Facesaving

Do not miss Alvaro Bedoya’s article in Slate warning how tech industry opposition to new privacy measures is leading to the creation of the “Loophole of Things.” In it, Bedoya, who is the founding executive director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, explains why he was one of several consumer privacy advocates who two weeks ago walked out of Commerce Department-sponsored talks with industry groups that were trying to set up voluntary rules for companies using facial recognition technology. He warns:

As checks strengthen on government surveillance, tech companies are evading even basic limits on their ability to collect, share, and monetize your data. At the heart of this divide is an increasingly formidable force: industry lobbying. Facial recognition lets companies identify you by name, from far away, and in secret. There’s little you can do to stop it.

Bedoya says that consumer privacy advocates are seeking a basic opt-in rule for the use of facial recognition, but industry lobbyists won’t touch it. Worse, this is “part of a broader pattern of industry lobbying that is shutting down Washington’s ability to protect consumer privacy.”

Newly published documents analyzed by The Intercept’s Morgan Marquis-Boire, Glenn Greenwald, and Micah Lee detail how the NSA’s XKEYSCORE surveillance program “not only include emails, chats and web-browsing traffic, but also pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation (CNE) targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions, and more.”

The UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal has admitted that Amnesty International was subject to unlawful surveillance by the British government, Privacy International revealed yesterday.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign raised $45 million since she declared officially in April, Amy Chozick, and Nicholas Confessore report for the New York Times. The campaign did not disclose how much of that came in from small donors.

The top 500 donors to political campaigns in 2014 were overwhelmingly old, white and male, Adam Smith of Every Voice notes, citing new reports from the Center for Responsive Politics.

@POTUS unbound? Here at Civicist HQ we have long joked about how Twitter changes “after hours” and some of the public and semi-public figures we follow seem to loosen their belts and start warbling in, shall we say, interesting ways. So with the kids tucked in and maybe a beer or two quaffed, who but President Obama is now popping up on late night Twitter, in this case bantering with the band The Black Keys? (Even when he’s supposedly on message, doing an “#AskPOTUS” session on health care yesterday, he can’t resist needling the New York Times for an errant guacamole recipe.

Responding to new data from Twitter showing that it employs just 49 African-Americans out of a U.S. workforce of 2,910, Reverend Jesse Jackson tells Rupert Neate of The Guardian that black people “are becoming intolerant with these numbers,” adding, “there’s a big gap between their talk and their implementation.”

Holy cow! Not only is “Shit Academics Say” (@academicssay) a hilarious Twitter account, the academic behind it, Nathan Hall of McGill University, has parlayed its popularity into recruiting nearly 7,000 academics from more than 60 countries into participating in three online studies of psychological well-being in academia. And remember, “To err is human. To err repeatedly is research.” (h/t Dave Karpf)

Shyp is reclassifying hundreds of its couriers as employees, following a similar recent announcement made by delivery start-up Instacart, Alexander Kaufman reports for the Huffington Post.

CityMart founder Sasha Haselmayer (and Civic Hall member) writes on his company’s blog that it’s time for city managers to reconsider how they define risk when they procure products and services, and change their RFPs into “problem statements” without the detailed specifications that currently snarl up the process. He notes that this shift is already underway in cities like Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Barcelona and asks some sharp questions like:

“Why” can only companies with $10 million annual revenue or more present solutions? Will that really help the citizen or exclude too many new ideas? “Why” are we really certain when we specify a solution that we know it doesn’t already exist, or that a better alternative may be out there somewhere? “Why” do we need to buy a solution? Can we not lease it, give a concession or pay for the results achieved?

This is civic tech: Meet DemocracyApps, a civic tech start-up growing out of the Code for Asheville volunteer group. It’s focused on making user-friendly interactive tools that help local voters understand public budgets, starting with western North Carolina’s cities, as Hayley Benton reports for Mountain Express.

GovFresh’s Luke Fretwell talks to St. Louis’ Rise data management coordinator Eleanor Tutt about how the city is planning to use data and technology to improve the lives of its low-income residents.

Patrick Metzger of Graphika shares seven key takeaways from his Personal Democracy Forum 2015 experience.