Kate Conger's posts - French uPOST

The effort began at an Applebee’s in Redwood City, a link in a chain of towns that dot that peninsula that connects San Francisco to Silicon Valley. Robert Taitt, a security officer who works on Facebook’s campus, signed his union card there. He was one of the first of more than 3,000 Silicon Valley security officers…

Google rolled out new workplace policies and guidelines for internal communication last week, a response to employees who have pressed the company for months to address their concerns over workplace harassment. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the changes in a company-wide email that stressed the company’s effort to…

When a group of about 40 players first tested out a live game called the Machine Learning President at a private event in San Francisco this February, they were unaware that the game would end up memorialized in the pages of The New Yorker.

The crash of an Uber self-driving car that killed an Arizona woman in March was “entirely avoidable,” according to police reports released by the Tempe Police Department. Cellphone data obtained by police suggests that the Uber operator was also streaming an episode of reality show The Voice at the time of the fatal…

Following employee protests at Google and Microsoft over government contracts, workers at Amazon are circulating an internal letter to CEO Jeff Bezos, asking him to stop selling the company’s Rekognition facial recognition software to law enforcement and to boot the data-mining firm Palantir from its cloud services.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella downplayed his company’s work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a company-wide email sent this evening, saying that Microsoft’s contract with ICE deals only with email, calendar, and messaging—not with separating children from their parents.

Microsoft employees are putting pressure on their management to cancel a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of a backlash against the agency’s policy of separating children from their families at the U.S. border.

Google is committing to not using artificial intelligence for weapons or surveillance after employees protested the company’s involvement in Project Maven, a Pentagon pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to analyze drone footage. However, Google says it will continue to work with the United States military…

Google will not seek to renew its artificial intelligence contract with the Department of Defense after it expires next year, Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene told employees last week. But despite the revelation that the contract has an end date, the pushback against it continues—within the company and externally.

When Facebook expanded its pilot program to block revenge porn from being posted on its platforms last month, the blowback was swift. The program, which asks users to send in nude or partially nude images so they can be hashed and blocked, was called “creepy” and “controversial.”

Google will not seek another contract for its controversial work providing artificial intelligence to the U.S. Department of Defense for analyzing drone footage after its current contract expires.

The big new European data-privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is here, and it’s ushered in a host of changes to the way companies treat your personal information.

A group of shareholders and several Google employees are teaming up to back a proposal that would tie executive compensation to the company’s ability to meet certain diversity goals. But Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is opposing the proposal, saying that linking executive pay to diversity metrics isn’t in the…

Facebook users who want extra account security but don’t want to share their phone number with the company can now lock down their accounts with alternative two-factor authentication methods like code-generating apps, Facebook announced today.

Neuralink, Elon Musk’s secretive startup dedicated to the development of brain-computer interfaces that could make it possible for people to communicate with computers using only their thoughts, is funding primate research at a California university, according to public records obtained by Gizmodo.

Google has pressed forward with its effort to provide artificial intelligence solutions to the Department of Defense, despite an internal employee petition against the company’s involvement in a pilot program that analyzes drone footage using AI and the resignations of around a dozen employees who objected to the…

Google’s unofficial motto has long been the simple phrase “don’t be evil.” But that’s over, according to the code of conduct that Google distributes to its employees. The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show.

Since Elon Musk launched his tunneling project, The Boring Company, in late 2016, he has often said that his goal is for his boring machines to outpace his pet snail, Gary, in a race.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is opening up its free denial-of-service protection program to political groups in the United States, a move that will help political campaigns defend themselves against online attacks during the upcoming election season.

It’s been nearly three months since many Google employees—and the public—learned about the company’s decision to provide artificial intelligence to a controversial military pilot program known as Project Maven, which aims to speed up analysis of drone footage by automatically classifying images of objects and people.…