Surveilled — Issue 31
Surveilled
Issue 31
A weekly summary of what I've found interesting at the intersection of economics, finance and technology.
Headlines
Money changer Travelex is paralysed by ransomware — the company has reverted to pen and paper for its daily operations. Situations like these are happening with such regularity now that it seems to trend to a new normal, where some more or less important parts of our daily infrastructure get taken out at random. Read ($)
Self-driving algorithms have trouble identifying dark-skinned road users — another good example of how AI could, mostly unwittingly, end up entrenching and even exacerbating existing biases in society. These will require additional effort to correct, but at least in the case of self-driving cars, the end goal is uncontroversial, every road user should be treated the same. Grappling with these issues for other algorithms (e.g. credit checks) involve moral choices. Read
DNA mapping firm 23andMe sold rights to a drug developed based on the DNA samples provided by its users — the real outrage will only manifest itself when they sell the dataset to health insurers, presumably. Another cautionary tale about providing sensitive data for frivolous benefits. Read (Twitter)
Internal Boeing emails shine a harsh light on the company culture — employees discussed deceiving the Federal Aviation Authority and airlines about the safety training required for the 737 Max, even joking with each other about not putting their family on the plane. This is of course damning for Boeing, but, seen together with previous similarly egregious behaviour, I can’t help but feel that this sort of mercenary mindset is also the result of 30 years of treating employees as commodities, and hence extinguishing any loyalty to employers, or even pride in their work. Read
Facebook and Teen Vogue bungled an attempted whitewash operation — everyone’s favourite social network placed sponsored content about their efforts to secure elections in the magazine (which has been doing great reporting on these very issues), but failed to disclose it, then denied it, then admitted it and finally scrapped the whole thing. Bottom line, once you’ve lost trust it’s very hard to win it back. Read
Context
The World Bank’s “World Development Report 2021” will be all about data for development, obviously a timely and important topic. Read (Twitter)
Cloud-based project management software provider Basecamp, who are very vocal about user privacy, removed the last tracker on their website recently. Leading by example. Read
One of Facebook’s top executives published an internal memo covering some of the issues the company is facing, notable mainly for the still fairly large disconnect between what’s written and prevailing public sentiment regarding the company. Read
Wide angle
News that Warner Bros is going to program upcoming movies with the help of AI leads to some interesting speculation on upcoming franchises... Read (Twitter)
That's it for this week's edition. As always, thanks for reading and please forward this to anyone who you think might be interested, it would be much appreciated.