Business, Spoken

The research institute was created to steer AI away from harmful uses. Now it's competing with tech giants to sell a cloud computing service to businesses.

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The social media company is testing warnings for users who try to share links to articles they haven't read. To do that, it has to know what you've read.

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To some in the tech industry, facial recognition increasingly looks like toxic technology. To law enforcement, it’s an almost irresistible crime-fighting tool.
IBM is the latest company to declare facial recognition too troubling. CEO Arvind Krishna told members of Congress Monday that IBM would no longer offer the technology, citing the potential for racial profiling and human rights abuse. In a letter, Krishna also called for police reforms aimed at increasing scrutiny and accountability for misconduct.
“We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies,” wrote Krishna, the first non-white CEO in the company’s 109-year history. IBM has been scaling back the technology’s use since last year.
Krishna’s letter comes amid public protest over the killing of George Floyd by a police officer and police treatment of black communities. But IBM’s withdrawal may do little to stem the use of facial recognition, as a number of companies supply the technology to police and governments around the world.
“While this is a great statement, it won’t really change police access to #FaceRecognition,” tweeted Clare Garvie, a researcher at Georgetown University's Center on Privacy and Technology who studies police use of the technology. She noted that she had not so far come across any IBM contracts to supply facial recognition to police.
According to a report from the Georgetown center, by 2016 photos of half of American adults were in a database that police could search using facial recognition. Adoption has likely swelled since then. A recent report from Grand View Research predicts the market will grow at an annual rate of 14.5 percent between 2020 and 2027, fueled by “rising adoption of the technology by the law enforcement sector.” The Department of Homeland Security said in February that it has used facial recognition on more than 43.7 million people in the US, primarily to check the identity of people boarding flights and cruises and crossing borders.
Other tech companies are scaling back their use of the technology. Google in 2018 said it would not offer a facial recognition service; last year, CEO Sundar Pichai, indicated support for a temporary ban on the technology. Microsoft opposes such a ban, but said last year that it wouldn’t sell the tech to one California law enforcement agency because of ethical concerns. Axon, which makes police body cameras, said in June 2019 that it wouldn’t add facial recognition to them.
But some players, including NEC, Idemia, and Thales, are quietly shipping the tech to US police departments. The startup Clearview offers a service to police that makes use of millions of faces scraped from the web.
The technology apparently helped police hunt down a man accused of assaulting protesters in Montgomery County, Maryland.
At the same time, public unease over the technology has prompted several cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, to ban use of facial recognition by government agencies.
Officials in Boston are considering a ban; supporters point to the potential for police to surveil protesters. Amid the protests following Floyd’s killing “the conversation we’re having today about face surveillance is all the more urgent,” Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said at a press conference Tuesday.
Timnit Gebru, a Google researcher who has played an important role in revealing the technology’s shortcomings, said during an event on Monday that facial recognition has been used to identify black protesters, and argued that it should be banned. “Even perfect facial recognition can be misused,” Gebru said. “I’m a black woman living in the US who has dealt with serious consequences of racism. Facial recognition is being used against the black community.”

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Late last month, a mysterious new video app called Zynn began appearing at the top of app store charts, beating out household names like Instagram and YouTube. Zynn is a near identical copy of TikTok, and both apps are the product of Chinese tech giants. The biggest difference is that Zynn, in an effort to attract new users, is currently paying people in the United States and Canada small sums to watch videos and invite their friends to join. The tactic has seemed to work: Zynn has already been downloaded over 3 million times, according to the market research firm Sensor Tower, and ranked number one this week on Apple’s list of the most popular free apps.
As of Tuesday, however, Zynn is no longer available for download from the Google Play Store, and a link that previously went to the app’s listing is now dead. It’s unclear why the app was removed, and Google did not immediately comment. A spokesperson for Apple said it was looking into Zynn but did not have any additional information as of publication. Twitter and Instagram accounts claiming to represent Zynn posted a statement Tuesday afternoon acknowledging the app had been removed, and said the company was “in communications with Google and working to fix this ASAP.”
Meanwhile, Zynn is filled with videos that appear to be stolen from creators on other social media platforms, including TikTok celebrities with massive followings like Charli D'Amelio and Addison Rae. Many of the clips are aggregated by accounts centered around a single theme, like “pranks.” Other videos appear on look-alike profiles impersonating individual creators. Four influencers who spoke to WIRED said videos they originally published to TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube were uploaded to Zynn without their consent, under accounts they didn’t open.
“I didn’t create this,” Max Mazurek, a Polish dancer and model with almost 190,000 TikTok followers, said after WIRED showed him a Zynn profile using his name. The account has nearly 25,000 followers and featured many of the videos Mazurek had previously uploaded to TikTok and other platforms. “It’s not my account. I can’t download this app in Poland,” he said.
The launch of a new social media platform often sets off a rush to grab famous or valuable usernames, and it’s not uncommon for scammers to impersonate celebrities on social media. Reposting other people’s content without credit has also long been an issue online. What’s strange about the Zynn accounts, however, is how many of the copied videos have time stamps that date back months before the app went public.
Zynn officially launched in the Apple App Store on May 7, and it was first installed by Google Play users on May 5, according to Sensor Tower. Many of the impersonator accounts reviewed by WIRED, including the one under Mazurek’s name, uploaded their first posts on February 19. The significance of that date isn’t clear, and Zynn did not respond to a request for comment sent to an email address listed on its website. Its Community Guidelines state that it respects intellectual property rights and forbids users from posting “anything that you do not own or do not have permission from the owner to share.”
“I feel that it’s honestly sad that they are stealing creators’ content and impersonating people,” said Chloe, a TikTok influencer with almost 18,000 followers. Until WIRED brought it to her attention, Chloe says she was unaware that a Zynn profile had been created using the same handle she uses on Instagram and TikTok, @ebonychlo. The account also began posting videos taken from her official social media profiles on February 19, months before Zynn became available for download.

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Uber, Lyft, and others have agreed to pay people who've missed work because of the virus. Seattle is on the cusp of making it law in that city.Â

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Employees who decline to work amid the pandemic could lose both their paychecks and their unemployment benefits.

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Administrators hope tracking beacons will identify where students congregate and who should be isolated if someone contracts the coronavirus.

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The killing of George Floyd elicited corporate outrage, and some donations. But well-intentioned rhetoric has not always been followed by meaningful action.

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By hiding but not deleting the president's tweets, the platform has struck a difficult balance to approach a nearly impossible situation.

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Some workers at the social media giant are publicly criticizing decisions not to remove or flag misleading posts by President Trump.

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