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In one plausible future, many people routinely are offered, and use, technical tools to keep their identities obscure. Call it Pseudoworld. When controlling what is known about us is difficult, the natural path is pseudonymization: establishing online presence without using a real name. One recent study found that the more sensitive a topic is, the less likely people discussing it online are to use their real names. It recorded about one in five accounts on English-speaking Twitter as plainly using pseudonyms. In Pseudoworld, that will be far more common. There, to tweet or blog—or sign on to Facebook—under a real name will be seen as a puzzlingly risky thing to do. Just as universities remind students to lock their dorm-room doors, civic education will teach us how to obscure our identities so we can’t be traced online.

We get to Pseudoworld precisely by trying to take individual responsibility for our own privacy.

From A World Without Privacy Will Revive the Masquerade – The Atlantic:

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That’s because the barrel of privacy invasion has no bottom. The rallying cry for privacy should begin with the strangely heartening fact that it can always get worse. Even now there’s something yet to lose, something often worth fiercely defending.

From A World Without Privacy Will Revive the Masquerade – The Atlantic:

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In the 19th century, privacy was about protection from people. In the 20th century, it was about protection from government. In the 21st century, it’s about protection from a new class of corporate giants that Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalists.”

From Crazy/Genius: Why Should We Care About Privacy? – The Atlantic:

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China is using a variety of smartphone apps to facilitate this. In Shanghai qr codes are used to determine whether a person can be admitted to a building, or even the city—and to provide a detailed contact history should that person later be found to have become infected. Each subway car has its own qr code to be scanned when you get on. If one of the passengers gets sick, only that car, rather than the whole train, needs to be contacted.

From The lockdown and the long haul – In Europe, and around the world, governments are getting tougher | Briefing | The Economist:

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The government is working with mobile network O2 to analyse anonymous smartphone location data to see whether people are following its social distancing guidelines,

From Coronavirus: Government using mobile location data to tackle outbreak | Science & Tech News | Sky News:

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Known as “cum-ex”, the scheme involved trading shares at high speed on or just before the dividend record date – the day the company checks its records to identify shareholders – and then claiming two or more refunds for capital gains tax which had in fact only been paid to the state once.

From Former London bankers convicted after Germany’s ‘greatest tax robbery’ | Germany | The Guardian:

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These pictures and patterns are known as “adversarial images,” and they exploit weaknesses in the way computers look at the world to make them see stuff that isn’t there. Think of them as optical illusions, but for AI. They can be made into glasses that fool facial recognition systems, they can be printed onto physical objects, and now, researchers from Google have turned them into stickers.

From These stickers make AI hallucinate things that aren’t there – The Verge:

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Swedish households are increasingly using electronic means of payment such as bank cards and Swish, at the same time as the use of cash is declining. Debit cards are still dominant among electronic means of payment.

From Payment patterns | Sveriges Riksbank:

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Enabling machine learning in power-constrained settings and eliminating the need for  network connectivity mean the sensor can be placed where there isn’t a hardy power supply. Latency advantages and cost advantages also can come into play.

“These devices can run neural network models on batteries for years, and deliver low-latency inference directly on the device,” said Ian Nappier, product manager of TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers at Google, in a statement to Arm.

From AI-everywhere IoT chips coming from Arm | Network World:

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The new machine-learning silicon will include micro neural processing units (microNPU) that can be used to identify speech patterns and perform other AI tasks. Importantly, the processing is accomplished on-device and in smaller form factors than have so far been available. The chips don’t need the cloud or any network.

Arm, which historically has been behind mobile smartphone microchips, is aiming this design – the Cortex M55 processor, paired with the Ethos-U55, Arm’s first microNPU – at Internet of Things instead.

From AI-everywhere IoT chips coming from Arm | Network World:

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