The internet is an amazing, magical place—until it fails
Another reason to delete Uber: It hoards all of its data from the cities it works in. (So does Lyft.)
This news was largely caught up in the midst of the #DeleteUber protests (delete Uber, by the way), but Uber has graciously decided to allow cities and the public to view a tiny modicum of data about its trips, though nothing that’s particularly useful.
Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, where its self-driving cars are arguably endangering the entire city pedestrian and bike populations, Uber refuses to provide the city with any actually useful data.
↩︎ posted Feb. 13, 2017
It’s hard to establish rapport with a potential terror recruit when—as one former worker told the AP—translators repeatedly mix up the Arabic words for “salad” and “authority.”
Word salad and worse plagues the Defense Department’s online counterterrorism propaganda efforts.
↩︎ Associated Press, posted Feb. 13, 2017
It’s roughly comparable to un-hygenic surgery.
Talkspace—one of many “therapy apps” connecting lower-income, remote, or busy patients with licensed therapists—is a workplace driven by profits, not treatment, according to interviews with current and former therapists.
↩︎ The Verge, posted Dec. 23, 2016
Don’t force Uber drivers to pee in their cars
Uber’s rise to empire was built on the backs of hundreds of thousands of laborers who do not make anywhere near what the company claims and are forced into algorithmically-driven work patterns, resulting in having to pee in jars in their cars.
That’s not to say anything of the thousands of largely working-class taxi drivers around the country who’ve been shoved out of business around the world, as TMN’s Sam Stecklow (among many others) has reported. Or the complete lack of safety regulations insisted upon by Uber at the threat of pulling service from cities entirely—despite its fairly spotty record with screening its own drivers.
Related: Airbnb’s similar skyrocket came at the cost of zero safety regulations or enforcement, and a damn near Heruclean effort on the company’s part to deflect responsibility—even in the face of a user’s death.
↩︎ posted Dec. 23, 2016
Finding a product solution for abuse was like looking for a moonshot, but NASA wouldn’t have put a person on the moon if between ’59 and ’69 there were seven heads of NASA.
Inside Twitter’s decade-long failure to meaningfully address its harassment issue.
↩︎ BuzzFeed, posted Dec. 23, 2016
Don’t believe everything you see online
IP mapping services used by thousands of companies and law enforcement agencies more than occasionally make mistakes. For instance, when one labeled a random point in Kansas as the exact center of the continental US, it turned life for the family that lived in the farm located on that spot into “a digital hell.”
↩︎ posted Dec. 23, 2016
Why are engineers in California getting to decide what constitutes harassment for people all around the world?
Women aren’t welcome on the internet because the internet was created by men, for men.
↩︎ Pacific Standard, posted Dec. 23, 2016