Category: Technology

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told lawmakers Wednesday the internet sector will need some form of regulation. After weathering heated questions from two Senate panels, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg returned to Capitol Hill Wednesday to face more questions from the House Energy and Commerce Committee about the social media platform's transparency and user privacy. Zuckerberg said it "is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation" of internet companies, an idea that has been floated by Republican and Democratic lawmakers. While it is not clear what that regulation would look like, lawmakers have said they want better protections after data breaches affected tens of millions of users. Zuckerberg cautioned lawmakers to be careful about what they propose, as larger companies like Facebook have more resources to comply with regulations than…

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday his company would step up efforts to block hate messages in Myanmar as he faced questioning by the U.S. Congress about electoral interference and hate speech on the platform. Facebook has been accused by human rights advocates of not doing enough to weed out hate messages on its social-media network in Myanmar, where it is a dominant communications system. "What's happening in Myanmar is a terrible tragedy, and we need to do more," Zuckerberg said during a 5-hour joint hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee and Senate Judiciary Committee. More than 650,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar's Rakhine state into Bangladesh since insurgent attacks sparked a security crackdown last August. United Nations officials investigating a possible genocide in Myanmar said last month…

Dumping sewage into a local river is common practice in some of America’s older cities.  With the benefits of modern engineering, cities like Washington D.C. will soon be able to divert hundreds of millions of liters of raw sewage every day to wastewater treatment plants instead of a river.  Arash Arabasadi reports. ...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified on Capitol Hill for the first time Tuesday, answering lawmakers' concerns about the social media giant's failure to protect the private information of as many 87 million users worldwide from Trump-affiliated political firm Cambridge Analytica. VOA's Congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson has more from a key day in the internet privacy debate on Capitol Hill. ...

The group known as the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots says fully autonomous lethal weapons that can strike selected targets are no longer within the realm of science fiction. The coalition says it wants pre-emptive action taken to ban them. Government experts will spend the next two weeks discussing the issue at a meeting of the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. The Campaign to stop Killer Robots - a coalition of 65 non-government organizations - says the world is running out of time to prevent these systems from becoming a dangerous reality. Campaign co-founder Richard Moyes warns the world is moving closer to situations where machine intelligence, instead of humans, may make life and death decisions on the battlefield. “We need humans involved in these processes and it needs…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to testify publicly Tuesday before a group of U.S. senators after apologizing for the way his company handled data for millions of users. He is due to appear before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Commerce Committee, and on Wednesday will go before House lawmakers. Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said users "deserve to know how their information is shared and secure," and that he wants to explore with Zuckerberg ways to balance safety with innovation. Zuckerberg met privately with lawmakers in Washington on Monday and released written testimony saying the social media network should have done more to prevent itself and the data of its members from being misused. "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility,…

Facebook users in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, were especially exposed to recent data privacy breaches due to high user numbers and the popularity of an app at the core of the problem, analysts believe. According to Facebook figures, the data of 1.175 million users in the Philippines may have been “improperly shared” with London-based voter profiling firm Cambridge Analytica. That estimate is the second highest, single-country total after the United States. Indonesia ranks third at around 1.1 million people exposed to data breaches. Vietnam was ninth with 427,000. Filipinos had also enjoyed a personality quiz app that spread fast due to the sharing of results, said Renato Reyes, secretary general of the Bagong Alyansang Makabaya alliance of social causes in Manila. The app is suspected as a source of…

Apple on Monday said it had achieved its goal of powering all of the company's facilities with renewable energy, a milestone that includes all of its data centers, offices and retail stores in 43 countries. The iPhone maker also said nine suppliers had recently committed to running their operations entirely on renewable energy sources like wind and solar, bringing to 23 the total number to make such a pledge. Major U.S. corporations such as Apple, Wal-Mart and Alphabet have become some of the country's biggest buyers of renewable forms of energy, driving substantial growth in the wind and solar industries. Alphabet's Google last year purchased enough renewable energy to cover all of its electricity consumption worldwide. Costs for solar and wind are plunging thanks to technological advances and increased global…

On the eve of an expected grilling by U.S. lawmakers, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg once again apologized for inadequately protecting the data of millions of social media platform users and highlighted steps the firm is taking to prevent a repeat. In multiple interviews with news media outlets and in prepared remarks to be delivered on Capitol Hill, Zuckerberg on Monday acknowledged that the tools Facebook provides to promote human interconnectedness were exploited for ill or nefarious purposes.   “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,” Zuckerberg said in testimony released ahead of Tuesday’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees and Wednesday’s appearance before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.   “I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here,” Zuckerberg added.  …

Social media giant Facebook is starting to notify 87 million of its users whether their personal data was harvested without their knowledge by Cambridge Analytica, the Britain-based voter profiling company U.S. President Donald Trump's campaign hired to target likely supporters in 2016. Facebook believes most of the affected users, more than 70 million, are in the United States, but there are also more than a million each in the Philippines, Indonesia and Britain. The company has apologized for the security breach, with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledging the company made a "huge mistake" by not more closely monitoring use of the data and not taking a broad enough view of the company's responsibilities. Facebook allowed a British researcher to create an app on Facebook on which about 200,000…

Congress has plenty of questions for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who will testify on Capitol Hill Tuesday and Wednesday about the company's ongoing data-privacy scandal and how it failed to guard against other abuses of its service.   Facebook is struggling to cope with the worst privacy crisis in its history - allegations that a Trump-affiliated data mining firm may have used ill-gotten user data to try to influence elections. Zuckerberg and his company are in full damage-control mode, and have announced a number of piecemeal technical changes intended to address privacy issues.   But there's plenty the Facebook CEO hasn't yet explained. Here are five questions that could shed more light on Facebook's privacy practices and the degree to which it is really sorry about playing fast and loose…

Despite a global abundance of food, a United Nations report says 815 million people, 11 percent of the world’s population, went hungry in 2016. That number seems to be rising. Poverty is not the only reason, however, people are experiencing food insecurity. “Increasingly we’re also seeing hunger caused by the displacement related to conflict, natural disaster as well, but particularly there’s been an uptick in the number of people displaced in the world,” said Robert Opp, director of Innovation and Change Management at the United Nations World Food Program. Humanitarian organizations are turning to new technologies such as AI, or artificial intelligence, to fight global food insecurity. WATCH: Global Hunger Is Rising — Artificial Intelligence Can Help “What AI offers us right now, is an ability to augment human capacity.…

Despite a global abundance of food, a United Nations report says 815 million people, 11 percent of the world's population, went hungry in 2016. Advances in technology and artificial intelligence can help feed them, but there are challenges that keep first world technologies from reaching the developing world. VOA's Elizabeth Lee explains. ...

The next generation of life-saving robots could be inspired by cockroaches. Faith Lapidus explains how. ...

Facebook violates its users' privacy rights through the use of its facial recognition software, according to consumer groups led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Their complaint to the federal government focuses on the use of Facebook software that identifies people in photographs that are uploaded to its site. A complaint filed Friday by a coalition of consumer organizations with Federal Trade Commission said the social media giant "routinely scans photos for biometric facial matches without the consent of the image subject." The complaint says the company tries to improve its facial recognition prowess by deceptively encouraging users the participate in the process of identifying people in photographs. "This unwanted, unnecessary, and dangerous identification of individuals undermines user privacy, ignores the explicit preferences of Facebook users, and is contrary to…

The European Union said Friday Facebook has told it that up to 2.7 million people in the 28-nation bloc may have been victim of improper data sharing involving political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica. EU spokesman Christian Wigand said EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova will have a telephone call with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg early next week to address the massive data leaks. The EU and Facebook will be looking at what changes the social media giant needs to make to better protect users and how the U.S. company must adapt to new EU data protection rules. Wigand said that EU data protection authorities will discuss over the coming days ``a strong coordinated approach'' on how to deal with the Facebook investigation. Separately, Italy's competition authority opened an investigation Friday into…

Amazon is spending millions of dollars on lobbying as the global online retailer seeks to expand its reach into a swath of industries that President Donald Trump’s broadsides haven’t come close to hitting. Trump’s attacks over the last week targeted what Amazon is best known for: rapidly shipping just about any product you can imagine to your door. But the company CEO Jeff Bezos founded more than two decades ago is now a sprawling empire that sells groceries in brick-and-mortar stores, hosts the online services of other companies and federal offices in a network of data centers, and even recently branched into health care. Amazon relies on a nearly 30-member in-house lobbying team that’s four times as large as it was three years ago as well as outside firms to…

About 1 percent of the world's population lives with the mental condition called bipolar disorder, characterized by swings between elevated and depressed moods. In most cases, timely interaction with psychotherapists, family and friends can alleviate the symptoms. Researchers in Denmark say modern technology can help by keeping track of a patient's symptoms and summoning help quickly when needed. VOA's George Putic reports. ...

Facebook's acknowledgement that the personal data of most of its 2.2 billion members has probably been scraped by "malicious actors" is the latest example of the social network's failure to protect its users' data. Not to mention its seeming inability to even identify the problem until the company was embroiled in scandal. CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters Wednesday that Facebook is shutting down a feature that let people search for Facebook users by phone number or email address. Although that was useful for people who wanted to find others on Facebook, it turns out that unscrupulous types also figured out years ago that they could use it identify individuals and collect data off their profiles. The scrapers were at it long enough, Zuckerberg said, that "at some point during the…

A Brazilian judge has ordered that Facebook Inc pay 111.7 million reais ($33.4 million) for failing to cooperate with a corruption investigation, federal prosecutors said on Thursday, prompting Facebook to say it was exploring “all legal options.” The judge fined Facebook for failing to give access in 2016 to WhatsApp messages exchanged by individuals under investigation for defrauding the healthcare system of Brazil’s Amazonas state, the prosecutors said in a statement. In an emailed comment sent to Reuters, Facebook called the fine groundless. “Facebook cooperates with law enforcement. In this particular case we have disclosed the data required by applicable law,” the statement said. “We understand this fine lacks grounds, and are exploring all legal options at our disposal.” According to federal police, a Brazilian judge ordered in April 2016…

Australia's Privacy Commissioner said on Thursday she had opened a formal investigation into social media giant Facebook Inc after the company confirmed data from 300,000 Australian users may have been used without authorization. The investigation will consider whether Facebook has breached Australia's privacy laws, Privacy Commissioner Angelene Falk said in a statement. Facebook said on Wednesday that the personal information of up to 87 million users, mostly in the United States, may have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, up from a previous news media estimate of more than 50 million. ...

Police say a woman shooter entered YouTube headquarters in California Tuesday and wounded at least three people before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Mike O’Sullivan reports, the shooter’s motive is unknown. ...

A woman who believed she was being suppressed by YouTube and told her family members she "hated" the company opened fire at YouTube's headquarters in California, wounding three people before taking her own life, police said. Investigators do not believe Nasim Aghdam specifically targeted the three victims when she pulled out a handgun and fired off several rounds in a courtyard at the company's headquarters south of San Francisco on Tuesday, police said. But a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation told The Associated Press that Aghdam had a longstanding dispute with the company. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case, said Aghdam used the name "Nasime Sabz" online. A website in that name decried YouTube's policies and…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before a congressional committee about the privacy scandal that has rocked the social media company. The House and Energy and Commerce Committee announced Wednesday Zuckerberg will testify on April 11 about the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook users that could be used to influence voters in U.S. elections. The firm was hired by U.S. President Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, which paid the firm nearly $6 million. Committee chairman Greg Walden and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone said the hearing hopes to "shed light on critical consumer data privacy issues and help all Americans better understand what happens to their personal information online." The panel is the first of three congressional committees that have asked Zuckerberg…

Facebook, expanding its response to people using the platform improperly, said Tuesday that it had deleted hundreds of Russian accounts and pages associated with a "troll factory" indicted by U.S. prosecutors for fake activist and political posts in the 2016 U.S. election campaign. Facebook said many of the deleted articles and pages came from Russia-based Federal News Agency, known as FAN, and that the social media company's security team had concluded that the agency was technologically and structurally intertwined with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency. Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg told Reuters in an exclusive interview that the agency "has repeatedly acted to deceive people and manipulate people around the world, and we don't want them on Facebook anywhere." Massive data collection The world's largest social media company is under pressure to improve its handling of data after disclosing that information about…

Autonomous cars should be required to meet standards on their ability to detect potential hazards, and better ways are needed to keep their human drivers ready to assume control, U.S. auto safety and technology experts said after fatal crashes involving Uber Technologies and Tesla vehicles. Automakers and tech companies rely on human drivers to step in when necessary with self-driving technology. But in the two recent crashes, which involved vehicles using different kinds of technologies, neither of the human drivers took any action before the accidents. Driverless cars rely on lidar, which uses laser light pulses to detect road hazards, as well as sensors such as radar and cameras. There are not, however, any standards on the systems, nor do all companies use the same combination of sensors, and some…

Bread and chocolate are staples of the American diet. And a scientific team in California is working hard to make sure the plants they’re made from are as robust as possible. They’re using a recently discovered bacterial gene-editing tool called CRISPR to create more pest-resistant crops. CRISPR is a feature of the bacterial defense system. The microbes use it like a molecular pair of scissors, to precisely snip out viral infections in their DNA. Scientists at the Innovative Genomics Institute in Berkeley, California, are using CRISPR to manipulate plant DNA. Managing director, Susan Jenkins, says the technique is so much faster and precise than other plant transformation methods, it will likely increase the speed of creating new plant varieties by years, if not decades. “What CRISPR is going to allow,”…

Facebook is a company in a hurry.   Since the world learned about the latest customer data controversy at Facebook, the social media network has unleashed a swarm of changes. But it’s unclear whether Facebook’s own reckoning will be enough to satisfy regulators and lawmakers.   “We've reached a tipping point with Facebook and privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest advocacy group. “What's most interesting at this moment are the number of forces — political, economic and social — that are converging. And I think the practical consequences is that something big will change.”   With more than 2 billion customers, Facebook has been in the hot seat in recent weeks over how an outside researcher gave the data of 50 million users to…