Social Good

Imagine a family organizing app, powered partly by artificial intelligence, that can anticipate and execute your every need at home.  It plans meals on your request, then makes a shopping list to use. You can tell it to create a to-do list for your child’s birthday list, and it responds with tasks like sending invitations,...

Microsoft Bing now has more power to scrub AI-generated or deepfake images, a form of nonconsensual intimate image (NCII) abuse, from appearing on the search engine, as the company announces a new nonprofit partnership. A collaboration with victim advocacy tool StopNCII, Microsoft is supplementing its user-reporting with a more “victim-centered” approach incorporating a more in-depth...

X (formerly Twitter) is re-investing in its trust, safety and security teams pre-election, after CEO Elon Musk controversially dissolved the platform’s oversight council nearly two years ago. The company has opened up two dozen new safety and cybersecurity positions at sites across the United States, TechCrunch reported, a lean addition intended to bulk up its...

As the tech landscape evolves, and the public’s awareness of digital attacks grows, scammers are harnessing every tool at their disposal — including Google Maps. A new sextortion scam (a form of financial coercion in which bad actors threaten to release personal, explicit images to the public) leverages publicly accessible geomapping data (read: images of...

Meta is cracking the door back open for minors interested in the company’s virtual offerings, with new parent-approved entry to the platform’s Horizon Worlds. Children (or “preteens,” as Meta refers to them) between the ages of 10 to 12 on parent-managed Meta accounts will be able to request access to specific virtual experiences, most of...

Lyft is rolling out a new feature designed to make rides more inclusive for pet owners across the U.S. Just in time for National Dog Day, the company announced the launch of “Pet Rides,” a service allowing riders to bring their pets along for the trip. Riders will pay an additional $4 fee, which goes...

In pursuit of technological innovation, generative AI‘s advocates have thrust the tools for highly-realistic, nonconsensual, synthetic forgeries, more commonly known as deepfake porn, into the hands of the Average Joe. Ads for “nudify” undressing apps may appear on the sidebars of popular websites and in between Facebook posts, while manipulated sexual images of public figures...

In what may be the most bonkers news to happen this year, billions of Americans had their most personal, sensitive info swiped by hackers late last year — and this massive breach wasn’t announced until just last week. The devastating data leak at the hands of National Public Data is a nightmare, exposing three decades’...

Over the next year, parents whose children have Android phones and tablets will notice a new setting called “school time,” Google announced Thursday. The parental control allows caregivers to set limits on their child’s device functionality while at school, or during other periods when they want to minimize distraction. The setting is already available on...

As students prepare to go back to school, finding reliable online homework help services can be a challenge. Websites touting “homework help,” for example, are often obscuring dicey services that simply complete assignments for you (done both by human and robot hands), while self-proclaimed “tutors” peddle possible money-grabbing scams. Educators are becoming increasingly suspicious of...