Tag: tech

This musician is calling on Spotify to ditch any plans to track listeners’ emotions

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Earlier this year, Spotify elicited sheer panic when it was granted a patent for analyzing users’ voices to decipher their emotional state and then make music recommendations to match. Under the patent’s description, Spotify would also be able to use your speech to identify gender, age, accents, and even if you’re with someone or alone. It’s just a patent and that technology may never find its way into the platform. But in an era of surveillance capitalism and ever-heightening privacy and data concerns, artificial intelligence that tries to feed you music based on what it thinks you’re feeling seems like yet another dystopian future that’s almost here. After all, emotion-recognition technology is already being used in marketing, security, and hiring. But musician and activist Evan Greer is doing what she can to make sure Spotify’s patents never become a reality. [Screenshot: Evan Greer] In conjunction with the release of her single “Surveillance Capitalism” off her new album, Spotify Is Surveillance , Greer is also calling for Spotify to ditch any plans of surveilling its users. Launched in partnership with nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future, where she is the deputy director, StopSpotifySurveillance.org lays out the stakes of the issue at hand and provides a petition to sign. “The fact that Spotify filed a patent for this type of emotional surveillance and manipulation is beyond chilling,” Greer said in a statement. “It’s not enough for them to say that they have no plans to use this technology right now, they should publicly commit to never conducting this type of surveillance on music listeners.” To drive that point home, Greer explains the song “Surveillance Capitalism” is meant to underscore how the internet still has “the potential to profoundly transform our society for the better, abolishing false scarcity, and enabling universal access to human knowledge and creativity, while ensuring marginalized and independent artists and creators are fairly compensated for our labor. “But if we allow a small handful of companies to dominate the web and the music industry with a parasitic business model based on surveillance and exploitation,” she adds, “we’re headed for the opposite: a dystopian future where algorithms decide what we see and hear based on profit, rather than artistry.” [Screenshot: Evan Greer] Greer isn’t the only one pushing back against Spotify, which hasn’t faced the same kind of attention as other large tech firms regarding privacy and surveillance. The digital civil rights group Access Now has also demanded that Spotify withdraw any plans to implement its patent. “This technology is dangerous, a violation of privacy and other human rights, and should be abandoned,” the nonprofit wrote in a letter to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, which was reported by Axios . Read more about StopSpotifySurveillance.org here and check out Greer’s album here . The proceeds from the song will be donated to the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) to support their #JusticeAtSpotify campaign. Read More …

We’re not getting a national vaccine passport. Here’s why it never stood a chance

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Political arguments about vaccine passports have been raging for months : whether we need them, if they could be built equitably , and if they are ultimately an infringement on Americans’ rights to keep their health information private. But while other countries experiment with rolling out digital vaccination credentials, the U.S. national effort was doomed before it ever began. Security experts had hoped that the government would develop a national system for credentialing vaccine recipients. A national vaccine passport would create a single standard that could be used everywhere and would be potentially difficult to fake. But on Tuesday, the White House announced the federal government would not be “supporting” a vaccine credential system. Part of what that means is that there will be no centralized database where all vaccination records live—a crucial feature of vaccine verification systems in other countries like Israel and Estonia. “Unless there was a major change in how health data is viewed from a public and government perspective, it wouldn’t even be possible to create the database,” says JP Pollak, cofounder and chief architect of the Commons Project, which has developed a globally available mobile app for storing COVID-19 testing results. “States have the mandate for maintaining vaccination registries and states are required to report things like how many people have been vaccinated for COVID-19, but they actually are not permitted to transmit the personal information of people back to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].” . @PressSec Jen Psaki on possibility of the federal government supporting vaccine passports: “The government is not now, nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential.” Full video here: https://t.co/TLFF718hVo pic.twitter.com/jJP0Ph95jH — CSPAN (@cspan) April 6, 2021 Since states are charged with maintaining vaccine registries, some, like New York, are creating their own credentialing systems Read More …

How the tech industry is sewing confusion about privacy laws

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Alastair Mactaggart founded and bankrolled the privacy activism organization that pushed California’s landmark privacy law–the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)–into the books in 2018. The law spurred the introduction of similar privacy bills in states around the country, and it will likely give shape to an eventual federal privacy law. As the story goes, Mactaggart, who made his fortune in the Bay Area real estate market, spoke to a Google employee at a cocktail party in 2016 who told him he’d be surprised at the amount of data the search giant had on him. Alarmed, Mactaggart and his friend Rick Arney hatched the idea of proposing a ballot measure to ensure privacy rights for Californians, and signed on attorney Mary Stone Ross to help shape a new law. The ballot measure eventually gave rise to a comparable bill in the state legislature, which, despite heavy blowback from the tech and telecom lobbies, was quickly passed and signed into law by then-governor Jerry Brown. The CCPA gives Californians the right to know what data tech companies like Google and Facebook are collecting on them, the right to stop that data from being shared or sold, and the right to sue if a tech company fails to protect their personal data. It was the most extensive consumer privacy law in the country at the time. Mactaggart’s group, Californians for Consumer Privacy , pushed another ballot measure in 2020, Proposition 24, that strengthened the CCPA. Voters passed the measure, and the proposition became the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), which goes into effect at the start of 2023. The law also establishes a new privacy agency called the California Privacy Protection Agency, with a 5-member board and a $10 million annual budget. While a number of states have followed California in passing their own consumer privacy laws , the vast majority of states still have weak or nonexistent privacy laws. Now Democrats and Republicans in Congress are trying to how to work together to pass a national privacy bill . A number of bills were floated in 2020, along with a major bill (from Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash.) in 2021, but none has advanced very far. Meanwhile, the tech and online advertising industries are lobbying hard for a weak federal privacy law that might preempt stronger state laws, such as California’s. I spoke with Mactaggart about the state of data privacy today, and about the chances for a meaningful federal privacy law in the near future. The interview has been edited for length and clarity Read More …

Applying for Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech: the secrets of success

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Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech is our newest recognition program. It’s the first one focused entirely on technological advances, and also our most forward-looking such program. As such, the criteria that will make for a winning entry are unique. Here’s a look at the factors our judges will be considering—and some tips on optimizing your entry for the best chances of becoming an honoree. Say what it is and why it’s a breakthrough Submitting your technology for consideration begins with telling us what it does—and, just as important, why it’s exceptional. We’re looking for products, services, research products, and other efforts that showcase significant innovations. Providing context—such as explaining how what you’re doing fits into larger trends, or how an ingredient technology will enable further innovation by others—is essential. So is avoiding buzzwords and hype. One note: You can submit technologies that have existed for any amount of time. But it’s recent progress we care about, so focus your explanations and examples on the last 12 months. Tell us a story At Fast Company , we love behind-the-scenes tales of innovation, That’s why we ask you to provide a story relating to your technology, such as a challenge you overcame, a surprise you encountered, or a discovery you made. With a 250-word maximum, you must tell it concisely. But doing so gives you the opportunity to convey what’s special about your submission in a most tangible way. Share some signs you’re succeeding You’re welcome to enter technologies that haven’t reached the market yet—in fact, we hope you do. But evidence that your technology is more than a good idea will still help your case. That could come in the form of promising research data, testimonials from third parties, fundraising announcements, or any other objective signs that you’ve created something that matters Read More …

How U.S. schools proved Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was safe

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When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the use of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines last December—a year after the coronavirus was first identified in Wuhan, China—it was a dramatic piece of good news after one of the most disruptive years the country has ever experienced. Now consider the thrill people felt in April 1955 when Dr. Jonas Salk’s new polio vaccine was officially declared to be “safe, effective, and potent.” That came more than 60 years after the first known polio outbreak in the U.S., which took place in rural Rutland County, Vermont in 1894. It killed 18—mostly children below the age of 12–and left 123 permanently paralyzed. From there, polio became an enduring, mysterious scourge. In 1916, it hit New York City, killing 2,343 out of a total of 6,000 nationwide that year. In the 1940s and early 1950s, the number of incidents in the U.S. grew eightfold, reaching 37 per 100,000 population by 1952. The fact that children were most susceptible to the disease made it only more terrifying. The Salk vaccine was approved only after going through the largest clinical trial in history. Rather than being a government project, this test was overseen and paid for by a nonprofit organization founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938: The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, better known as the March of Dimes. (Roosevelt himself had contracted polio at the unusually advanced age of 39.) More than 1.3 million children participated; some got either the vaccine, which required three shots over a five-week period, or a placebo, while others underwent observation for polio. The only logical way to reach so many children was through schools. The result was an unprecedented national effort built atop public-education infrastructure Read More …