Algorithms Allegedly Penalized Black Renters. The US Government Is Watching
[ad_1] Two years ago, Mary Louis submitted an application to rent an apartment at Granada Highlands in Malden, Massachusetts. She liked that the unit had two full bathrooms and that…
Iran Says Face Recognition Will ID Women Breaking Hijab Laws
[ad_1] Cathryn Grothe, a research analyst at Freedom House, a US government–backed nonprofit that works on human rights, says she has seen a shift in Iran in recent years away from a…
Amazon Investors Demand Answers About Its Cloud’s Human Rights Record
[ad_1] The proposed shareholder resolution also highlights Amazon’s relationship with the United Arab Emirates, which has been documented as targeting human rights defenders, journalists, and political dissidents. One group supporting…
San Francisco’s Killer Police Robots Threaten the City’s Most Vulnerable
[ad_1] One effect of AB 481 is to add local oversight to hardware like the kind obtained through a US Department of Defense program that sends billions of dollars of military…
Elon Musk’s Twitter Risks Big Fines From US Regulators
[ad_1] The FTC’s treatment of Facebook helps illustrate the danger to Musk and Twitter. In 2019, following a complaint alleging violation of a 2012 order, the agency hit the company…
Algorithms Quietly Run the City of Washington, DC—and Maybe Your Hometown
[ad_1] Washington, DC, is the home base of the most powerful government on earth. It’s also home to 690,000 people—and 29 obscure algorithms that shape their lives. City agencies use…
Europe Prepares to Rewrite the Rules of the Internet
[ad_1] Next week, a law takes effect that will change the internet forever—and make it much more difficult to be a tech giant. On November 1, the European Union’s Digital…
Meta’s VR Headset Harvests Personal Data Right Off Your Face
[ad_1] In November 2021, Facebook announced it would delete face recognition data extracted from images of more than 1 billion people and stop offering to automatically tag people in photos…
Biden’s AI Bill of Rights Is Toothless Against Big Tech
[ad_1] Last year, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced that the US needed a bill of rights for the age of algorithms. Harms from artificial…
Google Borrows From TikTok to Keep Gen Z Searching
[ad_1] In July, the Google executive who oversees the company’s lucrative and dominant search engine made a surprising admission. Younger users were diverting questions that would once have naturally flowed…
Trans Researchers Want Google Scholar to Stop Deadnaming Them
[ad_1] Picking her new name led Tess Tanenbaum to ponder many questions. Am I Josie or a Hanna? Should it sound similar to her previous masculine name? What will it…
How to Stop Robots From Becoming Racist
[ad_1] In 2017, Holliday contributed to a RAND report warning that resolving bias in machine learning requires hiring diverse teams and cannot be fixed through technical means alone. In 2020,…
Amazon’s iRobot Deal Would Give It Maps Inside Millions of Homes
[ad_1] After decades of creating war machines and home cleaning appliances, iRobot agreed to be acquired by Amazon for $1.7 billion, according to a joint statement by the two companies.…