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Instagram to let you download your content after portability concerns

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Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s privacy & portability issues have been all over the news lately. Naturally, some attention has turned toward Instagram, too. After all, he owns them both, so why not look at both platforms? TechCrunch posted an article a few days ago about Instagram’s portability problem. That problem being that you’re unable to download your data.

While Facebook (sort of) allows you to do this (it’s never worked for me), Instagram doesn’t. In response, TechCrunch report that Instagram has announced that this feature is on the way.

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DJI accused of spying on the US for China according to leaked government memo

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It seems that crowdsourcing is not beyond intelligence agencies. At least, according to a leaked memo from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In it, they say that the Special Agent in Charge Intelligence Program (SIP) Los Angeles have “moderate confidence” that DJI is providing critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to China.

They also say that they have “high confidence” that they are “selectively targeting government and privately owned entities within these sectors to expand its ability to collect and exploit sensitive U.S. data”. It all sounds a bit James Bond to me, but this isn’t the first time DJI’s been in the middle of security controversy. Nor even the first time this year.

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Treading lightly: managing your children’s digital footprint

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It was one of those moments when two articles collided in my day and struck a chord. The first was JP Danko’s here, on whether or not it’s ethical to use photos of your children for stock. The second was by Lucy Dunn, on The Pool, where she raises the question of ‘over-sharenting’. (Sharenting, for anyone who hasn’t yet encountered this hideous portmanteau, is the tendency to share your parenting experiences on social media, from potty-training successes to supermarket meltdowns.) In particular, Dunn is concerned about how little guidance exists for parents who are navigating the social media seas themselves.

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Watch: woman pulls a gun on a drone hovering above her house

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Drones have definitely become common in our everyday lives. There are plenty of their possible uses, from taking photos and videos to making tigers exercise. However, not all of the applications are useful or positive. I’ve often heard that you could use a drone to spy on your neighbors, and apparently, some people do it, big time. But this woman decided she doesn’t want to put up with that. So, she takes a gun and opens the drone hunting season.

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Can someone snap a photo of me in the street and use it to identify me?

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With facial recognition technology you can take pictures of people in the street, run them through publicly available photographs online, and get a match.

You would have heard this statement if you had been listening to the 20 September 2016 episode of Seriously on BBC Radio 4, called ‘The Online Identity Crisis’. I only heard it yesterday, though, as I caught up with it by podcast. It did, however, set me thinking. Just how likely, or easy, is it that someone should take a photo of me in the street, run said image through facial recognition software, and be able to identify me?

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Russian Drone pilot’s footage goes viral after capturing an “active” couple at the top of a church steeple (maybe NSFW)

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Something tells me the owner of this drone was not quite expecting to capture what he saw when he reviewed the footage from this flight.

While filming a local church at the city of Torzhok, in the Tver Oblast region in Russia, the drone’s camera accidentally caught a couple having sex in the church’s steeple.

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Russian app lets you shoot photos of strangers and identify them online

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As if the facial recognition news coming out of Russia wasn’t creepy enough already, it’s now available in App form to users of popular Russian social media network, Vkontakte.

FindFace, which launched only two months ago, allows users to photograph people in a crowd and discover their identities with 70% reliability and could be the final nail in the coffin for privacy as we know it.

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French Photojournalist faces criminal charges over image of Paris attack victim

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Photojournalist Maya Vidon-White is facing criminal charges over her photo of a man who was killed during the November terror attacks in Paris after the man’s family filed charges against the Paris based photographer.

Stating that the publication of the image caused the family emotional damage, press freedom advocates argue that Vidon-White has been wrongfully targeted using an “obscure” French law.

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Future drones will stalk you from walls ceilings and trees

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Its nice to have a drone that can take photos and videos. What could be more fun that taking photos of people on the beach from high above or assaulting drone pilots out for the sake of privacy. I don’t see where this can go wrong. In fact drone shooting privacy is such a concern that governments are putting regulations in place for keeping your privacy private.  But, at least you can hear a drone when it is approaching so you can stop doing whatever private business you want off camera, right?

Well, not for long. Researchers at Stanford University have created a spider drone, a drone that can perch on walls and ceilings just like a small flying spider, and just like the spider, the drone can stay very silent, “killing” the motors and only keeping the camera on while it perches.

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France: Sharing photos of your kids could land you in jail

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If you are a French parent who likes posting their kid’s photos all over the internet, we have same bad news for you.

The Telegraph noticed that the privacy laws in France are pretty strict. How strict, you ask? Strict to the point that your offspring can sue you for infringing on their right to privacy if you posted photos of them when they were younger. And this is not a small offence either; penalties could ramp up to €45,000 plus a year in prison (where no photo sharing is allowed at all!). The judge would have to be convinced that you published some of your kids without their consent, but, who decides what’s private? And show me the parent that asks for permission before every my-kid-is-making-soap-bubbles-and-he-is-so-cute photo upload, and I will show you one kid who’s gonna spend years in therapy.

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