This week is great technology news: Uber behaved badly. A massive document dump reveals that it deliberately broke laws to roll out its services as broadly and quickly as possible. Of course, the company can blame its disgraced former CEO. “We ask the public to judge us based on what we have done in the last five years,” sounds its pious-sounding statement. Where do you get this? Should Uber have paid a higher price for its actions? Or was moving fast and ruining things the only way to disrupt the taxi industry? Look into the comments. In the meantime, here’s this month’s update.
Monitoring in a postalRoe America
We have mapped the consequences of the overthrow of Roe v. Wade, which is expected to cause about half of the states in the United States to ban or strictly restrict abortion. One thing that stands out: the law in the field of law enforcement is much more advanced than it was in 1973, when Roe was decided. Back then, the easiest way for police to catch illegal abortions was to raid a clinic and perhaps act on a tip. If a woman was not caught red-handed, it was very difficult to prove that she had had an abortion. The doctors who performed them were the main targets.
Today, there is a huge monitoring infrastructure, which for the most part is activated by the clouds of data we all create every day. Prosecutors can sue location data (especially in the form of geofence rulings requesting data on everyone who was at a particular location at a particular time), search queries and social media postings, as well as data from fertility and health tracking apps. A proposed EU regulation designed to make it easier to capture material that abuses children could have the side effect of giving U.S. prosecutors more power to scan phones for abortion-related messages. Not all data needs a ruling, either: Automatic license plate readers could be used to prove that someone drove out of the state to have an abortion – or drove someone else that they could be prosecuted for aiding and abetting a crime.
This means that online platforms will also try to ward off prosecution for inadvertently helping people get abortions. At least Meta has been suppressing some abortion-related content for years. The changes in the law are likely to make companies much more cautious. An example of how this could work is what has happened to sex workers since the adoption of FOSTA-SESTA, a 2018 law that allows platforms to be prosecuted for hosting content that promotes or facilitates prostitution. It has created social media platforms, payment processors and reportedly even food delivery apps to suspend or shadow sex workers. It will be difficult to tailor this response state by state so that it can affect people even in states where abortion is legal.
None of these law enforcement methods are new; they have been used to catch criminals for years. It’s just that now people in half the country can be turned into potential criminals. It should also make you think: How can your data unexpectedly be used to attach charges to you or someone else?
China in the driver’s seat
The world is struggling to switch to electric vehicles, and as our special series reports, China is at the forefront. Nearly 15 percent of the new cars sold there in 2021 were electric, compared to 10 percent in the EU and 4 percent in the United States. It already has some of the biggest electric car manufacturers, and manufacturers like Foxconn (which makes most iPhones) are turning into cars. Chinese companies manufacture more than 50 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and have acquired a good share of global lithium supplies, and the country controls at least two-thirds of the world’s lithium treatment capacity. It is finding out the difficult problem of creating a massive public charging network that is compatible with many different car brands – whose absence is one of the main reasons why adoption has been slow in the United States.
All of this means that your first (or next) EV is increasingly Chinese. “So what?” you have to say. Is pretty much everything you own not Chinese made? Well, yes, but consider the national security implications of having hundreds of thousands of what are essentially mobile sensor devices – a lot fast and heavy units, which at least in theory can be remote controlled– roam the streets, sending countless amounts of data back to their producers, who are under the thumb of an increasingly harsh superpower government. The West freaked out when they decided that networking equipment made by Huawei could be used for espionage, and they did not even have it. wheel.