Digital Ethics

The number of posts today about deleting menstrual tracking data from startup apps is a very good reminder that you should never trust data you don't store yourself is safe. Whether it's a scrappy startup, a big megacorp, or a FOSS dude with a server: if someone extracts money to store your data they will, at some point, prioritize their gain over your privacy

Today's decision deprives millions of people of a fundamental right, and also underscores the importance of fair and meaningful protections for data privacy. Everyone deserves to have strong controls over the collection and use of information they necessarily leave behind as they go about their normal activities, like using apps, search engine queries, posting on social media, texting friends, and so on. But those seeking, offering, or facilitating abortion access must now assume that any data they provide online or offline could be sought by law enforcement.

Identifiers built into iOS and Android facilitate the collection and sale of personal data, four Democrats said in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission.

Attached: 1 image Important: there was a Barbie Dream Supercomputer in the 60s

The group — known for canceling missionaries and aid workers for alleged misdeeds — is embroiled in some very ugly scandals of its own.

Digital privacy laws help control how your data is stored, shared, and used by big businesses—but those protections vary wildly depending on where you live.

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.