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"As LGBTQ Egyptians flock to apps like Grindr, Hornet, and Growlr, they face an unprecedented threat from police and blackmailers who use the same apps to find targets."

"It's hard to incentivise profit-driven companies to change their services according to specific needs while maintaining them free and accessible for all."

"McAfee became a wholly owned subsidiary of a chip manufacturer. Crazy right? "

"Former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden says that tech workers need to think long and hard about how their labor is used by companies to amass power, surveil people, and fundamentally change society, and need to think about whether it is ethical to work at tech companies at all."

"A record 54m tonnes of "e-waste" was generated worldwide in 2019, up 21% in five years, the UN's Global E-waste Monitor report found. The 2019 figure is equivalent to 7.3kg for every man, woman and child on Earth, though use is concentrated in richer nations. The amount of e-waste is rising three times faster than the world's population, and only 17% of it was recycled in 2019."

"However, once technology is released it's like herding cats. Deepfakes are a moving feast and as soon as moderators find a way of detecting them, people will find a workaround."

"This RFID-enabled device allowed its proud new owners to do things such as log into their computer, open doors and purchase food in the office cafeteria with a flick of the wrist. Nearly half of the company's 85 workers had the device implanted when the firm held a "chip party". YIKES!

"More and more independent thinkers are realizing that when being an employee is the equivalent to putting all your money into one stock - a better strategy is to diversify your portfolio. So you're seeing a lot more people looking to diversify their career." Faith Popcorn, a futurist, echoes the idea that we will all have to become as agile as possible and "have many forms of talent and work that you can provide the economy".

"So, yes: the internet of things presents many new possibilities, and it would be foolish to dismiss those possibilities out of hand. But we would also be wise to approach the entire domain with scepticism, and in particular to resist the attempts of companies to gather ever more data about our lives - no matter how much ease, convenience and self-mastery we are told they are offering us."

"However, there is some concern about how accurate these new procedures will be. Apparently the facial recognition technology doesn't recognize all people will the same accuracy. White women and black people aren't as easily recognized as white men, meaning there could be some mismatching of identities. Some are also concerned that this is crossing the line in terms of passenger privacy."

"School officials see the cameras as a way to improve student confidence and crowdsource the task of catching misbehaving pupils. Parents use the feeds to monitor their children's academic progress and spy on their friendships and romances. But many students see live-streaming as an intrusion, prompting a broader debate in China about privacy, educational ethics and the perils of helicopter parenting."

"Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a model for traffic without ownership. You pay a monthly fee for it, like with Spotify, tell the app where you are going and get instant access to taxis, Ubers, buses, and so on. Everything is available on-demand and ownership is no longer needed."

"And now, 10 years later, the impact of reckless, subjective and inflammatory misinformation served up on the web is being felt like never before in the digital era."

"To demonstrate how reality may differ for different Facebook users, The Wall Street Journal created two feeds, one "blue" and the other "red." If a source appears in the red feed, a majority of the articles shared from the source were classified as "very conservatively aligned" in a large 2015 Facebook study. For the blue feed, a majority of each source's articles aligned "very liberal." These aren't intended to resemble actual individual news feeds. Instead, they are rare side-by-side looks at real conversations from different perspectives. "

"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. "

"The first known death caused by a self-driving car was disclosed by Tesla Motors on Thursday evening, a development that is sure to cause consumers to second-guess the trust they put in the booming autonomous vehicle industry. "

"An artificially intelligent fighter pilot system has defeated two attacking jets in a combat simulation. The AI, known as Alpha, used four virtual jets to successfully defend a coastline against two attacking aircraft - and did not suffer any losses. Alpha, which was developed by a US team, also triumphed in simulation against a retired human fighter pilot."

"In one survey, 76% of people agreed that a driverless car should sacrifice its passenger rather than plough into and kill 10 pedestrians. They agreed, too, that it was moral for AVs to be programmed in this way: it minimised deaths the cars caused. And the view held even when people were asked to imagine themselves or a family member travelling in the car."

"Citizens would no longer have the right to get information about their records. The Privacy Act states that anyone can request their record from a government database so it can be reviewed and any errors corrected. That right would be eliminated if the database were exempted, meaning no one would ever know what information the FBI had on them."