Category: Technology

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…

Shares of Amazon.com Inc fell 4 percent on Monday after U.S. President Donald Trump again attacked the online retailer over the pricing of its deliveries through the United States Postal Service and promised unspecified changes. "Only fools, or worse, are saying that our money losing Post Office makes money with Amazon," Trump tweeted. "They lose a fortune, and this will be changed. Also, our fully tax paying retailers are closing stores all over the country ... not a level playing field!" Trump has been vocal about his opposition to Amazon's use of the postal service and Monday's tweet adds to investor worries that the company could see more regulation. Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for a comment. Details of Amazon's payments to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) are…

"We've made a bunch of mistakes." "Everyone needs complete control over who they share with at all times." "Not one day goes by when I don't think about what it means for us to be the stewards of this community and their trust."   Sound familiar? It's Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressing a major privacy breach — seven years ago.   Lawmakers in many countries may be focused on Cambridge Analytica's alleged improper use of Facebook data, but the social network's privacy problems back more than a decade. Here are some of the company's most notable missteps and promises around privacy. 2007   The social media darling unveils its Facebook Platform to great fanfare. Zuckerberg says app developers can now access the web of connections between users and their friends,…

Coral reefs cover less than one percent of the world's ocean beds, yet they are home to a quarter of all marine life on the planet. But they are facing serious challenges that threaten their survival. As Faiza Elmasry tells us, beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean island nation of the Seychelles, conservationists are coming up with new ways to save the reefs. VOA's Faith Lapidus narrates. ...

Having robots to do the dirty, tedious parts of the job is a dream come true in the construction business. Automation technology developers say robotics are transforming the industry, making it safer, and helping companies take on more projects and finish them faster. Faiza Elmasry has the story. Faith Lapidus narrates. ...

More than 1 billion people around the world have some sort of disability. Rong Shi of VOA's Mandarin service toured an exhibit in New York that showcases the latest gadgets and inventions designed to help those with a range of physical, sensory or cognitive abilities lead more independent lives and engage more fully in the world. Faith Lapidus reports. ...

The fallout continues for Facebook over how it handles user data and privacy. U.S. and European lawmakers are calling for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify, and regulators have opened investigations. Michelle Quinn reports on how the social media giant is facing a tipping point when it comes to dealing with user privacy. ...

A vehicle in a fatal crash last week in California was operating on Autopilot, making it the latest accident to involve a self-driving vehicle, Tesla has confirmed. The electric car maker said the driver, who was killed in the accident, did not have his hands on the steering wheel for six seconds before the crash, despite several warnings from the vehicle. Tesla Inc. tells drivers that its Autopilot system, which can maintain speed, change lanes and self-park, requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel in order to take control of the vehicle to avoid accidents.  Tesla said its vehicle logs show the driver took no action to stop the Model X SUV from crashing into a concrete lane divider. Photographs of the SUV…

Russian ships are skulking around underwater communications cables, causing the U.S. and its allies to worry the Kremlin might be taking information warfare to new depths. Is Moscow interested in cutting or tapping the cables? Does it want the West to worry it might? Is there a more innocent explanation? Unsurprisingly, Russia isn't saying. But whatever Moscow's intentions, U.S. and Western officials are increasingly troubled by their rival's interest in the 400 fiber-optic cables that carry most of world's calls, emails and texts, as well as $10 trillion worth of daily financial transactions. "We've seen activity in the Russian navy, and particularly undersea in their submarine activity, that we haven't seen since the '80s," General Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of the U.S. European Command, told Congress this month. Without undersea cables,…

Was a leaked internal Facebook memo aimed at justifying the social network's growth-at-any-cost strategy? Or simply a way to open debate on difficult questions over new technologies? The extraordinarily blunt memo by a high-ranking executive — leaked this week and quickly repudiated by the author and by Facebook — warned that the social network's goal of connecting the world might have negative consequences, but that these were outweighed by the positives. "Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies," the 2016 memo by top executive Andrew "Boz" Bosworth said. "Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools." While Bosworth and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said the memo was only a way to provoke debate, it created a new firestorm for the social network mired in…

While wind turbines and solar cells generate power only when there is wind and sun, most rivers always flow and most ocean shores always experience tidal currents. At a recent energy summit organized by the U.S. Energy Department, a company from Maine displayed an innovative submersible generator that effectively harvests power from shallow rivers and tidal currents. VOA's George Putic has more. ...

A recent fatality involving one of Uber's self-driving cars may have created uncertainty and doubt regarding the future of autonomous vehicles, but it's not stopping automakers who say autonomous and self-driving vehicles are here to stay. At the New York International Auto Show this week, autonomous vehicles and electric cars were increasingly front and center as VOA's Tina Trinh reports. ...

A new coalition of tech giants and conservationists is looking to drastically reduce the amount of wild, and often endangered, animals that are trafficked via online services. As Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports, they hope to cut 80 percent of the illegal trade by the end of the decade. ...

The family of a woman killed by an Uber Technologies Inc self-driving vehicle in Arizona has reached a settlement with the ride services company, ending a potential legal battle over the first fatality caused by an autonomous vehicle. Cristina Perez Hesano, an attorney with the firm of Bellah Perez in Glendale, Arizona, said "the matter has been resolved" between Uber and the daughter and husband of Elaine Herzberg, 49, who died after being hit by an Uber self-driving SUV while walking across a street in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe earlier this month. Terms of the settlement were not given. The law firm representing Herzberg's daughter and husband, whose names were not disclosed, said they would have no further comment on the matter as they considered it resolved. An Uber…

A Nigerian entrepreneur is turning plastic waste into rain coats, school bags, car covers and shoes. He says he is doing his part to fight pollution and encourage recycling while making a practical fashion statement. But not everyone is buying into it. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports. ...