No Expectation of Privacy in Public? I Beg to Differ
Canadians are rapidly discovering smart vending machines with Internet-connected cameras installed “in many facilities across North America”. While Canada has always embraced a strategy of technological innovation, tolerance for surveillance capitalism was never the intended objective.
“This is innovation for the purpose of exploitation”: in a CBC/Radio-Canada interview this week I addressed the imperative need to disallow this invasive trend from being normalized.
Let’s learn from the runaway experiment that brought us a global web of cloud-powered doorbell cameras, with data collected without consent and used for facial recognition, training AI models and stuffing searchable databases.
Workplaces, college campuses and public spaces need to conduct proper due diligence, audit service providers and conduct often simple due diligence to secure an increasingly vulnerable supply chain.
No organization should be afraid of renegotiating firm contractual agreements and striking contractual clauses that make them uniquely accountable for security breaches and complicit in the proliferation of technology designed to prioritize profit over privacy.
This article originally appeared on ClaudiuPopa.ca.
