Loss of Privacy

Internet users in Belarus are facing new restrictions as the government has begun blocking sites it considers to be “extremist”.

It is being seen as a potential setback for the country’s opposition movement, who use the internet to organise themselves. President Aleksander Lukashenko faces an increasingly restive opposition, and demonstrations followed the last election he won, allegedly with 80 per cent of the vote.

Many of those arrested are still in jail.

From Friday, any internet site providing goods or services to users in Belarus must use the domain name ‘.by’. This would make it illegal for firms like Facebook, Amazon, or eBay to operate in the country.

Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull reports.

From the ZionEyez kickstarter page.

Our engineering team at ZionEyez is currently developing Eyez™, the latest innovation in personal video recording technology. Eyez™ embeds a 720p HD video camera within a pair of eyeglasses designed to record live video data and take pictures. The recorded data can be stored on the 8GB of flash memory within the Eyez™ glasses, transferred via Wifi/Bluetooth or Micro USB to a computer, or wirelessly transferred to most iPhone or Android devices. After a one-time download of the “Eyez™” smartphone and tablet app, users can wirelessly broadcast the video in real time to their preferred social networking website.

Several networking sites, including Qik and LiveStream, will broadcast to users profiles’ and save the videos to cloud storage. If users prefer not to broadcast the video to the internet or to their mobile, the data will automatically save to the built-in flash memory, allowing for an easy upload later via Micro USB or Bluetooth. While employing cutting-edge technological advances, Eyez™ glasses are also practical for daily use. Users can choose from high quality removable lenses in both clear and shaded tones. In addition, the shape of Eyez™ glasses is extremely popular, so most optical stores can easily fit the appropriate prescription lenses. Imagine yourself recording exactly what your “Eyez™” see, whether it be worldly travels or a college lecture, no memorable event will be lost. No other product in existence can deliver you such a first person video recording experience.

While the privacy implications should be obvious, these glasses would also be useful when recording police officers or other law enforcement officials. It can be sent directly to the cloud so that there wouldn’t be a chance of anyone deleting the information you recorded.

Shopper Tracker does just what it says it does, track shoppers as they move throughout the grocery store. The new twist in this tracker is that it uses a Microsoft Kinect to do so.

It analyzes customer movements to provide traffic flow analysis and heat maps indicating which shelves are attracting shoppers and which products they touch or take. This can be tied to conversion data by product SKU to help merchants optimize where products are placed within their stores.

To attain similar market research, merchants typically have to pay observers or use equipment and surveys that are expensive, inaccurate, and influence the behavior of the people they’re studying. With Shopper Tracker, multiple shoppers can be simultaneously tracked around the clock. As it doesn’t cost much more to conduct longer studies, merchants can get more confident results and do A/B testing.

The data can then be used by the store to determine which items are more popular and why customers go to a particular item, but never purchase it. The system is also capable of tracking multiple people simultaneously.

Shopper Tracker: tracking real world conversions like web analytics from Administrator Agile Route on Vimeo.

All the following metrics and reports can be filtered for any date/time range.

Visitors: people that are detected in the tracking zone. Associated metrics:
Visits and Visit duration

Zones: places where Visitors may physically be (e.g.: right in front of a particular part of the shelf). Associated metrics:
% Visitors through Zone and Average time in Zone

Area: a 3 dimensional space containing products the Visitor may touch (e.g.: an imaginary box right in front of one particular SKU in the shelf)
Event: an Event occurs when a Visitor touches an Area in the shelf. Associated metrics:
Total Events and Events per Area
Average Event time
Visits with Event and Events / Visit Ratio

Conversion: grabbing a product from an Area (requires image captures post-processing). Associated metrics:
Conversions and Conversions per Area
Average Conversion time
Conversions / Events
Visits with Conversion and Conversion / Visit

Goals: grabbing a SKU of interest (e.g.: own product SKU). Associated metrics:
Goal Funnels
Product traction

Other type of reports: Heat Maps
Available reports:
- Visitor transit paths
- Visitor touch location in the shelf
- Conversion locations in the shelf

From RT:

If you want to block facebook, you’ll have to edit your hosts files with this information. You can also use Adblock Plus, Ghostery, Collusion, BetterPrivacy, disconnect, and/or NoScript.

These addons are mostly for Firefox. If you want the Chrome version, go to the Chrome Web Store and do a search for their names and install whichever ones you want. If you already use Adblock Plus, you can add this link to your blocklist.