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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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As a curiosity, it is also worth mentioning the other new category of obliged entities, namely persons trading or acting as intermediaries in the trade of works of art, like art galleries and auction houses (transactions over EUR 10,000) have been added. Quite a specific business area, in which many people intend to remain anonymous, might be a challenge even though it opens numerous business opportunities for KYC service providers!

From Customer data protection and the impact on digital money and crypto: the 5th AML directive – ThePaypers:

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In 2019, there were 122,437 APP fraud cases in the UK, with losses hitting £456 million, up from £354 million in 2018. Financial providers returned about a quarter of losses – £116 million – to victims.

From APP fraud losses hit £456 million in 2019:

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RBS Group (including Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest and Ulster Bank) and HSBC (including First Direct) were unable to confirm a specific date when asked if they would be ready by the regulator’s deadline. Metro Bank told Which? that it has no current plans to implement CoP at all.

From Which? calls for all banks to adopt anti-fraud measures | Banks and building societies | The Guardian:

 

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