Group items tagged

"Users post violent and hateful content to Facebook and Twitter all the time, they argued - and no one was demanding those platforms get the boot from the app stores."

""The AI will be trained to detect incidents such as people fighting, a group of agitated persons, people following someone else, and arguments or other abnormal behaviour," SMART lecturer and team lead Johan Barthelemy said. "It can also identify an unsafe environment, such as where there is a lack of lighting.The system will then alert a human operator who can quickly react if there is an issue.""

"The questions of the day are "How do we save the planet from the climate crisis?" and "What do we do about misogyny, racial profiling and police violence, and homophobic laws?" and "How do we check mass surveillance and the widening power of the state?" and "How do we bring down autocratic, human-rights-abusing regimes without leaving behind chaos and tragedy?" Those are the questions. But the internet is the answer. If you propose to fix any of these things without using the internet, you're not being serious. And if you want to free the internet to use in all those fights, there's a quarter century's worth of Internet Utopians who've got your back."

"It is high time the Congress and Biden administration placed reasonable democratic constraints on online advocacy of violence and extremism. The choice is clear: we can either protect our democracy from extremism or lose it. In the real world, your postal carrier is prevented by law from reading your mail and selling your information to recruiters who wish to spam you with violent extremist material. Those same protections must be extended to Facebook and other companies."

"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.""

"Once you gather up every reported incident of violence in one place, however, the threat seems far greater. A record of up to date criminal activity might be useful if you are new to an area. Businesses considering locations and homeowners interested in moving might use it to get certain information. But it can also facilitate panic and unjustified accusations."

"Because for all the promises of smart tech, at least a "dumb" heating system can't be taken over by a vindictive ex, and used to torment you with unbearable heat or terrible cold, when you have no idea why. A daft doorbell can't tell a stalker when you leave, or when you're home, or where you go if you use a smartwatch, too. And no stupid speaker can be used to listen in on your private conversations. These situations may sound like nightmares, but they are all real cases of smart tech-enabled domestic abuse. And the number of cases is shooting up: between 2018 and 2022, the domestic violence charity Refuge saw an increase of 258% in the number of survivors supported by their tech abuse team."

"Roblox to give parents more control over children's activity after warnings over grooming Parents will be able to see who children interact with and ensure they cannot play games with graphic violence as report accuses company of lax safety controls"

"Meta is facing a second set of lawsuits in Africa over the psychological distress experienced by content moderators employed to take down disturbing social media content including depictions of murders, extreme violence and child sexual abuse. Lawyers are gearing up for court action against a company contracted by Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, after meeting moderators at a facility in Ghana that is understood to employ about 150 people. Moderators working for Majorel in Accra claim they have suffered from depression, anxiety, insomnia and substance abuse as a direct consequence of the work they do checking extreme content."

Huge chunks of the Internet will be effectively unreachable, and which sites go into the censorship bucket will be decided upon in secret, by unelected employees of big corporations, like China's Huawei. Sure, you can untick the box if you want, but as David Cameron's advisors will tell you, defaults are powerful and most users never change them.

"Now a study published in Royal Society Open Science has failed to find any association between the time spent playing violent video games and aggressive behaviour, adding to a growing body of literature that suggests that such a link has been overstated - or may not exist at all."

"Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world. "The world needs products like Signal - but they also need Signal to be thoughtful," said Gregg Bernstein, a former user researcher who left the organization this month over his concerns. "It's not only that Signal doesn't have these policies in place. But they've been resistant to even considering what a policy might look like.""