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Papa Johns Surveillance-Based Advertising

Schneier on Security · · International · Surveillance & Civil Liberties

Papa Johns is spying on people’s buying activities to predict when they are low on food: The pizza chain recently tapped NBCUniversal, Instacart and the dentsu-owned media agency Carat for help reaching consumers when they’re low on groceries—and thus more likely to be swayed by a mouth-watering ad. The idea is to reach hungry consumers by “knowing what is in their fridge without being too creepy,” said Carrie Drinkwater, chief investment officer at Carat. To achieve that goal, NBCU and Instacart created a custom audience of shoppers who regularly purchase grocer…

Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy

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Schneier on Security · · International

The Realities of AI Video Surveillance

A Financial Times report examines how AI is transforming video surveillance, drawing on examples from Israel, Iran, and Russia. The key shift is that AI now allows operators to query footage using plain language, moving well beyond the limited preset searches that older systems allowed.

Why this matters: This is the difference between a locked filing cabinet and a search engine. Old surveillance systems could do a few fixed lookups. These new tools let an operator type almost anything and get an answer from hours of footage. That is not a modest upgrade. It means the footage collected passively for years can now be interrogated in ways that were never possible when it was recorded. Every camera that ever caught your face becomes more useful to whoever holds the data. The accountability question is simple: who has access to these queries, and what rules govern what they are allowed to ask?

Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · AI governance · Policy

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