Anthony Kimery reports: A relatively small U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contract has revealed unusually specific details about a little-known Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) program that centrally manages the agency’s nationwide location tracking operations. ICE awarded Ensurity Mobile Corp. a $135,000 sole-source purchase order last week for specialized devices for HSI’s Technical Operations unit....

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Henry F. Fradella The Conversation, George Grispos, and Jihun Joun report: A husband in Taiwan suspected his wife of having an affair. In September 2023, he found a used toothbrush at their holiday home, and garage video showed an unfamiliar man driving his wife there. Three months later, he opened their robot vacuum’s app to...

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Yogev Toby reports: Meet the Instagram follower that may never stop looking at your feed: the Boston Police Department. The department this summer started using new artificial intelligence software that combs through social media looking for possible threats and information helpful to investigations, a city report revealed this week. The software, dubbed LifeRaft, offers tools...

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Jon Brodkin reports: The Boston city government abandoned Flock Safety’s license-plate reader cameras after the company shared data nationwide in violation of a contract provision, according to city officials. “We have actually abandoned Flock,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said in her monthly “Ask the Mayor” segment on GBH News last week. Wu made the comment...

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Rindala Alajaji and Dave Maass write: Here’s a riddle: Why did a Goshen Police Department officer search 6,474 automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks, representing data from 82,413 cameras, on May 7, 2025? If your answer is “I don’t know,” it turns out you’re 100% correct. The officer left the letters “idk” in the search...

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AFP reports: Calls are growing louder in Europe for action against “pervert” smart glasses after secretly filmed footage of girls and women appeared online — with a petition in Britain demanding a ban on their sale. Anyone wearing smart glasses can take photos, film videos, listen to music, make phone calls, translate text or interact...

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Jason Parham reports: We’ve all been there. You meet someone new on a dating app, start to envision a life together, only to wonder: Is the person actually who they say they are? It’s an experience that has led many singles, sometimes out of concern or just genuine curiosity, to prescreen dates by tracing their...

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Jake Moore of ESET had a concerning post on LinkedIn: I found a way to disable the privacy LED on Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. Now Meta says it’s releasing an update to stop it 👀 But I’m not convinced… The privacy LED on Meta’s glasses can be switched off or hidden with simple modifications. The fact...

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Connor Jones reports: LG is once again fending off allegations that its expensive consumer hardware gathers extensive information about users and their surroundings for the benefit of its advertising business. The latest concerns center on smart TVs that researchers claim continued capturing audio after voice recognition was activated, including while the display was in standby....

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Gintaras Radauskas reports: If you’re a Polarsteps user who loves to share your travels on the app, be aware that anyone could find out what you were up to this past summer. The app exposed enough data to track users – sometimes to within a meter, an investigation has found. According to Follow the Money, Polarsteps...

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Brian Dolinar writes: A growing movement has been campaigning against surveillance cameras from companies like Flock Safety, which allow local police to gather mass surveillance data, often citing the possibility of misuse of that data. But for years police have steadily been building a digital infrastructure with personal information on people with criminal backgrounds in...

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Jonathan Bilyk reports:  A federal judge will allow lawyers who led a privacy class action lawsuit against Google to claim nearly $147 million in legal fees, nearly a third of the $425 million a jury had ordered the tech giant to pay for allegedly tracking more than 100 million people’s data after the Google users...

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Biometric Update reports: Twenty-five years after the 9/11 Commission called for a biometric system capable of tracking foreign nationals entering and leaving the U.S., the House Intelligence Committee says the government still has not finished the job and is urging Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to expand biometric collection at land borders so it can...

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Jason Koebler has been all over Flock. He has also reported: The Texas sheriff’s office that used Flock to search more than 80,000 cameras nationwide for a woman who had a self-administered abortion used Axon’s Draft One AI tool to help write a police report about the incident, documents shared with 404 Media show. The tool was...

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Jason Koebler reports: Flock taught cops how they could surveil the No Kings protests and “small parades” using a mix of Flock’s technology and law enforcement’s own databases in a webinar last year. As Flock publicly downplays the power of its automated license plate camera network and highlights its use to solve violent crime, the...

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Cyrus Farivar reports: New data compiled by a Bay Area anti-surveillance advocacy group shows that not only are American localities dropping cameras from Flock Safety, but they are doing it at an accelerating rate. Communities from Lansing, Michigan, to Pflugerville, Texas, are ending their relationship with Flock, largely over concerns regarding out-of-control surveillance, unwanted data sharing, high expenses,...

Sam Levine reports: The Trump administration has been deploying an obscure legal maneuver to try to obtain private information on journalists, non-profits and unions, raising alarm over a power the government has asserted without judicial oversight. In one instance, the government obtained six months of telephone records for Georgia Fort, a Minneapolis journalist. Fort was not notified of...

Benjamin S. Weiss reports: The Homeland Security Department is looking to collect a sweeping tranche of American voter registration files in an effort the agency says will inform the “fraud detection” activities of its immigration investigations branch. The move comes as the administration continues to sow doubt in the security of the U.S. voting system ahead of...

Although this article focuses on a workplace potential issue, the surveillance issues and privacy risks go far beyond the workplace.  Kit Eaton writes: Apple’s big fall hardware release is just around the corner, and we suspect one of the hottest new devices we’ll see are AirPods with built-in cameras. A rumor about this innovation has been circulating...

Adeel Hassan reports: Samuel Tunick was returning to the United States in January 2025 from a vacation in the Dominican Republic when he was pulled aside during a customs search at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Customs and Border Protection officers wanted to search his phone. After questioning, he eventually turned it over but gave officers a...