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Virtual reality is coming to the newsroom and bringing with it questions about presence and empathy

Lancaster University researchers say their 'Living Room of the Future' is not just a peek at what could await us as the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution gathers pace.

"Amazon, Apple and Google all employ staff who listen to customer voice recordings from their smart speakers and voice assistant apps."

Kromtech Security Researchers have discovered another publically accessible Amazon S3 repository. This time it contained medical data in 316,363 PDF reports in the form of weekly blood test results. Many of these were multiple reports on individual patients. It appears that each patient had weekly test results totaling around 20 files each. That would still be an estimated 150,000+ people affected by the leak.

The blind application of machine learning runs the risk of amplifying biases present in data. Such a danger is facing us with word embedding, a popular framework to represent text data as vectors which has been used in many machine learning and natural language processing tasks. We show that even word embeddings trained on Google News articles exhibit female/male gender stereotypes to a disturbing extent. This raises concerns because their widespread use, as we describe, often tends to amplify these biases. Geometrically, gender bias is first shown to be captured by a direction in the word embedding. Second, gender neutral words are shown to be linearly separable from gender definition words in the word embedding. Using these properties, we provide a methodology for modifying an embedding to remove gender stereotypes, such as the association between between the words receptionist and female, while maintaining desired associations such as between the words queen and female. We define metrics to quantify both direct and indirect gender biases in embeddings, and develop algorithms to "debias" the embedding. Using crowd-worker evaluation as well as standard benchmarks, we empirically demonstrate that our algorithms significantly reduce gender bias in embeddings while preserving the its useful properties such as the ability to cluster related concepts and to solve analogy tasks. The resulting embeddings can be used in applications without amplifying gender bias.

" "I Agree" is an art installation that prints the terms of service for common apps on scrolls of colored paper, creating a bar chart of the fine print that neither you, nor anyone else in the history of the world, has ever read. "

The Digital Standard is an ambitious, open, and collaborative effort to create a digital privacy and security standard to help guide the future design of consumer software, digital platforms and services, and Internet-connected products.

burger King will start televising a commercial for its signature Whopper sandwich that is designed to activate Google voice-controlled devices, raising questions about whether marketing tactics have become too invasive.

An algorithm deduced the sexuality of people on a dating site with up to 91% accuracy, raising tricky ethical questions

All the Secret Stuff That Happens When You Visit Google.com

"This is one of the minor dangers of owning an Amazon Echo. Most anyone can activate the device by just saying the wake word, including Cartman. And in the season opener of South Park, that's exactly what happened. If someone watched that episode of South Park in the same room as an Echo, their Amazon shopping list was filled with random, gross items. This example shows the potential danger of having a voice-activated shopping assistant. It's easy to imagine a potential rogue advertisement, online or elsewhere, that could, in theory, say the right words to order a particular product - like a South Park box set."

The Dark Pattern Detection Project (Dapde) investigates how "dark patterns" control consumers in digital environments.

"Welcome to the Age of Privacy Nihilism Google and Facebook are easy scapegoats, but companies have been collecting, selling, and reusing your personal data for decades, and now that the public has finally noticed, it's too late. The personal-data privacy war is long over, and you lost."