“Surveillance Society”

The federal privacy commissioner wasn’t consulted by the Liberal government in developing its online harms bill, proposed legislation that experts say could significantly impact Canadians’ privacy.

The online harms bill would require social media and other online platforms to monitor and take down, within 24 hours, illegal content in five categories. Experts have been warning that the regulatory system the government has proposed, which the Liberals have promised to table as legislation within 100 days of Parliament’s return, would violate Canadians’ constitutional and privacy rights.

A woman was shocked to discover just how much data Amazon has collected about her.

She posted a viral TikTok video explaining how she requested to see the data but wasn’t expecting to receive so much.

TikToker my.data.not.yours explained: “I requested all the data Amazon has on me and here’s what I found.”

She revealed that she has three Amazon smart speakers.

Two are Amazon Dot speakers and one is an Echo device.

Many in the UK are expressing their worries about the future of internet freedom, after a group of MPs lobbied Prime Minister Boris Johnson to ban anonymous social media accounts in the wake of Sir David Amess’ death.

After the Tory MP was stabbed to death in a church on Friday by a man with links to Islamist extremism, several members of Parliament called for authoritarian social media laws that would prevent anonymity – despite no links having yet been established between the attack and Amess’ social media presence.

Nine Scottish elementary schools have embraced a pilot plan to deploy facial recognition technology to verify children’s school lunch payments, insisting the system is faster and more hygienic, while dodging the privacy issue.

A group of nine schools in North Ayrshire has begun scanning students’ faces to record school lunch payments, praising the new high-tech system for speeding up the transaction process and minimizing physical contact between individuals. The program officially began on Monday, replacing the schools’ previous system of card-swiping and fingerprint scanning.

Singapore has trialled patrol robots that blast warnings at people engaging in “undesirable social behaviour”, adding to an arsenal of surveillance technology in the tightly controlled city-state that is fuelling privacy concerns.

From vast numbers of CCTV cameras to trials of lampposts kitted out with facial recognition tech, Singapore is seeing an explosion of tools to track its inhabitants.

The U.S. government is using ‘keyword warrants’ to uncover the identity of anyone who searches Google and other search engines for certain search terms that may be related to a crime, according to a new report.

The controversial practice, which is already drawing civil liberties concerns about sweeping government overreach, was revealed on Tuesday in ‘accidentally unsealed’ court documents obtained by Forbes.

Keyword warrants — which have been secretly employed for at least several years — are drawing backlash as many argue they violate an individual’s constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

The Canadian government is considering new rules to regulate how social media platforms moderate potentially harmful user-generated content. Already, the proposed legislation has been criticized by internet scholars — across the political spectrum — as some of the worst in the world.

Oddly, the proposed legislation reads like a list of the most widely condemned policy ideas globally. Elsewhere, these ideas have been vigorously protested by human rights organizations and struck down as unconstitutional. No doubt, the federal government’s proposed legislation presents a serious threat to human rights in Canada.

An expansive federal law proposal to combat harmful online content is not only “fundamentally flawed” but also violates Canadians’ freedom of expression and privacy rights, warn internet law experts, who are calling on the Liberals to overhaul their approach.

The main problem with the so-called “online harms” proposal lies in its ability to filter content and block websites, which endangers the “survival of a free and open internet in Canada and beyond,” reads a submission to the Department of Canadian Heritage by the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law.