Tech news from 2024 this time, I promise... -m

• Google Pledges to Destroy Browsing Data to Settle ‘Incognito’ Lawsuit (gift link, WSJ, April 1, 2024): For having deceived users about the privacy protection in Incognito Mode, Google says it will now delete all the surveillance data it captured on users in Incognito Mode. (Deleting that data is a start. But deleting the inferences that Google made from all its surveillance, which is where the value really lies, will unfortunately be impossible . . .)

• Lina Khan – FTC Chair on Amazon Antitrust Lawsuit & AI Oversight (Daily Show, Apr 1, 2024): Jon tells Lina about Apple’s strange sensitivity.

• Jon Stewart On The False Promises of AI (Daily Show, Apr 1, 2024): quoting Big Tech billionaires on their faith in AI.

• Amazon's "just walk out" technology was poorly paid people in India (Gizmodo, April 3, 2024)

• How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I. (Gift link, NYT, Apr 6, 2024): “At Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, managers, lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster to procure long works, according to recordings of internal meetings obtained by The Times. They also conferred on gathering copyrighted data from across the internet, even if that meant facing lawsuits. Negotiating licenses with publishers, artists, musicians and the news industry would take too long, they said. Like OpenAI, Google transcribed YouTube videos to harvest text for its A.I. models, five people with knowledge of the company’s practices said. That potentially violated the copyrights to the videos, which belong to their creators.”

• NYC’s AI Chatbot Tells Businesses to Break the Law (The Markup, March 29, 2024)

• New York City to Allow Driverless Car Tests (NYT, March 29, 2024): Surveillance robot cars in NYC? Of course... because the NYPD robot dogs, and Times Square surveillance robot, and drones floating over back yards, and Google's Link5G surveillance towers, have all been such big successes.

• Company behind gun detection tech previewed in subway faces multiple lawsuits and federal investigations (City and State, April 2, 2024): "Evolv, whose weapons detection scanners were recently demonstrated by Mayor Eric Adams, is being investigated by the SEC and the FTC for allegedly making misleading statements about what its technology can do."

• MLB’s brave new facial recognition ticketing experiment (Sam Borden for ESPN, Apr 1, 2024): "While “facial authentication” might sound more benign than “facial recognition,” the technology that underpins it is similar, and there are no guarantees that teams won’t change their minds about what do with – or with whom to share – the images and biometric data they get from fans in the future."