Often when looking for topics to cover in upcoming newsletters, I check out what’s come in lately from WIRED Fast Forward. “From AI advancements to battery breakthroughs, see what’s next in tech with the Fast Forward newsletter.”
The challenge for a person who got paid $1 a page to type people’s handwritten term papers in college (exactly…in between feeding our pet mammoths), is filtering what you’ll really need to acknowledge and even use in your lifetime, and which things you can say “good luck with that” to future generations.
Sometimes it’s innocuous. Do you use Instagram posts or stories to promote your business (hit reply if you want to know.)
And sometimes, you’re like—do other people know about this?
One this week was this:
AI software company Alfi is experimenting with facial-recognition technology that could serve personalized ads based on a person’s age, ethnicity, and gender. (Bloomberg)
Even if I don’t like that one (kind of freaky when Tom Cruise walked into the store with his fake eye in Minority Report), at least I get it. Technically the benevolent marketers can say they are being helpful, only serving you information that will interest you.
But this one?
The National Security Agency recently awarded a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Amazon…“which is under protest.” To which I thought, Yay! Someone is fighting for our privacy! Until I saw the “under protest” is from Microsoft, which presumably is protesting because they didn’t get the contract.
So Amazon, a business that has testified before Congress on their consumer data privacy practices, will be helping the NSA manage all of its data?