OneZero
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Homeless in the Shadow of Apple’s $5 Billion Campus - 8 avril 2021
A group of ex-tech workers, gig employees, and locals priced out of the housing market are fighting for affordable housing in Silicon Valley
At the corner of East Homestead and North Wolfe Road in Cupertino, California, stands a large oak tree planted by one of the most successful companies in history — Apple. The (...)
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Oklahoma Quietly Launched a Mass Surveillance Program to Track Uninsured Drivers - 8 avril 2021
Cash-strapped governments are turning to tech that converts cameras into automated license plate readers to penalize uninsured drivers
In March, the president of Rekor Systems Inc., Robert Berman, told investors that 2020 was a “transformative year.” The surveillance tech company’s platform, Rekor One, which (...)
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Clear Conquered U.S. Airports. Now It Wants to Own Your Entire Digital Identity. - 27 mars 2021
‘You are your driver’s license, your credit card, your health care card, your building access card’
In March, the air travel industry ground to a halt.
The coronavirus pandemic was spreading, and both airlines and passengers were caught unprepared. Most of the world, including the United States, began turning away (...)
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3G Could End This Year. For People Who Rely on Basic Phones, That’s a Big Problem. - 27 mars 2021
Some rural residents, religious communities, and people who just like simple phones are still reliant on the vanishing network
Over the years, Mia Lipsit has innovated a number of tech workarounds to avoid buying a smartphone : She’s hacked her Kindle Fire to download Google Play (so she can use the Whole Foods (...)
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The Soft Corruption of Big Tech’s Antitrust Defense - 23 mars 2021
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are paying third parties millions to make their case. Sometimes we know about the money, sometimes we don’t.
When New York State Senator Michael Gianaris called a hearing last September to discuss his new Big Tech antitrust bill, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft (...)
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The Algorithmic Auditing Trap. - 18 mars 2021
‘Bias audits’ for discriminatory tools are a promising idea, but current approaches leave much to be desired
This op-ed was written by Mona Sloane, a sociologist and senior research scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible A.I. and a fellow at the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge. Her work focuses on design (...)
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Google’s ‘Privacy-First Web’ Is Really a Google-First Web - 7 mars 2021
Why the search giant can afford to kill the cookie
For two decades, the cookie has been an emblem of the online advertising model that powers much of the open web — and the privacy invasions that come with it. Now, the cookie as we know it is dying.
Online advertising will live on, of course, and so will privacy (...)
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How Google’s ’Privacy Sandbox’ Will Target Ads Without Singling Users Out - 6 mars 2021
A handful of new standards will personalize ads without the privacy violations of today
The internet is about to experience a dramatic shift toward privacy.
Today, advertisers like Facebook and Google use cookies to track people as they interact with different websites, building profiles for the sake of targeted (...)
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Facebook Scraped 1 Billion Pictures From Instagram to Train Its A.I. — But Spared European Users - 5 mars 2021
The team purposely excluded Instagram images from the European Union, likely because of GDPR
Facebook researchers announced a breakthrough yesterday : They have trained a “self-supervised” algorithm using 1 billion Instagram images, proving that the algorithm doesn’t need human-labeled images to learn to accurately (...)
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China’s ‘Sharp Eyes’ Program Aims to Surveil 100% of Public Space - 5 mars 2021
The program turns neighbors into agents of the surveillance state
One of China’s largest and most pervasive surveillance networks got its start in a small county about seven hours north of Shanghai.
In 2013, the local government in Pingyi County began installing tens of thousands of security cameras across urban (...)
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Clearview AI Is Taking Facial Recognition Privacy to the Supreme Court - 27 février 2021
International regulators have found Clearview AI’s technology breaches their privacy laws
Clearview AI plans to challenge an Illinois law guarding against private facial recognition databases in the Supreme Court, according to Bloomberg Law.
The Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) has been a thorn (...)
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The Shoddy Science Behind Emotional Recognition Tech - 19 février 2021
People’s facial expressions line up with their emotions less than half the time
Facial recognition isn’t just for verifying a person’s identity. In recent years, researchers and startups have focused on other ways to apply the technology, like emotion recognition, which tries to read facial expressions to understand (...)
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Amazon Is Watching. The Internet giant is wiring homes… - 18 février 2021
The Internet giant is wiring homes, neighborhoods, and cities with cameras and microphones, and powering the nation’s intelligence services. Are we sure we can trust it ?
When you think of Amazon, you might think of comparison shopping from your couch, buying exactly what you want, for less than you’d pay at the (...)
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The A.I. Industry Is Exploiting Gig Workers Around the World — Sometimes for Just $8 a Day - 13 février 2021
A new paper sheds light on the industry’s troubling relationship with the global gig economy
Modern artificial intelligence relies on algorithms processing millions of examples or images or text. A picture of a bird in an A.I. dataset would be manually tagged “bird” so that the algorithm associated aspects of that (...)
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Despite Scanning Millions With Facial Recognition, Feds Caught Zero Imposters at Airports Last Year - 10 février 2021
U.S. Customs and Border Protection scanned more than 23 million people in public places with facial recognition technology in 2020
U.S. Customs and Border Protection scanned more than 23 million people with facial recognition technology at airports, seaports, and pedestrian crossings in 2020, the agency recently (...)
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Amazon’s New CEO Is Shaping How the Military Uses Killer Robots - 5 février 2021
Andy Jassy is a member of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence
On July 1, Amazon will have a new CEO. Andy Jassy, who is replacing Jeff Bezos, helped build the company’s cloud business from scratch, cementing its servers as a cornerstone of the internet.
But not all of Jassy’s work has been (...)
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How Amazon Swindled Its Own Drivers, Got Caught, and Ended Up Richer - 3 février 2021
The company’s $62 million FTC settlement shows ‘corporate crime pays’
One of the world’s richest companies was accused of systematically shortchanging some of its lowest-paid, most precarious workers. It got sued by the U.S. government. It eventually agreed to pay back the money it had pocketed. And it came out (...)
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Black-Box Algorithms Shouldn’t Decide Who Gets a Vaccine - 31 janvier 2021
A failure at Stanford teaches us the limits of medical algorithms
“The algorithm did it” has become a popular defense for powerful entities who turn to math to make complex moral choices. It’s an excuse that recalls a time when the public was content to understand computer code as somehow objective. But the past few (...)
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Anatomy of a Facebook Privacy Scandal - 31 janvier 2021
How Facebook reacts to privacy scandals on the inside and why they persist
It had been a turbulent few weeks for Facebook when Mark Zuckerberg addressed his employees last Thursday. WhatsApp, the crown jewel of Facebook’s messaging empire, was under fire. A poorly worded privacy update had sent its users flocking (...)
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Nextdoor Is Quietly Replacing the Small-Town Paper - 27 janvier 2021
While Facebook and Twitter get the scrutiny, Nextdoor is reshaping politics one neighborhood at a time
One year ago, Delaware’s second-largest school district was in trouble. A failed referendum in 2019, on the heels of state funding cuts two years prior, had left it staring down a $10 million deficit that raised (...)
