James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Struggling with GDPR, big tech girds for another battle: Europe’s proposed electronic communications privacy rules
No sooner than the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation rules went into effect Friday, tech companies are now gearing up for another battle with what has been called even stricter regulation. That would be the “Regulation on Privacy and Electronic Communications,” or the “ePrivacy Regulation.” The law, approved by the European Parliament, is currently being reviewed ...
GDPR rules force some US media to close doors on European readers
Readers of some U.S. news media in Europe found that after the General Data Protection Regulation came into effect some sites denied them access. Some big names were affected, including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, the New York Daily News and the Baltimore Sun. Instead of news, readers were faced with ...
Samsung stung for $539 million for copying iPhone features
Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. today was ordered by a court to pay $539 million in damages to Apple Inc. over patent infringement relating to the design of the iPhone. In a case that has been going on for seven years, jurors in a federal court in San Jose, California, decided Thursday that the Korean electronics ...
Hoping to avoid more scandals, Facebook makes big changes to ad policies
Facebook Inc. today announced several steps to reduce the proliferation of propaganda on the platform, following months of controversy surrounding Russian meddling in the U.S. election and stirring up discord in the country. As of today, anything that appears on Facebook as an ad must be marked as such with the words “Paid for by” ...
Amazon criticized for selling police its facial recognition software
Amazon.com Inc. is selling its facial recognition system “Rekognition” to the cops, fueling fears of a surveillance state in which omnipresent eyes will always be watching. The revelation follows a release of documents by the American Civil Liberties Union pertaining to Amazon marketing its software to police. Amazon’s pitch to law enforcement is that Rekognition can ...
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin questions Google’s power
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin thinks Google Inc. might be too big for the good of society, echoing what other officials and businesses have been saying for some time. In an interview with CNBC Monday, Mnuchin said the Department of Justice must look seriously at Google and other tech companies that have unprecedented power and a great impact on ...
Google loses some prestige over its suspect Duplex AI demo
Google Inc. may have wowed the world with its demonstration of its almost too-human artificially intelligent Duplex virtual assistant, and it may have also been almost too good to be true. The short clip of Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai demonstrating the uncanny reality of the voice assistant making an appointment with a hair salon ...
Net neutrality gets a reprieve, but it could be short-lived
The U.S. Senate Wednesday voted to save net neutrality by overturning a decision made by the Federal Communications Commission to repeal the regulations made in 2015 under President Barack Obama. The vote was 52 to 47 and included three Republicans along with all 49 Democrats on the side of reversing the FCC decision. Such a ...
Facebook details abuse on platform – and AI falls short in flagging some of it
Facebook Inc. Tuesday released its first Community Standards Enforcement Report, detailing what its algorithm and human moderators have detected and removed from October last year to March this year. The upshot: a lot. Facebook said it took down 583 million fake accounts, most of which were removed within minutes of being setup. Some 837 million pieces of ...
Google employees leave company over supplying Pentagon with AI
Close to a dozen employees at Google Inc. have apparently quit their jobs in protest over a project in which the company is providing the U.S. Department of Defense with artificial intelligence. In March, several employees at Google said they were outraged about the project, some stating that it was a contradiction of its onetime motto, “Don’t be ...