A senior Google employee has claimed she was made redundant after reporting a manager who told clients stories about his swinger lifestyle and showed a nude of his wife. Victoria Woodall told an employment tribunal she was subjected to a campaign of retaliation by the company after whistleblowing on the man who was later sacked. Google UK's internal investigation found the manager had touched two female colleagues without their consent, and his behaviour amounted to sexual harassment, documents seen by the BBC in court show. The tech giant denies retaliating against Woodall and argues she became paranoid after whistleblowing and began to view normal business activities as sinister. In her claim, Woodall says her own boss subjected her to a relentless campaign of retaliation after her complaint also implicated his close friends who were later disciplined for witnessing the manager's behaviour and failing to challenge it.

Geedge Networks, a company with ties to the founder of China's mass censorship infrastructure, is selling its censorship and surveillance systems to at least four other countries in Asia and Africa. A leak of more than 100,000 documents shows that a little-known Chinese company has been quietly selling censorship systems seemingly modeled on the Great Firewall to governments around the world. Geedge Networks, a company founded in 2018 that counts the "father" of China's massive censorship infrastructure as one of its investors, styles itself as a network-monitoring provider, offering business-grade cybersecurity tools to "gain comprehensive visibility and minimize security risks" for its customers, the documents show. In fact, researchers found that it has been operating a sophisticated system that allows users to monitor online information, block certain websites and VPN tools, and spy on specific individuals. Researchers who reviewed the leaked material found that the company is able to package advanced surveillance capabilities into what amounts to a commercialized version of the Great Firewall--a wholesale solution with both hardware that can be installed in any telecom data center and software operated by local government officers.

One of Amazon's most iconic products has turned out to be a major money drain, newly unearthed documents show. The retail giant invested in Alexa voice technology in its relatively cheap Echo speaker products in the hopes people would use it to order more products online. But this is said to have backfired dramatically - with new market research showing customers see the AI voice assistant as a secretary and mostly use it for free apps like setting their alarms and checking the weather. 'We worried we've hired 10,000 people and we've built a smart timer,' a former senior employee told the Wall Street Journal. Sources shared internal documents with the newspaper showing that between 2017 and 2021, Amazon suffered more than 25 billion in losses from its devices business.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Taipei, Taiwan – A United States government agency grounded its drone fleet over concerns China could use the unmanned aircraft for spying despite internal warnings that a ban would in fact increase security risks, documents obtained by Al Jazeera reveal. The US Department of Interior (DOI) also disregarded warnings the ban could hamper efforts to fight wildfires, months before officials reported the restrictions were making fire-fighting more difficult and dangerous, the documents show. The DOI, which manages public lands and resources in the US, ordered the temporary grounding of drones made in China or containing Chinese parts in October 2019 amid deep suspicion of Chinese technology within the administration of former US President Donald Trump. Then-Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt formalised the ban in January 2020 with an open-ended order grounding the DOI's entire 810-strong fleet of unmanned aircraft systems (UAVs) – whose uses include responding to natural disasters, geological surveys and wildlife population monitoring – until "cybersecurity, technology and domestic production concerns are adequately addressed". The order, which followed years of warnings that drones made by firms such as Shenzhen-based DJI could be secretly sending data to Beijing, included exceptions for emergency uses, such as fighting wildfires and search-and-rescue missions.

A video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seeming to slur her speech at an event tore through the internet, gaining steam on Facebook. Share after share, it spread to the point of going viral. The altered video from May 2019 was a slowed-down version of the actual speech the California Democrat gave but was being promoted as real. Even though Facebook acknowledged the video was fake, the company allowed it to stay on the platform, where it continued to be reshared. That exponential resharing was like rocket fuel to the manipulated video.

Facebook trained its artificial intelligence systems to detect and block any future attempt to livestream a shooting spree with "police/military body cams footage," and other violent material, in the aftermath of the Christchurch terror attack. The emergency exercise – detailed in corporate papers leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen – followed the March 2019 mass murder in the New Zealand city, described internally as "a watershed moment" for the Facebook Live video service. The white supremacist attacker was able to broadcast a 17-minute live stream of the attack on two mosques that was not detected by the company's systems, allowing it to be swiftly replicated online. "It was clear that Live was a vulnerable surface which can be repurposed by bad actors to cause societal harm," the leaked review stated. "Since this event, we've faced international media pressure and have seen regulatory and legal risks increase on Facebook increase considerably."

Google this year moved to tighten control over its scientists' papers by launching a "sensitive topics" review, and in at least three cases requested authors refrain from casting its technology in a negative light, according to internal communications and interviews with researchers involved in the work. Google's new review procedure asks that researchers consult legal, policy and public relations teams before pursuing topics such as face and sentiment analysis and categorizations of race, gender or political affiliation, according to internal webpages explaining the policy. "Advances in technology and the growing complexity of our external environment are increasingly leading to situations where seemingly inoffensive projects raise ethical, reputational, regulatory or legal issues," one of the pages for research staff stated. Reuters could not determine the date of the post, though three current employees said the policy began in June. Google declined to comment for this story.

Huawei and its partners have provided some of these surveillance products to authorities in the northwest Xinjiang region, where the Chinese Communist Party has sought for decades to control and assimilate the Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic minority, most recently through a massive "reeducation" program. Among them, according to documents from Huawei's website, was a facial recognition system used by police in the Xinjiang capital Urumqi, and a highway surveillance camera system for the region.

David Feinberg, Google's Vice President of Healthcare, recently described "a search bar on top of ... [ ] your [electronic health records] that needs no training," on stage at a conference in Las Vegas. Google is testing a service that would use its search and artificial intelligence technology to analyze patient records for Ascension, the largest nonprofit health system in the U.S., according to documents about the efforts reviewed by Forbes. Called "'Nightingale," the Google-Ascension project indicates that Google's push into health analysis is farther along than previously believed, even as the company has faced a growing backlash over health-related privacy concerns. Ascension said in a statement that all its work with Google complies with privacy law and is "underpinned by a robust data security and protection effort, which Google echoed in its own blog post later Monday, including that "patient data cannot and will not be combined with any Google consumer data. " The Wall Street Journal first published details of the Ascension partnership earlier on Monday.

In March 2017, President Trump issued an executive order expediting the deployment of biometric verification of the identities of all travelers crossing US borders. That mandate stipulates facial recognition identification for "100 percent of all international passengers," including American citizens, in the top 20 US airports by 2021. Now, the United States Department of Homeland Security is rushing to get those systems up and running at airports across the country. But it's doing so in the absence of proper vetting, regulatory safeguards, and what some privacy advocates argue is in defiance of the law. According to 346 pages of documents obtained by the nonprofit research organization Electronic Privacy Information Center -- shared exclusively with BuzzFeed News and made public on Monday as part of Sunshine Week -- US Customs and Border Protection is scrambling to implement this "biometric entry-exit system," with the goal of using facial recognition technology on travelers aboard 16,300 flights per week -- or more than 100 million passengers traveling on international flights out of the United States -- in as little as two years, to meet Trump's accelerated timeline for a biometric system that had initially been signed into law by the Obama administration.