Digital Ethics

Families were subjected to around-the-clock visits from deputies, who often arrived without evidence of a crime.

Edgenuity involves short answers graded by an algorithm, and students have already cracked it

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 program, sought to collect the fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs of all residents. It wasn’t long, Kak remembers, before stories about its devastating consequences began to spread.…

Dispatches from Editor-in-Chief Julia Angwin

Facebook is sort of banning political ads in the week before the 2020 election and making other well-intentioned tweaks. That’s not nearly enough.

Palantir powers Ice immigration raids, the defense sector and police surveillance. It is the big tobacco of the tech world

On August 31, Airbnb launched Project Lighthouse, an initiative meant to “uncover, measure, and overcome discrimination” on the home-sharing platform. According to the company, Project Lighthouse will identify discrimination by measuring whether a renter’s perceived race correlates with differences in the rate or quality of that person’s bookings, cancellations, or reviews. This project comes amid…

The former FBI agent Peter Strzok worries that Americans will never learn the full story about Trump’s relationship with Russia.

Social media is unquestionably the vector for increasingly dangerous misinformation.

The company is surveilling dozens of private Facebook groups in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain, according to an internal web tool and reports left on the open internet.

Amazon and IBM get Covid screening systems from companies that use their technology to oppress minority groups

When Amanda Kemper found out that artificial intelligence would help monitor students during her mechanical engineering class's final exam this summer, she was worried.

Empirical studies have suggested that language-capable robots have the persuasive power to shape the shared moral norms based on how they respond to human norm violations. This persuasive power presents cause for concern, but also the opportunity to persuade humans to cultivate their own moral development. We argue that a truly socially integrated and morally competent robot must be willing to communicate its objection to humans’ proposed violations of shared norms by using strategies such as blame-laden rebukes, even if doing so may violate other standing norms, such as politeness. By draw...

Americans, frustrated they don't have more control over their data, would gladly switch to companies that prioritize privacy.

Alexa is in her element. With more of us working or staying at home, we’ve never been more in need of her wifely services. Alexa, Siri, Google Home, and other “smart wives” — feminised technologies that take on the duties and traits of stereotypical housewives reminiscent of the 1950s — are on hand to help in this emerging crisis. But “helping” might not be all they are doing.

Lincolnshire police plan to test facial recognition and behavioral tech that infers people's moods and expressions by analyzing CCTV footage.

The data set’s ripple effects are immeasurable

The company will pay Illinois users between $200 and $400 over claims that it violated the state’s facial recognition law.

An 11th-hour reprieve for Uber and Lyft.

Problems in the underlying data mean we can't leave algorithms to decide things on their own.

The immigration agency has used facial recognition in the past.

In online settings, I can make adjustments for this. I can change my account settings, make new passwords, do things in incognito mode, use a VPN, etc. But this is real life. And this is my face. I can't VPN my face or change it or even necessarily know when I'm being identified.— Calli Schroeder (@Iwillleavenow) December 15, 2018

Pop star’s reported use of software to root out stalkers may be well meant, but it fuels a disturbing trend, experts say

New ACLU test illustrates the limits of Amazon’s Rekognition system

The NYPD has previously stated that the technology is used to gather leads on suspects for crimes, such as robberies and shootings, not to identify people in crowds or at rallies

Currently, the department’s Patrol Guide allows police to run facial recognition searches on anyone suspected of a crime or anyone who may have witnessed a crime.

The tech firm is fighting efforts to make it pay for local media content.

Microsoft Excel: 1 — Human Genetics: 0.

chants of “fuck the algorithm” as a speaker talks of losing her place at medical school because she was downgraded. pic.twitter.com/P15jpuBscB— huck (@HUCKmagazine) August 16, 2020

According to internal discussions, Facebook removed "strikes" so that conservative pages were not penalized for violations of misinformation policies.

Similar content is also readily accessible across Twitter, YouTube and Reddit, says UK-based counter-extremist group

If the appeal doesn't work out for Uber, it will be banking on voters to determine its fate in voting on Proposition 22 in November.

Dark patterns are as old as the internet itself. For over 30 years, the web has served as a breeding ground for manipulative design—and we’ve been attempting to stop it for nearly as long. In an impressive act of foresight, Rolf Molich and Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group started creati

You might not even realize these things are causing anxiety.

Nomophobia is the fear of being without your phone or without cellular service. While not recognized as an official disorder, it is a growing problem.

Ed Bridges, 37, from Cardiff, brought a legal challenge after having his image captured twice.

Dropshippers buy cheap products from China and then pay internet celebrities to promote them.

This paper examines the ethical and legal issues arising from the closure of a data-rich firms such as Facebook and provides four policy recommendations to mitigate the resulting harms to society.

Quantifying the accuracy of vision/facial recognition on identifying PPE masks

If engineers don’t apply ethical thinking to the design process, regulation will be required in the future.

A four-year effort to monitor parolees in Indiana with bracelets and use AI algorithms to predict their behavior raises red flags.

The public deserves to know the extent to which Apple employees have been listening to our private conversations and intimate moments

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, contact tracing was considered the best hope for getting people back to offices and schools safely without a vaccine. The tech industry was optimistic that apps would provide a faster, more effective alternative to the usual painstaking human process of calling and interviewing the networks of infected people to figure out possible sources of exposure.

Facebook’s employees and fact-checking partners say they are left in the dark about how the company decides what content stays up and what comes down.

Researchers at security firm Check Point uncovered a flaw that could have allowed attackers to extract personal information from Alexa accounts.

Researchers call for new regulations to protect users, and society, in case of collapse

Victory in world-first legal challenge hailed as huge step in fight against oppressive surveillance tool

Pinterest has always been about aspiration. It is a platform for sharing beautiful images, curating galleries of an idealized world. Users…

Researchers have demonstrated that they can fool a modern face recognition system into seeing someone who isn’t there. A team from the cybersecurity firm McAfee set up the attack against a facial recognition system similar to those currently used at airports for passport verification. By using machine learning, they created an image that looked like…