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"Apple Inc. captured headlines last week for declaring it would be carbon neutral by 2030. "

"The answers to such questions will determine what regulatory oversight we believe is necessary or desirable, what role we think the government or unions should play in a new industry such as tech, and even how the industry and its titans ought to be discussed."

"But whether we trust Apple might be beside the point, if we don't yet know whether we can trust ourselves. It took eight years from the launch of the iPhone for screen time controls to follow. What will human interaction look like eight years after smartglasses become ubiquitous? Our cyborg present sneaked up on us as our phones became glued to our hands. Are we going to sleepwalk into our cyborg future in the same way?"

"Zoom has admitted it suspended the accounts of human rights activists at the behest of the Chinese government and suggested it will block any further meetings that Beijing complains are illegal."

"Goodreads stagnates even as its near-monopoly persists, a wedding of the worst excesses of online commenting, fiction fandom and tech-biz social engineering. The lies, the insecure hatereaders, the impassive tolerance of toxic behavior-all are brought to bear, without mercy, on authors at the precarious margins of career security. And after all that, it's all but useless as a discovery service. At The New Stateman, Sarah Manavis hopes that its "reign of terror" will soon come to an end."

"THE GLARING FALLACY that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one's own views. The most cursory review of history, and the most minimal understanding of how these tech giants function, instantly reveals the folly of that pipe dream."

"Over the years critics have pointed out their many shortcomings as well. Perhaps the biggest flaw of all is that the laws are vague. If machines become so human that we find it difficult to tell them and us apart, how will a machine tell the difference? Where does humanity end and artificial intelligence begin? And even if an AI can distinguish itself from a human being, we also cannot know what loopholes and reprogramming a robot is capable of. Surely an AI more clever than us could plan a way to access its core and bypass any of its existing limitations."

"The decision will be the most consequential yet made by Facebook's Oversight Board, a group of 20 members who range from humanitarian activists and religious experts to lawyers and a former prime minister. The board, which launched in late 2020, is meant to function as an independent arm of the social platform, making binding decisions on a selection of its thorniest content moderation issues."

"Raji says her investigation into the data has made her gravely concerned about deep-learning-based facial recognition. "It's so much more dangerous," she says. "The data requirement forces you to collect incredibly sensitive information about, at minimum, tens of thousands of people. It forces you to violate their privacy. That in itself is a basis of harm. And then we're hoarding all this information that you can't control to build something that likely will function in ways you can't even predict. That's really the nature of where we're at.""

"That can include statistical or machine learning algorithms that rely on police records detailing the time, location, and nature of past crimes in a bid to predict if, when, where, and who may commit future infractions. In theory, this should help authorities use resources more wisely and spend more time policing certain neighborhoods that they think will yield higher crime rates."

"Breaking: Twitter said it will require President Trump's campaign account to remove a post containing coronavirus misinformation, banning the account from tweeting until it does so."

"Using the robot will reduce the need for staff to patrol the grounds, says NParks, and it "lowers the risk of exposure to the virus." According to local newspaper The Straits Times, the board is also considering deploying the robot elsewhere in the city. Signs posted in the park ask visitors not to "disrupt" the robot on its patrols."

"While Ford still plans on launching its self-driving car fleet in 2021, Hackett added that "its applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex.""

"More algorithmic decision making and decision augmenting systems will be used in the coming years. Unlike the approach taken for A-levels, future systems may include opaque AI-led decision making. Despite such risks there remain no clear picture of how public sector bodies - government, local councils, police forces and more - are using algorithmic systems for decision making."

"The Singapore government says the wearable device it is developing for COVID-19 contact tracing will not have GPS, internet, or cellular connectivity, so data it collects can only be extracted when it is physically handed over to a health official. These details are being offered up as the government looks to ease concerns about data privacy and drive the adoption of digital tools that can help speed up contact tracing. "

""To my knowledge, this is the first instance in which a European DPA has imposed a ban on a contact-tracing app already in use in light of national developments regarding contagion levels," he told us. "It is thus possible that other European DPAs will impose similar bans in the future and demand that contact-tracing apps be changed as soon as contagion levels substantially decrease also in other parts of Europe. Norway has currently one of the lowest contagion levels in Europe.""

"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."

"Criminals often hide illicit data on the XBox in the hope that a gaming console will not be seen as a likely evidence target especially when conventional personal computers are present in the same premises, for instance"

"However, since machine learning algorithms are what they eat (in other words, they function based on the training data they ingest), they inevitably end up picking up on human biases that exist in language data itself."

"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."