Digital Ethics

I’ve heard it a few times: Don’t shop when you’re hungry, you’ll spend more and buy unhealthy food! There is more than a grain of truth to this, and plenty of empirical rese…

Newspaper says it bought access to details from world’s largest biometric database, used to administer public services

It’s official: John Deere and General Motors want to eviscerate the notion of ownership.

Twitter has a history of cooperating with Israeli authorities.

When you walk into a brick and mortar retail store like a Nordstrom, Cabela, or even Family Dollar, you're being tracked around the store. Not by an over-suspicious security guard, but by the store's wireless network, using your phone's Wi-Fi. The store then uses your phone to track you around the store, determine if you're a repeat visitor, see what departments you visit, and more. Here's how they do it, and how to stop them.

A company using technology in recycling bins to track smartphones has been asked to stop by the City of London Corporation.

Thomson ReutersGoogle is watching you while you shop in stores.Google has long tracked shoppers' activity online. Now it's stepping up its surveillance and

News that Facebook shared teens’ details with advertisers throws focus on firm’s ability to mine the data of its 2 billion users – and raises serious ethical questions

For nearly a year, Google was suppressing ProtonMail from search results for our primary keywords. This episode illustrates that Search Risk is serious and potentially fatal for small businesses.

A suburban Philadelphia school district remotely activates the cameras in school-provided laptops to spy on students in their homes, a lawsuit filed in federal court Tuesday alleged.

The long read: Investors are pouring money into apps that allow women to track their fertility. Can tech companies use data to change the world of women’s reproductive health?

Are you using a period tracking app for your menstrual cycle? Be careful! While you’re tracking your cycle, health data, moods, even sexual activity and medications, most apps out there are tracking YOU.  Most fertility apps (as well as fitness, health and diet apps - and any free app th

Recently, a slew of reports have popped up showing how fitness apps are logging and selling off your data to ad companies, city planners, and others. By their nature, these apps have a lot of sensitive personal data about you that you might not want out in the world. Let’s take a look at what’s going on.

After ProPublica revealed last year that Facebook advertisers could target housing ads to whites only, the company announced it had built a system to spot and reject discriminatory ads. We retested and found major omissions.

Cameras built into Dutch advertisement billboards at NS stations in the Netherlands have been recording the behaviour of passers-by.

After demonstrating how Facebook Messenger was collecting user geo-location data by default with Facebook Messenger to thousands of users, Facebook responded to the public and media pressure by releasing an updated product within 9 days.

The Silicon Valley giant says it deleted the accounts of the Chechen Republic’s tyrant — followed by 4 million people — because the U.S. government required it to do so.

Google Docs users are reporting various bugs today that result in them getting locked out of their documents. Most of the issues center on a mysterious Terms of Service violation. The reports...

Tolstoy's text victimized by modern technology, laziness.

An app supposed to detect when people on Twitter appeared to be suicidal has been suspended due to "serious" concerns.

BT and Phorm will not face prosecution for trials of technology that secretly intercepted and profiled the broadband traffic of tens of thousands of people, the Crown Prosecution Service has announced.

Nissan’s latest research project is ‘brain-to-vehicle’ (aka ‘B2V’) tech that could have your next car anticipating your driving reactions before you can even translate them into a turn of the wheel or applying the brake. The neural interface, which can not only improve reaction times, but also manage cabin comforts based on signals it takes […]

A San Francisco-based Facebook data scientist studied HTML code on 3.7 million profiles to find that 71% of users type comments and posts but don't submit them.

Facebook Inc. on Wednesday won its appeal at a Brussels court against Belgium’s privacy watchdog, allowing the U.S. tech company to restore its ability to collect information about internet users in the country not registered with the social media site.

Google has removed the 'gorilla' tag from its new Photos app, after it was found to be misidentifying images of black people

Chris Chambers: A covert experiment to influence the emotions of more than 600,000 people. A major scientific journal behaving like a rabbit in the headlights. A university in a PR tailspin

The story in the New York Times this week was unsettling: The New America Foundation, a major think tank, was getting rid of one of its teams of scholars, the Open Markets group. New America had warned its leader Barry Lynn that he was "imperiling the institution," the Times reported, after he and his group had...

Startup tells customer “Your unit will be denied server connection.”

In Australia pilot effort, company will ‘hash’ images, converting them into digital fingerprints that prevent any other attempts to upload the same pictures

On Wednesday, a Facebook employee in Nigeria shared footage of a minor inconvenience that he says speaks to tech’s larger diversity problem. In the video, a white man and a dark-skinned black man both try to get soap from a soap dispenser. The soap dispenses for the white man, but not the darker skinned man. After a bit of laughter, a person can be overheard chucking, “too black!”

The internet is awash in theories about Facebook using your smartphone's microphone to eavesdrop on your conversations. It's not. Here's why.

New tools are designed to show you how to post to Facebook and Twitter after you are dead.

Here's an unusual technique for managing your workers: Put up giant TV screens everyone can see that show exactly how fast each person is doing his or her job, and make the numbers glow bright red for those who don't keep up. That might sound like a nightmare scenario from [...]

The Long Read: The social network had a grand plan to connect millions of Indians to the internet. Here’s how it all went wrong

A recently discovered bug affecting cloud company Dropbox resulted in data that was supposedly deleted years ago being restored back to user accounts.

I have spent the past seven months gravely concerned for my future. With the imminent repeal of the Affordable Care Act and the subsequent massive cuts to Medicaid, my ability to receive the necessary supports to live and work in my community is at great risk. This will place me further at harm.

Samsung's SmartTVs are transmitting your voice commands to a third party.

Here's why these attacks present a much higher risk for civilian casualties and provoke significant anti-U.S. sentiment.

An upcoming service aims to keep a digital version of you alive for your loved ones after you die.

More than half of the selfies uploaded on Chinese social media are believed to have been edited using apps made by just one company. Meitu, which

People don’t just listen to Spotify, they live it.

The Roomba is generally regarded as a cute little robot friend that no one but dogs would consider to be a potential menace. But for the last couple of years, the robovacs have been quietly mapping homes to maximize efficiency. Now, the device’s makers plan to sell that data to smart home device manufacturers, turning the friendly robot into a creeping, creepy little spy.

A new Facebook Live show lets users vote to kill or save someone else’s relationship

Just in time for the new season of Black Mirror, another report of a company using smartphones to listen in on users has surfaced. The New York Times reported t...

New research shows an alarming new way to track web users Nearly every web browser now comes with a password manager tool, a lightweight version of the same service offered by plugins like LastPass and 1Password. But according to new research from Princeton's Center for Information Technology …

Canadian manufacturer We-Vibe collected data about temperature and vibration intensity, revealing intimate information without customers’ knowledge