Tag: Technology

The Anti-Abortion Movement Is Pumping Resources into Promoting Fake Clinics—And Google Is Helping

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Abortion opponents are now targeting states where abortion remains legal, such as Massachusetts, by pumping resources into a spider web of anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs) that work to entrap people searching for reproductive healthcare. And Google made $10.2 million over the last two years running deceptive advertisements for these fake clinics.

“Google … is more than willing to allow advertisers to lie, deceive, limit users’ rights to good information and to healthcare, as long as they get paid in the process.”

How AI Puts Elections at Risk—And the Needed Safeguards

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Next year will bring the first national campaign season in which widely accessible AI tools allow users to synthesize audio in anyone’s voice, generate photo-realistic images of anybody doing nearly anything, and power social media bot accounts with near human-level conversational abilities—and do so on a vast scale and with a reduced or negligible investment of money and time.

Voters need some level of transparency to promote safe AI use when it comes to elections.

Here’s How Companies Can Protect the Privacy of People Providing or Seeking Abortion Care

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Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Center for Democracy & Technology has released a set of best practices for companies to adopt in order to better protect the privacy and safety of people seeking, providing or otherwise supporting abortion care.

Without transparency, companies could sell data to law enforcement and civil litigants—which could help prove a person sought, received, aided or provided an abortion. The best practices call on companies to consider and closely review the types of individual user data they have access to, and minimize the collection of revealing information.

Miles Apart: Texas and California Lawmakers Stake Opposite Corners of Abortion Policy

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It’s about 1,500 miles from Austin to Sacramento, but Texas and California lawmakers are a million miles apart on how to treat private data related to reproductive health.

The goalposts are moving, what used to be legal is now illegal in many places, and online speech and personal data are the new battleground—with millions of people’s health and lives in the balance.

When Is a Threat a Threat?: A Forthcoming SCOTUS Ruling Could Have a Sweeping Impact on Gender-Based Violence

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on April 19 in a case that could have a sweeping impact on the ability of victims of stalking, verbal abuse and online harassment to be protected from their abusers.

In the case, Counterman v. Colorado, the Court appeared willing to increase the threshold for identifying speech that rises to the level of a “true threat” and ignore the collateral damage of protecting harassers—which will have devastating consequences for victims of abuse.

The Danger of Incels—and How We Shift the Thinking of Men Attracted to These Groups

The sources of misogyny and violence against women are complex, and it is critical to examine them—not just during National Sexual Assault Awareness Month, but always.

One such perpetrator of violence: incels, or “involuntary celibates.” The grievances of this group over their perceived sexual exclusion often takes the form of violence, especially violence against women. Society must come together to address the root causes of incel violence—or continue to face the deadly consequences.

Toward an Inclusive Artificial Intelligence: The Ms. Q&A With Gabriela de Queiroz

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Many people see language models, like ChatGPT and other new machine learning technologies like Meta’s Make-A-Video, as the beginning of the end. And as a woman in tech—a field dominated by men—Gabriela de Queiroz has reason to be skeptical of AI.

But when de Queiroz talks about her efforts to make artificial intelligence more inclusive, she takes a different approach to understanding the ever more influential and pervasive role of AI in contemporary societies.