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The Best in Alternative News

Privacy Experts, Senators Demand Investigation of Amazon’s Child Data Collection Practices…

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Last year, a coalition of privacy advocates and child psychologists warned against putting an Amazon Alexa speaker anywhere near your child on the fairly reasonable grounds that developing minds shouldn’t befriend always-on surveillance devices, no matter how cute the packaging. Now, a group of privacy researchers, attorneys, and U.S. senators are calling on the Federal […]

Alexa Has Been Eavesdropping on You This Whole Time, and Storing Your Data…

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Would you let a stranger eavesdrop in your home and keep the recordings? For most people, the answer is, “Are you crazy?” Yet that’s essentially what Amazon has been doing to millions of us with its assistant Alexa in microphone-equipped Echo speakers. And it’s hardly alone: Bugging our homes is Silicon Valley’s next frontier. Many […]

Amazon Employees Hired and Fired by Robots…

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Software and algorithms are used to screen, hire, assign and now terminate workers at Amazon. For lower-paid employees, the Robot Overlords Have Arrived. “Millions of low-paid workers’ lives are increasingly governed by software and algorithms. This was starkly illustrated by a report last week that Amazon.com tracks the productivity of its employees and regularly fires […]

Amazon’s Alexa Team Can Access Users’ Home Addresses…

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An Amazon.com Inc. team auditing Alexa users’ commands has access to location data and can, in some cases, easily find a customer’s home address, according to five employees familiar with the program. The team, spread across three continents, transcribes, annotates and analyzes a portion of the voice recordings picked up by Alexa. The program, whose […]

Thousands of Amazon Workers Listen to Recordings from Alexa…

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Alexa is like having your own personal assistant that never asks for a raise. When prompted by a “wake word” the device listens to your commands — and so do thousands of Amazon workers, according to a Bloomberg report. Teams stationed around the world listen to and transcribe recordings, then send them back into the […]

Millions of Facebook Records Mysteriously Found on Amazon Cloud Servers…

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Facebook Inc. user data is still showing up in places it shouldn’t. Researchers at UpGuard, a cybersecurity firm, found troves of user information hiding in plain sight, inadvertently posted publicly on Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing servers. The discovery shows that a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed how unsecure and widely disseminated Facebook users’ […]

Silicon Valley and “Communication Weapons of War” by Yasha Levine…

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I was in the New York Public Library recently doing research in the archives when I stumbled on a 1944 pamphlet from Western Electric, the old American techno-telephone monopolist. It’s called “Circuits for Victory” and its 40 glossy, slickly produced pages are dedicated to one thing: celebrating all the ways that the company’s telecommunication technology […]

SPLC Implodes: President and Legal Director Resign Amid Sexual Misconduct Scandal…

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The Southern Poverty Law Center – the “vicious left-wing attack dog” used by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google and Amazon to identify “hate groups” – is unraveling. A week after co-founder Morris Dees was ousted over sexual misconduct claims – with two dozen employees signing a letter of concern over “allegations of mistreatment, sexual […]

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