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TagPhilosophers Lead Academics’ Effort To Restrict Facial Recognition Technology
If you’re like most people, you probably haven’t been thinking much about facial recognition technology. Philosopher Evan Selinger (Rochester Institute of Technology), has, and he thinks we all should be, too, for it poses a serious threat to human welfare. Now he, Peter Asaro (a philosopher at The New School), and others have written an open letter to Amazon CEO Je..
Philosophers On The DNC Leaks
Earlier this month, the website Wikileaks released a collection of over 19,000 emails from seven officials of the Democratic National Convention (DNC). You can search through them here. While Wikileaks will not disclose information about how it obtained these emails, many experts believe that two Russian intelligence groups were involved. The Russian government deni..
Phones, Minds, States, and Corporations
Matthew Noah Smith (Leeds) has an article at Slate bringing together philosophy of mind and political philosophy to discuss the United States government’s attempts to get Apple to “unlock” the iPhone of a shooting suspect. It’s a great example of public philosophy. Professor Smith lays out the basics of extended cognition in clear but not oversimplified language, go..
Philosophers on Rating People
If you were to be rated—as a person—on a scale of 1 to 10, what do you think you’d get? Questions like that might have been lurking in people’s minds since news broke a couple of weeks ago about Peeple, an app that was pitched as “Yelp for people“. Initially, the idea was that anyone, once they’ve confirmed they know you, could leave a review of you on the Peepl..
Philosophers On The Ashley Madison Hack
Last Tuesday, a group calling itself “Impact Team” followed through on its threat to release data it had stolen from Ashley Madison, an internet service that facilitates encounters between people interested in having extramarital affairs. The data included information on approximately 37 million people who had signed up for the site (see news reports at Wired and Th..
Google Gets Philosopher to Help It Forget
Luciano Floridi (Oxford) has been selected by Google to be a member of an advisory panel to help the company handle requests from European residents asserting their newly acquired legal “right to be forgotten” (also here).