data
The European Commission recently presented a set of strategies to shape the bloc’s digital transformation. This policy package offers a roadmap for the EU’s plans on developing a single market for digital services and regulating platforms, and explains how the EU is approaching data governance and its ideas regarding specific artificial intelligence regulation. Over the next five years, the Commission will focus on three key objectives: technology that works for people; a fair and competi...
A damning new report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, raises alarm about the rise of the digital welfare state, which uses data and technologies to automate, predict, identify, surveil, detect, target and punish the poor. The report, recently presented to the UN General Assembly, covers a range of uses of digital technologies for welfare systems – digital identification, automated programmes to assess eligibility and calculation ...
The sociotechnical infrastructure that determines the way human activity is conducted largely functions within broader structures of surveillance capitalism and biopower. The former recognises the effective monetisation of data and information about people for (economic) activity. When probed, these inherent structures reveal an irreconcilability between modern surveillance states and fundament...
For the last few years, I’ve worked in different corners of what can be generally be dubbed as the content moderation industry. First as a contractor, then as an employee for well-known social media platforms, where day-to-day work is intimately linked to crucial social outcomes in different parts of the world. The decisions made in that industry can decide what counts as a real identity, the...
The Mozilla Festival (MozFest) 2018 wrapped up over the last weekend in October with the MozFest Weekend, showcasing world-changing ideas and technology through workshops, talks, art, games, debates and interactive sessions. Hundreds of activists and makers were brought together with the aim of building a stronger community. As a contributor to Mozilla’s open source project Common Voice and a...
In the last two decades, Kenya mobile communications and internet connectivity have rapidly increased. With these developments, the country has also developed a data economy. The data economy is the wealth and resources created from collection and processing of data. It is the cornerstone of the fourth industrial revolution which uses digital technologies to carry out processes, be they physica...
What is big data? Given its name, does one define it simply in terms of size or quantity? If that’s the case, much of the excitement that surrounds it is overblown. History, after all, is teeming with evidence of humans dealing with generous amounts of data. That also means the concept is a dated one, merely resuscitated from relative obscurity. No. Big data goes beyond that—though volume r...
