A company that sells GPS ankle bracelets and helps Chicago law enforcement run a program to monitor people under house arrest leaked “an enormous amount of private information.” A contractor for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, a law enforcement agency that covers the city of Chicago, left exposed online the private data—including the ankle bracelet movements—of people who are under house arrest and being monitored through GPS devices. Activists who have spoken against the use of electronic monitoring in Chicago highlighted how this leak was an indictment of the whole program. MediaJustice Fellow and Director of the Challenging E-Carceration Project at MediaJustice, explains in VICE’s Motherboard.
It’s hard to say how much trouble something like that could cause to people. This technology is fundamentally flawed. And the companies that are driving it are socially irresponsible, and completely uncaring. [I’m not] surprised that BI Incorporated lost control of this data, given that electronic monitoring has been largely an unregulated technology and that companies that run it are unaccountable and get a free pass.
James Kilgore via Motherboard
