Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"The UK is opposing an international ban on so-called "killer robots" at a United Nations conference that is this week examining future developments of what are officially termed lethal autonomous weapons systems (Laws)."

"In the fawning media coverage of the Obama campaign's technological prowess, it did not occur to observers at the time to call this a startling invasion of privacy. And it wasn't, or at a very minimum, the privacy risks were arguably outweighed by the benefits. A tool like this could be the future of politics: door-to-door canvassing for the digital age, and a welcome antidote to impersonal broadcast TV ads or a welcome upgrade from getting a phone call from a stranger telling you to vote."

"This way of thinking about search results is wrong. Recent studies suggest that search engines, rather than providing a neutral way to find information, may actually play a major role in shaping public opinion on political issues and candidates. Some research has even argued that search results can affect the outcomes of close elections. In a study aptly titled In Google We Trust participants heavily prioritized the first page of search results, and the order of the results on that page, and continued to do so even when researchers reversed the order of the actual results."

"Cybersecurity experts have warned for years that malfeasance, technical breakdown or administrative incompetence could easily wreak havoc with electronic systems and could go largely or wholly undetected. This is a concern made much more urgent by Russia's cyber-attacks on political party servers and state voter registration databases in 2016 and by the risk of a repeat - or worse - in this November's midterms. "

"the Financial Times quoted one Indian political source claiming that WhatsApp was "the echo chamber of all unmitigated lies, fakes and crap in India"."

"That was apparently the result of the US government's probing of visa applicants' social media profiles. After the search, an officer questioned the 17-year-old, who got a scholarship to study in the US, about his friends' social media activity and told him she'd found some "posting political points of view that oppose the US," the student paper noted. Despite Ajjawi's protests, the officer denied the student's entry and let him call his parents."

"Doctored images have become a fact of life for political campaigns. When they're disproved, believers 'just don't care.'"

"Interest in so-called dazzle camouflage appears to have grown substantially since the Metropolitan police announced last week that officers will be using live facial recognition cameras on London's streets - a move described by privacy campaigners and political activists as "dangerous", "oppressive" and "a huge threat to human rights"."

"Surrendering our privacy to the government would be foolish enough. But what is more insidious is the Faustian bargain made with the marketing industry, which turns every location ping into currency as it is bought and sold in the marketplace of surveillance advertising. Now, one year later, we're in a very similar position. But it's far worse. A source has provided another data set, this time following the smartphones of thousands of Trump supporters, rioters and passers-by in Washington, D.C., on January 6, as Donald Trump's political rally turned into a violent insurrection. At least five people died because of the riot at the Capitol. Key to bringing the mob to justice has been the event's digital detritus: location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing."

"Hundreds of Facebook employees have signed a letter to executive Mark Zuckerberg decrying his decision to allow politicians to post advertisements on the platform that include false claims."

"It has led to a proliferation of fake news and clickbait. It has fuelled surveillance capitalism and normalised pervasive tracking and data-mining. If we want to do something about the proliferation of misinformation and erosion of trust in traditional institutions, it is not enough to regulate or factcheck political adverts. We need to crack down on the use of personal information for all targeted advertising. Otherwise democracy will continue to erode, one highly optimised click at a time."

""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.""

""China has a politically weaponized system of censorship; it is refined, organized, coordinated and supported by the state's resources," said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of China Digital Times. "It's not just for deleting something. They also have a powerful apparatus to construct a narrative and aim it at any target with huge scale." "This is a huge thing," he added. "No other country has that." "

"The business, political and geopolitical mischief possible with manipulated data, audio or video is almost limitless; think manufactured video of Jeff Bezos-whose personal life has already apparently been the target of sophisticated adversaries and extortion plots-using a racial slur; grainy fake video or audio of Joe Biden admitting to assaulting Tara Reade; grainy video of Trump saying he plans to nuke Iran in one hour; or even Anthony Fauci saying that he's doctoring the Covid death tolls. "

"Two years after admitting under political pressure that Facebook must do more to prevent disinformation campaigns on its platform, founder Mark Zuckerberg told Fox News on Thursday that the company should step away from regulating online speech."

"Facebook on September 22 dismantled a network of fake accounts that originated in China and the Philippines, including some that criticised the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing Platforms such as Facebook have become political battlegrounds and have helped strengthen Duterte's support, having been instrumental in his 2016 election"

"One point I found heartening in preparing this data was this quote from one of our data scientists. Following the announcement of a winner, 'Americans applying heart reactions on political content were off the charts, while angry reactions were closer to baseline.' It's possible to have a spike in positivity without having a corresponding spike in negativity. There has been a lot of interest in Facebook's impact on civic discourse and reasonable requests for us to share more data so it can be studied more fully. Obviously, this post is not meant to be a perfect analysis."

""There has been a high degree of improvisation in the rollout of Chivo and a great deal of opacity," says Ricardo Castaneda, a local economist. "The app asks for access to your microphone and your contacts, which are not needed for a wallet. Bitcoin might be a distraction but given the decision to push ahead with the plan despite popular opposition and the advice of experts, it could also be an important pillar of Bukele's political project.""

"The problem with digital technology is that, for engineers, it is both intrinsically fascinating and seductively challenging, which means that they acquire a kind of tunnel vision: they are so focused on finding solutions to the technical problems that they are blinded to the wider context. At the moment, for example, the consensus-establishing processes for verifying blockchain transactions requires intensive computation, with a correspondingly heavy carbon footprint. Reducing that poses intriguing technical challenges, but focusing on them means that the engineering community isn't thinking about the governance issues raised by the technology. There may not be any central authority in a blockchain but, as Vili Lehdonvirta pointed out years ago, there are rules for what constitutes a consensus and, therefore, a question about who exactly sets those rules. The engineers? The owners of the biggest supercomputers on the chain? Goldman Sachs? These are ultimately political questions, not technical ones."