Date: 4/7/25 6:32 pm From: Fred Kaluza <fkaluza...> Subject: Re: [birders] The rise of A.I. in Consumer Electronics…
Even if you choose to leave your cell-phone at home, most cars and trucks nowadays have built-in trackers that collect your speed, your acceleration, your course over ground as well as throttle position, brake pressure and location. It’s crazy. So, don’t drive. Now you only have to be concerned about everyone ELSE’s devices. Whether car-mounted dash-cams, or just cameras mounted on homes and businesses, traveling anonymously is a real challenge these days. Even birds and insects are tracked by cell towers and satellites.
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From: RICHARD WOLINSKI <rawolinski...>
Sent: Monday, April 7, 2025 7:26:33 PM
To: Marta Manildi <mamanildi...>; Marta Manildi' via Birders <birders...>; Fred Kaluza <fkaluza...>
Subject: Re: [birders] The rise of A.I. in Consumer Electronics…
Marta stated: I was just another creature in the world. I was unobserved.
If you had your cell phone with you at the time you might want to rethink this. You have an invisible electronic tether on you whether you realize it or not. This is not meant to frighten anyone, but it is factual.
Do you have a digital SLR camera? Do you have it configured so it doesn't geo-tag your photographs? That new car with the wonderful GPS mapping feature? Yeah, that too. Did you use a credit or debit car for a purchase today?
Did you use the Sibley app to make a bird ID today? It requires your location data to work best. I could go on, but won't. You leave an electronic trail behind you.
On 04/07/2025 9:25 AM EDT 'Marta Manildi' via Birders <birders...> wrote:
This is a big question and I dont have answer. In this time of rapidly growing autocracy and cruel destruction of common goods and communities of all kinds, I find the risks of misuse of aggregated personal recognition data, with sound!, terrifying. In Iran this kind of aggregated tech is being used to identify and track women in every moment of their lives, so it is known when they take off their hijab, drive a car, speak to anyone. Under our current government, which cares nothing for the environment, abuse will occur. And at the same time, video of wild creatures in their spaces is a huge tool for engaging people to care - and perhaps then to do some good.
Just the other day I was walking in Nichols Arboretum - it was cold and I didn’t see anyone else there the whole time. I noticed this, and experienced a profound, quiet joy and humbleness. I was just another creature in the world. I was unobserved.
Marta
Sent from my iPhone
On Apr 6, 2025, at 8:40 PM, Fred Kaluza <fkaluza...> wrote:
and Big Brother in the outdoors. The military has been using network-based pattern recognition for years. Lately, this technology has found its way to the consumer market. Bird-Buddy and Birdfy have been using visual-based platforms in their feeders and nest boxes for a few years and today…I learned there are companies using audio-capture devices. Just wondering what you folks think about these. I might jump in but the recurring subscription fees seem onerous. One of these devices calls itself a “soundscape analyzer”. Similar to “Ring” and other cloud-based camera systems, can you imagine if law enforcement avails themselves of the content of millions of these distributed monitoring stations? Both very beneficial and very scary from a privacy perspective. High-gain and high fidelity with centralized digital processing? Wow.
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