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Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet announced a new tool for urban planners to use. Brenda McPhail, director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s Privacy, Technology, and Surveillance Project sees it as a good example of surveillance capitalism. Read the full article of The Intercept.
“Replica is a perfect example of surveillance capitalism, profiting from information collected from and about us as we use the products that have become a part of our lives,” said Brenda McPhail, director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s Privacy, Technology, and Surveillance Project. “We need to start asking, as a society, if we are going to continue to allow business models that are built around exploiting our information without meaningful consent.”
According to this article by The Intercept some prisons in the U.S. are capturing the voices of incarcerated people’s voice to create new biometric databases with their “voice prints”. It seems like another example of the deployment of new technology with the involvement of private companies on more vulnerable groups of people, with all the usual problems of biometrics (eg. reliability) and automated decisions (eg. transparency, explainability).
The enrollment of incarcerated people’s voice prints allows corrections authorities to biometrically identify all prisoners’ voices on prison calls, and find past prison calls in which the same voice prints are detected. Such systems can also automatically flag “suspicious” calls, enabling investigators to review discrepancies between the incarcerated person’s ID for the call and the voice print detected. Securus did not respond to a request for comment on how it defined “suspicious.” The company’s Investigator Pro also provides a voice probability score, rating the likelihood that an incarcerated person’s voice was heard on a call.
Have a look at this video on Youtube from The Nerdwriter. A great video essay on how photographer Dorothea Lange made her photogrpah “Dorothea Lange”.
Sad to learn that the American poet Mary Oliver has passed away. I always enjoy her keen obervational poems that show her high attentiveness to the natural world. Read some of her poetry on the Poetry Foundation.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world
From “When Death Comes” - Mary Oliver
The photography project "Wasteland" by Kadir van Lohuizen contains some very powerful images of large cities and how they manage their waste. I think that the waste managment and recycling process has been going on too much in the background, and the only way out is to reduce our trash. See also this article in the Financial Times on why the recycling system became more visible. In the word of Kadir: “If the world is not prepared to think about waste reduction and actually treat waste as a resource, next generations will drown in their own waste.”
This is an interesting use of a so-called Sankey diagram (a type of flow chart) to visualise spelling mistakes, by Collin Morris.
The following stop motion animation movie “In a Nutshell” is absolutely mesmerising. It tries to capture the world in a nutshell: “From a seed to war, from meat to love, from indifference to apocalypse”.
In response to the protests of the gillets-jaunes the President Emmanuel Macron has started a “grand débat national” to discuss the grievances. In an opinion piece for AOC-media, Bruno Latour discusses how for the general public describing their problems may difficult however as we are between different visions for civilisation:
La situation créée par les « gilets jaunes » est une occasion rêvée pour rebondir politiquement : c’est en effet la première fois qu’il devient clair pour tout le monde qu’il existe un lien direct entre transition écologique et justice sociale. Inutile de continuer à opposer économie et écologie : il faut les conjoindre, tout en reconnaissant que c’est ouvrir la boite de Pandore. (…) La tension actuelle vient de ce que la société civile n’est pas plus capable que l’État de s’organiser vers ce nouveau régime comme on le voit par l’irréalisme des demandes. Il n’est donc pas facile de passer de la plainte à la doléance (terme entendu au sens ancien des Cahiers de doléance qui décrivaient des territoires en fonction des injustices commises et des moyens d’y remédier par une autre organisation de la fiscalité et du droit). La désorientation est donc générale, d’autant que ce qui reste des anciens partis continue à organiser la dispute selon l’ancien vecteur — identité nationale ou ethnique d’un côté, mondialisation et progrès de l’autre, sans oublier la révolution en costume d’époque enfin, si l’on voulait compléter le désespérant tableau de « l’offre politique ».
The following really well video from the German channel Kurzgesagt provides a very balanced view, using lots of sources, to answer if organic vegetables and fruits are really better. The overall recommendation that I can extract from their message would simple and seems quite logical: eat more fruits and veggies that are produced locally and in season.
As an author from Wired tried to sell his personal data and found out it isn’t worth much, some economists made the following valid remark.
Yet data can be worth a good deal in the aggregate — just ask some of the major tech companies. The economics here are a bit like the economics of voting. If it were legal, and you tried to sell your vote and your vote alone, you might not get much more than 0.3 cents. That vote is unlikely to prove decisive. Yet average and marginal value do not coincide. If someone could buy a whole block of votes, which in turn could swing an election, the price could be much higher.