“They are not only going to be prosecuted by the Chinese authorities eventually or disappeared, as we’ve seen with Peng Shuai, but they’re also going to be punished by the IOC,” Hoffman said during a media briefing conducted by Human Rights Watch on Tuesday. “So my advice to athletes that are there is that they stay silent.”

The IOC and China both see the Games as a business opportunity. Ai suggested many Chinese see the Olympics as another political exercise with some — like athletes — trying to extract value.

Despite allegations of genocide against ethnic Muslims in Xinjiang, China, many foreign firms are hoping to make the most of the winter sports boom that's expected there from the Winter Olympics next month.

Other foreign car brands including Volkswagen, General Motors and Nissan have showrooms in Xinjiang operated by the car makers’ Chinese joint-venture partners. VW also operates a factory in Urumqi.

In the run-up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Chinese security services achieved a new level of control over the country’s internet. During China’s coronavirus outbreak, Xi’s government leaned hard on private companies in possession of sensitive personal data. Any emergency data-sharing arrangements made behind closed doors during the pandemic could become permanent.

Meanwhile, China thinks that the West, with its ideas of democracy and freedom, can hardly obtain effective control. So, the 2022 Olympics will further testify to the effectiveness of authoritarianism in China and the frustration of the West’s democratic regimes.”

He wants to build an all-seeing digital system of social control, patrolled by precog algorithms that identify potential dissenters in real time.

Just a fascist surveillance capitalism version of the autocratic surveillance communism?

A crude version of such a system is already in operation in China’s northwestern territory of Xinjiang, where more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs have been imprisoned, the largest internment of an ethnic-religious minority since the fall of the Third Reich. Once Xi perfects this system in Xinjiang, no technological limitations will prevent him from extending AI surveillance across China. He could also export it beyond the country’s borders, entrenching the power of a whole generation of autocrats.

Angwang’s job was to “locate potential intelligence sources” and “identify potential threats to the PRC in the New York metropolitan area,” court papers say. He also was expected to provide consulate officials “access to senior NYPD officials through invitations to official NYPD events,” they add.

The firm, called Tiandy, is one of the world’s largest video surveillance companies, reporting almost $700 million in sales in 2020. The company sells cameras and accompanying AI-enabled software, including facial recognition technology, software that it claims can detect someone’s race, and “smart” interrogation tables for use alongside “tiger chairs,” which have been widely documented as a tool for torture.

Protests, arson and looting have ravaged the capital in recent days following his government’s decision to switch alliances from Taiwan to Beijing.

In the near future, every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema. In time, algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources—travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases—to predict political resistance before it happens.

U.S. intelligence has established that Beijing has set up a high-tech surveillance system across Xinjiang that uses biometric facial recognition and has collected DNA samples from all residents, ages 12 to 65, as part of a systematic effort to suppress Uyghurs, according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters on the sanctions on the condition of anonymity.

Australian Strategic Policy Institute researcher Nathan Ruser wrote in the report released late Thursday: “Available evidence suggests that many extrajudicial detainees in Xinjiang’s vast ‘re-education’ network are now being formally charged and locked up in higher security facilities, including newly built or expanded prisons, or sent to walled factory compounds for coerced labor assignments.”

Uighurs who were spared the camps now make up the most intensely surveilled population on Earth. Not all of the surveillance is digital. The Chinese government has moved thousands of Han Chinese “big brothers and sisters” into homes in Xinjiang’s ancient Silk Road cities, to monitor Uighurs’ forced assimilation to mainstream Chinese culture.

Uighur women are also made to endure pregnancy checks. Some are forced to have abortions, or get an IUD inserted. Others are sterilized by the state. Police are known to rip unauthorized children away from their parents, who are then detained.

The Commerce Department said multiple federal agencies determined that the Chinese academy and research institutes “use biotechnology processes to support Chinese military end uses and end users, to include purported brain-control weaponry.”

“Hell is not hot enough for Chamath Palihapitiya,” he said in an emailed statement, noting that Uyghurs in China face government-sanctioned “rape, enforced sterilization, torture, imprisonment, persecution, deportation and enforced disappearance to wipe them out.”

The dispatcher then instructed her to “stay exactly where you are,” and said that if she came back with packages in tow, it would count as “refusing your route” and she would be fired. At that point, the dispatcher also said the driver wouldn’t be able to get into the warehouse building anyway, since high winds had damaged the door, and that the driver needed to “shelter in place.”

But make no mistake about it — Amazon is first and foremost a surveillance company. Data collection is the core of its business model, no matter what the business line. Amazon surveils consumers, competitors, citizens, and immigrants, and it invasively and ubiquitously surveils its employees.

Amazon’s surveillance is also used to enforce the corporation’s rigorous employee performance standards outside the physical premises of its warehouses. Delivery drivers often speed to meet Amazon’s rigorous delivery demands, harming both drivers and bystanders. Investigations conducted by ProPublica and BuzzFeed discovered that Amazon delivery drivers had been involved in more than 60 crashes that led to serious injuries, including at least 13 deaths, between 2015 and 2019.

Tuesday, after news that Amazon was hiring an intelligence analyst to identify labor organizers went viral, the company said the job listing was made “in error.” But internal documents, reports, and an online tool left on the open internet and viewed by Motherboard shows that Amazon has for years had a sophisticated, secret program and team to spy on its workers in closed Facebook groups.

But before long, Apple may have some company in the $3 trillion club. Microsoft (MSFT) is now worth about $2.5 trillion and Google owner Alphabet's (GOOGL) market value is right around $2 trillion. Still giant but further behind are Amazon (AMZN), which has a market cap of $1.7 trillion, and Elon Musk's Tesla (TSLA), worth about $1.2 trillion.

Apple has been at the vanguard of a group of Big Tech companies that are increasingly taking over people’s lives — and the stock market. Just five companies — Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google’s parent company — account for nearly 23% of the S&P 500’s entire value.

“a growing number of private corporations who see few consequences to bolstering the cyber arsenals of major Western adversaries, only profit.”

The company has already faced significant blowback because of, for example, its role during China’s crackdown in Hong Kong and the discovery that its technology was being used by a Bangladeshi “death squad.”

was one of several companies added to a US blacklist because of allegations that spyware it supplied to foreign governments was then used to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers.

The app is included by default on every Apple device. It accepts incoming messages from anyone who knows your number. There is no way to uninstall it, no way to inspect it, nothing a user can do to defend against this kind of threat beyond downloading every Apple security update as soon as possible.

BlastDoor did make exploiting iMessage harder, but the app is still a favorite target of hackers. On Monday, Apple disclosed an exploit that the Israeli spyware company NSO Group had reportedly used to circumvent BlastDoor protections and take over the iPhone through a different flaw in iMessage. Apple declined to comment.

on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful — and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.

It’s been almost six years since an NSA whistleblower exposed the reach of government surveillance and a year since a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower unveiled the corporate side of the surveillance coin, and the risks of something as simple as an online quiz. But the public has been hearing and sounding alarms about digital privacy for an eternity. “Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be surmountable,” Mark Zuckerberg told the Harvard Crimson way back in 2003, after his Hot or Not-esque Facemash website, built from photos he scraped in bulk from dormitories’ online “face books,” caused a campus uproar.

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
 Zuck: Just ask.
 Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
 [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?


Zuck: People just submitted it.


Zuck: I don't know why.


Zuck: They "trust me"


Zuck: Dumb fucks.

In the face of all the data abuse, many of us have, quite reasonably, thrown up our hands. Some have even parroted Zuckerberg and the other big tech executives who have heralded the end of privacy. But privacy didn’t die. It didn’t go away. It’s just been beaten up, sold, obscured, diffused unevenly across society. To mutate William Gibson’s quote about the future and its unevenness and inequalities, privacy is alive, it’s just not evenly distributed.

“Privacy”is about the data about us that’s harvested, bought, sold, and traded by an obscure army of data brokers without our knowledge, feeding marketers, landlords, employers, immigration officials, insurance companies, debt collectors, as well as stalkers and who knows who else. It’s the body camera or the sports arena or the social network capturing your face for who knows what kind of analysis. Don’t think of personal data as just “data.” As it gets more detailed and more correlated, increasingly, our data is us.

Privacy harms are dark ads bought with dark money and the 
micro-targeting of voters by overseas propagandists or domestic political campaigns. That kind of influence isn’t just the promise of shadowy political consultants or state-run misinformation campaigns, but the premise of modern-day digital advertising. (Facebook’s research division hired one of the psychology researchers behind Cambridge Analytica’s data-scraping Facebook quiz.) “Privacy” isn’t just privacy, but fairness, security, freedom, justice, free speech, and free thought.

The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.

The memo is a damning account of Facebook’s failures. It’s the story of Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe. It's also the story of a junior employee wielding extraordinary moderation powers that affected millions of people without any real institutional support, and the personal torment that followed.

“With no oversight whatsoever, I was left in a situation where I was trusted with immense influence in my spare time,” she wrote, according to BuzzFeed. “A manager on Strategic Response mused to myself that most of the world outside the West was effectively the Wild West with myself as the part-time dictator ― he meant the statement as a compliment, but it illustrated the immense pressures upon me.”

Critics note that opting out of surveillance today is as difficult as opting out of “electricity, or cooked foods,” and the workplace has turned into a digital panopticon. Between 2015 and 2018, 50% of 239 companies surveyed used some form of employee surveillance, according to a 2019 survey by Gartner. This number was expected to increase to 80% in 2020. Corporate practices have gotten so invasive that one of America’s leading security experts, Bruce Schneier, stated that employers are “the most dangerous power that has us under surveillance.”

What business schools today call “scientific management” actually has its very roots in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. ...High-tech corporate monitoring of workers today undoubtedly stems from this legacy of meticulous and detailed tracking of enslaved workers in order to extract the most profit from them, and to quell potential rebellion and collective action.

In her book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Brown describes the racial origins and evolutions of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, an institution of social control and surveillance where individuals are watched without ever knowing whether they are being watched or where the watcher is located. Bentham envisioned it while traveling aboard a ship with “18 young Negresses” who’d been enslaved and held “under the hatches.”

Amazon has vast ambitions to expand its surveillance and control over its workers. Amazon patented a wristband that “can precisely track where warehouse employees are placing their hands and use vibrations to nudge them in a different direction.” The patent states that “ultrasonic tracking of a worker’s hands may be used to monitor performance of assigned tasks.”

If a student leaves campus without permission, the app will alert the school, and the student’s ID card will be locked and access to campus buildings will be revoked, according to an email to students, seen by TechCrunch.

If her risk factor fluctuated upward—whether due to some suspicious pattern in her movements, her social associations, her insufficient attention to a propaganda-consumption app, or some correlation known only to the AI—a purely automated system could limit her movement. It could prevent her from purchasing plane or train tickets. It could disallow passage through checkpoints. It could remotely commandeer “smart locks” in public or private spaces, to confine her until security forces arrived.

Unbeknownst to her—because she didn’t read the fine print—some data from the research study, along with her liquor purchase history, has made it to one of the two employment agencies that have come to dominate the market. Every employer who screens her application with the agency now sees that she’s been profiled as a “depressed unreliable.” No wonder she can’t get work. But even if she could discover that she’s been profiled in this way, what recourse does she have?

Aura was developed by Nucleus Careers in the months after the pandemic began. Nucleus Careers is a Pennsylvania-based recruiting firm founded in 2020, with no apparent history or experience in building or developing healthcare apps

“The keys were practically ‘full access’,” Gilda told TechCrunch. She said the keys — since changed — gave her access to the app’s databases and cloud storage in which she found patient data, including COVID-19 test results with names, addresses and dates of birth.

Abercrombie & Fitch

adidas

Amazon

Badger Sport (Founder Sport Group)

C&A (Cofra Holding AG)

Calvin Klein (PVH)

Carter’s

Cerruti 1881 (Trinity Limited)

Costco

Cotton On

Dangerfield (Factory X Pty Ltd)

Esprit (Esprit Holdings Ltd.)

Fila (FILA KOREA Ltd)

Gap

H&M

Hart Schaffner Marx (Authentic Brands Group)

Ikea (Inter IKEA Systems B.V.)

Jack & Jones (Bestseller)

Jeanswest (Harbour Guidance Pty Ltd)

L.L.Bean

Lacoste (Maus Freres)

Li-Ning

Marks & Spencer

Mayor

Muji (Ryohin Keikaku Co., Ltd.)

Nike

Patagonia

Polo Ralph Lauren (Ralph Lauren Corporation)

Puma

Skechers

Summit Resource International (Caterpillar)

Target Australia (Wesfarmers)

Tommy Hilfiger (PVH)

Uniqlo (Fast Retailing)

Victoria’s Secret (L Brands)

Woolworths (Woolworth Corporation, LLC.)

Zara (Inditex)

Zegna

Abercrombie & Fitch, Acer, Adidas, Alstom, Amazon, Apple, ASUS, BAIC Motor, BMW, Bombardier, Bosch, BYD, Calvin Klein, Candy, Carter’s, Cerruti 1881, Changan Automobile, Cisco, CRRC, Dell, Electrolux, Fila, Founder Group, GAC Group (automobiles), Gap, Geely Auto, General Motors, Google, Goertek, H&M, Haier, Hart Schaffner Marx, Hisense, Hitachi, HP, HTC, Huawei, iFlyTek, Jack & Jones, Jaguar, Japan Display Inc., L.L.Bean, Lacoste, Land Rover, Lenovo, LG, Li-Ning, Marks & Spencer, Mayor, Meizu, Mercedes-Benz, MG, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Mitsumi, Nike, Nintendo, Nokia, Oculus, Oppo, Panasonic, Polo Ralph Lauren, Puma, Roewe, SAIC Motor, Samsung, SGMW, Sharp, Siemens, Skechers, Sony, TDK, Tommy Hilfiger, Toshiba, Tsinghua Tongfang, Uniqlo, Victoria’s Secret, Vivo, Volkswagen, Xiaomi, Zara, Zegna, ZTE. Some brands are linked with multiple factories.