Tag: Tech

Clearview AI Offered Free Facial Recognition Trials To Police All Around The World

Law enforcement agencies and government organizations from 24 countries outside the United States used a controversial facial recognition technology called Clearview AI, according to internal company data reviewed by BuzzFeed News. That data, which runs up until February 2020, shows that police departments, prosecutors’ offices, universities, and interior ministries from…

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Big Tech Thought It Had A Billion Users In The Bag. Now It’s Being Forced To Make Hard Choices To Get Them.

BuzzFeedNews / Getty Images For more than 30 years, Manjul, who goes by his first name only, has skewered leaders from every Indian government in acerbic political cartoons splashed across the country’s biggest news publications and, in recent years, on social media. But until June, no one had ever threatened…

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Facebook Unveiled VR Work Meetings, Which, No Thanks

Facebook / Via oculus.com “Workrooms,” Facebook’s new VR office meeting. Facebook on Thursday offered a first glimpse at the “metaverse” CEO Mark Zuckerberg has recently been touting as “the successor to the mobile internet” and the future of his now–$354 billion company. He’s described it as “an embodied internet that…

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The Co-Founder Of The Fact-Checking Site Snopes Was Writing Plagiarized Articles Under A Fake Name

David Mikkelson, the co-founder of the fact-checking website Snopes, has long presented himself as the arbiter of truth online, a bulwark in the fight against rumors and fake news. But he has been lying to the site’s tens of millions of readers: A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that between…

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Ahoy, Humans, Do Not Tempt The Cruel Gods Of The Sea

John Singleton Copley / Via Public Domain, nga.gov Watson and the Shark, 1778 I am mortal, flesh and bone, and I live only at the pleasure and mercy of the natural world. I am fully aware of how humankind has worked for tens of thousands of years to manipulate and…

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Venmo Is Ending The Public Feed. It Still Needs One More Privacy Fix.

Sopa Images / SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images Venmo, PayPal’s mobile payments app, announced on Tuesday that it is ending the global view — the feed where you could see transactions not just between your friends, but those between complete strangers. The global view was accessed via a globe icon…

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