Companies constantly install invasive computer codes on your devices and mobile phones to keep an eye on you – Epstein
Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist for the American Institute of Behavioural Research and Technology, recommends taking the following steps to protect your privacy: Use a virtual private network (VPN) such as Nord, which is only about $3 per month and can be used on up to six devices. In my...
Big Tech slavery: Without corporate openness and democratic oversight, epistemic inequality rules
Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are spearheading the surveillance market transformation, placing themselves at the top tier of the epistemic hierarchy. They know everything about you and you know nothing about them. You don’t even know what they know about you. “They operated in the shadows to amass huge knowledge...
Surveillance capitalism: Even modern cars are equipped with multiple cameras that feed Big Data
Christopher Wylie, now-former director of research at Cambridge Analytica, blew the whistle on the company’s methods of illicitly collecting clients data without their knowledge or consent. According to Wylie, they had so much data on people, they knew exactly how to trigger fear, rage and paranoia in any given individual....
Big Tech: Social media collect data and your photos, which are used to train facial recognition software
The Google Nest security system has a hidden microphone built into it that isn’t featured in any of the schematics for the device. Voice data, and all the information delivered through your daily conversations, is tremendously valuable to Big Data, and add to their ever-expanding predictive modelling capabilities. You cannot...
Covid returns to ravage China where projections show the virus will kill one million before June
In many places, life took on a semblance of pre‑Covid normality in 2022, as countries shed pandemic-control measures. Governments ended lockdowns, reopened schools and scaled back or abandoned mask-wearing mandates. International travel resumed. There were optimistic proclamations, too. In January, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen declared that SARS‑CoV-2 no longer...
The Internet is like an ancient city, its latest incarnation resting atop ruins of so many civilisations
We all do it. Make little snap judgments about everyday strangers as we go about our lives. Without giving it a second’s thought, we sketch minibiographies of the people we pass on the sidewalk, the guy seated across from us on the train, or the woman in line in front...
Twitter struggles to cope with moderation of rapid shifts in online conversation, it’s likely to worsen with Musk
Twitter’s discovery algorithm (which surfaces heavily discussed or shared messages on people’s timelines) “prioritises a very particular type of content”, says Renée DiResta, who studies social networks and misinformation at the Stanford Internet Observatory in California. “People who maybe don’t necessarily have an institutional credential, but are adept at commenting...
How Twitter new owner’s tyranny touched off migration from the platform, in turn hit science hard
In November, Vince Knight decided he’d had enough of Twitter. After more than a decade on the social-media platform, Knight – a mathematician at Cardiff University, UK – was concerned about the site’s direction under its new owner, entrepreneur Elon Musk, who began laying off vast numbers of staff shortly...
How influx of Ukrainian refugees in Georgia set off exodus of locals to US in hunt for better lives
Even before the war in Ukraine, some 40 per cent of the population in Georgia faced difficulties accessing enough safe and nutritious food for an active and healthy life, according to the UN. The number was around 32 per cent in 2014-2016. More than one in five adults were obese...
Hit hard by Russia-Ukraine war, neighbouring Georgia can’t grow or import food, faces hunger
For years, Georgia, the tiny former Soviet republic of 3.7 million people, relied on neighbouring agricultural powerhouses – Russia next door and Ukraine across the Black Sea – to feed its citizens. But the former’s invasion of the latter has changed all that. The rising costs of food, rent and...
