April 21, 2021

S4:E2 - U.K. Central Bank Digital Currency, the Environmental Impact of Digital Currency, a Problematic Spotify Patent, and WordPress’ Google FLoC Block

52 minutes

In this episode, we talk about WordPress blocking Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts tracking technology, a web app that received so much negative feedback from food bloggers it was taken down in less than a day, and The Bank of England and HM Treasury creating a joint task force to explore the possibility of creating a central bank digital currency in the U.K. Then we speak with Tim Swanson, founder and director of research at Post Oak Labs, and head of market intelligence at ClearMatics, as well as the author of the research paper, “Bitcoin and other PoW coins are an ESG nightmare,” about the environmental impact of digital currency. Then we chat with Isedua Oribhabor, U.S. policy analyst at Access Now about their letter to Spotify on why the company should abandon their recent speech-recognition patent of a technology to detect emotion, gender, and age.

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