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The privacy scandal you never heard of — A company called Securus Technologies has been packaging the location data for all US mobile phone users and selling it to clients to track users in real-time, first revealed by the New York Times. There’s no consent, no opt-out, and oh, Securus was hacked. Slate asks, why isn’t this headline news?
Bigger than Beyoncé — The GDPR is bigger than Queen Bey, as measured by Google search traffic, suggesting a scramble to get to grips with Europe’s data protection rules coming into force today. To be fair, Beyoncé hasn’t filled every inbox in the world asking people to ‘Please stay in touch’ (Quartz).
1 million records leaked — A year after South Africa’s largest data breach, 934,000 personal records of South Africans were leaked online, revealing national identity numbers, email addresses, full names and plain text passwords (iAfrikan).
I approve this message — Gearing up for election season, Facebook launched a new feature to show users who paid for political ads. Twitter is also making changes, following widespread criticism of platforms for failing to provide transparency around political advertising (Washington Post).
Learning from a history of hate — Katrin Bennhold looks at how Germany’s online hate speech law and other efforts to clean up content on social networks are playing out (New York Times).
Credibility problems — Elon Musk tweeted plans to build a website, tentatively called Pravda, that would crowdsource ‘truth’ ratings for news articles and give journalists a credibility score. Poynter was not impressed.
Don’t be evil — Thousands of Google employees are protesting the company’s involvement in Project Maven, a US military project that uses AI to analyse military drone footage (Gizmodo). A Guardian Op-Ed calls on Google to terminate its contract with the Department of Defense and commit not to help develop military technologies.
A little less automation — Europe’s new data protection rules are set to impact the finance industry, which increasingly leans on AI tools to automate decision making. The changes will impact what data can be used, and how. They also give customers the right to demand that an employee review automated decisions (Bloomberg).
Breaching victims’ privacy — The identities of victims involved in sexual assault cases are protected by UK law. However, Google’s autocomplete feature has been shown to reveal identities by linking them to the names of the accused (Business Insider).
Wiring the world — In 2013, Mark Zuckerberg formed Internet.org to get everyone hooked up to a basic internet connection within five to 10 years. Jessi Hempel looks at what happened to Internet.org and Facebook’s access projects (Wired).
Censorship threats in Mexico — Rights activists warn that changes to Mexico’s federal copyright law, which allow judges to order the removal of internet content without checks, clear the path to censorship of online content (Global Voices).
Prices in the Caribbean — ICT Pulse published its annual snapshot of mobile affordability across the Caribbean. The report finds services in Belize are most expensive with high-volume callers spending up to 14% of average monthly income.
Report: ‘Living in Digital Darkness: A handbook on internet shutdowns in India’, published by sflc.in.
No competition — US Senator John Kennedy explained why he was one of three Republican Senators last week to support a measure to restore net neutrality rules in the US. He says he’d like to drop net neutrality rules in principle, but the US doesn’t have a sufficiently competitive broadband market to justify it (The Register).
Senators want answers — After their identities were used to file comments on net neutrality to the FCC, two US Senators — one Democrat, one Republican — called on the FCC to investigate identity theft in its public consultation process (Gizmodo).
Women must design the future — Women make up just a quarter of computer scientists; fewer still work in AI research. Lauren Smiley tells stories of young women and girls learning AI programming and argues that bringing more women into AI is important not only for the field, but for all of us (The Atlantic).
Measuring the digital gender divide — There are various ways to measure the gender gap in internet use. A Web Foundation blog post argues we should choose the one that puts women at the center.
Gender equality top 100 — aPolitical published a list of the top 100 most influential people working in gender policy around the world.
Toolkit — In collaboration with A4AI, GSMA and the Association for Progressive Communications, we published a toolkit for researching women’s access and use, designed for those interested in integrating gender into their research projects.
Connecting open data, AI and privacy — While acknowledging that there are tensions between open data, privacy and AI communities, Tim Davies explores the values and goals that these groups share.
Open data for resilience — OpenDRI launched the Open Data for Resilience Index in beta. The tool identifies, assesses and compares the availability of key datasets for disaster risk management.
Partnership on open data — Open Government Partnership and the Open Data for Development Network announced a partnership to support open data initiatives in more than 60 countries.
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