“Surveillance Society”

Privacy experts are raising concerns after a Winnipeg bar flagged a woman as a nationwide public safety concern through its ID scanning system, which led to her being denied entry to a Calgary Stampede venue in July.

Alexandra, a Montreal-based lawyer, went to the Riverside bar in St. Vital on June 6, where a person working security scanned her driver’s licence at the door using a Patronscan ID scanner.

She said she was not told why they were scanning it and had no idea an incident later that evening would lead to a flag that potentially banned her from bars across Canada.

This is creepy.

Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown recently celebrated the installation of a network of powerful police surveillance cameras capable of scooping up personal data from unsuspecting drivers.

Automated licence plate recognition (ALPR) systems at 50 intersections would make the city, in Brown’s words, “the safest place to call home and the most inconvenient place in Canada for organized crime to operate.” And he said they had overwhelming support from participants in a telephone town hall.

But in the U.S., the same AI-driven technology has become a scourge.

Adam Heimerman kept seeing the surveillance cameras on his way to work as a river guide in East Tennessee, and the sight rankled him.

More than 130,000 of the automatic license-plate readers now dot the country, according to the crowdsourced tracker DeFlock.org. The artificial intelligence-assisted devices have been embraced by law enforcement as powerful investigative tools but widely denounced by the public over privacy concerns.

Montreal police are quietly growing their network of AI-powered tools to track vehicles and people across the city, raising questions about public transparency and privacy rights.

A high-powered camera able to scan and identify vehicles was spotted earlier this week by a Radio-Canada reporter, on a lamp post along Henri-Bourassa Boulevard in Montreal’s Rivière-des-Prairies neighbourhood.

Car based scanners capable of running license plate searches at a high rate has been in use for some time If I recall correctly.

This Canadian version of a Flock style system means we the criminal public can be surveilled 24/7.

I wonder what Toronto’s police use?

Flock, the US surveillance firm, is rolling out new safeguards to prevent police misuse of its technology which, its founder and chief executive admits, should have happened sooner.

Police have used Flock to track romantic partners and stalk strangers, leading to growing public backlash against the company. It has also been used to find stolen cars and missing people.

Asked whether it had taken Flock too long to protect tens of thousands of its cameras, licence plate readers and drones from police abuse, Garrett Langley said: “Yeah… yes.”

In our intensely divided moment, there’s one thing that the right and left seem to agree on: they hate Flock cameras.

The cameras are installed in most urban areas across the country and record the license plate number of every car that drives past them, storing information about people’s movement in a database, for use by local governments and police departments.

According to the company, Flock has 120,000 active cameras across the United States. Many police departments and investigators claim they make solving crimes and locating individuals easier than ever.

WOW 🚨 There is now a ‘Flock Safe City designations”

This happens when a city uses the integrated system of Flock license plate readers, drones, gunshot detectors and live cameras monitoring the city that track people that blanket the city and monitor at all times

“Harvey,… pic.twitter.com/XmUYMp7bKx

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) August 13, 2026

It was hardly an offensive video. Amid the buzz of the Tour de France finale, Oliver Hooson filmed himself whipping up a delicious-looking flat white for a fellow cycling enthusiast. But after posting the footage on social media, the comments that soon rolled in were a real shock. “PERV,” read one. “Out here pushing creep glasses,” said another. His mistake? Documenting the moment with Meta’s “spy glasses”.

When Meta used superstar Kylie Jenner to promote its sleek new line of “spy glasses”, the social media company hoped the devices would reach the same broad acceptance that tablets and smartwatches have found before them.

But those plans have hit a snag in the UK, where venues from elite restaurants to popular pub chains have banned the £359 glasses in order to preserve the privacy of customers and staff.

Celebrated restaurateur Jeremy King, owner of London venues including Simpsons in the Strand, Arlington and The Park, said guests should not wear the recording glasses.

JEFFERSON, Ga. — Marci Bakely couldn’t understand how her ex-boyfriend always seemed to know where she was.

When she went to buy groceries or on a date or to the doctor, he’d text her about it, sometimes within minutes, despite working 15 miles from her home as a police chief in a small town in the Atlanta suburbs. One day in 2024, when he incorrectly suspected that she’d gone to see a man against his wishes, he messaged her, “I didn’t think you would slip up,” according to texts she shared with The Washington Post.

It sounds like something that James Bond would use: a gadget that self-destructs if it falls into the wrong hands. But it’s actually an open-source operating system that can be downloaded onto Android phones.

Federal prosecutors in Atlanta are bringing an obstruction charge against a U.S. citizen who gave customs officers what is known as a duress passcode, which activated software that erased the contents of his phone.

The authorities stopped Samuel Tunick, an Atlanta resident, for interrogation at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as he returned to the United States on Jan. 24 last year, according to a November grand jury indictment. The authorities seized his phone before allowing him to enter the country. A hearing on the case was held last week in federal court in Atlanta.

New to me.

A ‘shameful’ Green Party councillor has been accused of telling ‘murderers, rapists and burglars’ how to avoid a Met Police van using facial recognition technology.

Hau-Yu Tam, cabinet member for sanctuary and healing at Lewisham Council, shared a map on her social media accounts showing the precise location of the police van on Tuesday.

Metropolitan Police has begun using cutting edge ‘Live Facial Recognition’ technology (LFR) to round up hundreds of criminals across the capital.

Live Facial Recognition vans???