Privacy News Online: Police use car data, UK stores use facial recognition, Zyxel backdoored & more
The short version: Private Internet Access rounds up a grim week of surveillance news — cops mining car data, UK stores scanning faces, and a backdoored Zyxel router — that all point the same direction: less privacy, less consent.
Our Take
Private Internet Access's latest privacy news roundup ties together a few threads we've been pulling on for a while, and the common denominator is data you never agreed to share. Police tapping into connected-car telemetry is just the automotive cousin of what Flock Safety cameras do on utility poles: quietly harvest movement data at scale, hand it to law enforcement with minimal oversight, and call it public safety. Whether it's your Nissan's infotainment system or a plate reader bolted to a stop sign, the pattern is identical — surveillance infrastructure built first, rules and accountability bolted on later, if ever.
The UK facial recognition story in retail stores is worth watching too, because it shows where ALPR-style logic goes next. Once a technology proves it can quietly track ordinary people 'for security,' it spreads from highways to grocery stores to your car's dashboard. Add a backdoored Zyxel device to the mix and you get the full picture: surveillance tech and the hardware running it are both frequently insecure, poorly audited, and deployed with the assumption that nobody's watching the watchers.
Credit to Private Internet Access for stitching these stories together — it's a useful reminder that license plate readers don't exist in a vacuum. If you want to see how much of this infrastructure is already sitting in your neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has a place to start.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Private Internet Access, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.