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"The possibility of digitally interacting with someone from beyond the grave is no longer the stuff of science fiction. The technology to create convincing digital surrogates of the dead is here, and it's rapidly evolving, with researchers predicting its mainstream viability within a decade. But what about the ethics of bereavement-and the privacy of the deceased? Speaking with a loved one evokes a powerful emotional response. The ability to do so in the wake of their death will inevitably affect the human process of grieving in ways we're only beginning to explore."

"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."

"Now spool forward to the present. One of the things that baffles me is why more people are not alarmed by what Edward Snowden has been telling us about the scale and intrusiveness of internet surveillance. My hunch is that this is partly because - strangely - people can't relate the revelations to things they personally understand."

"When people connected to the hotspot, the terms and conditions they were asked to sign up to included a "Herod clause" promising free Wi-Fi but only if "the recipient agreed to assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity". Six people signed up. F-Secure, the security firm that sponsored the experiment, has confirmed that it won't be enforcing the clause."

When it comes to technology, most people put their trust in people not too far away from them. Does this make an impact on sales, especially if advertising may be useless?

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"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. "

"This challenge inspired the Royal London Society for Blind People to team up with design firm Ustwo and create Wayfindr, a Bluetooth enabled beacon system to guide people who are blind or visually impaired through the London Underground."

"A story on the site of the Japanese broadcaster NHK shows how this is playing out in the world of social networks. Online criticism of the behavior of the President of South Korea following the sinking of the ferry MV Sewol prompted the government to set up a team to monitor online activity. That, in its turn, has led people to seek what the NHK article calls "cyber-asylum" -- online safety through the use of foreign mobile messaging services, which aren't spied on so easily by the South Korean authorities. According to the NHK article: Many users have switched [from the hugely-popular home-grown product KakaoTalk] to a German chat app called Telegram. It had 50,000 users in early September. Now 2 million people have signed up."

"EFF's Legal Director Corynne McSherry offers five lessons to keep in mind: 1. (Lots of) mistakes will be made: copyright takedowns result in the removal of tons of legitimate content. 2. Robots won't help: automated filtering tools like Content ID have been a disaster, and policing copyright with algorithms is a lot easier than policing "bad speech." 3. These systems need to be transparent and have due process. A system that allows for automated instant censorship and slow, manual review of censorship gives a huge advantage to people who want to abuse the system. 4. Punish abuse. The ability to censor other peoples' speech is no joke. If you're careless or malicious in your takedown requests, you should pay a consequence: maybe a fine, maybe being barred form using the takedown system. 5. Voluntary moderation quickly becomes mandatory. Every voluntary effort to stem copyright infringement has been followed by calls to make those efforts mandatory (and expand them)."

"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."

" If your consumption of content is tailored by near limitless observations harvested about people like you, how could your universe not collapse into the partial depiction of reality that people like you also enjoy? How could empathy and respect for difference thrive in this environment? Where's the incentive to stamp out fake accounts, fake news, paid troll armies, dyspeptic bots?"

"A draft government memo explaining how the NHS contact-tracing app could stem the spread of the coronavirus said ministers might be given the ability to order "de-anonymisation" to identify people from their smartphones, the Guardian can reveal. The health secretary, Matt Hancock, announced on Sunday that the UK planned to introduce an app that would enable people who developed Covid-19 symptoms to "anonymously" alert other users to whom they had been in close proximity. "All data will be handled according to the highest ethical and security standards, and would only be used for NHS care and research," he said."

""We've taken down hundreds of thousands of pieces of misinformation related to COVID-19, including theories like drinking bleach cures the virus or that physical distancing is ineffective at preventing the disease from spreading," Zuckerberg wrote. But at the very same time, The Markup found, Facebook was allowing advertisers to profit from ads targeting people that the company believes are interested in "pseudoscience." According to Facebook's ad portal, the pseudoscience interest category contained more than 78 million people."

"However, there is some concern about how accurate these new procedures will be. Apparently the facial recognition technology doesn't recognize all people will the same accuracy. White women and black people aren't as easily recognized as white men, meaning there could be some mismatching of identities. Some are also concerned that this is crossing the line in terms of passenger privacy."

"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."

"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."