Open Sourced: exposing and explaining the hidden consequences of tech

In the earlier days of the coronavirus pandemic, an animated map from a company called Tectonix went viral. It showed spring breakers leaving a Florida beach to return to their homes across the US, as a series of tiny orange dots congregating on a beach in early March scattered across the country over the following two weeks.

“It becomes clear just how massive the potential impact of just one single beach gathering can have in spreading this virus across our nation,” the video’s narrator said. “The data tells the stories we just can’t see.”

Update, September 3: Apple is delaying enforcement of its “permission to track” feature on iOS 14 until “early next year” to give app developers more time to make the required changes.

Apple is cracking down on what it allows other companies to know about you. The company announced on Monday that iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur will feature a host of improved privacy features that will give users better control over their data and knowledge over what apps and websites know about them. This is great for users who don’t like the idea of, say, a period tracker app sending their data to a company they’ve never heard of. It’s bad news for that company they’ve never heard of.

The Apple-Google exposure notification tool, announced on April 10, is one step closer to being launched. The two companies released software that will help public health authorities build apps that incorporate their exposure notification tool. Apple, specifically, rolled out a software update to iOS devices that some users could download immediately. This big public unveiling raises a couple very important questions: Will any government agencies actually build those apps? And will anybody use them?

These questions remain unanswered. They also raise another, more essential question: How will the new Apple-Google tool help the world fight the pandemic? The companies sold the concept early on as part of a tech-based solution to a very hard problem. But now, Apple and Google admit the tool is not meant to be a silver bullet.

During the coronavirus pandemic, many of us have vastly increased the time we spend online and moved many of the activities from outside of our homes to the confines of the internet. In the middle of this — and with this shift in mind — the Senate voted on Wednesday not to protect Americans’ internet browsing and search history data from secret and warrantless surveillance by law enforcement. The measure needed 60 votes to pass. It got 59.

The outcome is especially frustrating since four senators didn’t vote on the amendment at all, and at least one would have voted yes. Lamar Alexander couldn’t vote because he’s quarantined. Two others — Ben Sasse and Bernie Sanders — didn’t respond to request for comment on where they were during the vote. An aide told Politico that Patty Murray would have voted yes had she been there, but the senator was not in Washington, DC, when the vote occurred. In the end, the result didn’t come down to party — there were plenty of Republican and Democratic votes on both sides — but attendance.

You’ve seen the pop-ups: “This site uses cookies to improve your experience. Please accept cookies.”

It’s true, cookies do improve your experience. They function as the website’s short-term memory. With each new click you make, cookies help the site identify you as the same person. Imagine every time you add something to your cart and click away, it disappears. Or each time you load a new page on Facebook, you have to log in again. Without cookies, the online world we know today wouldn’t exist.

A battle over facial recognition is brewing in upstate New York, where earlier this month Lockport Schools became one of the first US school districts to turn on the controversial technology in all of the K-12 buildings that serve about 5,000 students. There, the district’s deployment of the tech has ignited a squabble between parents, school board members, state education officials, and privacy advocates over facial recognition’s risks and cost-effectiveness. Now a state assembly member plans to double down on a proposed bill that would put a moratorium on the tech in New York state schools.

The district’s plans, and the confusion it’s spurred, have made Lockport a test case for how facial recognition will be used in schools, and for how government officials will respond to mounting criticisms that the tech violates student privacy, is plagued by inaccurate results, and isn’t worth its high price tag.

Last year, tech companies couldn’t get enough of letting you use their products less.

Executives at Apple and Google unveiled on-device features to help people monitor and restrict how much time they spent on their phones. Facebook and Instagram, two of the biggest time sucks on the planet, also rolled out time spent notifications and the ability to snooze their apps — new features meant to nudge people to scroll through their apps a little less mindlessly.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly playing a role in companies’ hiring decisions. Algorithms help target ads about new positions, sort through resumes, and even analyze applicants’ facial expressions during video job interviews. But these systems are opaque, and we often have no idea how artificial intelligence-based systems are sorting, scoring, and ranking our applications.

It’s not just that we don’t know how these systems work. Artificial intelligence can also introduce bias and inaccuracy to the job application process, and because these algorithms largely operate in a black box, it’s not really possible to hold a company that uses a problematic or unfair tool accountable.

Your data, whether it’s your name, your location, or your shopping habits, has been a commodity for decades now. Collected, bought, sold, shared, transferred — however businesses get it, a lot of them have access to a lot of information about you. They use it in ways you never agreed to (and often that you’re not even aware of), and they make a lot of money off of it. And there wasn’t much you could do to stop them.

That’s about to change … to a point.

Lawmakers want to press pause on deploying facial recognition and other biometric technology in public housing. Though it’s not clear the extent to which the technology is already being used in public housing (or other categories of government-supported and -regulated housing), lawmakers say facial recognition raises privacy concerns, and point to its known inaccuracies, especially when applied to people of color and women (among other minority groups).

There’s no law regulating facial recognition at the federal level yet. But complementary legislation introduced in the House and the Senate — the “No Biometric Barriers to Housing Act” — would put a hold on the use of biometric-based recognition systems in most housing supported by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The bill also directs the department to conduct research into the technology and its potential impact on residents of public housing.

TikTok, the short-form video app that’s been downloaded 1.5 billion times, is one of the most exciting and goofiest places on the internet, and possibly the only truly fun social media network in 2019. It is also based in China — and that’s the part that has some users, and now, politicians, concerned.

Over the past year and a half, TikTok, where under-60-second videos often feature bizarre memes, inside jokes, and bite-sized sketch comedy, has become the defining social media app of Gen Z, not only in the US but around the world in places like India and Europe. Though it originated as Musical.ly, a nearly identical app known mostly for lip-synching and popular with pre-teens, in 2017 the Chinese internet company ByteDance bought the app and relaunched it as TikTok, with all Musical.ly accounts migrating over to TikTok in August 2018. ByteDance is now the world’s largest startup, estimated to be valued at $78 billion.

Three years ago, I put my faith in a 23andMe DNA test and got burned.

While most of my results initially checked out — about 50 percent South Asian and what looked like a 50 percent hodgepodge of European — there was one glaring surprise. Where roughly 25 percent Italian was supposed to be, Middle Eastern stood in its place. The results shocked me.

Facebook started out as Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room project. Now it’s a company that boasts more than 2 billion users and tens of billions of dollars in advertising revenue.

Those two data points are tightly linked, and together they create Facebook’s world-shaping power: Facebook users provide the company — knowingly or not — with an enormous amount of data about themselves. And Facebook uses that data to let advertisers reach those users with astonishing precision and effectiveness.

Everybody’s afraid of facial recognition tech.

Civil liberties activists warn that the powerful technology, which identifies people by matching a picture or video of a person’s face to databases of photos, can be used to passively spy on people without any reasonable suspicion or their consent. Many of these leaders don’t just want to regulate facial recognition tech — they want to ban or pause its use completely.

Human faces evolved to be highly distinctive; it’s helpful to be able to recognize individual members of one’s social group and quickly identify strangers, and that hasn’t changed for hundreds of thousands of years.

But, in just the past five years, the meaning of the human face has quietly but seismically shifted. That’s because researchers at Facebook, Google, and other institutions have nearly perfected techniques for automated facial recognition.

If you’ve visited a new website on your phone or computer over the past 18 months or so, you’ve probably seen it: a notification informing you that the page is using cookies to track you and asking you to agree to let it happen. The site invites you to read its “cookie policy,” (which, let’s be honest, you’re not going to do), and it may tell you the tracking is to “enhance” your experience — even though it feels like it’s doing the opposite.

Cookies are small files that websites send to your device that the sites then use to monitor you and remember certain information about you — like what’s in your shopping cart on an e-commerce site, or your login information. These pop-up cookie notices all over the internet are well-meaning and supposed to promote transparency about your online privacy.

Vox and Recode take a wide look at how technology is changing — and changing us in the process. Open Sourced will zoom in even further.

The new frontiers of data, privacy, algorithms, and artificial intelligence are closed-box ecosystems — often scary, mystifying, or simply impenetrable — built by people who speak and code in a very different language. Our year-long reporting effort will illuminate what these systems are, how they’re built, why they matter, and their potential risks and benefits.

A reckoning has come for tech — and for the rest of us, too.

Not so long ago, tech inspired optimism. It was revitalizing the economy, connecting people around the world, making our lives more convenient, innovating health care, and even helping to spread democracy. Tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon weren’t quite as big as they are in 2019, and most people seemed to think their rapid growth was a good thing. They were changing the world and they weren’t being evil as they did it, or at least that’s what their corporate slogans promised.