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How Amazon automatically tracks and fires warehouse workers for ‘productivity’ - 25 avril 2019
Documents show how the company tracks and terminates workers
Amazon’s fulfillment centers are the engine of the company — massive warehouses where workers track, pack, sort, and shuffle each order before sending it on its way to the buyer’s door.
Critics say those fulfillment center workers face strenuous (...)
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The problem with AI ethics - 22 avril 2019
Is Big Tech’s embrace of AI ethics boards actually helping anyone ?
Last week, Google announced that it is creating a new external ethics board to guide its "responsible development of AI." On the face of it, this seemed like an admirable move, but the company was hit with immediate criticism.
Researchers from (...)
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Inmates in Finland are training AI as part of prison labor - 30 mars 2019
Prison labor" is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor : classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. Though the startup in question, Vainu, sees the partnership as a kind of prison reform that teaches valuable (...)
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Taylor Swift tracked stalkers with facial recognition tech at her concert - 14 décembre 2018
Taylor Swift held a concert at California’s Rose Bowl this past May that was monitored by a facial recognition system. The system’s target ? Hundreds of Swift’s stalkers.
Swift’s facial recognition system was built into a kiosk that displayed highlights of her rehearsals, which would secretly record onlookers’ faces. (...)
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The Secret Service wants to test facial recognition around the White House - 6 décembre 2018
The US Secret Service has revealed plans for a test of facial recognition surveillance around the White House, with the goal of identifying "subjects of interest" who might pose a threat to the president. The document was published in late November, but the American Civil Liberties Union publicized its existence (...)
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Someone hacked printers worldwide, urging people to subscribe to PewDiePie - 1er décembre 2018
The fight over who gets to have the most-subscribed channel on YouTube spilled into the real world months ago when Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg fans started campaigning to raise awareness of the Swedish star. The grassroots effort has, for the most part, been in good fun "” but recently, people on social media have (...)
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Facial recognition scans are expanding to Delta flights in Atlanta International Airport - 30 novembre 2018
Delta will soon use facial recognition for international flights at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport later this year. Biometric face scanning will be optional, meant as an option to save travelers time from checking in, as spotted by TechCrunch.
Those who don’t want their faces scanned could (...)
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Amazon told employees it would continue to sell facial recognition software to law enforcement - 9 novembre 2018
Amazon has come under fire of late for the licensing of its controversial Rekognition system, a powerful piece of facial recognition software, to government and law enforcement agencies, with the most recent development involving revelations that Amazon met with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over (...)
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The long history behind the Google Walkout - 9 novembre 2018
Tech companies ignore labor history at their own peril
Last week, tens of thousands of Google employees around the globe a took part in a largely women-led walkout, organized in response to Google’s shielding and rewarding men who sexually harass their female co-workers. Protesters held signs that said “I reported (...)
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Amazon is investigating claims that employees deleted reviews and sold sales data to sellers - 17 septembre 2018
Employees have reportedly turned over proprietary sales information, deleted negative reviews, turned over reviewer e-mail addresses, or unbanned banned accounts
On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal published a report that revealed that sellers have bribed Amazon employees to get access to internal sales data or to (...)
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Oath’s new privacy policy allows it to scan your Yahoo and AOL mail for targeted advertising - 29 août 2018
This month, Oath updated its privacy policies, which grants the company the right to scan your AOL and Yahoo email for the purposes of tailoring ads for users.
Verizon acquired Yahoo in 2016, and brought AOL and Yahoo together under an unfortunately named brand : Oath. At the time, we noted that the merger, (...)
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This Japanese AI security camera shows the future of surveillance will be automated - 26 juin 2018
The world of automated surveillance is booming, with new machine learning techniques giving CCTV cameras the ability to spot troubling behavior without human supervision. And sooner or later, this tech will be coming to a store near you "” as illustrated by a new AI security cam built by Japanese telecom giant NTT (...)
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China wants to track citizens’ cars with mandatory RFID chips - 15 juin 2018
The government says it will help track congestion, but it’s likely to become another surveillance tool
The Chinese government is readying a program that will make it possible to track citizens’ cars using RFID chips, according to The Wall Street Journal. The program, which will be voluntary at first but mandatory (...)
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Drones taught to spot violent behavior in crowds using AI - 7 juin 2018
The work has questionable accuracy rates, but it shows how AI is being used to automate surveillance
Automated surveillance is going to become increasingly common as companies and researchers find new ways to use machine learning to analyze live video footage. A new project from scientists in the UK and India (...)
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New Homeland Security system will bring facial recognition to land borders this summer - 6 juin 2018
The Vehicle Face System is planned for testing in August at the Anzalduas Port of Entry in Texas
The week after the 2016 election, drivers exiting the United States at the Nogales border crossing would have noticed something out of the ordinary. A new canopy had been set up over the far-right lane of the (...)
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Amazon explains how Alexa recorded a private conversation and sent it to another user - 25 mai 2018
Amazon has been forced to explain how Alexa recorded a private conversation and sent it to an Echo user’s colleague without their knowledge. A Portland woman identified only as Danielle revealed the odd series of events in an interview with local TV station Kiro 7, claiming that an Amazon Echo device recorded a (...)
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Google’s Selfish Ledger is an unsettling vision of Silicon Valley social engineering - 25 mai 2018
This internal video from 2016 shows a Google concept for how total data collection could reshape society
Google has built a multibillion-dollar business out of knowing everything about its users. Now, a video produced within Google and obtained by The Verge offers a stunningly ambitious and unsettling look at how (...)
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Amazon needs to come clean about racial bias in its algorithms - 24 mai 2018
We shouldn’t be using unaudited facial recognition systems on public streets
Yesterday, Amazon’s quiet Rekognition program became very public, as new documents obtained by the ACLU of Northern California showed the system partnering with the city of Orlando and police camera vendors like Motorola Solutions for an (...)
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A Google update just created a big problem for anti-censorship tools - 19 avril 2018
Domain-fronting is now a thing of the past
App developers won’t be able to use Google to get around internet censorship anymore. The Google App Engine is discontinuing a practice called domain-fronting, which let services use Google’s network to get around state-level internet blocks.
A recent change in Google’s (...)
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Baidu’s new system can learn to imitate every accent - 19 avril 2018
One AI, 2,500 different characters
At the start of this year, Chinese search giant Baidu introduced a new system called DeepVoice. It uses deep learning, a popular artificial intelligence technique, to build a system that can convert text-to-speech. The first version was able to produce short sentences that, at (...)
