The owners of luxury flats opposite Tate Modern’s viewing gallery face an unacceptable level of intrusion that prevents them enjoying their homes, the supreme court has ruled.

In a majority judgment, the court determined that the flat owners faced a “constant visual intrusion” that interfered with the “ordinary use and enjoyment” of their properties, extending the law of privacy to include overlooking – albeit only in extreme cases. — The Guardian

Residents of a luxury development on London’s South Bank who lost a legal battle to close part of the tenth-floor viewing platform at Tate Modern are now taking their case to the UK Supreme Court.

Owners of four flats in the Neo Bankside block located alongside the gallery, previously claimed in court that “hundreds of thousands of visitors” to Tate Modern were looking into their homes from the viewing space located in its Blavatnik building. — The Art Newspaper

Residents of flats overlooked by the Tate Modern have lost their high court bid to stop “hundreds of thousands of visitors” looking into their homes from the art gallery’s viewing platform.

[...] the board of trustees of the Tate Gallery said the platform provided “a unique, free, 360-degree view of London” and argue that the claimants could simply “draw the blinds”. — The Guardian

A privacy expert tasked with protecting personal data within a Google-backed smart city project has resigned as her pro-privacy guidelines would largely be ignored by participants.

“I imagined us creating a Smart City of Privacy, as opposed to a Smart City of Surveillance,” Ann Cavoukian, the former privacy commissioner of Ontario, wrote in a resignation letter to Google sister company Sidewalk Labs. — Planet Free Will

Yet what has drawn the most concern and curiosity with regards to Quayside is a uniquely 21st-century feature: a data-harvesting, wifi-beaming “digital layer” that would underpin each proposed facet of Quayside life. According to Sidewalk Labs, this would provide “a single unified source of information about what is going on”—to an astonishing level of detail—as well as a centralized platform for efficiently managing it all. — City Lab

allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step — WIRED

A pair of USB ports on a console on the front of the bench provides juice from the solar panel mounted at lap level between the seats. Who wouldn’t want to hang out at a bench like this? It certainly catches the eye of passersby. What these kids might not realize, however, is that this bench is watching them back. — Landscape Architecture Magazine

Good walls make good neighbours – but not, it seems, when they are made entirely of glass. Five residents of the multi-million-pound Neo Bankside towers, which loom behind Tate Modern like a crystalline bar chart of inflated land values, have filed a legal claim against the museum to have part of its viewing platform shut down. They claim that its 10th-floor public terrace has put their homes into a state of “near constant surveillance”. — The Guardian

The National Security Agency is researching opportunities to collect foreign intelligence — including the possibility of exploiting internet-connected biomedical devices like pacemakers, according to a senior official.

[...]

When asked if the entire scope of the Internet of Things — billions of interconnected devices — would be “a security nightmare or a signals intelligence bonanza,” [Richard Ledgett, the NSA’s deputy director] replied, “Both.” — the Intercept

with the rise of these innovative areas, traditional-style dorms, characterized by shared bathrooms and two or more students living with one another in a single space, are becoming less frequent on campus, and will soon be discontinued altogether. [...]

living in a traditional-style dorm is important, especially for first-year students, because the living arrangements allow for greater communication between residents that may not necessarily occur in the newer dorms. — kykernel.com

“In the last 20 years, maybe 25 years, there’s a huge cultural shift in people that ultimately affects gyms,” said Bryan Dunkelberger, a founding principal of S3 Design, which has worked for clients like Equinox and the Sports Club/ LA. [...]

And the millennials, these are the special children. They expect all the amenities... Privacy, they expect.” [...]

“It’s funny, they’re more socially open with everything — Facebook, social media — yet more private in their personal space” — nytimes.com