Campaign group says firms such as Uber should reveal data on driver miles to
help boost wages
Uber and other ride-hailing apps should be forced to publish data on drivers’
workloads so that regulators can tackle exploitation and cut carbon emissions,
campaigners argue.
Analysis by the pressure group Worker Info Exchange suggests drivers for Uber
and its smaller rivals may have missed out on more than £1.2bn in wages and
costs last year because of the way they are compensated.
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Tag - Data protection
Paul Givan says details of 407 people mistakenly sent out included names,
addresses and personal comments
The education minister in Northern Ireland has “unreservedly” apologised after
the personal details of more than 400 people who had offered to contribute to a
review of special education needs were breached.
The embarrassing data breach came to light on Thursday after the education
department said it had mistakenly sent to 174 people a spreadsheet attachment
that contained the names, email address and titles of 407 individuals who had
expressed an interest in attending the end-to-end review of special education
needs (SEN) events across Northern Ireland.
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Development of ChatGPT and its ilk will plateau, just like it did for
smartphones, and then what are we left with? More ho-hum consumer tech
I bought an iPhone 15 the other day to replace my five-year-old iPhone 11. The
phone is powered by the new A17 Pro chip and has a terabyte of data storage and
accordingly was eye-wateringly expensive. I had, of course, finely honed
rationales for splashing out on such a scale. I’ve always had a policy of
writing only about kit that I buy with my own money (no freebies from tech
companies), for example. The fancy A17 processor is needed to run the new “AI”
stuff that Apple is promising to launch soon; the phone has a significantly
better camera than my old handset had – which matters (to me) because my
Substack blog goes out three times a week and I provide a new photograph for
each edition; and, finally, a friend whose ancient iPhone is on its last legs
might appreciate an iPhone 11 in good nick.
But these are rationalisations rather than solid justifications. The truth is
that my old iPhone was fine for the job. Sure, it would need a new battery in
time, but apart from that it had years more life in it. And if you take a cold,
detached look at the evolution of the iPhone product line, what you see from the
2010 iPhone 4 onwards is really just a sequence of steady incremental
improvements. What was so special about that model? Mostly this: it had a
front-facing camera, which opened up the world of selfies, video chat, social
media and all the other accoutrements of our networked world. But from then on,
it was just incremental changes and price rises all the way.
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Social media platform uses pre-ticked boxes of consent, a practice that violates
UK and EU GDPR rules
Elon Musk’s X platform is under pressure from data regulators after it emerged
that users are consenting to their posts being used to build artificial
intelligence systems via a default setting on the app.
The UK and Irish data watchdogs said they have contacted X over the apparent
attempt to gain user consent for data harvesting without them knowing about it.
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‘Unpredictable’ privacy regulations prompt Facebook owner to scrap regional
plans for multimodal Llama
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Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta will not release an advanced version of its artificial
intelligence model in the EU, blaming the decision on the “unpredictable”
behaviour of regulators.
The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is preparing to issue its Llama
model in multimodal form, meaning it is able to work across text, video, images
and audio instead of just one format. Llama is an open source model, allowing it
to be freely downloaded and adapted by users.
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If Keir Starmer wins on Thursday, he will have the power to free our
data, jump-start the NHS and strip friction from our daily lives. Here’s how
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Barring an asteroid strike, Keir Starmer is going to be the UK prime minister in
three days. Given the lead in polling, I’d probably bet on him over an asteroid,
too.
Labour will come into government with a broken state, a flatlining economy and
no money. A thin manifesto and enormous parliamentary majority means the party
will almost certainly end up stretching further afield for ideas about how to
deal with that trilemma from hell.
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