Tag: employees

A patent shows how facial recognition drones could identify you from above

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An Israeli biometrics startup called AnyVision with ties to Israel’s military has applied for a U.S. patent on technology that tells drones how to maneuver to capture better facial recognition images of people on the ground. Facial recognition technology has become widely used by law enforcement around the world, but the technology is controversial in part for its accuracy issues, especially when recognizing Black and brown faces. Activists are now calling for ending its use entirely , and police use of facial recognition has already been banned in a host of U.S. cities. The patent application, titled “Adaptive Positioning of Drones for Enhanced Face Recognition,” describes a computer vision system that analyzes the angle of a drone camera in relation to the face of a person on the ground, then instructs the drone on how to improve its vantage point. The system can then send that image through a machine-learning model trained to classify individual faces. The model sends back a classification with a probability score. If the probability score falls below a certain threshold, the whole process starts over again. A future defined by this type of mass surveillance would “obliterate privacy and anonymity in public as we know it,” said Kade Crockford, head of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts who’s led the charge on banning facial recognition in Massachusetts cities, in an interview with Fast Company last year. “Weirdly this is not a hugely controversial issue for voters. People don’t want the government to be tracking them by their face every time they leave their house.” People don’t want the government to be tracking them by their face every time they leave their house.” Kade Crockford As with any patent application, there’s no guarantee the technology will show up in a real product. But it does address a very real technical problem with existing facial recognition systems. Such systems usually process images captured by stationary cameras. Capturing a clear angle on someone’s face, and compensating for bad ones, is always a challenge with these systems. Shooting video from drones that can move around and intelligently zero in on the right angle is a way of taking the chance out of the process. The application, which was originally reported  by  Forbes cybersecurity writer Thomas Brewster, was filed last summer and published by the U.S. Patent Office on February 4. AnyVision , which was founded in 2015, sells artificial intelligence designed to let cameras in retail stores recognize the faces of people on “watch lists” who have been convicted of theft in the past. Read More …

Silicon Valley companies took $380 million in COVID-19 bailout money

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Silicon Valley tech companies took many millions in government bailout money this year via a program intended to allow employers to retain their employees during the pandemic. According to newly released Small Business Administration data, 885 Silicon Valley tech companies borrowed a total of $381.3 million via the Paycheck Protection Program . That figure excludes telecommunications companies and does not account for businesses based in San Francisco. Read More …

Top AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru says Google fired her over an email

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Timnit Gebru, a high-profile AI ethics researcher and leader in the field, has been forced out of Google. Gebru, who announced the news on Twitter Wednesday night, wrote that she was fired by Google’s head of AI Jeff Dean over an email she had written to a list consisting of women and allies at Google Brain. Read More …

The Democratic operative who beat Trump on Facebook is bracing for the war ahead

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Tara McGowan should be celebrating. Acronym, her three-year-old political outfit, placed an unprecedented $100 million bet on digital ads ahead of last month’s election, with the aim of convincing millions of Americans to vote against Donald Trump, and it appeared to pay off. Still, when we spoke in a wide-ranging conversation about Acronym’s work in 2020 and beyond, the 34-year-old veteran of Democratic campaigns sounded nervous. Trump wasn’t the Democrats’ only opponent: They also faced an unprecedented hurricane of right-wing disinformation that wreaked far more damage than the Kremlin ever could. That Trump won more votes than any incumbent president, and that Republicans succeeded in so many down-ballot races, represents one challenge for Democrats; that Trump hasn’t quite acknowledged his defeat and keeps harping on conspiracy theories represents a bigger one. Tara McGowan [Photo: courtesy of Acronym] These are different problems from Acronym’s original focus. Early on, McGowan had raised the alarm about a Republican “death star” of data and ads, and more than $1 billion in Trump campaign funds—all operating in lockstep with a powerful right-wing media apparatus. To combat it, she raised millions from Hollywood and Silicon Valley billionaires, including Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn, and Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow and the majority owner of The Atlantic . She built a strong team of digital operatives, many of them ex-Facebookers , tasked with bombarding key voters in battleground states with a virtuous circle of microtargeted ads, a monster data machine, and its own network of partisan news sites. Between Acronym’s work and a revamped Democratic data sharing operation, McGowan says the left once again has the digital advantage. “I believe that we definitely closed the gap, and started to leapfrog where Republicans are in terms of digital innovation and infrastructure and investments this cycle.” But the medium for Acronym’s success is also part of the problem, McGowan says. For someone who oversaw the left’s biggest Facebook ad blitz yet, using heaps of Big Tech cash, she has surprisingly little nice to say about the platforms. Now, after helping to accelerate right-wing falsehoods, Facebook and Google are making the problem even worse, she says: The platforms’ new indefinite bans on political ads could give a leg up to wealthier incumbent candidates, who can more easily buy TV spots. But they hurt Democrats in other ways, too: McGowan says the left doesn’t have the same kind of partisan media infrastructure as the right, which can use organic posts on Facebook and Google to circumvent ad bans. McGowan knows the damage that partisan misinformation can do. After a voter tabulation app made by a for-profit spin-off of Acronym failed disastrously during last year’s Iowa caucus, she became the target of a few conspiracy theories herself. (The startup’s name, Shadow Inc., didn’t help.) The incident brought intense scrutiny to Acronym, and its associated super PAC, Pacronym, spooked some donors and fed a burning skepticism about its venture-backed, Silicon Valley-style approach to progressive politics. Read More …

Shareholders sue Pinterest over pattern of race and gender discrimination

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Shareholders of Pinterest are suing members of the company’s board of directors and several top executives for allegedly ignoring or deliberately enabling discrimination against women and people of color. The suit claims that the board of directors, including Pinterest cofounders Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp, either actively perpetrated or knowingly ignored high-profile allegations of discrimination and retaliation against Pinterest’s former COO Francoise Brougher and two Black female executives, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks. Pinterest did not respond to a request for comment. The suit singles out Pinterest board chair, cofounder, and CEO Silbermann in particular for creating a boys’ club at the top that systematically ignored claims of pay disparity and an inability to advance for women and people of color. In addition, it alleges that even when employees told Silbermann about Pinterest’s problems, he did nothing to change the situation. “He repeatedly placed himself before the Company, surrounding himself with yes-men and marginalizing women who dared to challenge Pinterest’s White, male leadership clique,” the suit reads. In the summer of 2020, Ozoma and Banks first shared their stories of being underpaid, underappreciated, and misleveled on Twitter. The two came forward after Pinterest issued a statement in the wake of the George Floyd protests and said that they wanted to expose the company’s hypocrisy for saying Black lives matter publicly, while mistreating its Black employees privately. (While Pinterest first denied Ozoma and Banks’s allegations, the company has since done an about-face and hired a law firm to assess its internal practices.) “I spoke up so people would know and I want accountability but don’t expect it in a white supremacist system,” Ozoma says. Their story prompted other former and current Pinterest employees to speak out , including Brougher, who filed a gender discrimination lawsuit two months later. Her suit lays out how she was given a different stock compensation vesting schedule than her peers, dramatically affecting her compensation. After she raised concerns, she says, she was cut out of meetings, including the company’s IPO roadshow—even though she was the company’s second-in-command and the only executive who’d participated in an IPO before. She was later fired. Days after Brougher went public, Pinterest employees staged a virtual walkout in support. Pinterest has not commented on the active litigation. This new lawsuit claims that the board’s and executives’ actions have resulted in a breach of fiduciary duty, waste of corporate assets, and abuse of control Read More …