When Neguine Rezaii first moved to the United States a decade ago, she hesitated to tell people she was Iranian. Instead, she would use Persian. “I figured that people probably wouldn’t know what that was,” she says. The linguistic ambiguity was useful: she could conceal her embarrassment at the regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad while still […]
IoT
The human cost of a WeChat ban: severing a hundred million ties
In January, 1989, my 26-year-old father uprooted his life to move to the other side of the world. He had never been on a plane, let alone outside of China. But an American professor had offered him a postdoc, an opportunity he couldn’t refuse. When he landed, he made only one call at an airport […]
What happens when an algorithm gets it wrong
In the first of a four-part series on FaceID, host Jennifer Strong explores the false arrest of Robert Williams by police in Detroit. The odd thing about Willliams’s ordeal wasn’t that police used face recognition to ID him—it’s that the cops told him about it. There’s no law saying they have to. The episode starts […]
What happens in Vegas… is captured on camera
The use of facial recognition by police has come under a lot of scrutiny. In part three of our four-part series on FaceID, host Jennifer Strong takes you to Sin City, which actually has one of America’s most buttoned-up policies on when cops can capture your likeness. She also finds out why celebrities like Woody […]
Land of a billion faces
Clearview AI has built one of the most comprehensive databases of people’s faces in the world. Your picture is probably in there (our host Jennifer Strong’s was). In part two of this four-part series on facial recognition, we meet the CEO of the controversial company who tells us our future is filled with FaceID— regardless […]
Covid-19 “long haulers” are organizing online to study themselves
Gina Assaf was running in Washington, DC, on March 19 when she suddenly couldn’t take another step. “I was so out of breath I had to stop,” she says. Five days earlier, she’d hung out with a friend; within a day, that friend had started showing three classic signs of covid-19: fever, cough, and shortness […]
The EU is launching a market for personal data. Here’s what that means for privacy.
The European Union has long been a trendsetter in privacy regulation. Its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and stringent antitrust laws have inspired new legislation around the world. For decades, the EU has codified protections on personal data and fought against what it viewed as commercial exploitation of private information, proudly positioning its regulations in […]
Population immunity is slowing down the pandemic in parts of the US
The large number of people already infected with the coronavirus in the US has begun to act as a brake on the spread of the disease in hard-hit states. Millions of US residents have been infected by the virus that causes covid-19, and at least 160,000 are dead. One effect is that the pool of […]
Russia says it has a covid vaccine called “Sputnik-V”
Russia has cleared a vaccine against covid-19 for emergency use on health-care workers this fall. Fast advance: Russian president Vladimir Putin said during a meeting on Tuesday that the newly registered vaccine “has passed all the necessary tests” and that one of his daughters had received the inoculation. “She has taken part in the […]
The dwarf planet Ceres might be home to an underground ocean of water
Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system, seems to have liquid water seeping onto its surface, according to a new paper in Nature Astronomy. Data from NASA’s Dawn orbiter, the study suggests, show signs that it may be harboring an ocean deep underground. The background: Ceres, a dwarf planet located in the asteroid belt […]