This story was among the most-read, most-shared stories published by The Counter (then The New Food Economy) in 2019.
I met Marty in the produce section of a Stop & Shop in Bristol, Rhode Island. I was looking for vegetables to grill over hot coals, while Marty roamed the aisles, big, round eyes staring vacantly ahead, searching for spills and other hazards—with electric sensors strategically placed on its tall, rectangular form. Marty, you see, is a supermarket robot. Read more…
Foodies interested in the provenance of their groceries may have to give up something in return: their privacy.
The “internet of everything” (IoE) is coming to a grocery store near you. With a tap of your phone, you’ll be able to find out where your heritage pork was raised and your bluefin tuna caught—in theory. Read more…
On Thursday the Obama administration announced the elimination of the regulatory underpinning of a post-September-11 national registry program for “certain nonimmigrants.” Although the program, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), had not been active since 2011, many worried that it could have been rebooted under a Trump administration as Trump’s promised Muslim registry, and the announcement followed a targeted campaign around the issue by a coalition of groups, including MoveOn.
“This is a win,” MoveOn campaign director Iram Ali said Thursday. “I can’t even remember the last time Muslim communities have had a win so, it’s a huge deal.”
Last Sunday an 11-year-old boy in Andhra Pradesh, a state in southeast India, hung himself from a ceiling fan as his family slept. He was allegedly driven to this act after being denied an Aadhaar card—formally known as Unique Identification (UID)—which he was told he needed to attend school. The card is one arm of India’s sprawling scheme to collect the biometric data, including fingerprints and iris scans, of its 1.2 billion citizens and residents, and is quickly becoming practically, if not legally, mandatory, for nearly every aspect of life, from getting married to buying cooking gas to opening a bank account. More than 630 million residents have already enrolled and received their unique 12-digit identification number.
Since its launch in 2010, people have raised a number of questions and concerns about Aadhaar, citing its effects on privacy rights, potential security flaws, and failures in functionality. India’s poor, who were supposed to be the biggest beneficiaries of the program, are actually most at risk of being excluded from UID, and there is no evidence that biometric identification has curtailed corruption. The newly-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi lambasted the UID program as a candidate but in July did an about-face, calling for the enrollment process to be expedited and supporting a UID-linked social assistance program. In all likelihood, the world’s largest experiment in biometric identification will continue.
Jessica S. McKenzie