Many of the world's most popular apps have dubious terms of service, and exploit private data to make money, according to a cybersecurity expert. He says that by allowing data to be monitored by'big tech' companies, they can decide what we see online, and we become'defined by what computer algorithms decide for us.' Digital voice assistants such as Alexa are serious privacy risks, Gaffney says. The devices listen for'wake words' before operating but are listening to them all the time - and take snippets of your voice and process them in data centers far from your home. Gaffney says, 'I don't use them at all, but for those that do, I would not place them in the bathroom or bedroom. Though they wake on trigger words, they listen for a few seconds afterward.

Many of the world's most popular apps have dubious terms of service, and exploit private data to make money, according to a cybersecurity expert. He says that by allowing data to be monitored by'big tech' companies, they can decide what we see online, and we become'defined by what computer algorithms decide for us.' Below are Gaffney's three apps he would never use due to fears over privacy. Digital voice assistants such as Alexa are serious privacy risks, Gaffney says. The devices listen for'wake words' before operating but are listening to them all the time - and take snippets of your voice and process them in data centers far from your home. Gaffney says, 'I don't use them at all, but for those that do, I would not place them in the bathroom or bedroom.

Starting today, Uber Eats customers in Fairfax, Virginia can get their next meal delivered by a robot. In an expansion of the company's existing partnership with Cartken, Uber has begun offering automated deliveries in the city's Mosaic District. With today's announcement, a select number of the more than 40 restaurants in the area have begun transporting their food aboard Cartken's six-wheeled robots. Among the restaurants participating in the pilot include Our Mom Eugenia, Pupatella and RASA. Uber has been testing autonomous delivery robots in a handful of markets throughout the US.

A delivery driver who is suing Uber Eats in London over his dismissal from the company and claims its facial recognition technology is racially biased says the company treats couriers as "numbers rather than humans". Pa Edrissa Manjang worked for Uber Eats between November 2019 and April 2021 while employed full-time as a financial assistant. When Manjang first began working for the company he was not regularly asked to send in pictures of himself for verification purposes. However, these facial verification checks became more frequent. Manjang was eventually dismissed from the company by email, when it claimed there were "continued mismatches" between the pictures he took to register for a shift and the one on his Uber work profile.

As suspected, and following a similar deal yesterday to offload its self-driving taxi technology to autonomous vehicle startup Aurora, Uber announced Tuesday that it has sold its flying taxi service, Uber Elevate to California-based Joby Aviation. Joby already makes electric VTOL aircraft so it is acquiring Uber's aerial ride-hailing division. Doing so will allow the startup access to Uber's app infrastructure -- and vice versa, essentially integrating their respective ground and air apps -- once Joby's aircraft are FAA certified. That is expected to happen within the next few years and could be completed as soon as 2023. "We were proud to partner with Uber Elevate last year and we're even prouder to be welcoming them into the Joby team today," Joby Aviation founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt said in a Tuesday release.

Uber has ditched efforts to develop its own self-driving car with the multibillion-dollar sale of its driverless car division to a Silicon Valley startup. The ride-hailing company is selling the business, known as Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), for a reported $4bn (£3bn) to Aurora, a start-up that makes sensors and software for autonomous vehicles and is backed by Amazon and Sequoia Capital. As part of the deal, Uber is investing $400m in the venture, which employs 1,200 people, in return for a minority stake of 26%, and its chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi will join Aurora's board. The deal will also give Aurora access to a carmaker, Japan's Toyota, which has invested in ATG. Uber said it would collaborate with Aurora in bringing driverless cars to its network in the coming years.

Uber's firing of thousands more of its employees this week, starting Monday, will bring the number of people it has dismissed from responsibility over the past year to more than 10,000, according to some estimates. Uber's previous round of job cuts saw it remove 3,700 people, or 14% of its total global workforce, in the first week of this month. Sources inside Uber, cited by Business Insider, said surviving employees are bracing for the latest round of mass layoffs, which will definitely run into thousands. Ahead of the layoffs, Uber last week told employees to be fired that they'd received 10 weeks' salary plus paid healthcare until the end of 2020. Employees to be fired this week will come from freight and the self-driving car unit and Advanced Technologies Group.

For the first time, ride-hailing company Uber has opened up about what is going on under the hood of their ATG's machine learning infrastructure and versioning control platform for autonomous driving vehicles. ATG is the Advanced Technologies Group, which concentrates and researches on self-driving vehicles by deploying machine learning models into the cars. The self-driving division at Uber has more than 450 employees who have been working on autonomous vehicle technology for several years now. Recently, the self-driving team at Uber developed a set of tools and microservices to support the ML workflow known as VerCD. The team also discussed their self-driving vehicle components, which use machine learning models as well as the machine learning model life cycle.

Artificial intelligence(AI) has been an atypical technology trend. In a traditional technology cycle, innovation typically begins with startups trying to disrupt industry incumbents. In the case of AI, most of the innovation in the space has been coming from the big corporate labs of companies like Google, Facebook, Uber or Microsoft. Those companies are not only leading impressive tracks of research but also regularly open sourcing new frameworks and tools that streamline the adoption of AI technologies. In that context, Uber has emerged as one of the most active contributors to open source AI technologies in the current ecosystems.

"Uber is making decisions in real time at global scale, while needing to take into account local nuances of the marketplaces," explained Franziska Bell, Senior Data Science Manager on the Platform Team at Uber. "And, of course, we also want to incorporate the user preferences on the product." As a result, Uber has invested heavily in data science, and Bell outlined some of Uber's data science strategy last month at the AI World Conference & Expo in Boston. Uber employs hundreds of data scientists working across the company, and Bell reports constant efforts to, "increase the innovation and speed with which these data scientists move." To speed up the rate of data science at Uber, the company has taken a dual approach: first to maximize each step of the existing data science project life cycle, and second to commoditize data science by creating platforms applicable to multiple use cases that are transferable and reusable. Data science projects at Uber fall into four life cycle stages, Bell explained: data exploration, iterative prototyping, productization, and finally monitoring.