Researching Meta - The company announced it will finally give researchers access to targeting data for political ads. The lack of access to this information forced academics to use legally risky workarounds for years ➤ Protocol
Shutdown the spyware industry - Ahead of the World Economic Forum, Access Now called on the world’s powerbrokers to step up and take a bold stand on surveillance tech that violates human rights ➤ Access Now
Clearview AI fined once again - Following in the footsteps of France, Italy and Australia, a UK privacy regulator has fined the American company for scraping images from the web and social media of UK residents to create a global online facial recognition database that can be used by law enforcement ➤ CNBC
Accolades - Timnit Gebru — former AI researcher at Google, and founder of Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) — was listed on TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2022 ➤ TIME
Stat of the week
20B
Number of facial images of people around the world that Clearview has collected, according to its website ➤ CNBC
Access and Affordability
Resilient infrastructure - A new study by the University of San Diego has revealed that a quarter of the world’s Internet users live in countries that are more susceptible than previously thought to targeted attacks on their Internet infrastructure, many of which are in the Global South ➤ Newswise
Misinformation
Florida’s social media law is unconstitutional - A federal appeals court ruled that content moderation and curation is constitutionally protected, and that it was an overreach for the Republican-led Florida Legislature to tell social media companies how to conduct their work under its free speech guarantee ➤ NPR
"[Clearview AI] not only enables identification of those people, but effectively monitors their behaviour and offers it as a commercial service. That is unacceptable."
Gender inclusion - GSMA is exploring how tokenisation of mobile phone numbers can be used to improve security for customers, particularly women ➤ Business Today
Bytes and Pieces
Sustainable tech - Nvidia announced its new plan to use liquid cooling to reduce big tech’s energy use, joining the ever-growing list of companies that are considering the amounts of energy their servers use ➤ The Verge
Web Foundation in the News
The Alliance for Affordable Internet’s data on mobile data costs was cited in an article by Global Voices on the shift in how Africans consume music.
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