Amazon, Apple and Google all employ staff who listen to customer voice recordings from their smart speakers and voice assistant apps. News site Bloomberg highlighted the topic after speaking to Amazon staff who “reviewed” Alexa recordings. All three companies say voice recordings are occasionally reviewed to improve speech recognition. But the reaction to the Bloomberg article suggests […]
Facebook has said it is working on using artificial intelligence to prevent a common and upsetting problem: receiving notifications about deceased friends and loved ones. The company said it hoped to stop the “painful” experience of getting suggestions to invite dead people to events, or to wish them a happy birthday. On profiles, tributes to a […]
Internet sites could be fined or blocked if they fail to tackle “online harms” such as terrorist propaganda and child abuse, under government plans. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has proposed an independent watchdog that will write a “code of practice” for tech companies. Senior managers could be held liable for […]
Nearly three out of four Brits are more alarmed than ever about their privacy, but many are willing to accept risks to make their lives easier In today’s connected world, businesses are prime targets for cyber attacks and unintentional missteps can result in critical exposure of consumers’ sensitive personal information. According to the 2018 Norton […]
Mark Zuckerberg says regulators and governments should play a more active role in controlling internet content. In an op-ed published in the Washington Post, Facebook’s chief says the responsibility for monitoring harmful content is too great for firms alone. He calls for new laws in four areas: “Harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.” It […]
The passwords of millions of Facebook users were accessible by up to 20,000 employees of the social network, it has been reported. Security researcher Brian Krebs broke the news about data protection failures, which saw up to 600 million passwords stored in plain text. The passwords that were exposed could date back to 2012, he said. […]
Applause, the worldwide leader in digital quality and crowdsourced testing, has today released the global findings of its annual Retail Quality Report. It shows that global retailers are failing to keep up with consumer expectations for optimised digital experiences. Leveraging primary research from Applause’s industry-leading community of software and usability experts, testing took place on […]
Facebook has suffered the most severe outage in its history, with key services rendered unusable for users globally for much of Wednesday. The last time Facebook had a disruption of this magnitude was in 2008, when the site had 150m users – compared with around 2.3bn monthly users today. Facebook’s main product, its two messaging […]
The UK needs to tackle “bullying tactics by market leaders” and the other consequences of a lack of competition in the technology sector, according to a new report. A six month review of the sector has concluded tech giants like Facebook and Google should face greater competition. Philip Hammond will give his initial response to […]
Global action is required to tackle the web’s “downward plunge to a dysfunctional future”, its inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has told the BBC. He made the comments in an exclusive interview to mark 30 years since he submitted his proposal for the web. Sir Tim said people had realised how their data could be “manipulated” after the […]
