Tech Company Patent Applications Threaten Inmate Privacy

Patent applications from companies that provide communication services to prisons give an indication of where a company is looking to expand and hint at implementation ideas that could be very dangerous for inmates and their privacy, warns Beryl Lipton, an investigative researcher with the EFF Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an interview for Marketplace. Patent applications include ideas to incorporate ads on tablets that would be given to incarcerated people, augmented reality glasses that could monitor both prisoners and the guards who wear them, and systems to identify and disable drones suspected of bringing in contraband.

However, Lipton says that some patents revealed a future where, in addition to the common practice of inmates having their voices captured and put indefinitely into a particular database for future data analysis, family and friends and others who call into the facility would also have their voices collected. In addition, advertising could be a revenue-generating scheme within the prison, where the average inmate who works makes less than $2 a day and can use a tablet to purchase movies, [get] access to email, access to video phone calls. Meanwhile, patents related to drone detection and elimination are concerning because they would rely on surveillance of the area outside of a prison, and also would enable the prison to essentially be able to conduct combat outside or inside of its walls in a way that, at the very least, deserves additional public scrutiny.