Bad Tech

Pokemon Go's parent company Niantic (founded by a former State Department official and funded by the founding CEO of CIA's In-Q-Tel) has used Pokemon Go data to train 50 million neural networks in order to enable robots to operate in over a million locations worldwide (so far!)

What do Zuckerberg’s bromides about American values mean to Facebook users in Kashmir or the Philippines?

As Israel deploys tanks in the West Bank for the first time in 20 years, we reveal how two of the world’s biggest travel companies are helping settlers commercialise stolen land

Spain has become reliant on an algorithm to score how likely a domestic violence victim may be abused again and what protection to provide — sometimes leading to fatal consequences.

Israele (Internazionale) Israele potrà trasferire nel suo paese i dati dei cittadini europei. Come se niente fosse, come non ci fosse un genocidio, come se fosse un paese sicuro dal punto di vista della privacy. Come se sulla sorveglianza di massa non avesse costruito gli strumenti per le stragi a Gaza. La notizia è di qualche tempo

A spreadsheet on ad platform Xandr’s website revealed a massive collection of “audience segments” used to target consumers based on highly specific, sometimes intimate information and inferences

China is racing ahead in semiconductors and drones while we're building better ways to separate retail investors from their savings.

As policymakers around the world consider how to rebalance the relationship between Big Tech and the news industry, it is imperative that they take a global view and consider the implications for…

The market collapse isn’t just the inevitable result of macroeconomic forces like high interest rates and inflation. It’s also the best opportunity in more than a decade to reckon with the tech industry’s excess.

What is Agile? And where does it come from?

Algorithm expert Cathy O'Neil has written a new book that shows how the tech world and society generally feeds off the idea of shame.

As someone who grew up in Silicon Valley, I’m used to hearing two platitudes: either all tech is inherently evil, or tech will save us all. Either one seems to exempt this industry and its problems…

New research estimates that up to $1 billion worth of streaming ads are playing on devices that are powered down every year.

Thenmozhi Soundararajan was uninvited from giving a talk at Google about caste bias after some employees said such discrimination doesn't exist.

The Dutch tax authority ruined thousands of lives after using an algorithm to spot suspected benefits fraud — and critics say there is little stopping it from happening again.

VioGén è un sistema utilizzato dal ministero dell'Interno spagnolo dal 2007 per prevedere il rischio di violenza di genere in base alle denunce presentate alla polizia. Una recente valutazione esterna del modello ha fatto emergere alcune problematiche allarmanti

It was the word of hundreds of Post Office workers against a faulty computer system. Guess who was believed? says Guardian columnist Marina Hyde

A scandal involving racial discrimination in the verification of childcare benefit claims continues to rock the Netherlands. Now the government accepts a fine in the millions. It is probably the first case in which a government has had to pay for data-based discrimination against citizens.

The work of Paul Virilio urges us to ask: What future disasters inhere in today’s technologies?

Facebook is invading our privacy and harming us economically and socially

In the end, we're all bored apes

Innovation might help us create a low-carbon food system, but that's not the same thing as a sustainable or ethical one.

There’s plenty that the current builders of the metaverse can learn from Second Life, both for better and worse.

Social capital is becoming economic capital.

Voyager, which pitches its tech to police, has suggested indicators such as Instagram usernames that show Arab pride can signal inclination towards extremism

Portugal has moved a step closer to ordering digital platforms such as Uber and Glovo to employ some of their drivers as staff with formal contracts and benefits, becoming the latest European nation to tackle the gig economy.

Classic essay about how software routinely bumbles human names.

Facebook employees have warned for years that as the company raced to become a global service it was failing to police abusive content in countries where such speech was likely to cause the most harm, according to interviews with five former employees and internal company documents viewed by Reuters.

The system stores driving data for at least a year.

Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don't yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records…