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“Attorney General Paxton has sued Google, alleging that the tech giant has unlawfully captured and used the biometric data of millions of Texans without properly obtaining their informed consent to do so. The lawsuit alleges that Google, in yet another violation of Texans’ privacy, has collected millions of biometric identifiers, including voiceprints and records of …
“Global internet freedom declined for a 12th consecutive year as more governments erected digital barriers designed to censor dissent and monitor users, according to a report released today by Freedom House. The study finds that more than three-quarters of the world’s internet users now live in countries where authorities punish people for exercising their right …
NACBI: “The United States and Canada have lost 3 billion breeding birds since 1970—a loss of 1 in 4 birds, according to research published in Science in 2019. This steep decline in abundance can be reversed with new scales of conservation actions that benefit not only birds but also wildlife and people. When birds thrive, …
Brennan Center – Who Protects Your Vote?: “The “independent state legislature theory” is a misreading of the Constitution, advanced in recent years by a small group of right-wing advocates, that would give state legislatures wide authority to gerrymander electoral maps and pass voter suppression laws. It has even been used as political cover to try …
Nieman Lab: “About a quarter of Americans have ever paid for news directly. Americans making more than $150,000 a year are, not surprisingly, much more likely to have paid for news than those in any other income group (even the $100,000 to $150,000 bracket).”
Forbes: “…The team behind the monitoring project — ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department — is led by Beijing-based executive Song Ye, who reports to ByteDance cofounder and CEO Rubo Liang. The team primarily conducts investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees. But in at least two cases, the Internal Audit …
Ars Technica: “Over the past decade, Google has consistently documented its efforts to remove links from its search results to content that the tech giant considers pirated, and recently, the total number of Google takedowns since its reporting began has shot past 6 billion. It’s a milestone that Torrent Freak suggested shows that, “[w]hile copyright …
Washington Post – “A frightening number of kids’ apps are spying on them. Now parents can get some help to stop it. A new app called Do Not Track Kids acts like a privacy shield for iPhones and iPads used by children. For $5 per month, it runs in the background of the device to …
FT.com [subscription but this link may be open]: The myth that Kenyans ‘don’t read’ is a dusty relic of the country’s painful history – Gisa Tunbridge “We are not a reading nation,” lamented a Kenyan librarian in 2015. He did not mean, of course, that Kenyans can’t read — the vast majority can. He meant …
MakeUseOf: “During tumultuous times in world history, the news plays a critical role in informing people and spreading valuable messages. However, the difference between this digital age and previous periods of significant change is that the 24/7 news cycle keeps us aware of as much bad news as good news at nearly all times. This …
Maggie Farley / ICFJ – “Try this free social listening tool [beta] – or customize it for your newsroom. It’s useful for tracking politicians or issues in the run-up to the elections, and following contested races afterward. Political Pulse US is a social-listening app supported by ICFJ that allows journalists to monitor and analyze what …
Gizmodo – Here’s How Meta Became the Internet’s Biggest Hub of Covid-19 Misinformation: “…From the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, Facebook understood the outsized role its platform would plays in shaping public opinion about the virus and the safeguards that governments would inevitably institute in hopes of containing it. Ten months before the first reported …