Big Brother is watching the US anti-race protests

June 26, 2020 11:57

Photograph: Ken Cedeno/Reuters

'On the weekend of May 29, thousands of people marched, sang, grieved, and chanted, demanding an end to police brutality and the defunding of police departments in the aftermath of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. They marched en masse in cities like Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, empowered by their number and the assumed anonymity of the crowd. And they did so completely unaware that a tech company was using location data harvested from their cellphones to predict their race, age, and gender and where they lived,' reports Caroline Haskins in buzzfeednews.com.

'That company, Mobilewalla, released a report titled "George Floyd Protester Demographics: Insights Across 4 Major US Cities." In 60 pie charts, the document details what percentage of protesters the company believes were male or female, young adult (18'"34); middle-aged 3554, or older (55+); and "African-American," "Caucasian/Others," "Hispanic," or "Asian-American', she further writes.

Caroline also quotes Mobilewalla CEO Anindya Datta saying that 'the data analysis that made the George Floyd Protester Demographics possible wasn't a new kind of project'. "The underlying data, the underlying observations that came into the report, is something that we collect and produce on a regular basis,' he tells her.

The frightening bit is that in the US 'there is currently no federal law that regulates how companies like Mobilewalla -- which buy and sell people's data on the internet -- can use people's information,' Caroline writes, here.

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