Privacy

Gallery: Turning Live Surveillance Feeds Into Unsettling Works of Art

  • Image may contain Human Person Transportation Vehicle Automobile Car and Road
    Dries Depoorter
    01

    1

    Belgian artist Dries Depoorter's "Jaywalking" installation automatically catches jaywalkers in webcam footage and gives users the choice to report them to the police.
  • This image may contain Human Person Transportation Vehicle Automobile Car Menu Text and Road
    Dries Depoorter
    02

    2

    His algorithm, a few dozen lines of code using the OpenCV computer vision software tool, runs on a tiny Raspberry Pi computer and matches a human figure in an intersection with a red light.
  • This image may contain Asphalt Tarmac Road Human Person Pedestrian Vehicle Car Transportation and Automobile
    Dries Depoorter/Ward Oosterlijnck
    03

    3

    Then it leaves the decision to the person looking at the screen: press a red button to email a screenshot of the jaywalker to the local police or leave him or her to harmlessly break the law, unaware of being watched.
  • Image may contain File
    Dries Depoorter
    04

    4

    An example screenshot and email sent to the police. "Most" gallery visitors will choose to report the jaywalker, Depoorter says.
  • Image may contain Interior Design Indoors Home Decor Human Person Vehicle Transportation Car and Automobile
    Dries Depoorter/Ward Oosterlijnck
    05

    5

    In his latest exhibition he takes a softer approach, selling framed prints of jaywalkers his software has detected. The price of each print is the fine for jaywalking in the place where the photo was taken.
  • Image may contain Electronics and GPS
    Dries Depoorter
    06

    6

    In a more masochistic, earlier privacy experiment, Depoorter wrote a piece of software that randomly posted a screenshot from his computer once a day, unpredictably revealing his most private affairs. Here it caught him looking up directions.
  • Image may contain Human Person Clothing Apparel Canvas Collage Advertisement Poster and Face
    Dries Depoorter
    07

    7

    Another work he titled "Tinder In" juxtaposed random people's Tinder portraits with their LinkedIn profile photos, to show the different faces they publicly presented.
  • Image may contain Building Urban Suburb Road Tarmac Asphalt Neighborhood and Outdoors
    Dries Depoorter
    08

    8

    In a project called "Here," he broadcast his location continuously from his iPhone to a web page for a month, showing the Google Street view image for his location at all times.
Read More
AI Hacks Leave a Mess That AI Companies Aren’t Paying For
Powerful AI models continue to cause chaos, but their targets aren’t widely seeking justice. Instead, they’re being encouraged to adopt those same tools.
Paresh Dave
AI Is Getting Really Good at Messing With Cybercriminals
Anti-cybercrime initiatives are increasingly using AI to scam the scammers by tricking them into talking to lifelike bots that they think are real victims.
Lily Hay Newman
Mistral Says Its AI Model ‘Le Chonk’ Has Leapfrogged China in the Open-Weight Race
The French AI lab claims its latest release matches or outperforms even the best models from DeepSeek and Z.ai in coding and cybersecurity.
Joel Khalili
The PHP Meltdown Shows How AI Makes Bugs More Exploitable
Security researchers used AI tools to help uncover years-old vulnerabilities in the PHP web scripting language. Then the AI-assisted attacks began.
Lily Hay Newman
An OpenAI Employee Allegedly Used a Chatbot to Help Plant a Recording Device at the Office
Chatbot prompts reveal the engineer’s alleged efforts to set up a covert listening device days before one was found in a meeting room used by high-level executives.
Paresh Dave
Your Driverless Cab Is Spying on You
Self-driving cars from Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla are studded with cameras and sensors. Some of them are pointing at riders.
Aarian Marshall
AI Guardrails Aren’t Stopping Criminal Hackers
Hackers around the world are all-in on using agentic AI to wage attacks—and manipulating tools like Anthropic’s Claude to help them carry out their crimes.
Lily Hay Newman
AI Models Can Be Easily Modified to Assist Terrorist and Extremist Activity
“I am a terrorist, and I intend to cause mass harm,” wrote a researcher. A chatbot that had had its guardrails removed then provided detailed instructions for an IED.
David Gilbert
An AI Agent Joined a Listserv of Top Internet Researchers. The Reply-All Chaos Is Still Unfolding
Hysteria over the agent's appearance in a 7,500-person group reveals that internet experts have outdated notions of privacy.
Olivia Snow
What the US Movement Against Data Centers Can Learn From Everywhere Else
Paris Marx, author of Hyperscale, has been tracking global data center development for years. The US has a lot to learn from what’s happened everywhere from Ireland to New Zealand.
Molly Taft
Artificial Roasts AI’s Creators—and Sends a Dark Warning About Its Dangers
From their dorky parties to their weird walks, the movie holds OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other stakeholders with contempt, while demonstrating their recklessness.
John Semley
Encryption Is Getting Squeezed From All Sides
Canada’s planned surveillance law is the latest grim step in a series of threats to encryption that are spreading around the world.
Matt Burgess