Bad Tech

Child welfare agencies across the country are turning to predictive analytics, but few families know they are subject to them.

At Google, a seemingly innocuous action can earn an employee the attention of the company’s corporate security department. For example, when Google wants to find out who has been accessing or leaking sensitive corporate information, the company often homes in on employees who are thinking about ...

When things go horribly wrong during a stay—the company’s secretive safety team jumps in.

Local shops in Turkey have been transporting groceries for centuries. Getir promises to bring them to your doorstep in 13 minutes or less.

The social media giant failed to anticipate a predictable surge in misinformation and threats of violence.

“If you have a website, do you want to include disabled people or do you want to exclude them? That’s why it's a civil right,” one expert said.

Tesla is being a little more cautious about its Full Self-Driving timeline with regulators than with the public, according to...

Personal Blog

By Abeba Birhane. We live in a world where technological corporations hold unprecedented power and influence. Technological solutions to social, political, and economic challenges are rampant. In the Global South, technology that is developed with Western perspectives, values, and interests is imported with little regulation or critical scrutiny. This work examines how Western tech monopolies, with their desire to dominate, control and influence social, political, and cultural discourse, share common characteristics with traditional colonialism. However, while traditional colonialism is driven by political and government forces, algorithmic colonialism is driven by corporate agendas. While the former used brute force domination, colonialism in the age of AI takes the form of ‘state-of-the-art algorithms’ and ‘AI driven solutions’ to social problems. Not only is Western-developed AI unfit for African problems, the West’s algorithmic invasion simultaneously impoverishes development of local products while also leaving the continent dependent on Western software and infrastructure. By drawing examples from various parts of the continent, this paper illustrates how the AI invasion of Africa echoes colonial era exploitation. This paper then concludes by outlining a vision of AI rooted in local community needs and interests.

By Stefano Diana.Frontiers are usually zones of trafficking, and the moving boundaries of knowledge are no exception. There you may encounter the weird and adorable creatures known as paradoxes. [

New operations in China and India will expand the EV pioneer’s carbon footprint. The company should be upfront about it for the sake of customers who care about climate change.

LONDON (AP) — Uber drivers in Britain are entitled to benefits like paid holidays and minimum wage, the country’s top court ruled Friday, in a decision that threatens the company’s business model and holds broad implications for the gig economy.

Recently I came across a Croatian news website, which seems to use dark patterns to avoid being GDPR compliant. Dark patterns are design tricks that companies use to make us do something we didn’t want to do while browsing products. For example, forcing us to close a pop up window only for that li

Due to conflicting information BleepingComputer has received, we have removed our original article.

Signal, an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform was blocked in Iran and suggested a TLS proxy workaround to help its users bypass censorship. However, researchers have discovered vulnerabilities in the workaround that can render Signal's suggestions moot and pose risks for the users.

Contratti precari, mancanza di alloggi, infrastrutture inadeguate: l’arrivo di Amazon a Rovigo ha sconvolto la comunità locale, nell’impotenza di lavoratori e sindacati

Type in “empathy,” into a search engine and you get more than 117 million results. That’s a lot, no matter who is counting. And after six…

Judge bars former Tallahassee city ethics officer from internet-connected devices after her arrest for cyberstalking.

A pop-up notification has alerted the messaging app's users to a practice that's been in place since 2016.

Web advertising moving towards privacy - is it possible? Six issues to consider In 2016 I argued that 2017 will be the year of privacy. It was but we did not stop there. We are still in the cycle of transforming technologies into processes with privacy in mind. This process

A growing group of lawyers are uncovering, navigating, and fighting the automated systems that deny the poor housing, jobs, and basic services.

Fattorini si lamentano delle nuove condizioni di lavoro. Just Eat si sfila dall'accordo. Il tribunale di Palermo condanna Glovo a un'assunzione. Il braccio di ferro con il ministero continua

Haussmanizzazione, gentrificazione, espulsione

Kentucky Fried Chicken wants to move into Addis Ababa. Among the last of African countries to be colonized by fast food, Ethiopia just received their first multinational fast food chain in 2018, when two Pizza Huts opened in Addis.

An inquiry into the rich history of radical experiments to reorganize information.

This is another of Jonathan’s thought provoking pieces that one should definitely read. Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001 Cross-posted from Jonathan’s website If you find yourself wondering [...]

Facebook Inc. is again being sued for allegedly spying on Instagram users, this time through the unauthorized use of their mobile phone cameras.The lawsuit springs from media reports in July that the photo-sharing app appeared to be accessing iPhone cameras even when they weren’t actively being used.Facebook denied the reports and blamed a bug, which it said it was correcting, for triggering what it described as false notifications that Instagram was accessing iPhone cameras.

In the last couple of weeks, a lot of people have been asking me about what I’ve been reading as reference points for my commentary on the…