Clearview AI is back in hot water, this time from the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). The controversial facial recognition giant has caught the attention of global privacy regulators and campaigners for its practice of scraping personal photos from the web for its system without explicit consent. Clearview AI is expected to have scraped over 10 billion photos. "Common law has never recognised a right to privacy for your face," Clearview AI lawyer Tor Ekeland once argued. The UK's ICO launched a joint probe with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) into Cleaview AI's practices. Earlier this month, Australia's Information Commissioner Angelene Falk determined that "the act of uploading an image to a social media site does not unambiguously indicate agreement to collection of that image by an unknown third party for commercial purposes."

On Friday 3 December, the Telecommunications Ministers of the EU Member States will take stock of the progress made by the Slovenian Presidency of the Council of the EU on harmonised rules for artificial intelligence (AI) (see EUROPE B12812A2). Several clarifications were made in the EU Council Presidency's partial compromise. A clarification was made regarding the exclusion of the field of national security from the scope of application, which would remain under the responsibility of the...

A planned spacewalk to repair a faulty antenna on the International Space Station (ISS) has been postponed indefinitely, the United States space agency NASA says, citing a "debris notification" it received for the orbiting research laboratory. Two US astronauts had been scheduled to venture outside the space station at 7:10am Eastern Time (12:10 GMT) on Tuesday to begin their work, facing what NASA officials had called a slightly elevated risk posed by debris from a Russian anti-satellite missile test this month. But about five hours before the outing was to have commenced, NASA said on Twitter the spacewalk had been called off for the time being. "NASA received a debris notification for the space station. Due to the lack of opportunity to properly assess the risk it could pose to the astronauts, teams have decided to delay the Nov. 30 spacewalk until more information is available," the space agency tweeted.

Public opinion can be influenced by malicious actors trying to degrade public trust in media and institutions, discredit political leadership, deepen societal divides, and influence citizens' voting decisions. The rise in AI and algorithmic governance of web apps has led to propagation of racial and gender biases, reaffirmation of beliefs through personalised content, infringement of user privacy, and manipulation of the user and their data. A double-edged sword, AI is used to both spread and counter disinformation. Though the number of fact-checking initiatives has quadrupled from 2013 to 2018, manual fact-checking is increasingly ineffective given the substantial volume of disinformation. So, automated fact-checking (AFC) tools have been developed by non-profits such as Full Fact and Chequeado.

Artificial intelligence has been used in products targeting children for several years, but legislation protecting them from the potential impacts of the technology is still in its infancy. Ahead of a global forum on AI for children, UN News spoke to two UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) experts about the need for improved policy protection. Children are already interacting with AI technologies in many different ways: they are embedded in toys, virtual assistants, video games, and adaptive learning software. Their impact on children's lives is profound, yet UNICEF found that, when it comes to AI policies and practices, children's rights are an afterthought, at best. In response, the UN children's agency has developed draft Policy Guidance on AI for Children to promote children's rights, and raise awareness of how AI systems can uphold or undermine these rights.

Security officials in one of China's largest provinces have commissioned a surveillance system they say they want to use to track journalists and international students among other "suspicious people," documents reviewed by Reuters showed. A July 29 tender document published on the Henan provincial government's procurement website -- reported in the media for the first time -- details plans for a system that can compile individual files on such persons of interest coming to Henan using 3,000 facial recognition cameras that connect to various national and regional databases. A 5 million yuan ($782,000) contract was awarded on Sept. 17 to Chinese tech company Neusoft, which was required to finish building the system within two months of signing the contract, separate documents published on the Henan government procurement website showed. It is unclear if the system is currently operating. Shenyang-based Neusoft did not respond to requests for comment. China is trying to build what some security experts describe as one of the world's most sophisticated surveillance technology networks, with millions of cameras in public places and increasing use of techniques such as smartphone monitoring and facial recognition.

The Government Technology & Services Coalition's Homeland Security Today (HSToday) is the premier news and information resource for the homeland security community, dedicated to elevating the discussions and insights that can support a safe and secure nation. A non-profit magazine and media platform, HSToday provides readers with the whole story, placing facts and comments in context to inform debate and drive realistic solutions to some of the nation's most vexing security challenges.

The chief of the United Kingdom's foreign spy service warns that China and Russia were racing to master artificial intelligence in a way that could revolutionise geopolitics over the next 10 years. The world's spies are trying to grapple with seismic advances in technology that are challenging traditional human-led spying operations, which have dominated espionage for thousands of years. Richard Moore, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, said quantum engineering, engineered biology, vast troves of data and advances in computer power posed a threat that needed to be addressed by the West. "Our adversaries are pouring money and ambition into mastering artificial intelligence, quantum computing and synthetic biology, because they know that mastering these technologies will give them leverage," Moore, who rarely makes public speeches, will say on Tuesday, according to the Reuters news agency. Moore, a former diplomat who became MI6 chief in 2020, said technological progress over the next decade could outstrip all tech progress over the past century.

This project was the first attempt to use big data analytics approaches and machine learning along with Natural Language Processing (NLP) of tweets for flood risk assessment and decision making. Multiple Python packages were developed and integrated within the Flood Analytics Information System (FAIS). FAIS workflow includes the use of IoTs-APIs and various machine learning approaches for transmitting, processing, and loading big data through which the application gathers information from various data servers and replicates it to a data warehouse (IBM database service). Users are allowed to directly stream and download flood related images/videos from the US Geological Survey (USGS) and Department of Transportation (DOT) and save the data on a local storage. The outcome of the river measurement, imagery, and tabular data is displayed on a web based remote dashboard and the information can be plotted in real-time. FAIS proved to be a robust and user-friendly tool for flood data analysis at regional scale that could help stakeholders for rapid assessment of flood situation and damages. FAIS also provides flood frequency analysis (FFA) to estimate flood quantiles including the associated uncertainties that combine the elements of observational analysis, stochastic probability distribution and design return periods. FAIS is publicly available and deployed on the Clemson-IBM cloud service.

A US company that gathered photos of people from Facebook and other social media sites for use in facial recognition by its clients is facing a £17m fine after the Information Commissioner's Office found it had committed "serious breaches" of data protection law. Clearview AI, which describes itself as the "world's largest facial network", allows its customers to compare facial data against a database of over 10bn images harvested from the internet. The database is "likely to include the data of a substantial number of people from the UK and may have been gathered without people's knowledge from publicly available information online, including social media platforms", the ICO said. Clearview's technology had been offered on a "free trial basis" to UK law enforcement agencies, the data regulator added. It said Clearview had broken data protection law by failing to process the information of people in the UK in a way they were likely to expect or that was fair.