The $430 Casio Moflin is a pointless but adorable robot you can't help but love. My friend's dog Wylie sits watching it, suspicious of its every move. Moflin is an AI companion robot made by the Japanese electronics manufacturer Casio. Via the companion app, I have chosen to name this one Puff, because--well--that is what it looks like. Wylie immediately clocks it as something to be wary of, a device that moves on its own but is not alive. Wylie barks, then runs out of the room, growling. When I found out Casio--yes, the same Casio that makes watches--had made an AI pet bot, I figured I was exactly the type of person it was made for.

In a pub in London, England, complicated technology is taking on a simple problem: waiting for a pint in lines that can sometimes be unruly. It uses facial recognition software to form a digital queue and prevent people from cutting in line. A large TV screen is mounted above the bar with a live video feed showing the people waiting for a drink. Beside the image of each customer, a number pops up to indicate where they are in the line. "We just want to make the experience more frictionless and fair," said John Wyllie, managing director of DataSparQ, the company behind the technology called A.I. Bar.

Fashion retailer Hennes & Mauritz AB wants to get a better sense of what makes its customers tick. To help it, the Swedish company just hired a man best known for revealing a data privacy scandal that rocked Facebook Inc. and raised serious questions around how some corners of technology are shaping human existence. At H&M, 29-year-old Christopher Wylie will help the company use big data and artificial intelligence to make sure it actually designs things shoppers want. If successful, the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower might be able to help fix some of H&M's most pressing issues, including getting its inventory under control and ultimately making the company more profitable. "If you better understand what people like to wear, and how they like to wear it, and how they want to feel when they're wearing it, you'll naturally start to create insights as to modernizing and updating your collection," Wylie said in an interview at H&M's Stockholm headquarters on Thursday.

You've heard of profiling criminals, but welcome to fashion profiling -- the practice of classifying and targeting individuals based on their clothing brand preferences. Fashion profiling played a bigger role in the 2016 American presidential election than anyone realized, according to new information from Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower. Today at a conference in Britain organized by the fashion industry website The Business of Fashion, Mr. Wylie explained that clothing preferences were a key metric for Cambridge Analytica, whose business was constructing and selling voter profiles drawn from Facebook data. "Fashion data was used to build AI models to help Steve Bannon build his insurgency and build the alt-right," he said. Preferences in clothing and music are the leading indicators of political leaning, he said.

LONDON – The former head of Cambridge Analytica admitted on Wednesday his firm had received data from the researcher at the center of a scandal over Facebook users' personal details, contradicting previous testimony to lawmakers. Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by Donald Trump in 2016, has denied its work on the U.S. president's successful election campaign made use of data allegedly improperly harvested from around 87 million Facebook users. Former chief Alexander Nix, in earlier testimony to Parliament's media committee, also denied the political consultancy had ever been given data by Aleksandr Kogan, the researcher linked to the scandal. On Wednesday he said it had received data from Kogan. "Of course, the answer to this question should have been'yes,' " Nix said, adding that he thought he was being asked if Cambridge Analytica still held data from the researcher.

Federal immigration officials have abandoned their pursuit of a controversial machine-learning technology that was a pillar of the Trump administration's "extreme vetting" of foreign visitors, dealing a reality check to the goal of using artificial intelligence to predict human behavior. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told tech-industry contractors last summer they wanted a system for their "Extreme Vetting Initiative" that could automatically mine Facebook, Twitter and the broader Internet to determine whether a visitor might commit criminal or terrorist acts or was a "positively contributing member of society." But ICE dropped the machine-learning requirement from its request in recent months, opting instead to hire a contractor that can provide training, management and human personnel who can do the job. Federal documents say the contract is expected to cost more than $100 million and be awarded by the end of the year. After gathering "information from industry professionals and other government agencies on current technological capabilities," ICE spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell said, the focus of what the agency now calls its Visa Lifecycle Vetting program "shifted from a technology-based contract to a labor contract."

Federal immigration officials have abandoned their pursuit of a controversial machine-learning technology that was a pillar of the Trump administration's "extreme vetting" of foreign visitors, dealing a reality check to the goal of using artificial intelligence to predict human behavior. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told tech-industry contractors last summer they wanted a system for their "Extreme Vetting Initiative" that could automatically mine Facebook, Twitter and the broader Internet to determine whether a visitor might commit criminal or terrorist acts or was a "positively contributing member of society." But ICE dropped the machine-learning requirement from its request in recent months, opting instead to hire a contractor that can provide training, management and human personnel who can do the job. Federal documents say the contract is expected to cost more than $100 million and be awarded by the end of the year. After gathering "information from industry professionals and other government agencies on current technological capabilities," ICE spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell said, the focus of what the agency now calls its Visa Lifecycle Vetting program "shifted from a technology-based contract to a labor contract."

LONDON – Cambridge Analytica unleashed its counterattack against claims that it misused data from millions of Facebook accounts, saying Tuesday it is the victim of misunderstandings and inaccurate reporting that portrays the company as the evil villain in a James Bond movie. Clarence Mitchell, a high-profile publicist recently hired to represent the company, held Cambridge Analytica's first news conference since allegations surfaced that the Facebook data helped Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election. Christopher Wylie, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica's parent, also claims that the company has links to the successful campaign to take Britain out of the European Union. "The company has been portrayed in some quarters as almost some Bond villain," Mitchell said. "Cambridge Analytica is no Bond villain."

Cambridge Analytica is facing incredible pressure over the Facebook data sharing scandal -- and not surprisingly, it's determined to share its version of events before Mark Zuckerberg testifies in congressional hearings. The company has posted a "series of facts" that challenge some of the allegations made against the company. Not surprisingly, it started by insisting that it didn't do anything illegal: GSR "legally obtained" the data about Facebook users, and "did not illegally or inappropriately" scoop up and share data. Later on, it maintained that it "only collects data with informed consent." After that, Cambridge Analytica jumped into specifics.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Facebook suspended two companies from its platform over the weekend for improper data collection. The social media giant has been racing to address privacy concerns in light of revelations that data firm Cambridge Analytica accessed private data from as many as 87 million accounts and later used it to support Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Late on Friday, Facebook responded to reports that the Canadian political consulting firm AggregateIQ is affiliated with Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. "In light of recent reports that AggregateIQ may be affiliated with SCL and may, as a result, have improperly received FB user data, we have added them to the list of entities we have suspended from our platform while we investigate," Facebook said in a statement.