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Police in Ogden, Utah and small cities around the US are using these surveillance technologies - 19 avril 2021
Police departments want to know as much as they legally can. But does ever-greater surveillance technology serve the public interest ?
At a conference in New Orleans in 2007, Jon Greiner, then the chief of police in Ogden, Utah, heard a presentation by the New York City Police Department about a sophisticated new (...)
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Facebook’s ad algorithms are still excluding women from seeing jobs - 12 avril 2021
Its ad-delivery system is excluding women from opportunities without regard to their qualifications. That would be illegal under US employment law.
Facebook is withholding certain job ads from women because of their gender, according to the latest audit of its ad service.
The audit, conducted by independent (...)
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The NYPD used Clearview’s controversial facial recognition tool. Here’s what you need to know - 12 avril 2021
Newly-released emails show New York police have been widely using the controversial Clearview AI facial recognition system—and making misleading statements about it.
It’s been a busy week for Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition company that uses 3 billion photos scraped from the web to power a search (...)
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How beauty filters took over social media - 3 avril 2021
The most widespread use of augmented reality isn’t in gaming : it’s the face filters on social media. The result ? A mass experiment on girls and young women.
Veronica started using filters to edit pictures of herself on social media when she was 14 years old. She remembers everyone in her middle school being (...)
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How to poison the data that Big Tech uses to surveil you - 3 avril 2021
Algorithms are meaningless without good data. The public can exploit that to demand change.
Every day, your life leaves a trail of digital breadcrumbs that tech giants use to track you. You send an email, order some food, stream a show. They get back valuable packets of data to build up their understanding of (...)
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He got Facebook hooked on AI. Now he can’t fix its misinformation addiction - 27 mars 2021
The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem.
Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, a director of AI at Facebook, was apologizing to his audience.
It was March 23, 2018, just days after the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy (...)
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This is how we lost control of our faces - 8 février 2021
The largest ever study of facial-recognition data shows how much the rise of deep learning has fueled a loss of privacy.
In 1964, mathematician and computer scientist Woodrow Bledsoe first attempted the task of matching suspects’ faces to mugshots. He measured out the distances between different facial features in (...)
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How our data encodes systematic racism - 29 janvier 2021
Technologists must take responsibility for the toxic ideologies that our data sets and algorithms reflect.
I’ve often been told, “The data does not lie.” However, that has never been my experience. For me, the data nearly always lies. Google Image search results for “healthy skin” show only light-skinned women, and a (...)
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The coming war on the hidden algorithms that trap people in poverty - 8 janvier 2021
A growing group of lawyers are uncovering, navigating, and fighting the automated systems that deny the poor housing, jobs, and basic services.
Miriam was only 21 when she met Nick. She was a photographer, fresh out of college, waiting tables. He was 16 years her senior and a local business owner who had worked (...)
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Singapore’s police now have access to contact tracing data - 5 janvier 2021
Contact tracing apps and systems around the world have faced longstanding questions about privacy and trust.
The news : Police will be able to access data collected by Singapore’s covid-19 contact tracing system for use in criminal investigations, a senior official said on Monday. The announcement contradicts the (...)
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Inside China’s unexpected quest to protect data privacy - 4 janvier 2021
A new privacy law would look a lot like Europe’s GDPR—but will it restrict state surveillance ?
Late in the summer of 2016, Xu Yuyu received a call that promised to change her life. Her college entrance examination scores, she was told, had won her admission to the English department of the Nanjing University of (...)
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Why 2020 was a pivotal, contradictory year for facial recognition - 29 décembre 2020
The racial justice movement pushed problems with the technology into public consciousness—but despite scandals and bans, its growth isn’t slowing.
America’s first confirmed wrongful arrest by facial recognition technology happened in January 2020. Robert Williams, a Black man, was arrested in his driveway just (...)
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Live facial recognition is tracking kids suspected of being criminals - 25 octobre 2020
In Buenos Aires, the first known system of its kind is hunting down minors who appear in a national database of alleged offenders.
In a national database in Argentina, tens of thousands of entries detail the names, birthdays, and national IDs of people suspected of crimes. The database, known as the Consulta (...)
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Why Facebook’s political-ad ban is taking on the wrong problem - 10 septembre 2020
A moratorium on new political ads just before election day tackles one kind of challenge caused by social media. It’s just not the one that matters.
When Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would stop accepting political advertising in the week before the US presidential election, he was responding to (...)
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The long, complicated history of “people analytics” - 9 septembre 2020
If you work for Bank of America, or the US Army, you might have used technology developed by Humanyze. The company grew out of research at MIT’s cross-disciplinary Media Lab and describes its products as “science-backed analytics to drive adaptability.”
If that sounds vague, it might be deliberate. Among the things (...)
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Eight case studies on regulating biometric technology show us a path forward - 4 septembre 2020
A new report from the AI Now Institute reveals how different regulatory approaches work or fall short in protecting communities from surveillance.
Amba Kak was in law school in India when the country rolled out the Aadhaar project in 2009. The national biometric ID system, conceived as a comprehensive identity (...)
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Facebook is training robot assistants to hear as well as see - 30 août 2020
The company’s AI lab is pushing the boundaries of its virtual simulation platform to train AI agents to carry out tasks like “Get my ringing phone.”
In June 2019, Facebook’s AI lab, FAIR, released AI Habitat, a new simulation platform for training AI agents. It allowed agents to explore various realistic virtual (...)
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The problems AI has today go back centuries - 30 août 2020
Algorithmic discrimination and “ghost work” didn’t appear by accident. Understanding their long, troubling history is the first step toward fixing them.
In March of 2015, protests broke out at the University of Cape Town in South Africa over the campus statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes, a mining (...)
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The UK exam debacle reminds us that algorithms can’t fix broken systems - 29 août 2020
The problem began when the exam regulator lost sight of the ultimate goal—and pushed for standardization above all else.
When the UK first set out to find an alternative to school leaving qualifications, the premise seemed perfectly reasonable. Covid-19 had derailed any opportunity for students to take the exams (...)
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Podcast : Want consumer privacy ? Try China - 28 août 2020
Forget the idea that China doesn’t care about privacy—its citizens will soon have much greater consumer privacy protections than Americans.
The narrative in the US that the Chinese don’t care about data privacy is simply misguided. It’s true that the Chinese government has built a sophisticated surveillance apparatus (...)
