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A Couple of Interesting Things
First up, a movie written by an artificial intelligence. It's only 10 minutes long, but it's pretty interesting. An article on Ars Technica pointed me in this direction. These people set up an AI and fed it a few hundred movie scripts that they found on the internet, received some prompts from a film competition, and turned it loose.
Unfortunately I can't embed this video. A word of warning: it not only auto-plays, it starts a second video after it's done.
From Slashdot, "Creepy British startup Score Assured has brought the power of "big data" to plumb new depths. In order to rent from landlords who use their services, potential renters are "...required to grant it full access to your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and/or Instagram profiles. From there, Tenant Assured scrapes your site activity, including entire conversation threads and private messages; runs it through natural language processing and other analytic software; and finally, spits out a report that catalogs everything from your personality to your 'financial stress level.'" This "stress level" is a deep dive to (allegedly) determine whether the potential renter will pay their bills using vague indicators like "online retail social logins and frequency of social logins used for leisure activities." To make it worse, the company turns over to the landlords' indicators that the landlords aren't legally allowed to consider (age, race, pregnancy status), counting on the landlords to "do the right thing." As if this isn't abusive enough, the candidates are not allowed to see nor challenge their report, unlike with credit reports. Landlords first, employers next...and then? As the co-founder says, "People will give up their privacy to get something they want" and, evidently, that includes a place to live and a job.
In late May, an apartment building in Salt Lake City told tenants living in the complex to "like" its Facebook page or they will be in breach of their lease."
So, if the UK Parliament doesn't put in some decent privacy laws, you've got a big problem there if this company and concept continues to exist. I think I would definitely be in favor of someone like Anonymous doxxing this company's board of directors.
Unfortunately I can't embed this video. A word of warning: it not only auto-plays, it starts a second video after it's done.
From Slashdot, "Creepy British startup Score Assured has brought the power of "big data" to plumb new depths. In order to rent from landlords who use their services, potential renters are "...required to grant it full access to your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and/or Instagram profiles. From there, Tenant Assured scrapes your site activity, including entire conversation threads and private messages; runs it through natural language processing and other analytic software; and finally, spits out a report that catalogs everything from your personality to your 'financial stress level.'" This "stress level" is a deep dive to (allegedly) determine whether the potential renter will pay their bills using vague indicators like "online retail social logins and frequency of social logins used for leisure activities." To make it worse, the company turns over to the landlords' indicators that the landlords aren't legally allowed to consider (age, race, pregnancy status), counting on the landlords to "do the right thing." As if this isn't abusive enough, the candidates are not allowed to see nor challenge their report, unlike with credit reports. Landlords first, employers next...and then? As the co-founder says, "People will give up their privacy to get something they want" and, evidently, that includes a place to live and a job.
In late May, an apartment building in Salt Lake City told tenants living in the complex to "like" its Facebook page or they will be in breach of their lease."
So, if the UK Parliament doesn't put in some decent privacy laws, you've got a big problem there if this company and concept continues to exist. I think I would definitely be in favor of someone like Anonymous doxxing this company's board of directors.
no subject
I can only hope Score Assured joins similar startups in the graveyard. I'd be safe enough, given I've never had anything to do with F*c*b**k, and gave up on Twitter a couple years ago - there's approximately zero chance such a genius idea will consider anything but the most in vogue "social" networks, let alone consider privacy. Their marketers might not know that, so there's likely to be a suitably profitable period for the directors before folk get wise to their snake oil.
no subject