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"Amazon is to pay $25m (£20m) to settle allegations that it violated children's privacy rights with its Alexa voice assistant. The company agreed to pay the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after it was accused of failing to delete Alexa recordings at the request of parents. It was found to have kept hold of sensitive data for years. Amazon's doorbell camera unit Ring will also pay out after giving employees unrestricted access to customers' data."

"In short, Klarna offers shoppers something similar to a store credit card - rather than paying $500 now, you might split it into 12 payments with a micro-loan from Klarna that gets issued within minutes. The e-commerce provider then pays Klarna a fee (usually around 6 percent, higher than what they'd pay for a Visa or Mastercard transaction, but still a good deal if it makes it easier for the customer to buy the product). As you might imagine, Klarna has lots of customers and those customers have a lot of questions. This means they hire lots of customer service representatives. And those customer service reps are the first major, public casualty in the conflict between AI and human jobs."

"IDFC Bank has launched an app called Aadhaar Pay that aims to help millions of its citizens without a smartphone to pay for their purchases digitally with just their fingerprint.  Merchants will be able to download the app on their Android smartphones and attach a fingerprint scanner device. To make payments, buyers will only have to choose their bank name, input their unique Aadhaar number and scan their fingerprint, which acts as a password to make the payment directly from their bank account linked to their Aadhaar card."

"While Google has played down the notion of rolling out anything soon (it will take years until Glass builds up enough users to make it worthwhile), marketers can't stop buzzing about the possibility of paying for ads in the physical world based on user engagement and reactions. The patent even details how a device like Google Glass could infer a user's emotional response to an ad - whether they were happy, sad or indifferent - and adjust pricing accordingly."

"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

"But one church in Lichfield, Staffordshire, faced a different fundraising problem: to pay a £6,000 bill demanded for photographs used on its website. The case came to the attention of Gavin Drake, the communications director for the diocese's 600 churches. In creating the church's website, a volunteer had included a couple of images sourced from Getty, a large picture agency, without paying for them. A couple of months later, Getty sent the church a demand for £6,000."

"Customers will be able to use a "Smile to Pay" facial recognition system at the tech-heavy, health-focused concept store, part of a drive by Yum China Holdings Inc to lure a younger generation of consumers. "

"Facebook is keeping true to its "be terrible" motto by paying The Daily Telegraph to run a series of sponsored articles praising Facebook."

"Victims of a major ransomware cyberattack that has spread through the US and Europe can no longer unlock their computers even if they pay the ransom. The "Petya" ransomware has caused serious disruption at large firms including the advertising giant WPP, French construction materials company Saint-Gobain and Russian steel and oil firms Evraz and Rosneft. Infected computers display a message demanding a Bitcoin ransom worth $300. Those who pay are asked to send confirmation of payment to an email address. However, that email address has been shut down by the email provider. "

"Amazon's algorithms encourage customers pay more than they need to for popular products and appear to give more prominence to items that benefit the retail giant, according to an investigation by ProPublica. The investigation looked at 250 frequently purchased products over several weeks to see which ones were chosen to appear in the highly-prized "buy box" that pops up first as a suggested purchase. "

"Teatreneu's administrators found an ingenious solution: partnering with the advertising agency Cyranos McCann, they fitted the back of every seat with fancy tablets that can analyse facial expressions. Under the new model, visitors enter the club for free but have to pay 30 cents for every laugh recognised by the tablet - with a cap of €24 (or 80 laughs) per show. A mobile app makes it easier to complete the payment; the overall ticket prices have reportedly gone up by €6. As a bonus, you can also share your smiling selfie with friends: the path from funny to viral has never been shorter."

"Facebook has agreed to pay $52 million to its content moderators as compensation for mental health issues caused by their work. The internet is already generally a cesspool of filth and cruelty, so one can only imagine the incredibly horrific things its moderators are forced to witness every day."

" A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company's chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police. The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday. "(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake," senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city's public broadcaster RTHK. Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company's UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said."

"Sounds lovely. But a few (mostly worried) thoughts come instantly to mind. First, our fingerprints are unique whether or not they're attached to our hand. That sounds like a dangerous incentive to chop off a few fingers, no?"

"But with all of the successes of AI, it's also important to pay attention to when, and how, it can go wrong, in order to prevent future errors. A recent paper by Roman Yampolskiy, director of the Cybersecurity Lab at the University of Louisville, outlines a history of AI failures which are "directly related to the mistakes produced by the intelligence such systems are designed to exhibit." According to Yampolskiy, these types of failures can be attributed to mistakes during the learning phase or mistakes in the performance phase of the AI system."

"That is when the alarm bells went off for Mr Ang. "I saw that there was a text file inside the encrypted folder that showed that it was ransomware, asking for payment to decrypt the files." The company decided not to pay the ransom of US$1,000 (S$1,447). Instead, it spent a week rebuilding about 3,000 infected files with data of the accounts and stocks from hard copy files."

"By shaping the menus we pick from, technology hijacks the way we perceive our choices and replaces them with new ones. But the closer we pay attention to the options we're given, the more we'll notice when they don't actually align with our true needs."

"When Google's algorithms result in men on the Internet seeing better-paying job advertisements than women, it's worth looking under the hood at the assumptions that the algorithms, and the people behind it, have made. "

"But last month, Rocket Systems, who administered the .nu deal and the free Internet connection, announced that they would be shutting down the free link and replacing it with a paid one, because the .nu royalties had been cut. Under the new mandate, the 75% of people in Niue who relied on the service will begin paying an eye-popping NZD50/10gb to access the service. This is moderately competitive for satellite data, but by the standards of the developed world, it's amazingly expensive, especially given the country's low median per capita income."

"If students want a verified certificate for their online course, they can pay a fee of $30-90 (approximately £17-54) for the Signature Track service. They will be asked to submit a webcam photo and identification card to check their identity. "