Ethical Tech

UK eyes 'walk me home' phone-tracker to protect lone women

A top British government official is backing a phone company’s proposal for a new tracking service to help protect women walking alone, an idea pitched amid ongoing outrage over the slayings of two young women who were targeted near their homes in London. The chief executive of Britain’s biggest phone company, BT, proposed the “walk […]

Facebook Whistleblower sets stage for louder EU regulations

After a whistleblower uncovered to the U.S. Congress Facebook’s misleading workflow, the European Parliament will fortify regulations on key players in the tech league, with global forces joining the operation. The EU’s proposal will aim at European companies alongside the Big Tech giants, Facebook, Alphabet Inc. entity Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. One of the […]

Google: flight search tool can help you fly 'greener'

Searching for flights on Google just got “greener.” A new search feature rolled out Wednesday tells users which flights have lower carbon emissions, giving them the ability to choose flights based on carbon emissions just as they would price or the number of layovers. A basic search for flights will give an estimate of how […]

Facebook’s Oversight Board demands answers on celebrity rules

Facebook’s oversight board said on Tuesday that it will set in motion an urgent examination process to inspect whether the social networking platform is mitigating posts for famous personages, leading to a direct content rules breach, according to Wall Street inquiry. Facebook’s oversight board is an independent group assigned by the platform to observe its moderation policies […]

UN urges moratorium on use of AI that imperils human rights

The U.N. human rights chief is calling for a moratorium on the use of artificial intelligence technology that poses a serious risk to human rights, including face-scanning systems that track people in public spaces. Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, also said Wednesday that countries should expressly ban AI applications which don’t […]

How 9/11 changed air travel: more security, less privacy

Ask anyone old enough to remember travel before Sept. 11, 2001, and you’re likely to get a gauzy recollection of what flying was like. There was security screening, but it wasn’t anywhere near as intrusive. There were no long checkpoint lines. Passengers and their families could walk right to the gate together, postponing goodbye hugs […]

MIT removes famous AI dataset due to distasteful image branding

Earlier this week, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) removed the 80 Million Tiny Images dataset used to train machine learning systems in distinguishing individuals under the pretense that it uses racist and misogynistic labels to identify people.  On Monday, the technology institute published a letter on its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) website, […]

Google’s wielded location data goes to Geofence warrants

As a prologue to the search engine’s plans to conjointly work with the government, Google announced on Thursday that it received around 20,000 geofence warrants from U.S. authorities, portraying a conceptualization on how these warrants are wielded into the system. Geofence warrants, or as alternatively referred to as reverse-location warrants, are a controversial modern concept. […]