Thursday Threads this week delves into the rise of surveillance tech used by law enforcement, covering topics like Fog Reveal's phone tracking without warrants, suits against Whitepages for exposing officer info, and NYPD's deals with surveillance firms. It also discusses ICE's informal access to local license plate data and the growth of Real-Time Crime Centers. These issues underscore significant privacy concerns and highlight the urgent need for regulatory oversight to safeguard civil liberties.
U.S. surveillance is escalating: Trump’s order to scrap inter-agency data silos and Musk’s DOGE unite federal databases; Oracle’s Ellison envisions AI cameras and drones; the Pentagon’s Locomotive tracks phones via app data; and brokers sell personal records to law enforcement. As LexisNexis lobbied for hands-off regulation and Apple battled over data access, pressing issues of oversight, due process, and privacy are emerging.
This Thursday Threads issue explores the growth of surveillance camera networks like license plate readers, highlighting privacy concerns despite their law enforcement benefits. It discusses investigations, security flaws, private networks, AI integration, and artistic controversies.
Amazon's cloud mandate for Echo recordings sparks privacy worries. Workplace surveillance tech and the FTC’s findings on social media data collection highlight ongoing security challenges, alongside Fiverr's controversial data access listings.
In Thursday Threads this week: key legal cases and corporate actions on using copyrighted materials in AI training, emphasizing growing tensions between creators and tech companies as AI increasingly utilizes large licensed and some pirated datasets.
This thread of articles reviews social media's role in spreading misinformation and impacting teen mental health, highlighting personal strategies for prevention and a review of how “Community Notes” do and don't help.
This Thursday Threads explores global security issues, encryption reforms, and tech giants’ countermeasures against quantum threats and AI, reinforcing the crucial role of end-to-end encryption in safeguarding privacy and communication.
Recent research in generative AI highlights impressive capabilities and concerns. Models show harmful behaviors like 'emergent misalignment' and can 'scheme' autonomously. In Minecraft, AI agents mimic human-like social dynamics. However, models struggle with historical accuracy, revealing biases and knowledge gaps. Despite rapid advances, the unclear mechanisms of AI underscore the need for careful study to manage future risks.
This week's Thursday Threads is on generative AI in libraries, with projects by OCLC, JSTOR, EBSCO, Clarivate, and ProQuest. OCLC's AI model is removing duplicate WorldCat records. JSTOR and EBSCO explored AI tools for article summaries and research questions. Clarivate's survey highlighted AI as a library priority but noted concerns about skills and budgets. Ed Summers critiqued AI's biases, legal issues, and environmental impact, urging responsible use in libraries.
I've been in or near higher education for my entire career, so it is probably no surprise that educational technology ranks high on DLTJ topics.
Although a lot of my experience is with library technology, that isn't the only part of the ed-tech landscape that I'm interested in.
Take, for …
Batteries are among the technologies that have had a silent, dramatic change over my lifetime.
Last week, as I was setting up a blood pressure cuff for my mother, I opened the compartment in the back and realized I needed 4 AA-sized batteries.
It was once common for devices to …
With millions of digital transactions taking place every day, have you ever wondered about the complex world behind your simple card swipe?
In this week's Thursday Threads, we delve into the multi-layer maze that is the credit card industry.
Grappling with $130 billion in fees, merchants are the invisible heroes …
In this week's Thursday Threads, I'll point to articles on the contentious subject of facial recognition technology.
This tech, currently used by law enforcement and various businesses around the world, raises critical ethical and privacy questions.
Beyond the instances where facial recognition use has resulted in wrongful apprehensions by law …
This week's Thursday Threads looks at digital storage from the past and the future.
There are articles about the mechanics of massive data storage systems in tech giants like Google and Amazon, the still existing use of floppy disks in certain industries, and the herculean efforts of digital archivists to …
I'm about halfway through Saul Griffith's 2021 Electrify: An Optimist's Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future, and I find the author makes a compelling point about bringing nearly everything—energy creation, transmission, and use—to a common factor of "electricity" and then optimizing that system.
There are many interesting problems …
One of the very first issues of Thursday Threads was on data centers (2011).
That issue had articles on a major Amazon Web Services outage, remote data centers powered by renewable energy, and videos about Google's and Meta's data centers.
Unfortunately, I've found that the videos are lost to time …
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is just over a year old, and shortly after the war started there were calls to cut Russia off from the internet as a punitive action.
(See Can the Internet Sanction a Country? Should It?, Thursday Threads issue 89.)
A year later now, that discussion has …
Cecil Mae Feather, 1929–2023
This issue is offered in honor of Cecil Mae Thornburg Feather, my mother-in-law.
Cecil Mae was a wonderful person.
I only knew her a short time as I married into the Feather family, and that time was filled with love and joy.
She enjoyed playing …
Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. The Confessions of St. Augustine. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1931, page 267. Translation of the Latin original from circa 397 CE.
This week we look at time from a few points of view:
