Software developers “have made demonstrable progress at recognizing masked faces” using face-scanning technology, the National Institute of Standards and Technology reported Tuesday (see 2007270065). The highest scoring technology made errors between 2.4 and 5% of the time on masked faces, "comparable to where the technology was in 2017 on nonmasked photos,” said NIST study author Mei Ngan. Error rates dropped by as much as a “factor of 10 between their pre- and post-COVID algorithms,” she said. NIST tested technology from Canon, Intel, Panasonic, Samsung and dozens of others.
Voice service providers can block all calls from phone numbers highly likely to be associated with "one-ring scams," per an FCC order Monday. Such calls -- which involve a caller disconnecting after one ring, tricking the called party to call back and incur toll charges, of which the caller gets a cut -- "serve no beneficial purpose," so there's no need to require terminating providers give customers an opportunity to opt out of blocking the calls, it said. The agency said voice providers already are allowed by law to block illegal calls including one-ring scam calls. The order authorized under the Traced Act removes any doubt providers can "use reasonable analytics to identify and block calls that appear to be one-ring scam calls, even if such identification proves to be erroneous in any particular instance." It said blocking won't make providers liable for inadvertently blocking wanted calls and can be done on a network-wide basis. Those protections "will strongly encourage voice service providers to take a more aggressive approach to blocking one-ring scam calls," it said.
The House should amend a Senate intelligence bill and “cure critical defects,” civil liberties groups and others wrote Tuesday. Groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Prosperity, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future and Free Press Action oppose the Intelligence Authorization Act (S-3905). They urged the House to add the Lee-Leahy amendment (see 2005140061), which overwhelmingly passed the Senate in the USA Freedom Reauthorization Act but ultimately failed. The House has “been prevented from casting a single meaningful vote in support of serious civil liberties protections despite nearly unanimous support and decades of abuse of the executive branch's staggering surveillance powers,” said Demand Progress Senior Policy Counsel Sean Vitka.
Four telecoms asked the FCC for more time to implement call authentication technologies, before the June 30 deadline to meet the secure telephone identity revisited (Stir) and signature-based handling of asserted information using tokens (Shaken) framework. The filings appeared Monday in docket 17-97. AT&T asked for a one-year extension, citing network congestion due to COVID-19 and aging platforms. Lumen said it "remains on track" to meet the deadline but sought an additional six months to accommodate any potential equipment-related delays. UScellular asked for an extension and didn't request a specific time frame because it's transitioning non-IP customers to an IP network. Verizon asked the FCC to declare it's not required to deploy Stir/Shaken for its plain old telephone system customers because it would be "an onerous task with any benefits vastly outweighed by the burdens." The company wants three years to finish upgrading its fiber-to-the-premises-session initiation protocol platform with Stir/Shaken capabilities.
The European Commission proposed standard contractual clauses for personal data transfers from the EU to third countries, the European Data Protection Board said Friday. This will align SCCs with the EU general data protection regulation and the judgment of the European Court of Justice in "Schrems II" (see 2010190059). They will "better reflect the widespread use of new and more complex processing operations often involving multiple data importers and exporters." The EDPB and European Data Protection Supervisor will vet the draft. SCCs "are not a catch-all solution for data transfers post-Schrems II," said EDPB Chair Andrea Jelinek: They're an important piece of the puzzle but it's up to data exporters to "make the puzzle complete" by bringing the level of protection of data they transfer up to the EU standard of essential equivalence.
Revenge porn is rising during the pandemic as people spend more time online, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) warned Wednesday. Law enforcement also is grappling with more online child exploitation (see 2008280055).
Universities launching COVID-19 tracking technology should make it voluntary for students and share information about data collection, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Monday. It's wrong to require students and staff to commit to “using unspecified tracking apps that record their every movement, and failing to inform them about what personal data is being collected, how it’s being used, and with whom it’s being shared,” said EFF. Schools should commit to the University App Mandate Pledge, a “set of seven transparency- and privacy-enhancing policies,” it said.
Voice assistants are more desirable to consumers than other chatbot technologies, said a Friday report from artificial intelligence developer Myplanet. Phone-based voice assistants ranked a 33% comfort "agree rate" vs. 22% with text-based chatbots, said the report. Scheduling bots using voice had a 24% comfort level vs. ones that used text (20%). Female respondents were more comfortable than male respondents with phone-based voice assistants (37% vs. 30%), banking chatbots (22% vs. 15%) and customer service bots (34% vs 21%), it said. People prefer chatbots for simple tasks such as customer service or scheduling, it said, vs. ones dealing with sensitive information, such as health and banking data.
Some 35% of U.S. broadband households report a data security problem in the past year, including malware/spyware infection, loss of privacy and data/identity theft, said Parks Associates. “More activities and use cases are going across more devices, and that increases exposure to risk,” said President Elizabeth Parks. Four in five are concerned about security and privacy issues at home, led by identity theft.
Voters approved a sequel to the California Consumer Privacy Act (see 2011040028), as expected (see 2010230040). About 56% of voters supported the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), or Proposition 24, showed unofficial returns Tuesday. It would take effect Jan. 1, 2023. “We are at the beginning of a journey that will profoundly shape the fabric of our society by redefining who is in control of our most personal information and putting consumers back in charge of their own data,” said Prop 24 sponsor Alastair Mactaggart. CPRA “will sweep the country and I’m grateful to Californians for setting a new higher standard for how our data is treated,” said former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, Californians for Consumer Privacy chair. Opponents conceded Wednesday. “While we came up short, millions of California voters still realized now is not the time to pass a measure riddled with serious flaws that creates a costly new privacy bureaucracy,” said No on 24 Campaign Chairperson Mary Ross and Campaign Strategist Marva Diaz in a statement. They noted they reduced support from a July poll that showed 77% support. In Michigan, a privacy measure appeared to be OK'd (see 2011040040).