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"It's clear that surveillance affects a broad group of people, with real painful consequences for their lives. We've seen journalists being monitored, lawyers having their client confidentiality broken, victims of police misconduct being spied on and environmental campaigns infiltrated. These people are not criminals, and yet when we have a system of mass surveillance, they become targets for increasingly intrusive powers. "

"It comes as a Guardian investigation reveals the human stories behind scams that originate on Meta's platforms, with a nationwide estimate released this week predicting the tech firm's failure to stamp out fraud will cost UK households £250m during 2023. With someone in the UK said to fall victim to a purchase scam starting on either Facebook or Instagram every seven minutes, the Guardian asked people who had been defrauded on these sites as well as its WhatsApp platform to get in touch. One Facebook user told us she was defrauded of her life savings and got pulled into debt, losing a total of £70,000, after being duped by an investment scam. While some people lost large amounts of money, a stream of unsuspecting online shoppers reported being conned out of smaller amounts when they placed orders with bogus online shops advertised on Facebook and Instagram."

"Some of Britain's biggest retailers, including Tesco, John Lewis and Sainsbury's, have been urged to pull out of a new policing strategy amid warnings it risks wrongly criminalising people of colour, women and LGBTQ+ people. A coalition of 14 human rights groups has written to the main retailers - also including Marks & Spencer, the Co-op, Next, Boots and Primark - saying that their participation in a new government-backed scheme that relies heavily on facial recognition technology to combat shoplifting will "amplify existing inequalities in the criminal justice system"."

"Children are "saturated" with betting promotions and gambling-like content while using the internet, despite restrictions on ad campaigns targeting young people, new research reveals. GambleAware, the charity funded by donations from gambling firms, commissioned research that found the risks of online gambling were not understood by children because of the "blurred line" between betting ads and popular online casino-style games. It warns gambling ads with cartoon graphics are likely to be strongly appealing to children. Last week, one gambling firm was promoting a new online slots game on social media with three cartoon frogs, urging people to "take a dip" with the "ribbiting rascals"."

"Search for Common Ground designed BridgeBot together with TangibleAI after our research revealed that most people shy away - or turn away - from discussions online once they heat up. We learned that few people felt comfortable responding, and even fewer felt that they could be constructive. BridgeBot acts like a companion to help social media users think differently about how to deal with differences, by equipping them with skills and perspectives on empathy, identity, perception and non-violent communication."

"Some unemployment applicants have said that ID.me's facial recognition models fail to properly identify them (generally speaking, facial recognition technology is notoriously less accurate for women and people of color). And after their applications were put on hold because their identity couldn't be verified, many should-be beneficiaries have had to wait days or weeks to reach an ID.me "trusted referee" who could confirm what the technology couldn't."

""Mexico's capacity to spy on its citizens is immense. [And] it's extremely easy for the technology and the information obtained through the spyware to fall into private hands - be it organised crime or commercial," said Jorge Rebolledo, a Mexico City security consultant. "What we know about is only the tip of the iceberg." Andrés Manuel López Obrador Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The data leak is a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, since 2016, are believed to have been selected as belonging to people of interest by government clients of NSO Group."

"In some respects, singling out Twitter is unfair: it was a collective failure of social media. People were able to name Edwards as the BBC presenter with impunity in social media comment sections. TikTok suggested Edwards and other BBC presenters' names as "hot" search terms, appending the fire emoji to their names. Google showed news stories and videos about the then-unnamed BBC presenter to people who searched for Huw Edwards' name, connecting him to the scandal."

"In one survey, 76% of people agreed that a driverless car should sacrifice its passenger rather than plough into and kill 10 pedestrians. They agreed, too, that it was moral for AVs to be programmed in this way: it minimised deaths the cars caused. And the view held even when people were asked to imagine themselves or a family member travelling in the car."

"Facebook has detailed the steps it's taking to get help for people who need it. Which involves using artificial intelligence to "detect posts or live videos where someone might be expressing thoughts of suicide," identifying appropriate first responders, and then employing more people to "review reports of suicide or self harm". The social network has been testing this system in the U.S. for the last month, and "worked with first responders on over 100 wellness checks based on reports we received via our proactive detection efforts." In some cases the local authorities were notified in order to help."

"It's fast getting to the point where it feels unreasonable to solely blame the famous and the industries that promote them. These days, people are going to plastic surgeons wanting to resemble their own modified avatars from selfies, rather than celebrities. If you like, the fiction of Hollywood perfection has been democratised. Indeed, it's interesting how, even as "improved" celebrities are mocked, or, as with Pike, call it out themselves, the modification of our own images continues unhindered, save for the occasional "#nofilter" humblebrag. It's gone beyond old-school catfishing (pretending to be someone else) to the point where people are essentially deep-faking themselves. And it's all just a bit of fun. Until it isn't. The desire to look better is all too human but are we inexorably moving towards the moment when we lose our grip on what we actually look like?"

"How many conspiracy theorists does it take to change a lightbulb? QAnon won't let me tell you. I can, however, reveal that it takes only a dozen anti-vaxxers to spread dangerous misinformation to millions of people. According to a report from the NGO Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), up to 65% of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter can be traced back to just 12 people. Although Facebook has disputed the report's methodology, the 12 have been nicknamed the "disinformation dozen", and include Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nephew of John F Kennedy. A few of the 12 have been removed from at least one social media platform, but are still free to post on others."

"The app, called Care19, and produced by a company called ProudCrowd that also makes a location-based social networking app for North Dakota State sports fans, generates a random ID number for each person who uses it. Then, it can "anonymously cache the individual's locations throughout the day," storing information about where people spent at least 10 minutes at a time, according to the state website. If users test positive for the coronavirus, they can provide that information to the North Dakota Department of Health for contact-tracing purposes so that other people who spent time near virus patients can potentially be notified."

""Often the problem is that the topic itself is unethical," said Gemma Galdon Clavell, an independent tech ethicist who has evaluated many Horizon 2020 security research projects and worked as a partner on more than a dozen. "Some topics encourage partners to develop biometric tech that can work from afar, and so consent is not possible - this is what concerns me." One project aiming to develop such technology refers to it as "unobtrusive person identification" that can be used on people as they cross borders. ¨If we're talking about developing technology that people don't know is being used," said Galdon Clavell, "how can you make that ethical?" "

"In a way, this is a powerful rhetorical move. Insisting that the conversation focus on the details is an insistence that people who dismiss client-side scanning on principle are wrong to do so: if you believe that privacy of private communications is and should be an inviolable right, then Levy and Robinson are effectively arguing that you be cut out of the conversation in favour of more moderate people who are willing to discuss trade-offs."

"But an analysis by the Office of Information Technology Services issued last month "acknowledges that the risks of the use of (facial recognition technology) in an educational setting may outweigh the benefits." The report, sought by the Legislature, noted "the potentially higher rate of false positives for people of color, non-binary and transgender people, women, the elderly, and children." It also cited research from the nonprofit Violence Project that found that 70% of school shooters from 1980 to 2019 were current students. The technology, the report said, "may only offer the appearance of safer schools.""

"In the future, it may be possible to guard against this kind of photo misuse through technical means. For example, future AI image generators might be required by law to embed invisible watermarks into their outputs so that they can be read later, and people will know they're fakes. But people will need to be able to read the watermarks easily (and be educated on how they work) for that to have any effect. Even so, will it matter if an embarrassing fake photo of a kid shared with an entire school has an invisible watermark? The damage will have already been done."

"At the same time, the internet is constantly disappearing. It's a world of broken links and missing files-often because the people in charge cast things off on a whim. In 2019, MySpace lost 50 million music files and apologized for "the inconvenience." Around the same time, Flickr started deleting photos at random. Even though many of Vine's most unnerving or charming or "iconic" six-second videos have been preserved, its community was shattered when the platform was shut down. It doesn't help that the internet has no attention span and no loyalty: What isn't erased or deleted can still be quickly forgotten, buried under a pile of new platforms, new subcultures, and new joke formats. The feed refreshes, and so does the entire topography of the web."

"Some standards did spread and crystallise over time, as more books were printed and literacy rates climbed. The printing profession played a key role in these emergent norms. Printing houses developed habits for spelling frequent words, often based on what made setting type more efficient. In a manuscript, hadde might be replaced with had; thankefull with thankful. When it came to spelling, the primary objective wasn't to faithfully represent the author's spelling, nor to uphold some standard idea of 'correct' English - it was to produce texts that people could read and, more importantly, that they would buy. Habits and tricks became standards, as typesetters learned their trade by apprenticing to other typesetters. They then often moved around as journeymen workers, which entailed dispersing their own habits or picking up those of the printing houses they worked in."

"Facebook enables advertisers to promote content to nearly 900,000 people interested in "vaccine controversies", the Guardian has found. Other groups of people that advertisers can pay to reach on Facebook include those interested in "Dr Tenpenny on Vaccines", which refers to anti-vaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny, and "informed consent", which is language that anti-vaccine propagandists have adopted to fight vaccination laws."