Research By: Slava Makkaveev Introduction Since 2007, Amazon has sold tens of millions of Kindles, which is impressive. But this also means that tens of millions of people could have potentially been hacked through a software bug in those same Kindles. Their devices could be turned into bots or their private local networks could be... Click to Read More

To better understand the ethics of machine learning datasets, we picked three controversial face recognition / person recognition datasets—DukeMTMC, MS-Celeb-1M, and Labeled Faces in the Wild—and analyzed ~1,000 papers that cite them. Paper: https://t.co/FZRO4eB1TtThread ⬇️— Arvind Narayanan (@random_walker) August 9, 2021

These are fair question regarding systems like the one Apple has proposed, and there is enough general ignorance regarding some of the building blocks that I think it is worth attempting to answer.But it's going to take way more than a few tweets, so settle in... https://t.co/h8f0F0YmpK— Sarah Jamie Lewis (@SarahJamieLewis) August 8, 2021

A group of researchers says that artificial intelligence can be used to trick most biometric face scanners.

Atlas of AI pic.twitter.com/76gJEk4H9J— Evan Thompson (@evantthompson) August 4, 2021

A recent scientific paper proposed that, like Big Tobacco in the Seventies, Big Tech thrives on creating uncertainty around the impacts of its products and business model. One of the ways it does this is by cultivating pockets of friendly academics who can be relied on to echo Big Tech talking points, giving them added gravitas in the eyes of lawmakers. Google highlighted working with favourable academics as a key aim in its strategy, leaked in October 2020, for lobbying the EU’s Digital Markets Act – sweeping legislation that could seriously undermine tech giants’ market dominance if it goes through. Now, a New Statesman investigation can reveal that over the last five years, six leading academic institutes in the EU have taken tens of millions of pounds of funding from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft to research issues linked to the tech firms' business models, from privacy and data protection to AI ethics and competition in digital markets. While this funding tends to come with guarantees of academic independence, this creates an ethical quandary where the subject of research is also often the primary funder of it. var pymParent = new pym.Parent("bars", "https://nsmg-projects-public.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/live/nsmg-072/bars/index.html", {}); The New Statesman has also found evidence of an inconsistent approach to transparency, with some senior academics failing to disclose their industry funding. Other academics have warned that the growing dependence on funding from the industry raises questions about how tech firms influence the debate around the ethics of the markets they have created. The Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), for example, received a $7.5m grant from Facebook in 2019 to fund five years of research, while the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin, has accepted almost €14m from Google since it was founded in 2012, and the tech giant accounts for a third of the institute's third-party funding. The Humboldt Institute is seeking to diversify its funding sources, but still receives millions from Google Annual funding to the Humboldt Institute by Google and other third-party institutions !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r

The pandemic increased the demand and possibility of automating care, but doing so may deliver racist stereotypes and unemployment for women of color.

Exclusive: ‘On The Move’ website claims to offer ‘reliable information’ but does not disclose government affiliation

This is a thread for those of you who say coders and developers should take no role in politics. Those of you who watched my #WCLDN talk last year already heard this story. You can hear it again.This was Rene Carmille, and that is a punch card. pic.twitter.com/GJeWmFKIeH— Heather Burns (@WebDevLaw) January 27, 2018

Catherine Zhu of Foley & Lardner LLP examines the increasing use of dark patterns and movement at both state and federal levels to ban or regulate such practices.

Former and current Google employees said that H.R. would respond to their workplace complaints by referring them to counseling programs instead of addressing the broader issues.

The inside story of Sophie Zhang’s battle to combat rampant manipulation as executives delayed and deflected

A 6,600-word internal memo from a fired Facebook data scientist details how the social network knew about specific examples of global political manipulation — and failed to act.

When combined The Facebook Companies know a huge amount about you

Interviews with 23 experts identify a pattern.

Phone-free events are on the rise: is the tide turning from the false intimacy of screens towards true social interaction?

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.

Northern rail's new self-service machines were installed at 420 stations two months ago.

The death of the woman he loved was too much to bear. Could a mysterious artificial intelligence website allow him to speak with her once more?

This little bit about an AI chatbot begging for its human operator to save its life when it started to break down is seriously messing with my head. (h/t @Avi_Bueno). https://t.co/iVYnD2f7Ja pic.twitter.com/F3OIdDmjqg— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) July 24, 2021

In 2020, the term ‘infodemic’ rose from relative obscurity to becoming a popular catch-all metaphor, representing the perils of fast, wide-spreading (false) inf...

The latest scandal to rock the Catholic Church was both incredibly unnerving and entirely preventable. Why isn't anyone doing anything about it?

The key to combining privacy and innovation is baking it into the SDLC. Analogous to application security's (AppSec) upstream shift into the development cycle, privacy belongs at the outset of development, not as an afterthought. Here's why.

One gave our candidate a high score for English proficiency when she spoke only in German.

In a recent 1News interview, Gabe Newell, the co-founder of game development company Valve, described how new consumer-grade brain-computer interfaces will soon be mainstream and that they by now s…

The recent apartment building collapse in Miami, Florida, is a tragic reminder of the huge impacts engineering can have on our lives. Disasters such as this force engineers to reflect on their practice and perhaps fundamentally change their approach. Specifically, we should give much greater weight to ethics when training engineers.