[ Ahmed Binfad, Dubai police major ] Since the electronic services came worldwide.
Dubai Police took that to have always advantage in technologies
to engage the guests and residents to communicate, to make them happy and safe –
by using the latest smart channels,
by using the latest technologies from blockchain,
from artificial intelligence.
All that to satisfy and to assure the happiness of the guests and residents.
[ Hadi Hosn, CEO, Axon Technologies ] I think Dubai is not different to other cities –
when it comes to cyberspace.
Digital smart city is a city that’s using technology to
make peoples’ lives easier, happier,
collecting a lot of data to try to improve the way things are.
[ Rustem Khairetdinov, director of development, BI.zone ] People's data are being collected,
so much data that there's a real possibility
of privacy violation that most of us wouldn't want
It's easier to identify you from your phone billing than from your passport number
A passport can't say where you were yesterday
If we collect data, someone can access it, and we can't control every controller
That's a problem. There's no regulation over this yet
Yes, data is protected,
that's passport, social security, it's a very short, non-expandable list
The world's transparent, we must live with permanent surveillance
[ Artur Khachuyan, Big data specialist, CEO, Tazeros global systems ] The problem with Moscow's
facial recognition is that it's sold on the dark web
It's practically an open market
Some staff are offered cash to leak all the data
No one can fight that, because people don't have good systems for data leak protection
They're just algorithms that track other
algorithms and people, to try and prevent leaks
[ Khairetdinov ] We've all heard of facial recognition cameras,
about which the legislators always say,
'They must be regulated'
Yeah, we collect data, and there are laws for it
It's one thing if, say, a security agent gets legal access, right?
He took an oath and if he breaks the law, his penalty is different to a civilian
They've been specially selected and trained
These are responsible, vetted people
But if commercial or state bodies collect data,
and anyone in them can access it, that raises many questions
[ Khachuyan ] Technically, Moscow's facial recognition is pretty good
There are cameras that recognise faces
They know this face was near that pole at a particular time, but not who the person is
When the police come looking for a crook, they have a prepared image of that criminal
But the IT people, who run the cameras,
can't tell from that image who the person is
Well, until, they bring one in on a regular USB-stick, which is more likely
But technically, on paper, the system is
designed to avoid that kind of de-anonymisation
[ Khachuyan ] No one likes facial recognition,
but if their car gets stolen, the first thing they do is ask,
'Why doesn't facial recognition work?'
And they realise that it's not very easy, it's not linked to social networks,
you need a court decision, an official request, and people are very surprised
They've read in the press about 180,000 cameras,
but not every camera actually has facial recognition
and it's not so simple
Technology works both ways. We talk of digital footprints,
and always how it's easier for governments to watch us
But it's easier for us to watch governments too:
site data, public spending, lots of public services and data,
politicians who have social media, their mistresses' social media pages
With that, you can interact, and assess it all more seriously
[ Gleb Mikheev, CTO, Beta digital Production ] We all use Google, Facebook,
YouTube, and a host of other services
That's a fact that's just become part of our lives
When we sign up to any service,
we click on, 'I agree to the terms', without
reading them. In fact, they are curious,
because they list the kinds of data they collect about you
It's amazing, for example, go to your Google dashboard and grab all your data,
you won't believe how much, 10, 20, 30GB
All the pictures from your phones, anywhere you've been, all your searches,
even voice commands, for example, when I say, 'Siri',
or, 'OK Google, where's the nearest hairdresser?'
I think it's all processed locally on my phone,
but it doesn't work like that
All the algorithms are on their servers. When I speak, it records an audio file,
and sends it to a server, which processes it and sends back the information
that you see in the search bar
So, one huge archive holds all those files
And recording doesn't end when you stop talking,
that can be fun. Try it sometime, it's interesting
Maybe then, you'll tweak your privacy settings
and stop your phone from tracking your location
[ Sam Soichet, director of development, EEC services ] In theory,
these big organizations
that are multinational and employing all that data together –
they are not looking at you as an individual necessarily,
but hey have a large data set.
And they typically take what’s called the metadata -
which is sort of, like, the ‘mid-level’ data
to say: ‘Ok, this is a group’s behavior’ or this is:
‘He probably falls into this group doing this type of shopping, travelling’.
But with this metadata you’ve got a lot of power.
You can really figure out how people act,
what they most likely to have in their vote…
All these things can be extracted from the metadata.
[ Ivan Botanov, penetration tester ] You can't just clear your history from the web
Companies, but not many, do have options to completely delete your account,
but you can't know if they really have or not
Even so, if you're 25, or 30, in the time you've used the net,
you've left so many traces, you could never clear them all
[ Soichet ] Digital footprint is something both good and bad, you know…
It makes your life easier, speed things up for you, you know, delivery knows exactly –
they know what I ordered in the past, and I just click it again,
it saves me 5 minutes of ordering my old pizza, right?
There’s a lot of bonuses from having individual ‘footprint’.
But it also expands off your privacy,
and it also expands off a little bit of security potentially, right?
Because companies you can resell that data
can ‘pack’ it from that data, they can target you at more advertising,
or they can encourage you to get stuff that you would not normally be interested.
And they can kind of manipulate what your buying behavior is,
or your general behavior, or your general social responsibility or beliefs, right?
Like we talked about the social engineering.
It’s a tricky one, I think it’s a ‘give-and-take’. I think
the advantage of having digital footprint is – it makes our lives easier.
The side effect and the downside of having digital footprint
is that you sacrifice a lot of your privacy.
[ Khachuyan ] Looking at Russian social networks,
there are about 65 million Russians signed up to them
Some have several accounts, so that's a total of up to 118-120 million accounts
That's a lot of open source information,
based on information directly from people's
social media pages, like age, property owned,
digital content interaction, and it can be based on proxy indicators,
like: response to ads, favored clothes colors, styles and brands,
their political preferences,
and any other content based metric that's linked to users,
can be used as a filter
to select a desired group of people
Then, we can track their movement around the city,
see what clusters they were in and with whom they interacted
That kind of research can also apply to the political arena
[ Khairetdinov ] It's seen as non-personal if,
for example, a city buys mobile data to see traffic flow
From people's phones, you can see where they go, and when
They, the city, don't care who it is, they just work out transport capacity,
all perfectly legal
But can it be used maliciously? Absolutely
[ Khairetdinov ] The experts say we need to regulate it as soon as possible
For one thing, data has value: authorities can
track crime, improve healthcare, like COVID
Maybe boost tax collection, and so on, so, I mean...
The goal may be noble, but it's very open to misuse
There's a black market where any citizen can buy something
But how do the data get there?
That's partly on hackers who leak databases and so on
But sometimes, it can just be system administrators or staff who have access
There's information about taxes and bank transactions
There are data on airline flights
And, in principle, if you really wanted to, you could illegally collect all these data
to establish people's routes and predict where they might go
For example, my car alarm company has information about my movements
There's always an admin on duty just sitting there
If a friend asks: 'Where did this car go on Saturday?'
he could tell them with a couple of clicks, he's responsible to no one
Any employee might use their work computer or company car to make money on the side
This is nothing new
[ Khairetdinov ] Even when there is full protection...
a city service operator can snap a screen on their phone and publish it
You can't stop that
If people have access to data, especially data with monetary value...
they can abuse it
The so-called 'penetration' market, that
recently surfaced, will, I think, be reformatted
because the security holes are being fixed. It's long 'lived off' malicious use
[ Hacker, 2014-2019 ] As for anonymity, well, it's complicated, even in the darknet
Because, it's pretty well known actually, that Tor has been de-anonymised
Upload and download nodes are being kind of monitored
Yes, forums and the community really are in the dark
But the question is, how to get there because,
to get in, you can use the Tor browser,
press the button, you're on the darknet, but through that browser's nodes
I can say that it's too deep in there,
which makes it hard to maintain anonymity
It's strange
As a rule, if a user has a good reputation,
they can just ask an administrator, who gives them the information
[ Khachuyan ] No matter if it's Tor or VPN, whatever tech you love
If we use 100% of our capability at state level,
there will be no anonymity in the foreseeable future
Your ISP bill is tied to your passport, so is your phone
Very soon, social media will be linked to passports too
On the one hand, it's bad, because we don't want our passport details
stored anywhere like Mail.ru, with bad security
On the other hand, it really would stop people
from doing bad things on the internet
like writing, 'Tomorrow, we'll burn you!'
I assure you, if anything was to happen to a family,
I don't know, their child gets kidnapped or their car stolen,
and law enforcers come and say,
'OK, there's a button: we can use it to get information on everyone in the building,
but it violates their privacy.' We'd all press that button!
In theory, if peer-to-peer networks evolve, people could do stuff anonymously
But again, the network owners could still monitor everything
[ Mikheev ] Let's look at what Google knows about us
There's a 'Data & Privacy' menu
What do we find?
'Location History', 'Web & App use', 'YouTube History', and a bunch of stuff
It's no surprise that Google knows about my searches,
but this is odd, 'Location History'
Here, 'Manage Activity', a page shows where we've been
Here! There's a time stamp, 2018, March 17. On that Saturday...
we walked 270 meters, and drove 110 kilometers
Where were we? We started at a hotel, see? A hotel icon
We see that we were in a hotel room from 1:10 to 10:23 am
Feel a chill in your spine? Sick!
Next, we drove 10 km in 31 minutes, and arrived at Pleasant View Gardens
We were there from 10:54 to exactly 11 am
Then we took the car again for another 26 km in 52 minutes
It goes on: we keep driving, we zoom, zoom, zoom...
we can even see the route on a map too, and then get to Mondawmin Mall
It has a shop icon, so it was clearly a shop
If we look in perspective for 1, 2, or 3 years,
we get a complete picture of our interests
where you live, where you work, and...
we might see, for example, at 2 pm every Saturday, you go to a restaurant
You don't eat at home, so we can assume a lot
Starting with where to find you, ending with slipping in an ad, right?
A new restaurant opens, and Google can say to you,
'Hey! Restaurant X is your favorite, but Y just opened, you should go'
[ Dmitry Artimovich, former hacker ] I'm quite certain that bif email services
that big email service and messenger companies
cooperate with national security agencies
You've heard of PRISM right?
It was leaked from intelligence agencies,
that they had direct access to any major email service server,
can see what a person does, no questions, or bug phone calls
[ Khachuyan ] All those personal data protection firms,
or private consultants who work for hundreds of dollars an hour...
No matter how much they surround you with firewalls or anti-virus software,
the best they can do is explain to you that there will be a leak sooner or later
[ Khachuyan ] Telegram is considered a 'white horse' in the privacy realm
When Telegram says, 'It's all encrypted', it is, but not everything, not everywhere
Durov loves saying, 'We do end-to-end encryption, you can't crack it'
And you can't, but it's only in secret chat
Everything else is on servers. What kind? Where are they?
On the other hand, we have WhatsApp
It has end-to-end encryption in all chats by default...
but people hate it!
At a basic level, WhatsApp is better secured than Telegram
Meanwhile, Telegram is considered privacy super-system number one
while WhatsApp is just seen as non-privacy junk from Facebook
So, this question, is solely a matter of human self-indulgence
[ Khairetdinov ] Firstly, we only know how strong end-to-end encryption is,
from what the developer tells us
No one runs independent tests, or tries to crack it
We never see the code, so we don't know how long the key is
We don't even know if there really is any encryption,
you just get to see a closed padlock icon
Now, everyone's dumping WhatsApp, some have gone to Telegram,
even ICQ has come back
I have about 12 messengers on my phone. Now new unknown apps appear…
'This is the safest app.' Well, OK!
[ Khachuyan ] They say WhatsApp has bad security and sells your chat history,
especially since Feb 2021, when Facebook changed its privacy policy
A legal formality: the data was on the
servers anyway, and Facebook had access to it
Users just needed to agree, formally
As a result, they only put up a banner saying just that,
and more than 20 million users dumped WhatsApp
Most went to Telegram, the rest to Signal
[ Khairetdinov ] It's all just hype. Today, it's, 'Telegram! Hurray!'
Or, if Telegram is blocked, 'I want it anyway,' they get it out of spite
Actually, the Telegram story is a typical example of how banning something
led people who weren't tech-savvy at all to learn the words 'VPN' and 'Proxy'
[ Khachuyan ] People feel very safe, and that's a valuable currency
All these messenger apps are based on Opera or Turbo VPN,
you click the red button and don't even know how it all works
People sign up to the first VPN service,
and then install it
What does a VPN do?
Instead of using your ISP, controlled by ruthless authorities,
your traffic goes to a VPN provider. Has anyone ever read a VPN's privacy policy?
Of course not! They have the same ad integration, advertising messages,
it's all just the same
No government in the world is above messing with messaging apps and search engines
On one hand, we all want some level of control,
at least over requests for personal data
There are security issues that can't be under public control
It's slow and public control might warn people that someone's after them
And we soon realise, it's not that simple. The world isn't black and white
Government - black, Twitter - white, and most people just deny
that the world is a very complex construct
[ Nikita Mokhnatkin, head, information systems protection sector, Innopolis University ] We started developing
an emotion computing platform
It offers a broad spectrum of possibilities,
it lets us determine a person's current emotions
From that, we can predict their intentions
We can analyse their physiology,
like alcohol or drug influence, fatigue, and so on
They may have family issues, or they argued with a boss,
lost company loyalty and acted like Snowden
That's quite real, we know it works
[ Evgenia Kivotova, mathematician and programmer, Innopolis University AI laboratory ] We open the app
and the camera scans the person's image
The algorithm finds his face
and aligns it with special spots. We see two windows
We are in the first,
a histogram in the second, showing how likely each of the 7 emotions is
The neural network scans the image to determine the emotion
When we're in a neutral position...
it leans toward 'neutral'. If you smile...
it shows that you're happy. If we're surprised,
'surprise' is shown. So far, it's just a tool
Soon, we'll build any kind of analysis: what someone likes or hates, how they feel
You can link it to outside security cameras
You could also observe employees and block their access if they behave strangely
[ Mokhnatkin ] If anyone has official access to information,
they could simply copy it, just by taking a picture of the screen
If they have that kind of intent,
our system can anticipate it and revoke access to the information
When it comes to using services from Facebook, such as Instagram,
these are cool services to be commercialised
Social networks hold a huge amount of data,
which they sell. That's how they commercialise it
I'm sure they use some sort of technology,
but emotion detectors, particularly? I think not
[ Correspondent ] Not yet? [ Mokhnatkin ] Not yet, soon, we'll sell it to them
[ Mokhnatkin ] In time, the technology will catch on,
because it's a kind of credit score
I mean, we need to know if someone's happy, how they feel, if they want a loan
[ Yusufov ] You know, for years, I thought the worst
case dystopian scenario was an 'Orwellian' world
where a government intervened too much in people's privacy
But now, especially in recent years, I've decided that
it's not governments controlling it all,
it's corporations intervening too deeply, yes?
I log into Facebook and write something...
quite ordinary and legal, and with absolutely no malicious intent...
but the AI flags it for moderation because of a few trigger words
Why does it do that? Is it allowed to?
Twitter, that blocks the US president's account,
according to their own criteria,
plays a major role in the geopolitical arena
[ Danila Medvedev, applied futurist, head, Neyrokod software project ] Maybe a person thinks things
that might be seen as 'wrong'?
What about someone with internal conflicts and contradictions, or mood swings?
They always commit what Orwell called thought crime
So, the question is: who punishes for that? Facebook?
Even now, Twitter and Facebook quickly block you for one wrong phrase
That's harsher than Orwell or Huxley's dystopian novels.