Digital Ethics

At a Duke administrative law conference (yes, this is how I spend my Saturdays). Cass Sunstein says the **most pressing issue** in law / public administration is (1) to reduce the impact of cognitive bias and (2) eliminate noise. For the record I absolutely disagree … (1/n)— Jenna Burrell, PhD (@jennaburrell) February 12, 2022

I was asked at short notice to fill in for a speaker in Stanford's EE380 course who had to cancel. Below the fold is a hastily updated vers...

A year and a half ago I attended Brewster Kahle's Decentralized Web Summit and wrote: I am working on a post about my reactions to the fi...

‎Program: Tech Won't Save Us, Avsnitt: The Poorly Paid Workers Powering Automation w/ Phil Jones – 10 feb. 2022

by Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Margaret Mitchell and Alexander Todorov

Blockchain research firm Chainalysis says the value extracted from the hacks grew by 40% year-on-year.

New Google research suggests what AI does to identify images may not amount to "knowing" anything.

Kathy Baxter and her product design ethics team at Salesforce have a lot of sway over when tech is ready to ship and when it’s not. But there are lots of technologies living on the Salesforce platform beyond their control.

Update (October 22): Earlier this month, SpotSpotter filed a lawsuit alleging that the Vice report linked below contains false and defamatory statements.Court documents recently reviewed by VICE have revealed that ShotSpotter, a company that makes and sells audio gunshot detection to cities and...

Before you post your latest Wordle triumph, read this. https://t.co/oFeANdVHhc— Slate (@Slate) February 7, 2022

Joe Rogan argued for saying the N-word: “Don’t you think by not saying it, it becomes this ridiculously charged magic word?”Rogan predicted people would get in trouble for saying “the N-word,” just like they do for wearing “hoop earrings, braids, and dreadlocks.” #SpotifyKnew pic.twitter.com/CAhTWtTpHn— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) February 6, 2022

absolutely horrifying: amazon’s algorithm identified a product that people were using to commit suicide. it then started to recommend additional products that made the suicide easier to executte. https://t.co/eKX4z8FOt7 pic.twitter.com/BpbvLhjoTO— maxwell (@maxwellstrachan) February 4, 2022

So The British Journal of Photography sold out its twitter account with 250000 followers into a NFT marketing account called 'art3'.They started a new account for photography. Which has 836 followers.And in doing so destroyed their reputation and reach. pic.twitter.com/KDI0HpT2fW— duckrabbit (@duckrabbitblog) February 2, 2022

Got a letter, the Police were to prosecute me for speeding! on a date I was home in a place I have never been. Called, all sorted out, but when they checked the vid it was a silver van, I have a blue Skoda. A quick look at the vehicle data would have flagged this immediately?— LinkoVitch (@Link2076) February 3, 2022

Major chains begin testing automated age-verification, to avoid the wait for staff at self-checkouts.

‎Show Made You Think, Ep 28: Bring the Crowbar. Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System by Donella Meadows - 13 Mar 2018

This video is just… so very good. #DataPrivacy #SurveillanceCapitalism #surveillance via @worldsayer https://t.co/J9bFj2cgbJ— Per Axbom (@axbom) January 31, 2022

Evan Selinger vehemently argues against the tenets of Firmin DeBrabander’s “Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society.”...

In 1999, I asked David Gerrold to write a "future of computing" prediction for the magazine where I was Technology Editor. Here's what he wrote. https://t.co/UAMM0Pm4W6

@axbom Wow I've never seen this before, that is amazing that they had this vision of the future back then.

California's net neutrality law will remain in effect after industry associations lost big in court.

I took (most of) January off from writing to take a step back and observe. Writing week in and out, as I did last year, keeps one pretty close to the subject — maybe even too close. And what I no...

Machine Learning lives in an uncanny valley btw Science and Engineering.It's the worst of both worlds.We don't care about understanding, just making things "work" (bad science).We don't care if things work in the real world, just on contrived benchmarks (bad engineering).— David Krueger (@DavidSKrueger) January 29, 2022

Fingerprinting is bad. It's a term that refers to building up enough metadata about a user that you can essentially figure out who they are. JavaScript has

In interviews with AI experts, IEEE Spectrum has uncovered six real-world AI worst-case scenarios that are far more mundane than those sci-fi robot apocalypses depicted in the movies. But they’re no less dystopian. And most don’t require a malevolent dictator to bring them to full fruition.

Following the release last week of the draft National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children 2022-2032, the Law Council of Australia has

tl;dr

AI pioneer says machine learning may work on test sets, but that’s a long way from real world use

The European Parliament has definitively backed major limits on behavioral advertising during a plenary vote on amendments to the pan-EU Digital Services Act (DSA). The move looks set to crank up pressure on Big Tech business models that rely on pervasive tracking and profiling of users to target a…