Frankly, it was a little stressful to know that my application was being judged by a computer and not by a human being. A professional journalist, I had recently applied for a new job, and for the first part of the recruitment process the publisher made me play a number of simple online games from… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Ethical issues
Amazon’s Panorama box lets firms check if staff follow coronavirus rules
Amazon plans to sell companies a way to detect when staff are not wearing face masks or socially distancing. Beyond the pandemic, the system could also be used to track compliance of other workplace rules or to monitor the public – for example, to check the number of customers queuing in a store. It involves… Read more »
How artificial intelligence may be making you buy things
now more retailers are using AI (artificial intelligence) – software systems that can learn for themselves – to try to automatically predict and encourage our very specific preferences and purchases like never before. Retail consultant Daniel Burke, of Blick Rothenberg, calls this “the holy grail… to build up a profile of customers and suggest a product before… Read more »
Mall real estate company collected 5 million images of shoppers, say privacy watchdogs
The real estate company behind some of Canada’s most popular shopping centres embedded cameras inside its digital information kiosks at 12 shopping malls in major Canadian cities to collect millions of images — and used facial recognition technology without customers’ knowledge or consent — according to a new investigation by the federal, Alberta and B.C. privacy commissioners…. Read more »
A third of brands set to halt social media spending, survey says
Almost one in three top brands are set to stop spending on advertising with social media platforms like Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube due to hate speech policies, according to a new survey. Among major brands, five per cent said they have already withheld money from such platforms, and a further 26… Read more »
The algorithms that make big decisions about your life
In many ways, social-media platforms are simply giant algorithms. At their heart, they work out what you’re interested in and then give you more of it – using as many data points as they can get their hands on. Every “like”, watch, click is stored. Most apps also glean more data from your web-browsing habits… Read more »
Coronavirus: How China’s using surveillance to tackle outbreak
The coronavirus pandemic may have emerged in China, but the country now has fewer cases than the US, Italy and Spain. The Chinese government has used tools such as phone tracking to control the outbreak. Other countries are starting to look at similar technological solutions. But how does China’s controversial surveillance system work and can… Read more »
To Track Coronavirus, Israel Moves to Tap Secret Trove of Cellphone Data
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has authorized the country’s internal security agency to tap into a vast and previously undisclosed trove of cellphone data to retrace the movements of people who have contracted the coronavirus and identify others who should be quarantined because their paths crossed. Source: New York Times Date: March 19th, 2020… Read more »
How computers wrote BBC election stories
For the first time, BBC News published a news story for every constituency that declared election results overnight – all written by a computer. It was the BBC’s biggest test of machine-generated journalism so far. Each of nearly 700 articles – most in English but 40 of them in Welsh – was checked by a… Read more »
The Chinese suicides prevented by AI from afar
Li Fan, a 21-year-old student, attempted suicide after posting a brief message on the Chinese Twitter-like platform Weibo just after Valentine’s Day. “I can’t go on anymore. I’m going to give up,” he wrote. Soon after, he lost consciousness. He was in debt, had fallen out with his mother and was suffering from severe depression…. Read more »
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