We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.

“If a business is built on misleading users on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform.”

On December 2, after a protracted disagreement over the release of a research paper, Google forced out its ethical AI co-lead, Timnit Gebru. The paper was on the risks of large language models, AI models trained on staggering amounts of text data, which are a line of research core to Google’s business. Gebru, a leading voice in AI ethics, was one of the only Black women at Google Research.

Joanna van der Merwe and Hannah wrote a blogpost about the main insights gathered from their session at the MyData Online 2020 Conference: Risks, challenges and solutions for data-driven public-private partnerships.

The growth of research projects relying on pervasive data — big datasets about people’s lives and activities that can be collected without them knowing — are testing the ethical frameworks and assumptions traditionally used by researchers and ethical review boards to ensure adequate protection of human subjects.

Standards compliance is a noble ideal, but by itself, it’s not going to get us to practical interop on verifiable credentials (VCs). That’s because there’s not enough agreement on which standards we’re talking about, and the ones we all like aren’t clear enough to force alignment.

Where are we now? Understanding the evolution of women in technology.

Henri Verdier, France’s ambassador for digital affairs, said the decision was both personal and political. He decided on February 1 that he would permanently leave the social network and the messaging app it owns.