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Israeli phone hacking company faces court fight over sales to Hong Kong - 28 août 2020
"The workers inside the company didn’t join to help the Chinese dictatorship," says one human rights lawyer.
Human rights advocates filed a new court petition against the Israeli phone hacking company Cellebrite, urging Israel’s ministry of defense to halt the firm’s exports to Hong Kong, where security forces have (...)
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Participation-washing could be the next dangerous fad in machine learning - 25 août 2020
Many people already participate in the field’s work without recognition or pay.
The AI community is finally waking up to the fact that machine learning can cause disproportionate harm to already oppressed and disadvantaged groups. We have activists and organizers to thank for that. Now, machine-learning (...)
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Inside NSO, Israel’s billion-dollar spyware giant - 19 août 2020
The world’s most notorious surveillance company says it wants to clean up its act. Go on, we’re listening.
Maâti Monjib speaks slowly, like a man who knows he’s being listened to.
It’s the day of his 58th birthday when we speak, but there’s little celebration in his voice. “The surveillance is hellish,” Monjib tells (...)
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8 million people, 14 alerts : why some covid-19 apps are staying silent - 11 août 2020
Critics have rounded on contact tracing apps in France and Australia for sending out almost no virus notifications. But experts say it’s not a total failure—as long as we learn what went wrong.
When France launched its app for digital contact tracing, it looked like a possible breakthrough for the virus-ravaged (...)
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In machines we trust - 7 août 2020
Don’t believe everything you hear.
Some of the most important decisions in our lives are being made by artificial intelligence, determining things like who gets into college, lands a job, receives social services, or goes to jail—often without us having any clue.
In season one of In Machines We Trust, host (...)
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Human rights activists want to use AI to help prove war crimes in court - 9 juillet 2020
It would take years for humans to scour the tens of thousands of hours of footage that document violations in Yemen. With machine learning, it takes just days.
In 2015, alarmed by an escalating civil war in Yemen, Saudi Arabia led an air campaign against the country to defeat what it deemed a threatening rise of (...)
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Why tech didn’t save us from covid-19 - 28 juin 2020
America’s paralysis reveals a deep and fundamental flaw in how the nation thinks about innovation.
Technology has failed the US and much of the rest of the world in its most important role : keeping us alive and healthy. As I write this, more than 380,000 are dead, the global economy is in ruins, and the covid-19 (...)
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A new US bill would ban the police use of facial recognition - 28 juin 2020
The news : US Democratic lawmakers have introduced a bill that would ban the use of facial recognition technology by federal law enforcement agencies. Specifically, it would make it illegal for any federal agency or official to “acquire, possess, access, or use” biometric surveillance technology in the US. It would (...)
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The two-year fight to stop Amazon from selling face recognition to the police - 18 juin 2020
This week’s moves from Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM mark a major milestone for researchers and civil rights advocates in a long and ongoing fight over face recognition in law enforcement.
In the summer of 2018, nearly 70 civil rights and research organizations wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos demanding that Amazon stop (...)
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This startup is using AI to give workers a “productivity score” - 6 juin 2020
Enaible is one of a number of new firms that are giving employers tools to help keep tabs on their employees—but critics fear this kind of surveillance undermines trust.
In the last few months, millions of people around the world stopped going into offices and started doing their jobs from home. These workers may (...)
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Nearly 40% of Icelanders are using a covid app—and it hasn’t helped much - 22 mai 2020
The country has the highest penetration of any automated contact tracing app in the world, but one senior figure says it “wasn’t a game changer.”
When Iceland got its first case of covid-19 on February 28, an entire apparatus sprang into action.
The country had already been testing some people at high risk of (...)
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India is forcing people to use its covid app, unlike any other democracy - 21 mai 2020
Millions of Indians have no choice but to download the country’s tracking technology if they want to keep their jobs or avoid reprisals.
The world has never seen anything quite like Aarogya Setu. Two months ago, India’s app for coronavirus contact tracing didn’t exist ; now it has nearly 100 million users. Prime (...)
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Why contact tracing may be a mess in America - 21 mai 2020
High caseloads, low testing, and American attitudes toward government authority could pose serious challenges for successful efforts to track and contain coronavirus cases.
Technology can certainly supplement human contact tracing. Smartphone apps that flag when someone may have been in close contact with an (...)
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Podcast : Who watches the pandemic watchers ? We do - 21 mai 2020
No sooner had the stay-at-home orders come down than mobile app developers around the world began to imagine how our smartphones could make it safer for everyone to venture back out. Dozens of countries and a handful of US states are now urging citizens to download government-blessed apps that use GPS-based (...)
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Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models - 14 mai 2020
Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models
Machine-learning models trained on normal behavior are showing cracks —forcing humans to step in to set them straight.
In the week of April 12-18, the top 10 search terms on Amazon.com were : toilet paper, face mask, hand sanitizer, paper towels, (...)
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A flood of coronavirus apps are tracking us. Now it’s time to keep track of them. - 7 mai 2020
There’s a deluge of apps that detect your covid-19 exposure, often with little transparency. Our Covid Tracing Tracker project will document them.
As the covid-19 pandemic rages, technologists everywhere have been rushing to build apps, services, and systems for contact tracing : identifying and notifying all (...)
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An ex-Google engineer is scraping YouTube to pop our filter bubbles | MIT Technology Review - 22 avril 2020
He’s built a website that lets you see how often YouTube’s algorithm recommends videos, so you can find out where it wants to take you.
If you’ve ever used YouTube, you’ve probably noticed that it’s easy to fall into a sort of viewing trance : you start out watching a funny cat video, and suddenly it’s an hour later (...)
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The Human Screenome Project will capture everything we do on our phones - 5 février 2020
It proposes taking screenshots of your smartphone activity every five seconds to better understand our digital lives. Is it worth it ?
If Byron Reeves has his way, the concept of “screen time” will be a relic. Instead, it will be your “screenome” that’s important.
Reeves, a professor at Stanford University, and two (...)
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An elegy for cash : the technology we might never replace - 3 janvier 2020
Cash is gradually dying out. Will we ever have a digital alternative that offers the same mix of convenience and freedom ?
Think about the last time you used cash. How much did you spend ? What did you buy, and from whom ? Was it a one-time thing, or was it something you buy regularly ?
Was it legal ?
If you’d (...)
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This is how Facebook’s AI looks for bad stuff - 19 novembre 2019
The context : The vast majority of Facebook’s moderation is now done automatically by the company’s machine-learning systems, reducing the amount of harrowing content its moderators have to review. In its latest community standards enforcement report, published earlier this month, the company claimed that 98% of (...)
