Digital Ethics

Smartphones leave a trail that anyone — and any foreign government — could follow.

We followed every move of people in one city. Then we went to tell them.

Do customers realise that genetic genealogy companies profit by amassing huge biological datasets, asks geneticist and author Adam Rutherford

Geneticist and author Adam Rutherford examines the evidence

I'm really sorry to p1ss on anyone's chips but DNA kits for heritage are:- junk science- a front for massive commercial data trawling, analysis, re-use and onward sale. It's not 'harmless fun'. You can never get data back. And you just dumped your relatives in it, too. https://t.co/EH62v6u1jA— Maria Farrell (@mariafarrell) January 27, 2020

It’s simply a tool—and hardly a perfect one

Artificial intelligence may never match the brain

One nation under CCTV

If you're skittish about DNA testing services, you're not the only one -- and it's directly affecting one of the heavyweights in the field. The 23andMe team is...

Twitter said Clearview AI, whose app is spreading in law enforcement, was violating its policies. Lawmakers also expressed privacy concerns.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann talks with Recode’s Kara Swisher about deliberately engineering happiness into the site, expanding into commerce, and competing with larger social and commerce tech companies. This interview was recorded in front of a live audience at the National Retail Federation’s annual conference, the Big Show, in New York City. Featuring: Ben Silbermann (@8en), CEO, Pinterest Host: Kara Swisher (@karaswisher), Recode co-founder and editor-at-large More to explore: Subscribe for free to Reset, Recode’s new podcast that explores why — and how — tech is changing everything. A...

It may not be long before you'll have to forget about walking down the street anonymously, says a New York Times report.

Last month I canceled a random charge for $4.99 per month from HP called "InstantInk". Wasn't sure what it was for. I've had it for over a year but had no idea what it did.I just found out what it did pic.twitter.com/lsFLDR5grv— Ryan Sullivan (@ryandonsullivan) January 17, 2020

Kaylen Ward's Twitter fundraiser for the Australian bushfire relief has ended. The Los Angeles-based model said she raised $1 million (by comparison Jeff Bezos...

Airbnb has a patent for AI that crawls and scrapes everything it can find on you, then judges whether you are conscientious & open or show signs of "neuroticism, involvement in crimes, narcissism, Machiavellianism, or psychopathy." Good luck challenging these judgments, too! https://t.co/b0wZgz85DL— Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) January 17, 2020

‘This is some real-life ‘Black Mirror’ stuff’ — @AOC called out the hidden dangers of facial recognition tech, especially for people of color pic.twitter.com/NHDh3Sjewy— NowThis (@nowthisnews) January 15, 2020

The European Union is considering banning facial recognition technology in public areas for up to five years, to give it time to work out how to prevent abuses, according to proposals seen by Reuters.

Mix together a bit of freely accessible facial recognition software and a free live stream of the public space, and what do you get? A powerful stalker tool.

Social network apologises for allowing the use of discriminatory ad keywords it had meant to ban.

Where is your distributed ledger technology now?

The 'robot rights' debate, and its related question of 'robot responsibility', invokes some of the most polarized positions in AI ethics. While some advocate for granting robots rights on a par...

BlackVue has an app that shows the location of drivers that opt-in. The creators say it shouldn’t be possible to track its users in bulk; we found otherwise.

A group tested Amazon's facial-recognition software on Denver City Council members. Nine of them were falsely identified as sex offenders, and in some cases the system was 92% confident they were a match https://t.co/PHBK2gWjUV @JessicaDenver7 pic.twitter.com/cpbMOax5An— Drew Harwell (@drewharwell) January 14, 2020

1. [thread] We are filing legal complaints against six companies based on our research, revealing systematic breaches to privacy, by shadowy #OutOfControl #adtech companies gathering & sharing heaps of personal data. https://t.co/qGsiNSe7gJ #privacy pic.twitter.com/f1ReGIgUUn— Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad (@finnmyrstad) January 14, 2020

There could be multiple reasons why some of them have flopped, but perhaps we're simply not ready to be served by robots in lieu of humans.

Here’s everything we know about Amazon’s video doorbell and the controversies surrounding it.

Four employees watched video footage from customers, exceeding "what was necessary", the company says

Technology has grown from some devices and platforms we use to an entire environment in which we function