Amid privacy concerns, payments giant Mastercard is rolling out the controversial biometric payment systems, allowing users to pay with the wave of a hand or a smile at a camera. The payments giant said it is rolling out the biometric checkout programs to speed up checkout time and reduce wait times. It also claims that biometric systems are more secure and hygienic than debit and credit cards. ( A.La. exploiting public fears,”Biosecurity” in order to roll in a Cashless society.)
“Once enrolled, there is no need to slow down the checkout queue searching through their pockets or bag,” Mastercard said while introducing the controversial tech. “Consumers can simply check the bill and smile into a camera or wave their hand over a reader to pay.”
Mastercard will begin testing its biometric checkout systems in Brazil, at five St Marche stores in the city of Sao Paulo. Interested users can register their biometrics via an app or in a store through Mastercard’s partner Payface. A spokesperson said that it will soon roll out the biometric checkout system in the UK, and is also focusing on markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The system will help Mastercard tap into the biometrics technology industry, which will be worth over $18 billion by 2026, according to KBV Research. Mastercard cited a study that claimed that 74% of the global population has a “positive attitude” towards biometrics.
However, privacy advocates have raised concerns about biometric checkout systems. The (rightful) concern is that the systems will collect and store data that can be used to monitor and track users.
“While it seems Mastercard have taken steps to protect and encrypt this data, as biometric payments become more commonplace the use of such data is likely to evolve and it will inevitably become harder to protect individuals rights to privacy,” – Added Suzie Miles, a partner at lawfirm Ashfords
Who owns your face? You might think that you do, but consider that Clearview AI, an American company that sells facial recognition technology, has amassed a database of ten billion images since 2020.
By the end of the year, it plans to have scraped 100 billion facial images from the internet. It is difficult to assess the company’s claims, but if we take Clearview AI at face value, it has enough data to identify almost everyone on earth and end privacy and anonymity everywhere.
As you read these words, your face is making money for people whom you’ve never met and who never sought your consent when they took your faceprint from your social media profiles and online photo albums.Today, Clearview AI’s technology is used by over 3,100 U.S. law enforcement agencies, as well as the U.S. Postal Service.In Ukraine, it is being used as a weapon of war. The company has offered its tools free of charge to the Ukrainian government, which is using them to identify dead and living Russian soldiers and then contact their mothers.
It would be easy to shrug this off. After all, we voluntarily surrendered our privacy the moment we began sharing photos online, and millions of us continue to use websites and apps that fail to protect our data, despite warnings from privacy campaigners and Western security services. It is tempting to overlook the fact that Ukraine is not using Clearview AI to identify dead Ukrainians, which suggests that we are witnessing the use of facial recognition technology for psychological warfare, not identification. Some people will be fine with the implications of this: if Russian mothers have to receive disturbing photos of their dead sons, so be it.
To understand why we might want to rethink the use of facial recognition technology in conflict, consider the following thought experiment: Imagine a conflict in which the United States was fighting against an opponent who had taken American faceprints to train its facial recognition technology and was using it to identify dead American soldiers and contact their mothers. This would almost certainly cause howls of protest across the United States. Technology executives would be vilified in the press and hauled before Congress, where lawmakers might finally pass a law to protect Americans’ biometric data.
We do not need to wait for these scenarios to occur; Congress could act now to protect Americans’ biometric data. If taking inspiration from the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) seems a step too far, Congress only needs to look to Illinois, whose Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) requires that companies obtain people’s opt-in consent before capturing facial images and other biometrics.
Clearview AI is currently fighting multiple lawsuits in federal and state courts in Illinois for failing to obtain users’ consent. These lawsuits highlight a troubling aspect of facial recognition technology in the United States: Americans’ privacy, civil liberties, and rights over their biometric data vary from state to state, and even within states, and are not protected by federal law
For all of Clearview AI’s many flaws, the challenge free-societies face is about more than the actions of one company. Many companies and governments are using similar means to create the same tools, such as PimEyes, FindClone, and TrueFace.Liberal democracies can regulate them, but currently, there is nothing preventing adversaries from capturing our faces and other biometric data. Failing to act could endanger soldiers, security personnel, and law enforcement officers, as well as civilian populations. It is time to confront this challenge head-on.
“May you live in interesting times”...is a cultural colloqualism that can be taken as either a blessing or a curse. Given our current trajectory down the path of total Biosecurity slavery,Ill take it as the latter. And we sure do live in “interesting times”. The Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing 2 years of constant fear mongering over a novel virus that has yet to leave bodies piled up in the streets,have been the center point for a continued assault upon the public’s privacy and “freedom” of travel(We can thank the Global War OF Terror for the kickoff to this party). While Biometrics have been gradually being integrated into the global travel infrastructure, There is now a parallel (Biosecurity) infrastructure being built to fight yet another invisible enemy. Sure being that we live in an age of advanced technology,these types of changes were bound to happen in the way we travel and live our lives.However on the flip side there are forces that seek to leverage these advancements for further control and coralling of the population,to place us on a fast track to a Dystopian vision of how were allowed to move,travel and live our lives,all in the name of staying “Healthy”,”Safe” and “Secure”. As though we needed a constant daddying supervision of our unruly and dangerous “Freedom”.
While the global pandemic hit the airline industries pockets pretty hard in 2020,With a 387 billion dollar net loss (or so they say). That didn’t stop the forward progress Frog march of the global surveillance industry which took full advantage of the New Bio-security state paradigm in the Wake of Covid-19.
How will Facial recognition work in the age of required masking you may ask? No worries they’ve already got that figured out(of course)with credit due to the decade long War on Terror. Israeli based company Corsight is working with multiple law enforcement & intelligence agencies and has established business with several airports in deploying an AI facial recognition system that can “see through masks”
As per Corsights CEO: “Corsight’s autonomous AI is essentially military-grade software and represents a vast evolution over the type of facial recognition tech we’re used to using. “We can identify someone with 90-degree head turn. We can identify someone with a camera at 70-degree rake, we can identify someone with a face mask—not just with a face mask, but with a ski mask…with hat, glasses, all of that, And, astonishingly,“We can identify someone who is now age 50 from a photograph of them at age 17.”
Makes you feel all cold and creepy inside huh?
“Touchless” technology is one of the burgeoning Tech/surveillance advancments in the post pandemic era,of course being marketed as “safe” and “efficient” ways of tech/social interaction to limit your exposure to cooties and to keep you from having to actually interface with another human being(Do i sense a sort of de-humanization in these technologies?).
Of course in the case of Air travel this technology doesn’t prevent you from being packed like sardines into a flying aluminum tube with other dirty humans and their offspring….But im sure they’ll be finding a Transhumanist solution to that at some point.
With the airline industry on a slow rebound in this post covid era, not much has changed in the way of the usual flight delay’s and endless hours of waiting around to catch your flight. Well of course that issue is addressed by Tascent technologies and their announcement of creating Touchless passenger lounges,also equipped with…you guessed it Facial recognition technology. Welcome to the Air travel version of the Panopticon..it’s all for your “convenience” and (Health?) “Safety” of course. No specifics on how they plan to implement such a strategy,but no doubt it will have some kind of preference to Vaxxed individuals,vs exclusion of the unvaxxed. A little bit more on that later…
But don’t you worry US travelers, this type of intrusion isnt just relegated to overseas airports..No we live in the age of GLOBAL Mass surveillance. Not only will you have the pleasure of being tracked and traced by AI algorithm’s but Airport police will be equipped with specially designed Facial recognition/Thermal sensing cameras. Yup… be prepared to be stared down by officer Robocop on your next Disney vacation.
As per the reporting of MasspriveteI: KeyBiz’s smart helmets also come equipped with license plate readers, essentially turning cops into mobile surveillance platforms.According to an NBC 25 News article the Feds are sneaking facial recognition smart helmets into airports looking for blacklisted or “wanted criminals.”
Although the article does not specifically mention blacklisted people, it does mention that airport police use smart helmets to compare peoples faces to “databases of alleged criminals.” History has shown that airport police (DHS/TSA) have access to numerous databases of blacklisted people and a secret list of unruly passengers.
The creeping Tyranny we were warned about in the War of Terror campaign,is no longer creeping,it’s coming at you in full force,on all four fours….
Of course it seems recently that compliance has become the norm for the worlds populace who have been terrorized into a Stockholm syndrome level of Psychological conditioning. A recent IATA report noted that a majority of passengers were willing to go along with this Digital dictatorship,in order to avoid waiting on long lines….
“According to Nick Careen, IATA’s Vice President for Operation, Safety and Security, passengers want technology to work harder, so they don’t have to spend long waiting hours in queues or waiting to get their documents checked. The Global Passenger Survey for 2021 (GPS) which counted 13,579 respondents from 186 countries, reveals that 73 per cent of passengers claimed to be willing to provide their biometric data to improve the travel and airport check processes, showing an increase of 27 per cent compared to 2019.
Vaxx passports & Digital ID a warning fallen on deaf ears, Now a reality
As I wrote about in Early 2021..Vaccine passports were already under developments and ready to be released to the world’s public. Of course the majority of normie’s who would have heard such a proposition called it impossible and crazy. Not more than 6 months later,were looking at a GLOBAL Vaccine passport scheme. Now while not entirely monolithic and united in systems there are now multiple nations that are requiring their citizens to show proof of vaccination in order to travel,Work,and to even pay for groceries.
Of course it’s unprecedented that a majority of the worlds population’s movements would be restricted to something as seemingly arbitrary (in 2019 standards,I’d guess) as vaccination status,but yet…here we are.While the purpose here is not to argue the validity of the so called “global Pandemic”it’s pretty obvious that these programs of Mass surveillance,Tracking,and Biometric monitoring wouldn’t be at this stage of advancement without a GLOBAL Emergency excuse (A Biological/Psychological 9-11 if you will).
The newest iterations in the Vaxx passport scheme range from IATA’s Global travel pass initiative,”green passes” in the EU,Israel,China,and hold on get ready for this one…..”Super” green passes in Italy. While the US doesn’t have an outright Vaccine passport program, there is the CLEAR health pass app, which “links Covid-19 health information to biometric identifiers such as your face, eyes and fingerprints”. But hey…It’s not a Vaxx passport, it’s a “health convenience” Right guys????
Almost all aspects of what was once considered “normal” daily life in these countries,Freedom of travel,Freedom of assembly,down to even whether or not you’ll be allowed to feed yourself have been subjugated and surrendered to Govt mandates,which require “Full vaccination” and proof of such via your Digital health Id or Vaccine passport. So…Who are the crazy ones now?????
Vaxx Passports/Digital ID: two sides of the same Globalist coin
The push to global digital Identification has been in place even before the pandemic. In 2016 the United Nations held the opening of the ID2020 summit which discussed plans and how to implement ways to provide digital ID to everyone on the planet. While couched in the terms of “sustainable development” and “equity” The UN planned called for means to “provide all invisible and vulnerable people with legal identity by 2030, to make them visible and restore them into society”.Once again we see the globalist trend of manipulating lofty language and tugging on the heart strings to advance their control agenda’s. In 2018 the Known Traveler Digitial Identity (KTDI) initiative was launched by the World Economic Forum,That bastion of Globalist innovation that has given us “The Great Reset”. In collaboration with the governments of Canada (Which now has one of the strictest vaxx passport/ID scheme imprisoning it’s own citizens) and The Netherlands, The KTDI initiative piloted paperless digital travel documents for traveler’s between both countries.
And of course not more than a few weeks into the opening of the Pandemic itself we had the consummate globalist lap dog himself, Bill Gates “specultaing” that at some very near future point “Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.” Really ahead of the curves there,huh Bill? Gates isn’t alone in this push for digital immunity ID,of course other like minded Technocrat’s/Government talking heads and Corporate “business leaders” have been insistent in this push for global digital ID.
What are they gonna do next,Microchip us? You’re crazy if you think that……..
Of course one of the Ad-hominem attacks against those of us critical of this agenda,is that we’re crazy for thinking that anyone would want to track and control us. Our governments and Public-Private partnerships(Corporate Fascism) are only doing this for our own best interests. Tracking via Microchips is one of the tropes that is pushed by popular opinion and the media,no doubt spurned on by earlier conspiracy theorists and their speculations about tracking via Microchips.
It’s kind of simplistic to criticize the idea of Tracking chips and Technologies when people are willingly allowing themselves to be tracked and traced by such means.
But then again, we’re in the 21st century,So Microchips,RFID and Bar codes are a thing of the past. In the new Biosecurity paradigm,tracking/tracing and constant surveillence is being accomplish on the nano and atomic levels.As we move further along our path of almost cyberpunk/Corporate overlord dystopia,we have begun the process of categorizing/inventorying ourselves as well as almost every other life form animate or inanimate,Via The Internet of Things(IOT),& the Internet of Bodies(IOB).
And so the further you dig into these topics,the clearer it becomes that we are inching (Incrementalism) towards a Total panopticon style society.The more that the public complies with such steps towards Total tyranny in the empty name of “Health and Safety” (Biosecurity) the worse it will become, All via a process of acclimation and gradualism. But then again that’s been the globalist strategy for nearly a hundred years now. It’s up to us to act on this knowledge that (For now) is freely available to us. Much like the concept of a virus, these forces thrive in darkness and invisibilty,but that which can be destroyed by exposure to the light of Truth,Should be destroyed by Truth. All it takes is the commitment to act upon these realizations, rather than passing the buck to the next guy,or the next generation. the only ones coming to save us…are ourselves.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced plans for a new pilot program that will test out biometric facial recognition technology as part of an effort to identify fugitives or terror suspects.
Thanks to quantum leaps in facial recognition technology, especially over the past year, the future is arriving sooner than most Americans realize. As early as this summer, CBP will set up a pilot program to digitally scan the faces of drivers and passengers — while they are in moving vehicles — at the busy Anzalduas Port of Entry outside of McAllen, the agency announced Thursday.
The Texas-Mexico border is being used as the testing grounds for the technology. The results of the pilot program will be used to help roll out a national program along the entire southern and northern borders.( Rollout preparation for HR 4760 ??)
The Department of Energy hired researchers at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to help overcome the difficulties of using facial recognition technology on moving vehicles. The researchers developed a method for combating window tinting and sun glare which can make a vehicle’s windows impenetrable to cameras. The facial recognition technology being developed for the pilot program will be capable of identifying the driver, front passengers, and the passengers riding in the back.
Although the CBP claims implementing facial recognition technology could eventually eliminate the need for passports, boarding passes and other travel documents(A perfect setup for a National ID card,and cashless banking society), the technology is without a doubt an invasion of privacy. The new Texas pilot program is only the latest effort by the federal government to implement a wide range of biometric and surveillance programs around the United States.
These programs are reminiscent of mass surveillance systems established in Russia and China. The truth of the matter is that all three nations are taking different paths towards the same goal: control and monitoring of their population and suppression of critical thought or opposition. The only way to stand against this is to refuse to fund the programs at every turn and sharing the information.
According to a report by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, half of Americans now have photos of themselves stored in facial recognition databases. The vast majority of these citizens are not suspects in crimes, nor do they have criminal records.
Over 117 million adults are stored in facial recognition databases, and any of their photos can be used at any time in a “virtual lineup,” where they can be picked out by law enforcement as potential suspects.
According to the ACLU, many police departments use photos from Facebook, photos from protests, and even videos of average people walking down the street taken from cameras posted up around urban centers. It was even indicated in the report that drivers license photos are used to populate these databases, meaning that almost anyone could be a potential suspect in one of these lineups.
The report’s findings suggest that the technology may be violating the rights of millions of Americans and is disproportionately affecting communities of color, advocates said.
Neema Singh Guliani, ACLU’s legislative counsel, pointed out that government agencies have free rein to do whatever they want with this technology, and that they offer absolutely no transparency.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the recent report is the fact that these facial recognition databases have become “overwhelmingly made up of non-criminal entries.” This can get extremely dangerous because this technology is far from perfect and, in fact, mistakes are made all of the time.
Even the FBI admits that one out of every seven searches of its facial recognition database are incorrect, meaning that innocent people are singled out on a regular basis. However, independent investigation revealed that the number was far higher, with close to 90% of those identified by facial recognition technology being innocent people.
(Insert U.S. in the place of China while reading this article, and you wont be far off from how this technology/ Data gathering is being used here against the public as well)
China has a new strategy in fighting crime, ripped from science fiction and hastily pasted at the top of the list of paranoia-inducing concepts. It’s called pre-crime. It goes further than sting operations, counterterrorism, or any other government action to preempt criminal activity ever before.
Like the 2002 film Minority Report, China wants to fight crimes before they happen. They want to know they’ll happen before they’re planned—before the criminal even knows he’s going to be part of them. The Chinese Communist Party “has directed one of the country’s largest state-run defense contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur.”
The Chinese government wants to know about everything: every text a person sends, every extra stop they make on the way home. It’s designed for dissidents, but it means that they’ll know every time a smoker buys a pack of cigarettes, how much gas a car owner uses, what time the new mom goes to bed, and what’s in the bachelor’s refrigerator.
Science fiction aside, pre-crime is already somewhat of a reality; data gathering is part of intelligence communities’ and police surveillance efforts and has been for years. A lot of that surveillance has helped nab those responsible for things like child pornography. But whereas it’s been largely surgical here in the U.S., China wants total coverage, which makes crime prevention look a lot different.
Crime prevention is a double-edged sword when it comes to individual rights: The logic that promotes deterrents (like better locks, larger police forces) doesn’t target individual criminals, but rather focuses on protecting people and property from any criminals that might do harm. And again, this sort of thing isn’t going to be used to stop break-ins and muggings, but rather anti-government and anti-stability crimes. This activity isn’t getting a lot of pushback from civil liberties groups, and part of that could be because a lot of people aren’t convinced the government doesn’t already have all of this information.
The fear of identity theft and cyber-banking crime has been the latest sales pitch to encourage accepting identity tech such as vein scanners, facial recognition, voiceprints, iris scans – even tears – as well as their attendant databases. There is an ongoing cooperative effort between global banks and corporations to ensure that there will be standardized, centralized entry into the consumer/Internet/banking matrix of the future.
MasterCard is now partnering with a Norwegian company called Zwipe to introduce the first fully biometric credit card, which will dispense with a PIN and instead use a fingerprint sensor for verification.
Planet-wide biometric ID is the stated goal of corporations, as well as various globalist foundations.The transition to a cashless society continues while simultaneously incorporating an all-inclusive tracking database from which it will become very difficult to escape if one wishes to interact in any meaningful way with a modern-day economy.
The biometrics agenda goes far beyond financial transactions, but this is the most palatable way to introduce the concept as a logical necessity to solve myriad problems with banking security. This should be kept in mind as we find ourselves in the midst of a perfect storm of health crises where we are already hearing calls of Big Data to be employed for health tracking and BioSurveillance.
Law enforcement agencies are building what critics say is becoming a de facto national, searchable database of ID photos — with pictures of both those with and without a criminal past — that uses state driver’s licence photos as a foundation.
The facial databases have grown rapidly in recent years and generally operate with few legal safeguards beyond the requirement that searches are conducted for “law enforcement purposes.” Amid rising concern about the National Security Agency’s high-tech surveillance aimed at foreigners, it is these state-level facial-recognition programs that more typically involve American citizens.
Such open access has caused a backlash in some of the few states where there has been a public debate. As the databases grow larger and increasingly connected across jurisdictional boundaries, critics warn that authorities are developing what amounts to a national identification system — based on the distinct geography of each human face.
You are probably participating in the facial recognition database whether you want to or not. Most likely, your visage is there to be easily identified, without your consent, even if you’ve never committed a crime.
Using the vague criteria of “law enforcement purposes”, the United States has more than 200 million Americans filed away in various facial recognition databases. If you have a driver’s license or any other government photo ID, your face is probably one of them.
Law enforcement use of such facial searches is blurring the traditional boundaries between criminal and non-criminal databases, putting images of people never arrested in what amount to perpetual digital lineups. The most advanced systems allow police to run searches from laptop computers in their patrol cars and offer access to the FBI and other federal authorities.
Facial-recognition technology is part of a new generation of biometric tools that once were the stuff of science fiction but are increasingly used by authorities around the nation and the world. Though not yet as reliable as fingerprints, these technologies can help determine identity through individual variations in irises, skin textures, vein patterns, palm prints and a person’s gait while walking.
The Supreme Court’s approval this month of DNA collection during arrests coincides with rising use of that technology as well, with suspects in some cases submitting to tests that put their genetic details in official databases, even if they are never convicted of a crime.
it isn’t only our driver’s licenses that we have to worry about. Another, even larger, database exists. The US State Department has a database with 230 million searchable images. Anyone with a passport or an immigration visa may find themselves an unwilling participant in this database.
This invasion of privacy is just another facet of the surveillance state, and should be no surprise considering the information Edward Snowden just shared about the over-reaching tentacles of the NSA into all of our communications. We are filing our identities with the government and they can identify us at will, without any requirement for probable cause.
As part of an update to the national fingerprint database, the FBI has begun rolling out facial recognition to identify criminals. It will form part of the bureau’s long-awaited, $1 billion Next Generation Identification (NGI) program, which will also add biometrics such as iris scans, DNA analysis, and voice identification to the toolkit. A handful of states began uploading their photos as part of a pilot program this February and it is expected to be rolled out nationwide by 2014.
Applications include tracking a suspect by picking out their face in a crowd and comparing images of a person of interest. against a national repository of images held by the FBI. An algorithm would perform an automatic search and return a list of potential hits for an officer to sort through and use as possible leads for an investigation.
The FBI’s Jerome Pender told the Senate in July that the searchable photo database used in the pilot studies only includes mugshots of known criminals. But it’s unclear from the NGI’s privacy statement whether that will remain the case once the entire system is up and running or if civilian photos might be added(and they will be, you dont spend 1 Billion dollars on this technology to keep tabs on a small minority of criminals and “suspected terrorists”), says attorney Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Realize the lies 