Only days after The Washington Post’s startling revelations of abuse by various governments using Israeli firm NSO’s Pegasus spyware, Axios reports on the case of a Catholic Church official in the US, Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who resigned after being shamed as apparently gay by the Catholic...
Ulises Ali Mejias, co-author of “The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism,” has penned an article in which he draws our attention to a seemingly invisible fact when he claims that “there is a new form of colonialism emerging in the world:...
As data scientists, we’re lucky. Data scientists, in the broadest sense, are the very first human beings whose conceptual language — in particular dimensionality-reduction, compression and statistical validation — can explain human bodies and minds, and hence “consciousness,”...
The final nail in the coffin of value is finding the right price of data. The rule that underlies the Zeitgeist of late-stage capitalism is “everything has a price,” the corollary or simple inversion of Milton Friedman’s cherished, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” In an...
The gig community, which is on a path to quickly becoming a majority, needs the collaborative protection that the labor movement originally provided. Society has spent more than a century fighting over the value of human labor. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith links a society’s potential...
Big Brother is not only watching you. He now keeps in touch, too. There are over 200 million voters in America and now, with the help of new technology and lax privacy laws, both the Republicans and Democrats have a file on, well, every one of them. Cambridge Analytica, a British firm, was...
Data collection and analysis have played an important role in smart cities, but should citizens’ privacy be used as a foundation? The real-time analysis of data procured over various electronic platforms has become integral to the development of infrastructure, planning and policy formulation...
