Futurists and tech companies often use the idea of freedom to promote products, but as technology gets ever more complicated and spreads into every facet of life, it provides authorities with ever more tools and opportunities to observe the populace and potentially infringe on those freedoms.
Law enforcement agencies, in particular, are rapidly incorporating cutting-edge tech into their workflow, and while some of these gadgets may make it easier to catch criminals, they’re also raising concerns about the erosion of privacy and the seeming ubiquity of surveillance.
Perhaps nowhere is the dichotomy between security and intrusiveness more apparent than in facial-recognition software. Software is becoming frighteningly good at telling one face from another, and while that means you can unlock the latest iPhone simply by looking into the camera, it also means authorities can scan entire crowds, picking out individuals of interest. This isn’t merely the stuff of sci-fi nightmares, either; the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon has already used Amazon’s facial-recognition software, trimming the time needed to identify suspects to mere seconds and apprehending its first suspect within a week by using the new system, according to Amazon.
That might make catching criminals easier — in theory, anyway — but it’s raising concerns among skeptics and civil liberties watchdogs like the American Civil Liberties Union. Whether through closed-circuit television arrays (like those used in London) or through drones flying overhead, law enforcement agencies could keep an eye on anyone they want to, tracking the movements of private citizens wherever they may go.
Smartphones are another area in which police are looking to gather information about suspects. In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court examined a case in which police used location information from a suspect’s cell phone records to present a detailed account of the suspect’s movements over a period of time. The court ultimately ruled that police need a warrant to obtain cell phone location records, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing: “Given the unique nature of cell phone location records, the fact that the information is held by a third party does not by itself overcome the user’s claim to Fourth Amendment protection. Whether the government employs its own surveillance technology … or leverages the technology of a wireless carrier, we hold that an individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements as captured through CSLI.”
However, police are also using tech in ways that can promote more accountability and safety in law enforcement. For example, some departments are using virtual reality to train officers in handling tense situations. Many police departments in the U.S., in response to high-profile accusations of police brutality and unjustified shootings, are experimenting with body cameras, including those that turn on automatically when an officer draws their weapon, or even cameras that are always on. Debates about how society should weigh security versus privacy are unlikely to slow down, and neither is law enforcement’s pursuit of more advanced technology.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.