Digital Ethics

In this week’s newsletter: Crypto giant Celsius is freezing out users as it tries to solve a mammoth lending crisis. So what happens if money in the bank isn’t really there?

When parents scheduled an appointment for their children on the Nemours page, Facebook received that information

While some tech tools might indeed be helpful, they should be considered in conjunction with, not as replacement for, regulations that address the role of guns.

We created an algorithmic tool to find out what risks the criminal legal system poses to the people entering it, rather than their risk to "public safety."

When an algorithm causes harm, is discontinuing it enough to address its harms? This paper introduces the concept of the **The Algorithmic Imprint** to show how algorithmic harms can persist long after the algorithm is discontinued. It chronicles the 2020 Ofqual Algorithmic Grading Scandal, not from the UK, but from a Bangladeshi perspective. The concept of the Algorithmic Imprint helps us understand how the algorithm's impact lives on in the algorithm's afterlife much the remnants of palimpsest remain. Critically examining our current conception of algorithmic impact, it expands how we may view algorithmic impact, especially in the algorithm's afterlife (after being discontinued). It also offers practical and actionable guidance on how an imprint-aware mindset can inform algorithmic design. This is a presentation of the paper "The Algorithmic Imprint" to be presented at the ACM Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) conference. Here is a quick tweetorial covering the key points: https://bit.ly/AlgorthmicImprint_Tweetorial

Commonly used by researchers and journalists, data scraping is an underacknowledged privacy concern

The language used by AI is the reflection in the mirror.

Why are we only hearing about a huge security flaw now?

Apple’s AirTags are great for finding lost items. But they have a darker side.

You may want to think twice before giving the parking attendant your Tesla-issued NFC card.

Traffic safety officials escalate and widen probe to 830,000 Tesla cars as they discover patterns suggesting Tesla's Autopilot feature can encourage dangerous driving behavior.

Centralised power and decentralised communities are on the verge of outright conflict for the control of the digital public space. The resilience of centralised networks and the political organisation of their owners remains significantly underestimated by protocol activists. At the same time, the peer-to-peer community is dangerously unprepared for a crisis-fuelled future that has very suddenly arrived at their door.

“I feel like with these tools, there’s some backdoor to access user data in almost all of them,” said an external auditor hired to help TikTok close off Chinese access to sensitive information, like Americans’ birthdays and phone numbers.

Harassed across the internet for more than a decade, a group of women found each other—and their alleged tormentor.

Can You See Me is a simple tool that offers guidance on webcam placement to people with limited amounts of useful vision.

Big Tech’s big car ambitions have antitrust advocates worried.

‘Is LaMDA sentient?’

In the recent paper about "soulbound" tokens, Vitalik Buterin et al. write that they aim to build technology that is "acceptably non-dystopian". Do any of today's self-sovereign identity projects fit that bill?

Lisa Jones-Engel quit her work as a lab researcher when she began to see how ‘like us’ monkeys are

Nope. Not doing it. Always own your platform.

Automakers and technology companies say they are making driving safer, but verifying these claims is difficult.

The maker of the Taser believes its new virtual reality firing range and community policing simulator can make cops less violent. Critics are less than sure.

Why great things never came from comfort zones? Because the world is always changing. We need to face uncertainty to move forward.

Voi releases industry-first research into women and escooter riding. But how do we go from understanding the challenges to making real gains?

My goal is to get meaningful privacy protection in the hands of as many people as possible...

Data analyzed by Atlas VPN reveals that Google collects the most information about its users out of five selected tech giants - Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Apple.

The e-mail startup isn’t the only company learning that a product can be powerful and elegant without being good.