AI

Facial recognition bans, one year later

This time last year, tech industry heavyweights announced they would stop selling facial recognition tech to law enforcement until Congressional oversight caught up. One year later, Congress still hasn't regulated the tech.

Since then, multiple Black men have been wrongfully arrested due to facial recognition. One faulty match left a Detroit man jailed for 10 days. Congress proposed facial recognition regulation last June, but it never made it to a vote. 

An update: Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), one of the 2020 bill’s co-sponsors, told us to expect the proposal to resurface. 

“We can’t keep assuming that private companies like Amazon will implement their own moratoriums on technology that isn’t ready for prime time,” Merkley said. “That’s why I will soon be reintroducing the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, so we can establish a federal moratorium on the technology until critical safeguards are put in place to prevent bias and protect Americans’ right to privacy.” 

How we got here 

Last June, amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, three major tech companies temporarily suspended police use of their facial recognition tech, which research has proven to be biased against people with darker skin tones. Activists said the bans were too little too late coming from the companies that developed and popularized the tech to begin with.

All three companies pointed the finger at lax government regulation: 

• On June 9, 2020, IBM announced it would prohibit use of its facial recognition software for “mass surveillance or racial profiling” and offered to help Congress regulate the tech.    
• The next day, Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on police use of its facial recognition technology, in hopes it “might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules.”
• And a day later, Microsoft said it would not sell the tech to US police departments “until we have a national law” to govern the tech. 

Weeks later...Sens. Jeff Merkley and Ed Markey (D-MA) proposed the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act. Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) introduced it in the House. The bill sought to prohibit federal use of “any biometric surveillance system”—and thwart funding for state and local governments that use it anyway. 

Several jurisdictions have banned police use of facial recognition over the last year, including cities in California, Massachusetts, and Mississippi. Last September, Portland, Oregon, passed the broadest facial recognition ban in the US—prohibiting use by police, hotels, restaurants, and retail businesses. 

Bottom line: Until national regulation is passed, the companies that make facial recognition technology are largely in control of who gets to use it and how.—HF 

EDTECH

The stack runneth over

Things that overflow: cups of water, emotions, river banks. Things that overflow if you’re a developer: stacks. 

Wait..what? Stack Overflow is a Q&A website for programmers. It has over 100 million monthly visitors, and the WSJ reports that it was just sold to Prosus, a massive European tech conglomerate, for $1.8 billion. 

• Stack Overflow has existed since 2008, and gets its name from a common coding error where a program tries to use more memory than is available (also, a naming contest).
• The mostly free, ad-supported company will operate independently, per a statement from cofounder Joel Spolksy. 

Programmers use the site to crowdsource sticky wickets across languages ranging from Python to HTML. Participation is Reddit-esque: There’s up-voting and down-voting, and users can earn reputation points. 

Buyer byte: Prosus owns slices of global tech companies in categories from fintech to e-comm. It’s also Tencent’s largest shareholder. Stack Overflow will nestle into its edtech holdings, which include ownership stakes in Udemy and Codecademy. 

Zoom out: 2020 was a record-breaking year for the US edtech sector both in terms of deal value ($2.2 billion) and volume (130), per EdSurge. In buying Stack Overflow, Prosus is snapping up an attractive edtech target before others can, and betting on the durability of the familiar and slightly patronizing ol’ mantra: “Learn to code.”—DM

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SMART HOME

It's my security footage, not the cloud's

Home security is coming down from the clouds. Eufy, the home security brand owned by China-based electronics company Anker, is releasing a new line of standalone home security cameras that don't require a central hub or cloud storage account. 

What’s different? Eufy’s previous models used Bluetooth connections to send footage to a central hub. The new SoloCams still need a wi-fi connection to access the Eufy Security app, but they are independently managed and won’t transmit footage over the airwaves. 

• Local storage is generally perceived as more secure than cloud storage...provided no one steals the camera outright. 
• The SoloCam line can store up to 8GB (~2 months of video).

In May, a botched server update led to a significant security breach for Eufy. Just over 700 (0.001%) of its camera owners had full access to strangers’ live feeds, contact details, saved videos, and more. 

Big picture: Jessica Lee, co-chair of privacy, security, and data innovations at Loeb & Loeb law firm, told us local storage carries its own issues. For one, you lose some remote capabilities (emergency service reporting, remote monitoring). And even if it’s a safer setup, risks still exist.

“You can put passwords and pins and you can have remote wiping and different protocols in place to make it harder, but I don’t think there is any failsafe way to say, ‘Your data will never be breached, there will never be an incident,’” Lee said.—JM 

BITS & BYTES

Stat: US cybersecurity insurance premiums rose 18% in Q1, compared to the norm of 1–2%, per the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers via the Financial Times. 

Quote: “He’s talking about climate change while he’s wearing a three-hundred-thousand-dollar watch and flying around on a private jet. You know it’s ridiculous, but he makes you want to believe it can be true.”—a former employee of Social Capital, Chamath Palihapitiya’s VC firm, on Palihapitiya

Read: Getting to the bottom of reports that a robot may have autonomously hunted down and killed a person for the first time.   

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WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• 7-Eleven will add 500 car Slurpee machines (EV charging stations) across North America by the end of 2022. 
• Tesla is struggling to procure enough chips, just like the rest of the industry. 
• Coinbase Pro listed dogecoin on its trading platform.  
• United signed a $3 billion deal with Boom Supersonic to buy 15 supersonic airliners. 
• New ransomware victims: Fujifilm and the largest ferry service to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The US now says it will prioritize ransomware attacks like it does terrorism. 
• SCOTUS issued a 6–3 ruling that narrows and (partially) clarifies the application of the nation’s main anti-hacking law.
• Huawei released its own smartphone- and smartwatch operating system to rival Android. 

GOING PHISHING

Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

1. A UK police drone detected large heat signatures above a warehouse. Authorities thought they had discovered a weed farm, but instead, it was a large, illegal bitcoin mining operation.   
2. TikTok’s new privacy policy allows it to collect “faceprints and voiceprints” from users.
3. CGI-generated virtual influencers reportedly make followers “feel more alive.”
4. Robots in India are cheffing up complicated meals like biryani.

MARKET RESEARCH

The LinkedIn demographic data is in: Austin, TX, has registered the biggest inflow of tech workers over the past 12 months, as reported by Bloomberg. The top five cities in terms of net tech worker inflows, per 10,000 LinkedIn users...

• Austin, TX: 217
• Nashville, TN: 155 
• Charlotte, NC: 146
• Jacksonville, FL: 136
• Denver, CO: 130

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• Why ex-OpenAI employees created a new AI startup
• Why Snap bought WaveOptics for $500 million
• To regulate AI, try playing in a sandbox

GOING PHISHING ANSWER

No such reports have emerged about virtual influencers.