CDP Institute

“Regulating Biometrics: Global Approaches and Urgent Questions,” from the AI Now Institute says there’s a growing sense among regulation advocates that a biometric surveillance state is not inevitable.

Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD) is set to go into effect September 16th. Their Senate decided to reject further delays.  Unless vetoed by Brazil’s President, the law which has an extraterritorial effect, will proceed. The Senate also approved creation of a new data authority for enforcement, the ANDP.

CDP Institute’s 2020 member survey found 28% of companies treat privacy as a selling point; 58% just try to comply with regulations; and 14% take few steps to comply.

PopID users’ faces are key to payment & entry  California start-up PopID has just launched a face-based payments network and a facial ID tool, called PopEntry, to verify people at businesses and universities. The company anticipates 3,000 installations in U.S. states by the end of 2020. People enrolled with PopID can use their face as ID for a range of applications, including for keys, key cards, facilities access, payments and loyalty programs.

Facebook’s Opacus tool, offers new approach  Facebook wants to make it easier for engineers to use differential privacy in AI, with a new tool that limits impact on the primary dataset. Opacus, which trains PyTorch models with differential privacy, uses an algorithm that centers instead on intervening with parameter gradients. This follows recent announcements from Google to open source the differential privacy library, and Microsoft, which released WhiteNoise for Azure and GitHub.

Help is on the way for those despairing of fending off random news alerts, ads, and trick emails in the form of a new service from Edison that lets you choose who can get into your inbox. The new release, now in public beta, includes a proprietary Permission Control feature that allows you to accept or block senders before mail gets in your box. It also blocks ad targeters trying to monitor your email behavior and lets you set a custom domain for use on multiple platforms.  Free and professional plans are available.