Google CEO Sundar Pichai is calling for governments around the world to regulate artificial intelligence, saying the sensitive technology should not be used to "support mass surveillance or violate human rights." However, Pichai -- the top executive at Google as well as its parent company Alphabet -- also argued that governments should not go too far as they work to rein in high-stakes technologies like facial recognition and self-driving vehicles. His speech in Europe and companion op-ed come as Europe weighs new ethics rules for artificial intelligence and the White House urges a light-touch approach to regulating technology. "There is no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to be regulated," Pichai wrote in the Financial Times. "It is too important not to. The only question is how to approach it."

NEW YORK/BANGALORE, INDIA – Facebook Inc. has reached a $550 million settlement of claims it collected and stored millions of users' biometric data without their consent, as Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg pledged better protections for users to address privacy concerns that have dogged the social media company. The proposed class-action settlement was disclosed by Facebook's chief financial officer on a Wednesday conference call to discuss fourth-quarter results, and by lawyers for Facebook users who called it the largest cash settlement of a privacy lawsuit. Facebook did not admit wrongdoing in agreeing to the settlement, which requires court approval. The accord followed Facebook's $5 billion settlement last year with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which arose from the company's having allowed British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to harvest data for an estimated 87 million users. Zuckerberg said during the call that the FTC settlement committed Facebook to privacy controls that "set a new standard for our industry, going beyond anything that's required by law today."

SAN FRANCISCO – A House subcommittee is investigating popular dating services such as Tinder and Bumble for allegedly allowing minors and sex offenders to use their services. Bumble, Grindr, The Meet Group and the Match Group, which owns such popular services as Tinder, Match.com and OkCupid, are the current targets of the investigation by the U.S. House Oversight and Reform subcommittee on economic and consumer policy. In separate letters Thursday to the companies, the subcommittee is seeking information on users' ages, procedures for verifying ages, and any complaints about assaults, rape or the use of the services by minors. It is also asking for the services' privacy policies and details on what users see when they review and agree to the policies. Although the minimum age for using internet services is typically 13 in the U.S., dating services generally require users to be at least 18 because of concerns about sexual predators.

KOTA KINABALU (Jan 30): Courts in Kota Kinabalu will be the first in the country to use data analysis by artificial intelligence (AI) application in deciding on sentences, Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Datuk Liew Vui Keong said. He said AI application would be used in a criminal case hearing on Feb 17. According to Liew, the use of the application was launched on Jan 17, after opening of the legal year in Sabah and Sarawak by Chief Judge Tan Sri David Wong Kah Wah in Kuching Sarawak. For a start, he said AI would be used for drug possession offences under Section 12(2) of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952 and rape offences under Section 376 of the Penal Code. "The technology will be able to analyse information to help judges and magistrates determine appropriate sentences on the accused. "With AI, there will be less disparity and inconsistency when sentences are meted out," he told reporters after a briefing on the use of AI application at the Kota Kinabalu Court today. The AI application would only serve as a guideline for judicial officials in making their decisions. Before sentencing he said, the judge or magistrate would inform the defence lawyers and prosecutors on the result of the AI analysis. "However, the discretion of the judges or magistrates in imposing an appropriate sentence will not be affected with the implementation of this technology,.

We demonstrate how easy it is for modern machine-learned systems to violate common deontological ethical principles and social norms such as "favor the less fortunate", and "do not penalize good attributes." We propose that in some cases such ethical principles can be incorporated into a machine-learned model by adding shape constraints that constrain the model to respond only positively to relevant inputs. We analyze the relationship between these deontological constraints that act on individuals and the consequentialist group-based fairness goals of one-sided statistical parity and equal opportunity. This strategy works with sensitive attributes that are Boolean or real-valued such as income and age, and can help produce more responsible and trustworthy AI.

The 2016 United States presidential election was marked by the abuse of targeted advertising on Facebook. Concerned with the risk of the same kind of abuse to happen in the 2018 Brazilian elections, we designed and deployed an independent auditing system to monitor political ads on Facebook in Brazil. To do that we first adapted a browser plugin to gather ads from the timeline of volunteers using Facebook. We managed to convince more than 2000 volunteers to help our project and install our tool. Then, we use a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to detect political Facebook ads using word embeddings. To evaluate our approach, we manually label a data collection of 10k ads as political or non-political and then we provide an in-depth evaluation of proposed approach for identifying political ads by comparing it with classic supervised machine learning methods. Finally, we deployed a real system that shows the ads identified as related to politics. We noticed that not all political ads we detected were present in the Facebook Ad Library for political ads. Our results emphasize the importance of enforcement mechanisms for declaring political ads and the need for independent auditing platforms.

Facebook has settled a lawsuit over facial recognition technology, agreeing to pay $550m (£419m) over accusations it had broken an Illinois state law regulating the use of biometric details. The settlement was quietly disclosed in the company's quarterly results, released on Wednesday evening, which showed record revenues overall at the company, but also surging costs. It is one of the largest payouts for a privacy breach in US history, a marker of the strength of Illinois's nation-leading privacy laws. The New York Times, which first reported the settlement, noted that the sum "dwarfed" the $380m penalty the credit bureau Equifax agreed to pay over a much larger customer data breach in 2017. Illinois heavily regulates the use of biometric identifiers, prohibiting the collection and storing of biometric information without consent from individuals. The law, passed in 2008, also requires companies to store the identifiers securely, and to delete them in a timely manner.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other executives working on artificial intelligence are now calling for limited government regulation as the European Union mulls potential five-year bans of facial recognition software. Pichai called for governments to take a bigger role in regulating the use of artificial intelligence (AI), and he published his beliefs in a Financial Times editorial while speaking out on the topic in speeches around the world. This is in stark opposition to comments he made in an interview with the Financial Times in September that called for caution with any potential government intrusion of how tech companies deploy AI. "There are real concerns about the potential negative consequences of AI, from deepfakes to nefarious uses of facial recognition. While there is already some work being done to address these concerns, there will inevitably be more challenges ahead that no one company or industry can solve alone," Pichai wrote in The Financial Times. "The EU and the US are already starting to develop regulatory proposals. International alignment will be critical to making global standards work. To get there, we need agreement on core values. Companies such as ours cannot just build promising new technology and let market forces decide how it will be used. It is equally incumbent on us to make sure that technology is harnessed for good and available to everyone," he said in the editorial.

Consumers rely on search results, social media and peer reviews to perform research and gather feedback on businesses they are considering visiting or products they're thinking of purchasing. And while it can be easy to turn a blind eye on the reviews your business receives, simply ignoring those review sites can be damaging to your bottom line. While this probably comes as no surprise, 95% of shoppers read online reviews before making a purchase. As they seek out peer reviews on brands or products that they're considering doing business with, they're looking for specific things. Consumers actually look for negative reviews to discover authentic feedback from real customers.

If ever there was a white paradise, it was Silicon Valley in the 1980s. We called them geniuses and wizards. Industry titans, and even a few free-thinking hippies who believed they were gods, powerful enough to shape technology to their will. This white cast of characters populated the world's largest high tech hub at a rate of nearly 75%. Absorbed 80% of the area's generated income.