Digital Ethics

Good morning! This is a great Sunday read: "A new sort of American messianic religion has gathered in Silicon Valley under a techno-futurist banner emblazoned with one word: 'Singularity.'https://t.co/d5MTIfGC6B— Flavia Dzodan (@redlightvoices) March 31, 2019

Empowerment or exploitation?

Once again, Facebook is in the news for bad security practices, dark design patterns, and secretly reappropriating sensitive data meant for “authentication” to its own ends. Incredibly, this time,

Guardian study finds inferior items appear highly praised, making ratings worthless

The controversial panel lasted just a little over a week.

To be honest, I don’t really have time to write this article. I’ve got loads of other things I should be doing. But it needs to be written. Now. So I’ve popped up my laptop on the bus and am angrily typing away. Sounds so serious…what’s going on? So Apple just released a new accessibility […]

A new study has found that we are quicker to blame the operators than complex systems when they fail

Estate agents and banks have been accused of gaming Britain’s biggest consumer feedback website by paying it to help gain better review scores. Analysis by The Times of almost 200,000 reviews on...

The surprisingly short life of new electronic devices

On Tuesday, tech and political elites descended on Stanford University to launch a new center dedicated to “human-centered artificial…

The initial euphoria over AI’s potential is giving way to the realization that the tech industry will need ethicists to guard against problems caused by artificial intelligence.

danah boyd, Founder and President of Data & Society talks about media and how it can be changed by external forces.

Facial recognition systems could one day surveil the people in photographs

The research and design thinking behind the latest treatments for Misinformation on Facebook

Platforms can have the power to not only moderate content, but also to moderate language itself

RIP, Dash buttons. Amazon has come up with far easier ways to complete transactions.

Rather than simply designing products that drive revenue, let’s use the science of friction to maximize the value a product can offer humanity.

On behalf of workers at Microsoft, we're releasing an open letter to Brad Smith and Satya Nadella, demanding for the cancelation of the IVAS contract with a call for stricter ethical guidelines.If you're a Microsoft employee you can sign at: https://t.co/958AhvIHO5 pic.twitter.com/uUZ5P4FJ7X— Microsoft Workers 4 Good (@MsWorkers4) February 22, 2019

"I’m fucked up."

“The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society,” quoth Wikipedia, “held in common, not owned privately.” We live in an era of surveillance capitalism in a symbiotic relationship with advertising technology, quoth me. And I put it to you that privacy is not just a virtue, or a […]

It’s just one of the things the company is doing to protect your data.

nice read, but this news resource threw this at me :( #whyyoumakemefeelbadjezebel pic.twitter.com/Dv1yFLrbWu— Alina Cvetkova (@nuacco) February 28, 2019

The once-hyped social media company, known for gamifying mobile check-ins, is still alive and well as an incomprehensibly vast data empire.

gaslighting is telling people they're wrong about their own feelings - it's describes my experience of the app telling me congrats I'm back home with a sparkle icon when it just did something that upset me. I have no idea if it's malicious, but it's unquestionably gaslighting.— Cyd Harrell (@cydharrell) March 1, 2019

Arbetsförmedlingens generaldirektör kallas till riksdagens arbetsmarknadsutskott för att förklara det it-haveri som kan ha orsakat upp till 70 000 felbeslut.

The Elon Musk-backed nonprofit company OpenAI declines to release research publicly for fear of misuse

Researcher finds one of the databases used to track Uyghur Muslim population in Xinjiang.

Exclusive: Advertisers are collecting info that can help them skirt an Android privacy feature, according to new research.

Top brass from Facebook, Twitter, and Google stopped by Stanford Law School Thursday to participate in a conversation about the challenges social media companies face in regulating free speech and protecting democracies. The panel showed the companies are much better at identifying problems than actually solving them.