Articles by Eli Siems

PRG News Round Up – October 24   Ann Cavoukian, the former privacy commissioner of Ontario and key developer of the Privacy by Design movement, resigned from Sidewalk Labs. Cavoukian said that her resignation was intended as a “strong statement” about the treatment of data privacy in Sidewalk Labs’ plans for a smart city neighborhood in Toronto.…

    The Machine Learning algorithms Amazon has been using to screen applicant’s resumes generated gender biases. This is the most recent in a line of cases of algorithm generated biases. Amazon’s system has taught itself that male candidates were preferable to female and therefore started to sort for particular terms used mostly by male applicants.…

Tim Berners-Lee and John Bruce founded the start-up Interrupt and are working on Solid, a web project designed to decentralize data ownership (The Inquirer). Facebook was hacked through their “View As” feature with over 50 million users having having their accounts taken over as well as access to the third-party websites they logged into with Facebook taking advantage of the Single Sign-On feature (Wired).…

Uber agreed to pay $148 million in settlement for 2016 data breach (Washington Post).   French data protection authority issued some of the first formal guidance on blockchain and the GDPR (Tweet by Michele Finck, Study). Spotify and Ancestry can tell you your “music DNA” from your actual DNA (QZ).  …

A little-known data firm that created 48 million user profiles by scraping data from sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Zillow had been storing its profiles on Amazon cloud storage without password protection, leaving it open for anyone to download. “In a brief per curiam decision, the [Supreme Court] dismissed United States v.…

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a decision in Sandvig v. Sessions. The case pitted the First Amendment against data privacy concerns, and the decision has garnered interest and some criticism. Facebook says it will not apply  some GDPR protections to US citizens.…

The United States Department of Education issued a letter to Agora Charter Schools telling them that they cannot require parents to use an online service that would require them to waive their rights under FERPA. FISA section 702 was extended.…

Emiliano Falcon and Eli Siems contributed A recent Op-Ed in the New York Times assailed the academic community for being asleep at the wheel on the critical study of algorithms and technology more broadly. Meanwhile NYU officially launched the AInow Institute for the study of the social implications of AI.…

News Roundup, April 26 By Eli Siems   U.K. Parliament concluded an inquiry into algorithmic decision-making. James Davenport contributed. “Buzzfeed is building a team of writers to sell you stuff you didn’t know you wanted,” mainly by producing familiar lists and slideshows about products and linking to partners like Amazon.com.…