- “Meet The Immigrants Who Took On Amazon” – Wired. This article traces a burgeoning movement of workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Minneapolis-St. Paul comprised largely of Somali immigrants to win some concessions from management. The article also traces Amazon’s view on unionizing (not surprisingly, it’s not favorable) and its employment practices. Whether the efforts of Amazon workers at this warehouse spread to other facilities remains to be seen.
- “Child Abusers Run Rampant as Tech Companies Look the Other Way” – The New York Times. A horrific expose on how poorly technology platforms are doing in identifying and taking down child pornography. A number of the tech companies claim security and privacy are the reasons they do not scan the pictures and videos uploaded to their networks, law enforcement officials and other stakeholders decry a lack of will. Worse still, tech companies are not sharing technology to identify this illegal material or are not sharing proprietary methods. Moreover, end-to-end encryption is only complicating matters.
- ““He’s F–King Destroyed This Town”: How Mark Zuckerberg Became The Most Reviled Man In Tech” – Vanity Fair. Once widely admired among the tech community in Northern California, Facebook’s CEO is a bit less admired these days on account of the company’s bruising (some say illegal) business tactics and how its actions portray the larger tech world.
- “Yes, Robots Are Stealing Your Job” – The New York Times. Candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, Andrew Yang, shares his views on automation and why many current and future jobs may soon not be available for humans. He discusses his proposal on how to help those displaced by the coming wave of automation, including a universal basic income.
- “How Facebook’s ‘Switcheroo’ plan concealed scheme to kill popular apps” – ComputerWeekly.com. An investigative journalist got his hands on thousands of pages of documents showing Facebook’s methods of dealing with competitors and potential rivals, which a former app developer is alleging in a California state court violates antitrust laws. In addition to the outlets reporting on these documents, the cache of internal Facebook communications have been provided to the House Judiciary Committee for its investigation into digital markets.
- “Microsoft vows to ‘honor’ California’s sweeping privacy law across entire US” – The Verge. Just as with the GDPR, Microsoft says it will voluntarily honor the “core” principles of the CCPA when it becomes effective.
Further Reading (23 November)
Published
Michael Kans 