Almost as soon as the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic in March, contact tracing apps seem to have sprouted everywhere. Last May, MintPress News reported on a Bluetooth-enabled sports fans tracking app, which was later repurposed to push COVID-19 contact tracing methods. The app, called Care19, was one of the first publicly known…

Following Donald Trump’s Friday announcement that he would ban the popular Chinese-owned video platform, Microsoft has today swooped in to hoover up TikTok after it received “personal assurances” from the president himself that he would back such a move. Trump has given the two parties up to 45 days to hash out a deal. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent…

Through the magic of Internet meme culture, most Millennials will be familiar with the famous opening scene of the 1942 film, “Casablanca,” where two policemen stop a civilian in the “old Moorish section” of Nazi-occupied French Morocco and ask him for his “papers.” The subject is taken away at once after failing to produce the required…

By now it is no secret that COVID-19 is being used to justify profiteering, power grabs, and the incremental decimation of our right to privacy. It is also serving to perpetuate age-old practices of oppression against Native peoples and other minority groups in the United States, as evidenced by a secret policy enacted by a neonatal women’s…

Should you be one of the dozens of people working minimum ten-hour shifts at Amazon’s fulfillment center in Kent, Washington these days, you might very well be at the vanguard of the “new normal” for American blue collar workplaces. The 1 million-square-foot facility located about 20 miles south of Seattle is the site of a new…

College football is deeply ingrained in popular American culture and represents one of the most important mechanisms to foment social cohesion in the country. Owing to the close ties between the government and military and America’s institutions of higher learning, often through research grants and recruitment programs, it will come as no surprise that the…

In the fight against COVID–19 (coronavirus), Google has announced it is partnering with dozens of governments around the world, sharing its users’ location history, and, in the process, giving us an insight into how much the Silicon Valley company knows about us. “As global communities respond to COVID-19, we’ve heard from public health officials that…

The U.S. government-social media nexus appears to be tightening. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump held a closed-door meeting with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Just days prior, the other top social-media network, Facebook, hired Jennifer Newstead, a former legal adviser to Trump’s state department who had previously co-authored the controversial Patriot Act, known for its…

This year Facebook filed two very interesting patents in the US. One was a patent for emotion recognition technology; which recognises human emotions through facial expressions and so can therefore assess what mood we are in at any given time-happy or anxious for example. This can be done either by a webcam or through a…

Emails obtained by Lucy Parsons Labs reveal that Geofeedia touted social media surveillance of middle and high school students by its suburban Chicago police customers in an effort to sell their services to Evanston police. Geofeedia provides law enforcement with tools to monitor social media use by mapping location and other data. It has received funding from…

Android and iPhone users may be under the impression that Google is not tracking their location data if they’ve turned off “Location History” on their devices. After all, the Google support page says, “With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored.” But a new Associated Press investigation showed how that is not really the…

In a decision that digital rights advocates called “a groundbreaking victory for Americans’ privacy rights,” the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Friday that police generally must obtain a warrant before collecting cellphone records that can be used to track a person’s movements. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which represented the petitioner, predicted the “historic”…