’s Cameras? - gift link, by Megan Stack for NYT Opinion, June 28, 2025:

A.I. could help to supersize the surveillance state, offering the potential to quickly synthesize and draw inferences from huge quantities of data.

“The really powerful thing is when personal data get integrated,” said Maya Wang, associate China director at Human Rights Watch. “Not only am I me, but I like these things, and I’m related to so-and-so, and my friends are like this, and I like to go to these events regularly on Wednesdays at 6:30. It’s knowing relationships, movements and also any irregularities.”

• Mexico’s president threatens to sue over SpaceX debris from rocket explosions (The Guardian, June 25, 2025): “Last week, a SpaceX Starship rocket exploded during a routine ground test at the Starbase headquarters of Musk’s space project on the south Texas coast near the Mexican border. . . . Mexican officials are carrying out a ‘comprehensive review’ of the environmental impacts of the rocket launches for the neighboring state of Tamaulipas, Sheinbaum said.”

• Man Proposed to His AI Chatbot Girlfriend Named Sol, Then Cried His 'Eyes Out' When She Said 'Yes' (CBS Saturday Morning, June 18, 2025). See also video excerpt and source video (June 14, 2025).

• As ChatGPT Linked to Mental Health Breakdowns, Mattel Announces Plans to Incorporate It Into Children's Toys (Futurism, June 17, 2025): “Leveraging this incredible technology is going to allow us to really reimagine the future of play.”

    --> See also: Child Welfare Experts Horrified by Mattel's Plans to Add ChatGPT to Toys After Mental Health Concerns for Adult Users (Futurism, June 21, 2025): “‘Endowing toys with human-seeming voices that are able to engage in human-like conversations risks inflicting real damage on children,’ Weissman said. ‘It may undermine social development, interfere with children’s ability to form peer relationships, pull children away from playtime with peers, and possibly inflict long-term harm.’”

• Bill Moyers: “Plutocracy and democracy don’t mix.”

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