Surveillance

Ring’s Protect Basic subscription is going up by about $1/month. Image: Chip Somodevilla (Getty Images)Ring announced today that it’s increasing the price of its Protect Basic subscription plan. Starting on July 1, Protect Basic subscribers will pay a dollar more each month. Currently, it’s still $3/month or $30/year for the Protect Basic plan. It’s going up to $4/month, or $40/year if you pay upfront.In an attempt to sweeten the deal, Ring will increase some of the offerings of this entry-level tier. It will include up…

A psychologist’s perspective on why, how and when digital privacy violations irk us. Richard Shweder has discovered that societies are constructed from three ethics: autonomy, community, and divinity. Autonomy largely concerns our personal sphere; communal sphere contains social norms that keep society running smoothly and uniformly. The divinity sphere involves religious and moral beliefs and rituals. Digital rights is a relatively new arena for these three social spheres to work out their jurisdiction. But sometimes…

An Israeli private investigator currently in U.S. custody used Indian hackers to conduct surveillance operations for ultra-wealthy Russians, a reporter said in a court filing late Wednesday.Independent journalist Scott Stedman told a court in New York that jailed private detective Aviram Azari worked "on surveillance and cyber-intelligence operations at the behest of Russian oligarchs," citing a mix of public reporting and confidential sources.Stedman said in a declaration that one of the Russian oligarchs concerned was…

Security and surveillance is one of the biggest growth areas in the ever-expanding unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sector. While it's a relatively recent addition to enterprise toolkits in many industries, the use of drones to provide aerial assessments of activities on the ground is actually a return to form for the technology, which has seen some of its most ambitious development in defense applications.…

PHILADELPHIA — When Chandler Jones realized she was pregnant during her junior year of college, she turned to a trusted source for information and advice. Her cellphone. “I couldn’t imagine before the internet, trying to navigate this,” said Jones, 26, who graduated Tuesday from the University of Baltimore School of Law. “I didn’t know if hospitals did abortions. I knew Planned Parenthood did abortions, but there were none near me. So I kind of just Googled.” But with each search, Jones was being surreptitiously followed…

Encrypted messenger services have been quick to condemn the Commission’s proposal. Julia Weiss, a spokesperson for the Swiss messenger app Threema, says the company was not willing to undermine its users’ privacy in any way. “Building a surveillance system to proactively scan all private content was a terrible idea when Apple proposed it, and it's a terrible idea now,” added Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp, in a Twitter post. In August 2021, Apple announced a proposal to scan its users’ photos for child sexual abuse…

The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) plans to set up a hospital-based surveillance network to collect data on sexually transmitted infections (STI), document patterns and analyse trends. The move will help experts to formulate patient management policies, diagnostic protocols, and develop a public health policy to address concerns over STIs, according to ICMR. The World Health Organization (WHO) has also set a target to reduce the incidence of sexually transmitted…

Dozens of Chinese firms have built software that uses artificial intelligence to sort data collected on residents, amid high demand from authorities seeking to upgrade their surveillance tools, a Reuters review of government documents shows.According to more than 50 publicly available documents examined by Reuters, dozens of entities in China have over the past four years bought such software, known as "one person, one file". The technology improves on existing software, which simply collects data but leaves it to people…