If you’re not familiar with the surveillance giant Palantir, you should - because they already know plenty about you.
Primarily a defence contractor, Palantir Technologies specialises in data integration and surveillance analytics.
Police forces are rapidly adopting AI, placing at risk the human rights they are meant to protect.
Victoria Police use generative AI on 20% of crime reports. When a contact centre employee files an online crime report, they use generative AI on the form to generate a summary for police officers.
Grok, an AI embedded within Twitter/X, is being used to digitally remove women’s and children’s clothing, and the results are being posted publicly.
The Internet Search Engine Services Online Safety Code is another tranche of policy that bars young people accessing ‘harmful content’, this time through search engines. It is unlikely to succeed in its stated ambition of protecting children, and will definitely cause harmful side-effects.
Social media companies harvest vast amounts of personal data and use it to push whatever will keep you engaged, even when that means prioritising attention over accuracy, safety, or wellbeing. This can result in mental health harms for all users, including increased levels of depression, anxiety and body image dissatisfaction. Everyone would benefit from reform that stops personal data being used to feed people content that captures attention at the expense of their wellbeing.
However, rather than address the root causes of this harm the Social Media Ban complicates the landscape and creates additional privacy risks for all of us.
This is your guide to how to navigate this new terrain.
Australians’ right to protest is eroded daily. Behind the scenes, digital surveillance is assisting this erosion, and AI has the potential to accelerate the damage. This is made possible by Australia’s weak privacy laws.