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"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."

"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."

"You're nailing the problem: the tech sales people and the politicians are all on the same drug, which is "This tech is perfect", because it's cheaper than more police. There's a lawsuit in the US because a black man was wrongly arrested based on facial recognition. tech companies need to be held to account. One company we focused on, Clearview AI, scraped social networks - collected images of people's faces and data from publicly available information - to create its software. Facial recognition relies on artificial intelligence. It needs to study faces. And only the government - the DVLA etc - and social networking companies have access to a lot of faces."

"Tech workers are in demand: companies find it easier to raise cash than to hire engineers; this gives workers enormous bargaining power, and they're using it. From the Google uprisings over a Pentagon babykiller project and a Chinese surveillance project to the Microsoft uprising over ICE contracts, Tech workers are emerging as part of the solution -- while their secretive, shareholder-haunted bosses are more and more the problem."

"That tacit acceptance is actually buying into the tech-deterministic narrative, though. The question we should be asking - as the legal scholar Frank Pasquale says - is whether some of these technologies should be outlawed, or at least licensed for socially productive uses, like, say, radioactive isotopes are for medical purposes."

"Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they build. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech startups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere."

"This is the difference, tech executives and experts say, between consensual identity verification and non-consensual surveillance."

"There are clear indications that the UK government is now actively considering use of the technology as a way of easing the lockdown. If this signals an outbreak in Whitehall of tech "solutionism" - the belief that for every problem there is a technological answer - then we should be concerned. tech solutions often do as much harm as good, for example, by increasing social exclusion, lacking accountability and failing to make real inroads into the problem they are supposedly addressing."

"The system uses AI to predict situations before they occur - thus informing on how resources could be better allocated - and to provide insights for better decision-making."

"But, in fact, civic tech is a real thing, featuring real people, with real technical expertise, trying to hack around every democratic deficiency. They are trying to tackle everything from a sheer lack of easily accessible information to the shortcomings of the first-past-the-post system. "

"Having mastered facial recognition for humans to an alarmingly precise degree, even picking out wanted criminals from huge crowds, Chinese tech whizzes are turning their attention to furrier faces. "We've been using it for sheep, pigs and cows," said Zhao Jinshi, who studied at Cornell University and founded Beijing Unitrace tech, a company developing software for the agriculture industry."

"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."

"It has been formed as a reaction to attempts by major tech platforms to clamp down on coronavirus disinformation - but the same tech outlets also help enable its reach: the Light's distribution relies on a 5,000-strong private Facebook group where volunteers offer to hand out copies and post them through their neighbours' doors."

""Often the problem is that the topic itself is unethical," said Gemma Galdon Clavell, an independent tech ethicist who has evaluated many Horizon 2020 security research projects and worked as a partner on more than a dozen. "Some topics encourage partners to develop biometric tech that can work from afar, and so consent is not possible - this is what concerns me." One project aiming to develop such technology refers to it as "unobtrusive person identification" that can be used on people as they cross borders. ¨If we're talking about developing technology that people don't know is being used," said Galdon Clavell, "how can you make that ethical?" "

"Joel and Anna have experienced this too, though Joel believes his tech is not inherently misogynistic. "Because I set it up, I know exactly the phrase that needs to be used and Anna doesn't," he explains. "She'll say it slightly wrong, then I say it and to her ear it sounds like I'm saying exactly the same thing in a calmer voice.""

"In the 20 years since the birth of social media, child sexual exploitation has become one of the biggest challenges facing tech companies. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the internet is used by human traffickers as "digital hunting fields", allowing them access to both customers and potential victims, with children being targeted by traffickers on social media platforms. The biggest of these, Facebook, is owned by Meta, the tech giant whose platforms, which also include Instagram, are used by more than 3 billion people worldwide. In 2020, according to a report by US-based not-for-profit the Human Trafficking Institute, Facebook was the platform most used to groom and recruit children by sex traffickers (65%), based on an analysis of 105 federal child sex trafficking cases that year. The HTI analysis ranked Instagram second most prevalent, with Snapchat third."

"Ransomware hunters: the self-taught tech geniuses fighting cybercrime"

"The government is introducing some amendments in time for the report stage on 12 July, with another batch to be announced shortly after. Under one confirmed change, tech firms will be required to shield internet users from state-sponsored disinformation that poses a threat to UK society and democracy. This is a tightening of existing proposals on disinformation in the bill, which already require tech firms to take action on state-sponsored disinformation that harms individuals - such as threats to kill. Another confirmed amendment is equally incremental. A clause in the bill aimed at end-to-end encrypted services already gives Ofcom the power to require those platforms to adopt "accredited technology" to detect child sexual abuse and exploitation [CSEA] content. If that doesn't work, then they must use their "best endeavours" to develop or deploy new technology to spot and remove CSEA. This move appears to be aimed at Mark Zuckerberg's plans to introduce end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger and Instagram."

"Generative artificial-intelligence tools are unproven and expensive to operate, requiring muscular servers with expensive chips that consume lots of power. Microsoft MSFT -0.43%decrease; red down pointing triangle , Google, Adobe and other tech companies investing in AI are experimenting with an array of tactics to make, market and charge for it. Microsoft has lost money on one of its first generative AI products, said a person with knowledge of the figures. It and Google are now launching AI-backed upgrades to their software with higher price tags. Zoom Video Communications ZM 1.79%increase; green up pointing triangle has tried to mitigate costs by sometimes using a simpler AI it developed in-house. Adobe and others are putting caps on monthly usage and charging based on consumption. "A lot of the customers I've talked to are unhappy about the cost that they are seeing for running some of these models," said Adam Selipsky, the chief executive of Amazon.com's cloud division, Amazon Web Services, speaking of the industry broadly. "

"The artificial intelligence (AI) industry could consume as much energy as a country the size of the Netherlands by 2027, a new study warns. Big tech firms have scrambled to add AI-powered services since ChatGPT burst onto the scene last year. They use far more power than conventional applications, making going online much more energy-intensive. However, the study also said AI's environmental impact could be less than feared if its current growth slowed. Many experts, including the report author, say such research is speculative as tech firms do not disclose enough data for an accurate prediction to be made."