Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Hack the SEC A good plot for, like, an insider-trading Hollywood thriller would be if the villains hacked into the computers of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC, after all, is maybe the world’s greatest repository of material information about public companies. Companies are constantly filing earnings releases, merger announcements, management changes, proxy…
For the Tech Policy Press Sunday Show podcast, I spoke to author Carissa Véliz about her recently published book, Privacy is Power: Why And How you Should Take Back Control of Your Data. Carissa is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute for Ethics in AI, and a Tutorial Fellow at Hertford College, at the…
Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard’s podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet. Tech companies have repeatedly reassured the public that trackers used to follow smartphone users through apps are anonymous or at least pseudonymous, not directly identifying the person using the phone. But what they don’t mention is that an…
It’s a harrowing time. First, we were hit with the COVID pandemic, and in recent weeks, protests and discussions about racial inequities in America have taken the main stage. Businesses are questioning their operating practices (or sometimes being called out for them and canceled) and uncovering how unconscious biases might play a role in everything…
Over the past year, we’ve seen schools shift to digital services at an unprecedented rate as a way to educate kids safely during the covid-19 pandemic. We’ve also seen these digital tools slurp up these kid’s data at a similarly unprecedented rate, suffer massive breaches, and generally handle student’s personal information with a lot less…
Screenshot the from “Bitcoin Clean Energy Initiative Memorandum” You have probably heard it said that bitcoin is really bad for the environment. You might have heard it said that mining it — ie the computer processing that is required to produce new “coins” — is more energy-intensive than [insert increasingly large nation state]. It’s one…
Heads up, fellow T-Mobile customers: You might want to take a look at your mobile carrier’s privacy policy. As by the Wall Street Journal, the company’s latest update to its privacy policy is set to automatically enroll paying phone subscribers into an ad-targeting program that will see their data shared with unnumbered advertisers starting next…
.entry-header In December 2016, when then-President-elect Donald Trump summoned tech leaders to Trump Tower for a roundtable discussion, there was considerable debate about whether or not executives like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella should accept the invitation. I argued that they absolutely should in this Daily Update…
It’s easy to feel right now. Cities across the country are seeing unarmed protesters by police officers who enjoy both the full support of the current and of the itself. Congress is, in 2020, whether to . And there’s ! Meanwhile, even the people who emerge from this moment unscathed physically will, undoubtedly, find their…
For the thousands of people and on George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department—or even for bystanders caught up in the demonstrations—arrests, injuries, and even are becoming commonplace in this moment. And just like protests we’ve experienced , confrontation with police comes coupled with risks to people’s lives through digital means,…