Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Added by PressForward
AI is becoming synonymous with things that are unbelievable, generic, or just a little bit off. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; MadMusclesPlans/X It’s an exciting time at the cutting edge of AI research. Massive companies are spending tens of billions of dollars to build, train, and deploy new AI models with which they hope to automate a…
Is flying less safe? Or are we just paying closer attention? Dennis Stock / Magnum March 20, 2024, 1:03 PM ET Somewhere over Colorado this weekend, while I sat in row 21F, my plane began to buck, jostle, and rattle. Within seconds, the seat-belt indicator dinged as the pilot asked flight attendants to return to…
“Anonymised” data lies at the core of everything from modern medical research to personalised recommendations and modern AI techniques. Unfortunately, according to a paper, successfully anonymising data is practically impossible for any complex dataset. An anonymised dataset is supposed to have had all personally identifiable information removed from it, while retaining a core of useful…
A photographer is refusing a prestigious award after admitting to being a “cheeky monkey” and generating the prize-winning image using artificial intelligence. The German artist Boris Eldagsen revealed on his website that he was not accepting the prize for the creative open category, which he won at the Sony world photography awards. The winning photograph…
TikTok quietly updated its earlier this week in a way that allows the company to automatically collect extensive data on users in the United States —including data about their faces and their voice . The policy change, first spotted by , specifically states that TikTok “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information as defined under…
If you’re fed up with apps and websites using shitty psychological tactics—aka dark patterns—to coerce you into clicking, then good news: there’s finally a way to put them on blast. Consumer Reports teamed up with a cavalcade of researchers and policy wonks to roll out the Dark Patterns Tip Line on Tuesday, a project that…
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…
A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positive platform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former’s ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday. The ads were meant to show users the bevy of data that Instagram and its parent company Facebook collects on users, by… targeting those users…
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…
About a year and a half ago, Google began the chance to be one of the search engines that European users as their default on Android devices. And for the past year and a half, we’ve seen some familiar ad-targeting giants continue to take those expensive slots. This auction was the result of a spearheaded…