This week…
The sun is out, the heat is strong, and I spent most of my time outdoors. As a result, I had a much smaller news diet and that is reflected in the loosely put together edition this time.
Anyway, here’s a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Surveillance AI needs fake data to track people. These companies are supplying it
Kate Kaye for Protocol:
Sloshed in the subway after a night of partying? Bored during a virtual meeting? Dozing off at a red light? Companies are building software that uses AI to monitor people’s behavior and interpret their emotions and body language in real life, virtually and even in the metaverse. But to develop that AI, they need fake data, and startups are stepping in to supply it.
Synthetic data companies are providing millions of images, videos and sometimes audio data samples that have been generated for the sole purpose of training or improving AI models that could become part of our everyday lives in controversial forms of AI such as facial recognition, emotion AI and other algorithmic systems used to keep track of people’s behavior.
While in the past companies building computer vision-based AI often relied on publicly available datasets, now AI developers are looking to customized synthetic data to “address more and more domain-specific problems that have zero data you can actually access,” said Ofir Zuk, co-founder and CEO of synthetic data company Datagen.
Thousands of popular websites see what you type—before you hit submit
Lily Hay Newman for Wired:
When you sign up for a newsletter, make a hotel reservation, or check out online, you probably take for granted that if you mistype your email address three times or change your mind and X out of the page, it doesn't matter. Nothing actually happens until you hit the Submit button, right? Well, maybe not. As with so many assumptions about the web, this isn't always the case, according to new research: A surprising number of websites are collecting some or all of your data as you type it into a digital form.
Researchers from KU Leuven, Radboud University, and University of Lausanne crawled and analyzed the top 100,000 websites, looking at scenarios in which a user is visiting a site while in the European Union and visiting a site from the United States. They found that 1,844 websites gathered an EU user's email address without their consent, and a staggering 2,950 logged a US user's email in some form. Many of the sites seemingly do not intend to conduct the data-logging but incorporate third-party marketing and analytics services that cause the behavior.
Why a satirical Instagram account may hold lessons to reinvent local journalism in Brazil
But is it journalism? Or a new model of it? Murillo Camarotto writes for Reuters Institute:
In a paper I published in 2019 after my Journalist Fellowship at the Reuters Institute, I explained how local journalists were leaving these newsrooms and being hired by local politicians. Less than three years later, the picture has gotten much worse. With no reporters, no salaries and (almost) no journalism, the relevance of the local press has melted away.
Undeniably, some efforts have been made: training programs for the digital transition, partnerships with technology giants, innovative news formats, internal restructuring. Little has been done, however, about the essentials: promoting a genuine reconnection between journalists and the community they serve.
This is where Recife Ordinário comes in. This Instagram account was launched in 2018 by Gabriel Oliveira, a citizen annoyed by the lack of original local content in Pernambuco, from jokes to tips on what to do on weekends. He used colloquial language as a strategy to get closer to the public and soon reached 1 million followers. Today almost 1.4 million people follow Recife Ordinário, almost half the population of the region and twice as many fans as the leading local newspaper.
What I read, watch, and listen to…
I’m reading a paper that shows that AI-synthesized faces are indistinguishable from real faces and more trustworthy co-authored by Sophie J. Nightingale of Lancaster University and Hany Farid from the University of California Berkeley, published in PNAS.
I’m watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. 🖖🏽
I’m listening to episode 161 of Citations Needed on the real-life implications of pop culture’s fascination with the dubious science of “criminal profiling” hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
More stray links:
Prof Hannah Fry on calculating the risks of cancer treatment: ‘I would have paid any price’ by Louise Carpenter for The Telegraph.
‘Jiggle Jiggle’: How documentarian Louis Theroux took over TikTok with a novelty rap song by Suzy Exposito for LA Times. “My money don’t jiggle, jiggle, it folds / I like to see you wiggle, wiggle, for sure.”
What makes hate a unique emotion – and why that matters by Cristhian A Martínez for Psyche.
The bias hunter by Douglas Starr for Science.
Chart of the week
Pretty self-explanatory chart by Martin Armstrong for Statista. I wonder if the Chart of the Week segment should just be real charts but with no labels—and readers have to guess what they’re about.