Mark Zuckerberg and his data-hoarding creation Facebook remain in the crosshairs this week as scrutiny over its Cambridge Analytica profile-scraping scandal continues to mount, with the social media giant’s stock price falling by over 13 percent this week.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, fresh off of not apologizing for the social media giant’s failure to prevent sketchy election data firm Cambridge Analytica from partnering with a similarly sketchy app to allegedly scrape 50 million users’ profile data, briefly emerged from his gilded panic room on Wednesday evening for…
Facebook held an open meeting at 10am Tuesday morning in Menlo Park. The whole company was invited to gather and ask questions about the recent—and rather furious—scandal around how Cambridge Analytica, a private data company hired by the Trump campaign that acquired and leverage information on over 50 million…
Facebook has booted Cambridge Analytica, a data firm once hired by President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, and its UK-based parent company SCL Group after it allegedly received user data improperly downloaded and shared by a University of Cambridge professor.
The Pentagon accidentally left at least 1.8 billion publicly accessible posts it scraped from social media sites, forums and other web destinations unsecured on an Amazon S3 repository, where anyone with a free Amazon Web Services account could download the data, PC Mag reported.
In the summer of 2015, Alexandra Franco got a letter in the mail from a company she had never heard of called AcurianHealth. The letter, addressed to Franco personally, invited her to participate in a study of people with psoriasis, a condition that causes dry, itchy patches on the skin.
We rarely stop to think of just how many people the world’s airlines transport on any given day, never mind form a mental picture of that activity. Now there’s a nifty animated visualization of how all those different airports around the globe are connected—a total of 3,200 airports and 60,000 routes in all.
An Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) investigation just revealed an awfully Orwellian fact: the FBI is working with government researchers to develop advanced tattoo recognition technology. This would allow law enforcement to sort and identify people based on their tattoos to determine “affiliation to gangs,…
Wikipedia is a voluntary organization dedicated to the noble goal of decentralized knowledge creation. But as the community has evolved over time, it has wandered further and further from its early egalitarian ideals, according to a new paper published in the journal Future Internet. In fact, such systems usually end…
Do you work for a big company? Have you been having back pain? Your company probably knows about it already thanks to high-tech healthcare companies that it hired. Welcome to our brave new world of big data.
Police departments, like everyone else, would like to be more effective while spending less. Given the tremendous attention to big data in recent years, and the value it has provided in fields ranging from astronomy to medicine, it should be no surprise that police departments are using data analysis to inform…
What if you knew exactly what to say over email to get someone to like you? When to insert a smiley face, when to get to the point, when to flirt? A service called Crystal offers a cheat sheet for email finesse.
We know less about the deep ocean than we do about the surface of Mars. But if we want to really understand how humans are impacting the Earth, we need to start looking down deep into the muck. That’s why scientists created the first digital map of the seafloor’s geologic composition.
Friday’s Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage was a historic moment for civil rights in America, and for the first time ever, Facebook released a tool that encouraged people express solidarity with a rainbow profile picture. Naturally, Facebook is also keeping track of who’s using it. [Update: Facebook…
The image you’re looking at is a glimpse into our future. Welcome to July 2099, according to 21 different climate models. CO2 concentrations have topped 900 parts per million, comprising nearly 0.1 percent of our atmosphere. (In early 2015, we hit 400).
Rather than relying on carpet-bombing approaches like chemotherapy and radiation treatments, cutting-edge cancer cures are looking more towards a surgical strike, tailored to shutting down the mutations that are driving growth. And the secret weapon in that fight might just be a well-known Jeopardy contestant.
It’s hard to figure out who the villain is in Alex Garland’s sexy robot thriller Ex Machina. That’s what makes the film so, well, thrilling. But as a new featurette called from the studio called “God Complex” makes painfully clear, the real villain is the one you can’t see, the one that’s ever-present, always…
If you've ever wanted to hear the difference between traditional funk and Memphis soul, or understand where they fit in the context of more than 1300 musical genres, you might want to clear your schedule. An interactive project called Every Noise at Once is about to devour the rest of your day.
After teasing a "Precision Medicine Initiative" in his State of the Union address, President Obama today released the details of his $215 million plan: A massive database containing the genetic profiles and health records of at least a million volunteers. Genetics sequencing! Big data! These all sound like good…
There's probably something you do right now you wouldn't really want everyone to know about. Maybe you're letting a Fitbit gather dust while you eat Doritos and watch The Good Wife (understandable). Maybe you're in the habit of driving around at 3 AM when you can't sleep. Whatever you do, if you're doing it while…