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"The 61-year-old British computer scientist described how political advertising has become a sophisticated and targeted industry, drawing on enormous pools of personal data on Facebook and Google. This means that campaigns create precisely targeted ads for individuals - as many as 50,000 variations each day on Facebook during the 2016 US election, he said."

"So, yes: the internet of things presents many new possibilities, and it would be foolish to dismiss those possibilities out of hand. But we would also be wise to approach the entire domain with scepticism, and in particular to resist the attempts of companies to gather ever more data about our lives - no matter how much ease, convenience and self-mastery we are told they are offering us."

"The results may seem similar to what you'd get if you'd searched WebMD, Mayo Clinic, etc. The difference is that Dr. A.I. pulls in many more data points than those sites do, then combines artificial intelligence with a massive database to pinpoint the most likely results in your specific case. It doesn't just find all possible ailments and list them for you to explore further on your own."

"It's been said that software is "eating the world." More and more, critical systems that were once controlled mechanically, or by people, are coming to depend on code. This was perhaps never clearer than in the summer of 2015, when on a single day, United Airlines grounded its fleet because of a problem with its departure-management system; trading was suspended on the New York Stock Exchange after an upgrade; the front page of The Wall Street Journal's website crashed; and Seattle's 911 system went down again, this time because a different router failed. The simultaneous failure of so many software systems smelled at first of a coordinated cyberattack"

"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."

"A data trust is a legal entity that collects and manages people's personal data on their behalf. Though the structure and function of these trusts are still being defined, and many questions remain, data trusts are notable for offering a potential solution to long-standing problems in privacy and security."

"SoundCloud announced on Tuesday it would become the first major streaming service to start directing subscribers' fees only to the artists they listen to, a move welcomed by musicians campaigning for fairer pay. Current practice for streaming services including Spotify, Deezer and Apple is to pool royalty payments and dish them out based on which artists have the most global plays. Many artists and unions have criticised this system, saying it disproportionately favours megastars and leaves y little for musicians further down the pecking order."

"THE DIGITAL DIVIDE The fear of losing control aside, many hawkers also have to deal with another major challenge: Digital technology, which entails some basic competence in logic and literacy - much to the horror of those who only received some primary school education, typical of the older generation of hawkers."

"Beginning in 2017, I did a project with artist Trevor Paglen to look at how people were being labelled. We found horrifying classificatory terms that were misogynist, racist, ableist, and judgmental in the extreme. Pictures of people were being matched to words like kleptomaniac, alcoholic, bad person, closet queen, call girl, slut, drug addict and far more I cannot say here. ImageNet has now removed many of the obviously problematic people categories - certainly an improvement - however, the problem persists because these training sets still circulate on torrent sites [where files are shared between peers]."

"What might happen next? First the investigators would find out the culprits' names, telephone numbers, and where they lived. Then the authorities would be alerted. Shortly afterwards, accounts would be closed down. And, in the worst cases, the police would prosecute. Finally, as people began to realise that actions online had actual consequences, many would start modifying their behaviour. The tsunami of online hate might eventually become a sea swell."

""This is the largest impact on the energy system in the United States we've seen from a cyberattack, full stop," says Rob Lee, CEO of the critical-infrastructure-focused security firm Dragos. Aside from the financial impact on Colonial Pipeline or the many providers and customers of the fuel it transports, Lee points out that around 40 percent of US electricity in 2020 was produced by burning natural gas, more than any other source. That means, he argues, that the threat of cyberattacks on a pipeline presents a significant threat to the civilian power grid. "You have a real ability to impact the electric system in a broad way by cutting the supply of natural gas. This is a big deal," he adds. "I think Congress is going to have questions. A provider got hit with ransomware from a criminal act, this wasn't even a state-sponsored attack, and it impacted the system in this way?""

"Iqbal Khan works as a chauffeur in Lahore. His children are in his home village in a rural area north of Peshawar. Both of these very different areas of Pakistan have the same problem for many of their young people: no means of getting access to an education. Online learning was not an option for Khan's children as the pandemic locked down schools across cities and countryside. Even as he worked to pay the school fees, his two sons, aged 16 and 13, were unable to access any lessons as their schools went digital."

"What if this isn't just a one-off case of a popular professor dying. With so many classes online, why wouldn't universities just lay off any professor with a body of recorded lectures? We already know that tenure is harder to achieve every year, and schools are relying more and more on adjunct professors who teach a couple of classes on yearly contracts with no benefits. This scheme could save schools even more money! Of course, tuition will remain the same. One prof in the Twitter thread saw this possibility already."

"But today that universe seeks and surrounds you. When you first join Facebook you make a few choices of your own. But soon the algorithm starts narrowing your options and deciding what further choices to present to you. Because many of us rely on a limited number of news sources that populate our social media feeds, our information universe becomes more and more niche. For Trump supporters, that universe is often paramilitary."

"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."

""This is the first time such machine learning tools have been used in this context," says Fluri, "and we found that the deep artificial neural network enables us to extract more information from the data than previous approaches. We believe that this usage of machine learning in cosmology will have many future applications.""

"As of this summer, though, Sift does have a file on you, which it can produce upon request. I got mine, and I found it shocking: More than 400 pages long, it contained all the messages I'd ever sent to hosts on Airbnb; years of Yelp delivery orders; a log of every time I'd opened the Coinbase app on my iPhone. Many entries included detailed information about the device I used to do these things, including my IP address at the time."

"On inbuilt bias in algorithms, Sharkey said: "There are so many biases happening now, from job interviews to welfare to determining who should get bail and who should go to jail. It is quite clear that we really have to stop using decision algorithms, and I am someone who has always been very light on regulation and always believed that it stifles innovation."

"The CCPA exempted many forms of targeted advertising, essentially permitting the collection and sharing of personal user data without consent-precisely the activity the law was intended to eliminate. CCPA also left enforcement solely to the already overburdened state attorney general, a concession that caused an ongoing rift between two of its authors, Mary Stone Ross and Alastair Mactaggart. (Mactaggart coauthored the CPRA, which Ross opposed.)"

"An array of free website-building tools, many offered by ad-tech and ad-funded companies, has led to a dizzying number of trackers loading on users' browsers, even when they visit sites where privacy would seem paramount, an investigation by The Markup has found. Some load without the website operators' explicit knowledge-or disclosure to users."