Dec 29, 2021
Justin Sherman for Wired points out the farce that is anonymized data: Data on hundreds of millions of Americans’ races, genders, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, political beliefs, internet searches, drug prescriptions, and GPS location histories (to name...
Dec 24, 2021
Many colleges use virtual proctoring software in an effort to reduce cheating on tests that students take virtually at home. But the software relies on facial recognition and assumptions about the proper testing environment. YR Media breaks down the flaws and even...
Nov 12, 2021
Patrick Sisson for The New York Times reports on the growing popularity of tracking customer movement in stores: Complicating efforts to address privacy concerns is a lack of regulatory clarity. Without an overarching federal privacy law or even a shared definition of...
Oct 1, 2021
Companies collect and aggregate location data from millions of people’s phones. Then that data gets sold in a multibillion-dollar market. Jon Keegan and Alfred Ng for The Markup report on who’s doing the collecting and where your data goes: Once a person’s...
Aug 6, 2021
The Wall Street Journal tested out the TikTok algorithm with bots to see how quickly the app converged towards a user’s pre-specified interests. As viewing time of videos as the main signal, and to nobody’s surprise (I think), it only took a couple of hours for TikTok...
Jun 8, 2021
Traitor or hero? If you follow along with the party line, i.e., the gov’t then you would believe Edward is a traitor. However, if you delve deep into his life and story then you’ll realize he is a HERO. He brought light to the dark places in our...
