The government is still dragging its feet on gender recognition Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel, and for the second group, each passing day must make the thought of retreating to the bunker with the wine and olives increasingly appealing. Still, we are presented now and then with cause for optimism, an example of which presented [...]
Is facial recognition technology finally being seen for the dystopian threat it is? In the end, even Silicon Valley has had to admit that there is something a bit sinister about facial recognition technology. Momentum has been building in recent months. Arvind Krishna of IBM was first. He announced in June that his company would no longer offer automatic facial recognition (AFR) software. He also said it would [...]
The new counter-terror bill threatens our civil liberties and our justice system As More points out to Roper in A Man For All Seasons, if you flatten all the laws in England to get to the devil, you will have no protection when he turns round to meet you. This often goes to the heart of questions of individual liberty. You may one day need to rely [...]
Our obsession with George Orwell has robbed his name of all meaning March 17, 2020 The very first rule for writing set out in George Orwell’s 1949 essay “Politics and the English Language” is: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print”. It’s therefore amusing that “Orwellian” has become one of the most widely used figures of speech in English-language [...]
The privacy paradox: How we got trapped in a data dystopia February 18, 2020 One of the less encouraging reports to come out of the tech world this month was that Facebook, everyone’s favourite villainous corporation, knew very well about the colossal security flaw that let hackers rob personal data from millions of users long before the breach itself. Facebook employees have said that they felt “guilt” and “hurt” [...]
With its foray into facial recognition, Uber is normalising mass surveillance January 13, 2020 The news late last year that Uber plans to introduce facial recognition technology seems to have mostly escaped the notice of the public, buried as the story was beneath five or six paragraphs in most of the reports on the loss of the firm’s London licence. Or perhaps, as one depressing Wall Street Journal headline [...]
