James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Amid staff tensions, Google’s HR chief steps down
Eileen Naughton, Google LLC’s head of human resources, will step down from her role at the company amid growing tensions between staff and management. Naughton had been with Google since 2006 and had spent the last four years working as vice president of people operations. Her position over the last two years surely was a ...
Silicon Valley startup Nuro first to get self-driving vehicle exemption from US
Autonomous vehicle delivery company Nuro Inc. has become the first company to be given an exemption from the federal government to operate its cars. The U.S. Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Thursday granted the Mountain View-based startup permission to test its second-generation vehicle, the R2. That car is designed to ...
Google demands startup Clearview AI stop scraping photos
Google LLC-owned YouTube Wednesday said it has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview AI, telling the startup that it can no longer scrape videos from its platform. Clearview AI came under scrutiny this year after reports that it had been scraping videos of people on social media platforms and then adding faces to its database. Its ...
Twitter explains how it will crack down on deepfake content
Twitter Inc. announced Tuesday that it will weed out deceptive, doctored content, joining other social media behemoths that have recently said the same. The company said in blog post that for the past several months it has been collecting feedback from its users as well as researchers regarding the threat that “synthetic and manipulated media” ...
YouTube will crack down on misleading political content for 2020 elections
Google LLC’s video sharing giant YouTube said on Monday that it plans to weed out any unreliable content that appears on its platform as the 2020 elections get underway. The company said that though it already had policies in place to curtail the spread of misinformation, it has now introduced deceptive-practices policies that will better ...
EU issues guidelines for 5G infrastructure, but doesn’t mention curtailing Huawei
The European Union today released a set of guidelines for member states that address security risks related to the rollout of 5G infrastructure, with no mention of Chinese tech behemoth Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. On Tuesday, the Trump administration said it was “disappointed” with the news that the U.K. would go ahead with its deal ...
Facebook announces upcoming content oversight board and how it will work
Facebook Inc.’s much-anticipated oversight board will get into action soon and its members will be announced in the “coming months,” the company said today. In a press release, Facebook said Thomas Hughes, a digital rights advocate and former executive director for the British human rights group Article 19, will become the director of oversight board ...
UK government introduces new rules for ‘internet of things’ devices
The U.K. government announced today that it will usher in new regulations for internet-enabled smart devices that can be used around the home. In a press release, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said smart devices in the home, commonly called the “internet of things,” are on the rise but many of the connected ...
A political first for Seattle: voting by mobile phone
Residents of King County, Washington, which includes Seattle, will become the first people in the U.S. to be able to cast a vote by smartphone, it was announced Wednesday. It’s a modest start. The 1.2 million people in the area will be voting in the obscure King County Conservation District Board of Supervisors election, which will take ...
Facebook to expand in UK, hiring 1,000 new workers
Facebook Inc. will hire 1,000 new staff in the U.K., bringing its total number of staff there to 4,000, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg announced today. Half the new roles will be focused in technology development, such as positions in software engineering and data science. The rest of the jobs will be positions in content ...