Inside Facebook’s Data Wars
By: New York Times July 14, 2021 One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits. Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and chief executive, assembled dozens of employees on a video call to tell them that they were being broken up. CrowdTangle, which […]
Racist Abuse of Black Footballers Reignites Debate Over Social Media Policing
By: Financial Times July 13, 2021 The torrent of racist abuse targeted at black England footballers in the wake of the team’s loss in the Euro 2020 final on Sunday has reignited the national debate over the policing of social media platforms, with Boris Johnson urging tech bosses on Tuesday to “up their game”. […]
How New Biden Rules Could Make It Easier To Buy Hearing Aids Or Fix Your Phone
By: NPR July 9, 2021 President Biden unveiled a new plan on Friday taking aim at powerful industries where a handful of players have so much market clout that they can drive up prices, depress wages and make it hard for small companies to break in. “We know we’ve got a problem, a […]
Game Over: Chinese Company Deploys Facial Recognition to Limit Youths’ Play
By: New York Times July 8, 2021 For almost every video game restriction, children and teenagers will find a way around it. But the room to maneuver is shrinking in China, where underage players are required to log on using their real names and identification numbers as part of countrywide regulations aimed at […]
YouTube Algorithm Keeps Recommending ‘Regrettable’ Videos
By: The Hill July 7, 2021 YouTube users have reported potentially objectionable content in thousands of videos recommended to them using the platform’s algorithm, according to the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. The findings, released Wednesday, revealed many instances of YouTube recommending videos that users had marked as “regrettable” — a broad category including misinformation, violence and hate speech. The […]
ExxonMobil Lobbyists Filmed Saying Oil Giant’s Support for Carbon Tax a PR Ploy
By: Guardian June 30, 2021 Lobbyists for ExxonMobil have described the oil giant’s backing for a carbon tax as a public relations ploy intended to stall more serious measures to combat the climate crisis. Two senior lobbyists based in Washington told an undercover reporter for Unearthed, the investigative journalism branch of Greenpeace, that they worked […]
Opioid Addiction Apps Access Personal Data, Study Finds
By: Financial Times July 7, 2021 Opioid addiction apps used by tens of thousands of people to aid treatment and recovery are accessing sensitive personal information that could be used to identify them, a new study has found. The ExpressVPN Digital Security Lab study, published on Wednesday, examined the source code of 10 Android apps […]
Didi’s Removal From China’s App Stores Marks a Growing Crackdown
By: Economist July 5, 2021 CHENG WEI, the billionaire founder and chief executive of Didi Global, had scarcely a moment to revel in his firm’s $4.4bn New York listing. Within 48 hours of the initial public offering (ipo), which valued the Chinese ride-hailing giant at around $70bn, cyber-regulators in Beijing spoiled the party. On […]
This Manual for a Popular Facial Recognition Tool Shows Just How Much the Software Tracks
By: The Markup July 6, 2021 One school using the software saw that a student’s face was captured more than 1,000 times during the week In 2019, the Santa Fe Independent School District in Texas ran a weeklong pilot program with the facial recognition firm AnyVision in its school hallways. With more than 5,000 […]