(bclocalnews)
ICBC's offer to let police use its new photo database of B.C. drivers to identify rioters from images circulating online opens an alarming new chapter of anti-privacy surveillance, according to the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

Policy analyst Micheal Vonn said it's "deeply disturbing" the facial recognition software ICBC uses mainly to detect driver's licence and insurance fraud may quickly be put to other police purposes.

"We are in a new world because of the amount of information that was collected through social media and the ability to run that information through population-level biometric databases," she said.

"Your face itself – recorded anywhere in public space – will now be traceable to your identity..."
(bclocalnews)

(nation)
US scientists said Friday they have developed an on-off memory switch that helped laboratory rats remember a behavior that they had forgotten. The brain prosthesis marks the first time that researchers have been able to duplicate the brain's learning process, restoring memories that test rats were drugged to forget, and could offer hope for people with dementia. "Flip the switch on, and the rats remember. Flip it off, and the rats forget," said Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering's Dept.
(more)

Tired of social networking? Logging off Facebook? You’re probably not the only one.

Fearing for their privacy or perhaps just bored with using the site, 100,000 Britons are said to have deactivated their accounts last month.

And Facebook fatigue seems to be catching. Six million logged off for good in the U.S. too, figures show.

Worldwide, the rate of growth has slowed for a second month in a row – and as it aims to reach its goal of one billion active users, Facebook is having to rely on developing countries to boost its numbers...
(more)

(guardian)
"Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that increasingly have come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning. From metal detectors to drug tests, from increased policing to all-seeing electronic surveillance, the schools of the 21st century reflect a society that has become fixated on crime, security and violence."

So reads a passage from the opening pages of Lockdown High, a new book by the San Francisco-based journalist Annette Fuentes. Subtitled "When the schoolhouse becomes the jailhouse", it tells a story that decisively began with the Columbine shootings of 1999, and from across the US, the text cites cases that are mind-boggling: a high-flying student from Arizona strip-searched because ibuprofen was not allowed under her school rules; the school in Texas where teachers can carry concealed handguns; and, most amazingly of all, the Philadelphia school that gave its pupils laptops equipped with a secret feature allowing them to be spied on outside classroom hours...
(more)