Made in China, Exported to the World: The Surveillance State

In Ecuador, cameras capture footage to be examined by police and domestic intelligence. The surveillance system’s origin: China.

QUITO, Ecuador — The squat gray building in Ecuador’s capital commands a sweeping view of the city’s sparkling sprawl, from the high-rises at the base of the Andean valley to the pastel neighborhoods that spill up its mountainsides.

The police who work inside are looking elsewhere. They spend their days poring over computer screens, watching footage that comes in from 4,300 cameras across the country.

The high-powered cameras send what they see to 16 monitoring centers in Ecuador that employ more than 3,000 people. Armed with joysticks, the police control the cameras and scan the streets for drug deals, muggings and murders. If they spy something, they zoom in.

This voyeur’s paradise is made with technology from what is fast becoming the global capital of surveillance: China.

Ecuador’s system, which was installed beginning in 2011, is a basic version of a program of computerized controls that Beijing has spent billions to build out over a decade of technological progress. According to Ecuador’s government, these cameras feed footage to the police for manual review.

But a New York Times investigation found that the footage also goes to the country’s feared domestic intelligence agency, which under the previous president, Rafael Correa, had a lengthy track record of following, intimidating and attacking political opponents. Even as a new administration under President Lenín Moreno investigates the agency’s abuses, the group still gets the videos.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/technology/ecuador-surveillance-cameras-police-government.html

#surveillance #cameras #Ecuador #China #police #why
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Amazon wants to sell “surveillance as a service”

Amazon has filed a patent to use delivery drones as mobile surveillance cameras. These cameras will then be used as part of "surveillance as a service" to take pictures as they approach their delivery points. Customers could also request regular fly-bys of the drones.

In case Amazon’s surveillance capabilities weren’t extensive enough with its Echo, Ring, and Key products, not to mention all the data Amazon routinely collects on its customers, the company recently received a US patent to provide “surveillance as a service.”

The patent is for an “unmanned aerial vehicle”—the technical term for a drone—that “may perform a surveillance action at a property of an authorized party” and could “image the property to generate surveillance images.” Amazon suggests in its patent, filed June 12, 2015, and granted June 4 of this year, that drone-based surveillance would be superior to traditional video-camera installations that have limited range, are liable to miss things, and can be manipulated or damaged by an intruder.

https://qz.com/1648875/amazon-receives-us-patent-for-surveillance-as-a-service/

And
https://telegra.ph/Amazon-drones-could-be-used-to-spy-on-your-home-and-spot-intruders-patent-reveals-06-21

#DeleteAmazon #surveillance #cameras #drones #why
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Ring’s Hidden Data Let Us Map Amazon's Sprawling Home Surveillance Network

As reporters raced this summer to bring new details of Ring’s law enforcement contracts to light, the home security company, acquired last year by Amazon for a whopping $1 billion, strove to underscore the privacy it had pledged to provide users.

Even as its #creeping objective of ensuring an ever-expanding #network of home #security devices eventually becomes indispensable to daily #police work, #Ring promised its customers would always have a choice in “what information, if any, they share with law enforcement.” While it quietly toiled to minimize what police officials could reveal about Ring’s police partnerships to the public, it vigorously reinforced its obligation to the privacy of its customers—and to the users of its crime-alert #app, #Neighbors.

However, a #Gizmodo #investigation, which began last month and ultimately revealed the potential locations of up to tens of thousands of Ring #cameras, has cast new doubt on the effectiveness of the company’s privacy safeguards. It further offers one of the most “striking” and “disturbing” glimpses yet, privacy experts said, of #Amazon’s privately run, #omni-#surveillance shroud that’s enveloping U.S. cities.

Gizmodo has acquired data over the past month connected to nearly 65,800 individual posts shared by users of the Neighbors app. The posts, which reach back 500 days from the point of collection, offer extraordinary insight into the proliferation of Ring video surveillance across #American #neighborhoods and raise important questions about the #privacy trade-offs of a consumer-driven network of surveillance cameras controlled by one of the world’s most powerful corporations.

And not just for those whose faces have been recorded.

👉🏼 Read more:
https://gizmodo.com/ring-s-hidden-data-let-us-map-amazons-sprawling-home-su-1840312279

#DeleteAmazon #DeleteRing #why #thinkabout
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The Cameras in Your Car May Be Harvesting Data as You Drive
Safety system sensors in modern cars are collecting data about the road on behalf of the company that makes them

If you drive a newer car, it’s likely to have at least one built-in camera or sensor that powers important safety systems such as automatic emergency braking (AEB) and blind spot warning (BSW), or that makes driving easier with assistance features such as adaptive cruise control and lane centering. Most of the software and algorithms that control those systems were developed by Mobileye.

https://www.consumerreports.org/automotive-technology/the-cameras-in-your-car-may-be-harvesting-data-as-you-drive/

#data #harvesting #cars #cameras #algorithms #surveillance #thinkabout #Mobileye
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Mapped: The Top Surveillance Cities Worldwide

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-top-surveillance-cities-worldwide

#cameras #cctv #cities #streets