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"Maybe so, but guess what? You're next. When automation starts displacing lawyers, accountants and bankers, then we might see some push-back about the social costs of technology. So long as it's only truckers and factory workers getting sacked, well, there's always Walmart, McDonald's, or food stamps."

"The first thing that came into my mind when I first heard about Deep Fakes, is what would happen if we could create DeepFakes in realtime and not just for existing videos or photos? Suppose we can go online with someone else's face, would this be funny or would this push the ethical boundaries even further? I decided to see how much effort it would be to try it out."

"Today we fear a different technological threat, one that centers not on machines but other humans. We see ourselves as imperiled by the terrifying social influence unleashed by the Internet in general and social media in particular. We hear warnings that nothing less than our collective ability to perceive reality is at stake, and that if we do not take corrective action we will lose our freedoms and way of life."

""Face recognition … might be the thorniest issue, where the benefits are so clear, and the risks are so clear, and we don't know where to balance those things." Excuse me? What kind of benefits could possibly balance the risk of making life extremely easy for stalkers and creeps? Well, Bosworth later said on Twitter, it could help people with prosopagnosia, a neurological condition where you can't recognize people's faces. More generally, Bosworth said, it would be super handy when you run into someone at a party and can't remember their name. Ah yes, I can totally see how avoiding a little social awkwardness balances out the whole stalker thing!"

"And lest you think we are dealing in long-term abstractions- this devastation has tangible, externalized cost; a recent study out of the University of New Mexico estimated that in 2018 every $1 of Bitcoin value was responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in the US, costs that are borne by those who will, for the most part, never see any return from cryptocurrency mining whatsoever."

"So when I discovered the pocket of Instagram where you can find out what it thinks you're interested in (on the app, you'll find it under Settings> Security> Access data > Ads), I obviously felt it my duty as a netizen to see what dark insights it had into my private soul. Here goes: jewellery; luxury goods; electronic music; love; emotions; fashion design; crafts. I mean: no offence, Kraftwerk (and loved ones) but I could not name eight things I am less interested in. Maybe oxbow lakes."

"The disclosure points to a problem security researchers have been warning about for years: that despite its reputation for building what is seen by millions of customers as a secure product, some believe Apple's closed culture and fear of negative press have harmed its ability to provide security for those targeted by governments and criminals. "Apple's self-assured hubris is just unparalleled," said Patrick Wardle, a former NSA employee and founder of the Mac security developer Objective-See. "They basically believe that their way is the best way. And to be fair … the iPhone has had incredible success. "But you talk to any external security researcher, they're probably not going to have a lot of great things to say about Apple. Whereas if you talk to security researchers in dealing with, say, Microsoft, they've said: 'We're gonna put our ego aside, and ultimately realise that the security researchers are reporting vulnerabilities that at the end of the day are benefiting our users, because we're able to patch them.' I don't think Apple has that same mindset.""

"German Green party MP, Malte Spitz, went a step further and published 6 months of records kept (at the time by law) by his phone company about him. To emphasise how scary it was privacy-wise he published it in the form of a minute by minute interactive map, so anyone could follow his exact location (just like the phone company) as though in real time from the location metadata his phone was giving away all the time. The metadata was combined with his freely available social networking data, allowing anyone to see not just where he was but often what he was doing. Germany no longer requires phone companies to keep this metadata, but other countries have antiterrorist laws that require similar information to be kept for everyone. You can explore Malte's movements at (archived link: www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention) to get an idea of how your life is being tracked by metadata."

""If everything that people are seeing is via social media - who is accountable? There is very little human intelligence or decision-making behind it, no attempt to give a balanced view. That seems to leave all responsibility on the reader.""

"When they opened their eyes, they did indeed see that the Digital Nation had been born. Only it hadn't set them free. They were being ruled by it. It hadn't tamed politics. It sent them berserk. And it hadn't brought people closer together. It had alienated them."

"What the apps have done, instead of competing to serve customers and restaurants, is use Wall Street money to accumulate market power, raise barriers to entry, and then merge with each other and set up regional monopolies.The people who have invested tens of billions of dollars in the four dominant delivery apps tolerate huge short-term losses purely because they see the likelihood of monopoly power"

"Instagram turned our phones into adult pacifiers. At first, this was a tranquillising reel of pretty pictures, pumped in a steady stream with each thumb-swipe. Like a warm milky drink, but of sunsets and puppies and toes in the sand. Later, and more insidiously, the dopamine hit shifted to refreshing your feed to see how many likes your own pictures had. Either way, we had got ourselves in a feedback loop of attention-seeking in which our emotions were channelled from our brains to our phones and back again. Twitter is about your tribe, Facebook is about home and family, but Instagram is a romance between just you and your phone."

"I do want us all to be non-binary in how we think about the big issues, however. It was deeply saddening to see the abuse Malala Yousafzai got on social media last week because she is mates with a Tory. On Facebook she had endorsed a young woman who is standing for president of the Oxford Student Conservative Association. She said her friend was talented and this was not a personal reflection of her own political views."

"In the beginning, we thought anonymity was part of the problem - that people being able to hide behind their screens without being identified were willing to say more extreme things than people who are named. But now you see people don't care about being named. They're willing to go to a public white supremacist rally unmasked with their full identity showing. They're proud of it. It doesn't make me believe more in humanity."

"Our brains tend to lean on the visual, heavily prioritising sight over the other four senses. Ever since we climbed on to two feet as a species, taking our noses farther from the aroma-rich savannah floor, we have been wired to be seeing creatures and for better or worse we usually experience the what's-next-what's-next of this world through our peepers."

""This database has to be updated every 28 days, so you can see how much of a chore this has to be for an engineer to visit," Lomas said, pointing out the floppy drive - which in normal operations is tucked away behind a locked panel."

"This is the biggest concern. I can't overstate how big of a problem this is. I'd be the first that wishes I could wave a magic wand and have an easy solution where all of this could be solved. A teacher I know says there's just 5 percent or 10 percent of her kids in Mountain View, Calif., who are just checked out. She can't get them to show up. She can even see that their language has degraded because they haven't spent as much time with adults or peers in an academic setting."

"On the other hand, users (as distinct from developers) are about to see an upside of Apple's monopoly power. The next update of its mobile operating system, iOS14, includes a change that should have a dire impact on many online advertisers. The industry assigns a unique code to each device called an IDFA. Knowing your IDFA can help advertisers tell whether their ads are effective, particularly when they've shown you the same ad in multiple places. Facebook uses the IDFA as part of Audience Network, its ad network for developers."

"But the technology raises important issues of governance, justice and fairness. In recent months, the Black Lives Matter movement has taken action to address what it sees as an abuse of police power and surveillance technology. Facing reputational and financial costs, several major tech companies stopped developing facial recognition or selling it to the police. Microsoft went as far as petitioning the US Congress to legislate against it."

"Soon, Reddit will be overrun by bots. There are many of them here already, but it's nothing like what we are about to see. Reddit is about to become a battleground. A test site for a new age of social media. Perhaps even civilization. Things are going to get weird."