Uber mistakenly sent out an email to some of its drivers and delivery workers last month offering to cover some of their health insurance costs -- only to revoke the offer two weeks later. From a report: On May 26th, an email from Uber with the enticing subject line "It's a great time to get health coverage" appeared in the inbox of an unspecified number of the company's drivers and delivery workers. When they opened the email, they were greeted by an even more alluring proposition: "Uber can help cover your healthcare costs." Drivers and couriers for Uber are classified as independent contractors, making them ineligible for employer-sponsored health insurance plans. For years, many of these workers have lobbied for more benefits and protections, only to face vicious opposition from Uber.

So one can only imagine the shock from drivers who opened this email and saw an offer for subsidies ranging from $613.77 to $1,277.54, depending on the type of insurance plan they had and the amount of hours they worked each week. That kind of money could be transformative for drivers, many of whom subsist on poverty-level wages and are struggling to find work amid a steep drop in demand during the pandemic. What could account for this radical change in position by Uber? As it turns out, nothing has changed. Uber intended only to send the email to drivers and delivery workers in California, and not any other state.

It's been argued that technology (especially automation) will continue weakening the position of workers. But today the senior economics correspondent for The New York Times argues a "profound shift" happening in America is instead something else.

"For the first time in a generation, workers are gaining the upper hand..." Up and down the wage scale, companies are becoming more willing to pay a little more, to train workers, to take chances on people without traditional qualifications, and to show greater flexibility in where and how people work. The erosion of employer power began during the low-unemployment years leading up to the pandemic and, given demographic trends, could persist for years. March had a record number of open positions, according to federal data that goes back to 2000, and workers were voluntarily leaving their jobs at a rate that matches its historical high. Burning Glass Technologies, a firm that analyzes millions of job listings a day, found that the share of postings that say "no experience necessary" is up two-thirds over 2019 levels, while the share of those promising a starting bonus has doubled.

People are demanding more money to take a new job. The "reservation wage," as economists call the minimum compensation workers would require, was 19 percent higher for those without a college degree in March than in November 2019, a jump of nearly $10,000 a year, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York... [T]he demographic picture is not becoming any more favorable for employers eager to fill positions. Population growth for Americans between ages 20 and 64 turned negative last year for the first time in the nation's history. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the potential labor force will grow a mere 0.3 to 0.4 percent annually for the remainder of the 2020s; the size of the work force rose an average of 0.8 percent a year from 2000 to 2020.
The article describes managers now "being forced to learn how to operate amid labor scarcity... At the high end of the labor market, that can mean workers are more emboldened to leave a job if employers are insufficiently flexible on issues like working from home..."

But it also notes a ride-sharing driver who switched to an IBM apprenticeship for becoming a cloud storage engineer, and former Florida nightclub bouncer Alex Lorick, who became an IBM mainframe technician, "part of a deliberate effort by IBM to rethink how it hires and what counts as a qualification for a given job." [IBM] executives concluded that the qualifications for many jobs were unnecessarily demanding. Postings might require applicants to have a bachelor's degree, for example, in jobs that a six-month training course would adequately prepare a person for.

"By creating your own dumb barriers, you're actually making your job in the search for talent harder," said Obed Louissaint, IBM's senior vice president for transformation and culture. In working with managers across the company on training initiatives like the one under which Mr. Lorick was hired, "it's about making managers more accountable for mentoring, developing and building talent versus buying talent."

"I think something fundamental is changing, and it's been happening for a while, but now it's accelerating," Mr. Louissaint said.

An anonymous reader writes: Data mining startup Stealth Data is working to help websites uncover the "individual names, phone numbers, emails and physical addresses" of the users who visit websites. This information "can include a website visitor's job title, employer, annual income, age, and personal and professional social media profiles" so that businesses can use this data for marketing purposes.

Stealth Data's third co-founder Chad Sneed experienced marketing frustrations firsthand through his family's dealership, Dennis Sneed Ford in Gower, Missouri. Sneed, who's a vice president and partner, said the dealership spends a significant amount on marketing, from search engines to third-party advertising. A bulk of the dealership's website visitors were anonymous, however, which meant it couldn't follow-up with visitors to try and close a sale. Sneed wanted to unlock that information and started talking to the dealership's outside marketing firm, Phame Influence, to see if it was possible. Puckett, who co-founded Phame with Paris, also is a trial lawyer.

"My lawyer hat instantly says no," Puckett said.

But after digging further, he discovered it's legal and that using the information for cold calling and emailing is fair game.

Co-founder Chad Sneed noted that he doesn't see any privacy issues.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: [T]he routing algorithm designed for its Flex app by Amazon's research scientists often makes [Amazon delivery drivers cross two- or three-lane highways], according to a source with direct knowledge of Amazon's routing algorithm. In North America and Europe, roughly 85,000 contracted delivery drivers rely on this algorithm to do their jobs. While crossing the street in a quiet suburban neighborhood is probably safe, doing so on a 50 mph highway can be deadly. Motherboard spoke to Amazon delivery drivers who work in Florida, Illinois, Michigan, South Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, and California who described sprinting across the street -- or the highway -- to follow the Flex app's directions.

This app determines delivery routes for both Amazon's contracted delivery drivers, who drive Amazon-branded vans, and members of its independent contractor workforce, known as Amazon Flex drivers, who drive their own cars. When a driver has to make deliveries to several addresses that are clustered together, the Flex app combines them into a single stop, rather than make a stop at each address. Drivers call these "group stops," while Amazon research scientists and engineers tasked with optimizing routes that incorporate hundreds of stops per shift refer to this routing mechanism as "stop consolidation." These stops often include addresses on both sides of a street -- or highway. Rather than directing drivers to make a U-turn and deliver packages on one side of the street and then the other, the app instructs drivers to cross the street on foot. Depending on the size and number of packages, the driver might have to walk across the street multiple times, or run in order to meet Amazon's delivery quotas.

Amazon's contracted delivery drivers must use the app and follow its directions to make deliveries, meanwhile Amazon's gig workers -- who are independent contractors -- can manually change Amazon's routing order, but must use the app to make their deliveries. At Amazon, which pays delivery companies a fixed rate per delivery route each day regardless of how long it takes, the goal is to squeeze in as many deliveries as possible on a route, the source with internal knowledge of how Amazon creates its delivery routes said. "The main goal [at Amazon] is to make them deliver the most packages as possible in [a shift] because then we have to hire fewer drivers," the source familiar with Amazon's routing algorithm said. Hiring fewer drivers means the employer can pay less into worker's compensation, disability, and other employment benefits. Alexandra Miller, a spokesperson for Amazon Logistics, denied that Amazon delivery drivers frequently jaywalk across busy intersections and run across high-speed rural highways, and said that if the company identifies data quality issues or defects in its maps, it fixes them promptly.

"Our routing system is designed to make the delivery experience as easy as possible for drivers and prioritizes same side of the street deliveries, unless the road is safe to cross," Miller said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Amazon will no longer test most job applicants for marijuana use in the latest sign of America's changing relationship with pot. Amazon, the second-largest private employer in the U.S., also says it now backs legalizing marijuana nationwide. "In the past, like many employers, we've disqualified people from working at Amazon if they tested positive for marijuana use," the company said in a blog post on Tuesday. "However, given where state laws are moving across the U.S., we've changed course."

With the shift in policy, the only job candidates Amazon will screen for marijuana are those applying for positions regulated by the Department of Transportation -- a category that includes delivery truck drivers and operators of heavy machinery. The company says it will handle marijuana the same way it deals with alcohol -- and it will still test for all drugs and alcohol after any accidents or other incidents. Amazon is also acting on the political level, throwing its weight behind the push to legalize marijuana in the U.S. and expunge criminal records for nonviolent marijuana-related convictions.

The company says its public policy team "will be actively supporting" the MORE Act -- the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act -- a move that adds momentum to legislation that was reintroduced in Congress on Friday. The MORE Act would remove marijuana from the list of drugs in the federal Controlled Substances Act, making its status similar to alcohol and tobacco. It would also tax cannabis products, directing some of that money toward investments in communities that have been harmed by marijuana's criminalization. "We hope that other employers will join us, and that policymakers will act swiftly to pass this law," Amazon said in a statement about its support for legal marijuana.

Developers are sharing their salaries on Twitter under the hashtag #GameDevPaidMe to encourage pay transparency in their industry. Axios reports: The hashtag started circulating last year, but has returned periodically as developers fight for better working conditions. Salary sharing is a way to equalize the field. By removing the secrecy, as well as the stigma, around discussing pay, workers have more power to advocate for themselves when negotiating salaries and raises. In 2020, Blizzard employees shared their salaries anonymously via a spreadsheet to compare compensation. The pay gap between people at the top, and workers on the ground is measurable in hundreds of thousands of dollars -- even when those CEOs take pay cuts.

What they're saying:
A lead designer on "Hearthstone" working for Blizzard Entertainment: "I started getting paid fairly once I started asking questions. I only started asking questions once I better understood what I was worth. Understanding what your worth can be a difficult question, but this helps."

A lead designer at Blackbird Interactive: "Every single person who plays games should take a good look at #GameDevPaidMe and get a sense for what the people who make your art actually make."

A senior game designer at Reflector Entertainment: "Don't wait for your employer to give you the raise you deserve, be open to talking to other companies even if you feel you are at a 'great' spot."

This week CNN investigated PimEyes, a "mysterious" but powerful facial-recognition search engine: If you upload a picture of your face to PimEyes' website, it will immediately show you any pictures of yourself that the company has found around the internet. You might recognize all of them, or be surprised (or, perhaps, even horrified) by some; these images may include anything from wedding or vacation snapshots to pornographic images. PimEyes is open to anyone with internet access. It's a stark contrast from Clearview AI, which became well-known for building its enormous stash of faces with images of people from social networks and limits its use to law enforcement (Clearview has said it has hundreds of such customers).

PimEyes' decision to make facial-recognition software available to the general public crosses a line that technology companies are typically unwilling to traverse, and opens up endless possibilities for how it can be used and abused. Imagine a potential employer digging into your past, an abusive ex tracking you, or a random stranger snapping a photo of you in public and then finding you online. This is all possible through PimEyes: Though the website instructs users to search for themselves, it doesn't stop them from uploading photos of anyone. At the same time, it doesn't explicitly identify anyone by name, but as CNN Business discovered by using the site, that information may be just clicks away from images PimEyes pulls up...

PimEyes lets users see a limited number of small, somewhat pixelated search results at no cost, or you can pay a monthly fee, which starts at $29.99, for more extensive search results and features (such as to click through to see full-size images on the websites where PimEyes found them and to set up alerts for when PimEyes finds new pictures of faces online that its software believes match an uploaded face)... Although PimEyes instructs visitors to only search for their own face, there's no mechanism on the site to ensure it's used this way... There's also no way to ensure this facial-recognition technology isn't used to misidentify people...

The website currently lists no information about who owns or runs the search engine, or how to reach them, and users must submit a form to get answers to questions or help with accounts.

"Banking giant HSBC has confirmed that top managers in its Canary Wharf HQ have lost their offices and will have to hot-desk on an open-plan floor," reports the BBC, noting it comes as the bank "pursues plans to shrink its office space by 40% in a post-pandemic shake-up." Boss Noel Quinn said the whole bank was embracing "hybrid working" and he would no longer come in five days a week. "My leadership team and I have moved to a fully open-plan floor with no designated desks," he said on Linkedin.

Up to now, senior managers have been based on the 42nd floor of the building in east London in their own private offices. But in future, they will be jostling for workspaces two floors down, while their old offices have been transformed into client meeting rooms and other communal spaces. Mr Quinn told the FT that the old arrangement had been "a waste of real estate", adding: "Our offices were empty half the time because we were travelling around the world..."

He added that most staff at the bank would be able to work part-time from home in future. "A minority of roles can be done wholly remotely. We estimate, though, that most of our roles could be done in a hybrid way — and that includes myself and the executive team of the bank..."

Other firms in the sector have announced plans to embrace hybrid working as employees signal their desire to commute less. One big UK employer, the Nationwide building society, has indicated that it does not intend to force people to return to the office if they have been successfully able to work from home during the pandemic. It said about two-thirds of its 18,000 employees had been working from home for the past year.
Forbes has more context: [HSBC's] Quinn wrote in a LinkedIn post, "Having spent more than a year working from home, the last thing I want is to be stuck in an individual office when I return to the building." The chief executive said, "I want to have people around me, to reconnect with colleagues and friends and to be able to speak to them informally..."

Having a prime location in a prestigious city is highly expensive and a drag on earnings. If the costs of office space could be dramatically slashed, the banks would see significantly more free cash flow. The other driver is the acknowledgement that many people want to work part or full-time remotely for a variety of reasons. The last year served as a test case, which showed that it's possible to conduct business with a large segment of the workforce being remote...

HSBC is not alone in shedding properties in Europe. Lloyds Bank is also moving toward a hybrid model. This entails a 20% cut in office space over the next two years. The move was made after about 77% of Lloyds' 68,000 employees said they wanted to work from home for three or more days a week.

Michelle Dionne, a former employee at a cleaning company in Darwell, Alberta, says she was fired for refusing to download an app that would check her location and ensure she was working her scheduled hours. CBC.ca reports: Dionne says she was thrilled to get the job last fall -- responsible for things like disinfecting door handles, light switches and bathrooms to prevent possible spread of the coronavirus. When her boss told her to download the app, Dionne says she was concerned about her privacy. The app would go on her personal phone and, she says, her boss didn't clearly explain how it worked or what would happen to any data it collected.[...] The app, called Blip, generates a geofence -- a virtual boundary, created by the employer using GPS -- that detects when an employee enters or leaves. The app registers a signal from the worker's cell phone, when their "locations" setting is turned on, so the boss can tell whether an employee is on site and how many hours that person works. It only registers an employee's location when they enter and exit the geofence and doesn't track their specific movements. It's not clear where that data is stored, or whether any other employee information might be included.

Go Public reached out to the maker of the app, U.K.-based BrightHR. Spokesperson Natalie Shallow said, although the app collects data, that data "belongs to the customer organization" -- meaning, the company using the app -- and therefore is subject to the company's own policies. The data's protection "complies with all applicable laws, including Alberta's Personal Information Protection Act," Shallow said. Dionne worried about where the information might end up. She knew apps like Instagram, Facebook and others had been breached. She says no one told her how securely the information would be protected.

Dionne's former boss admits she didn't know where the data generated by Blip would be stored when she introduced the app to her workforce last fall. "I never asked that question and it never came up in my mind to ask," said Hanan Yehia, founder and owner of H.Y. Cleaning Services, which operates cleaning services for eight locations in northern Alberta. She says after Dionne raised concerns, she went back to BrightHR for more information and was told employees' movements within the geofence are not specifically monitored. Yehia says she shared that information with Dionne. The app was a solution to a problem, says Yehia -- she was looking for a way to simplify payroll by easily tracking hours and making sure employees who claimed they were working were actually on the job. "We had some issues in some locations where they would say they were on site, that they were working, but they weren't," she said, clarifying that attendance was not an issue with Dionne. She also says Dionne's refusal to download the app wasn't the sole reason she was fired.

According to Bloomberg, Google has settled one of the first legal complaints filed by a new union, promising not to silence workers who talk about their pay. From the report: "WE WILL NOT tell you that you cannot discuss policies with other employees," states the notice to staff, signed by an attorney for Google and parent Alphabet Inc. and being posted at a Google data center in South Carolina. "WE WILL NOT discipline you because you exercise your right to discuss wage rates, bonuses, hours and working conditions with other employees."

The settlement ends a National Labor Relations Board complaint filed by the Alphabet Workers Union in February alleging that management at the data center forbid workers from discussing their pay and also suspended a data technician, Shannon Wait, because she wrote a pro-union post on Facebook. Wait was reinstated earlier this year, although she left soon after. [...] The Alphabet Workers Union filed its complaint against units of Google staffing vendor Adecco Group AG, which employed workers including Wait, and also against Alphabet, which it deemed a "joint employer" -- a company with sufficient control over a group of workers to be legally liable for their treatment. The settlement also requires the companies to remove any reference to Wait's suspension from her file.

The National Labor Relations Board on Monday rejected Amazon's request to install a video camera to keep an eye on boxes containing thousands of ballots key to a high-stakes union election in Alabama. From a report: The closely-watched union election in Bessemer, Alabama, concluded on Monday. Approximately 5,800 workers at the facility in Bessemer were eligible to vote to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). Vote counting begins at 11 a.m. ET on Tuesday, but the final tally may be days or weeks away, as Amazon and the RWDSU can contest ballots. Amazon had sought to place a video camera in the NLRB's Birmingham office, where votes will be tabulated, to keep an eye on the ballot boxes in the off hours between counting, according to an NLRB order denying Amazon's request. The camera feed would have been accessible by both Amazon and the RWDSU. "Though the mail ballot election in this matter is large, it is not, as the Employer asserts, of a 'special nature,'" Lisa Henderson, acting regional director for the NLRB, said in the ruling. "The Region will conduct the ballot count within view of observers participating via virtual platform as well as in-person observers, and in accordance with Agency procedures and protocols, including those for securing ballot boxes."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers at the Tech Transparency Project found that Facebook created dozens of pages for groups like the "Universal Aryan Brotherhood Movement" when a user did something as simple as listing it as their employer. Some of the autogenerated pages garnered thousands of likes by the time they were discovered by researchers. TTP also discovered four Facebook groups that had been created by users. The researchers shared their findings with Facebook, which removed most of the pages. Yet, two of the autogenerated pages and all four Facebook groups remained active when the group published its findings. Facebook reportedly banned "white nationalist" content following the 2019 mass shooting at a New Zealand mosque, expanding on an earlier ban of white supremacist content.

It wasn't hard for the researchers to find offending pages and groups. They simply searched Facebook for the names of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups identified by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center. More than half of the groups in their query of 221 names returned results. A total of 113 white supremacist organizations and groups had a presence on Facebook, sometimes more than one. One user-generated page that has been active for over a decade had 42,000 likes. Ten other pages and one group had more than 1,000 likes each. [...] Facebook's own user-interfacing algorithms have also been coming up short. TTP found that on a page for an organization called the "Nazi Low Riders," Facebook recommended that users also like a page for the "Aryanbrotherhood." The company's tactic for combatting rising extremism on the site also appears to be failing. Searches for known hate groups are supposed to direct users to the page for Life After Hate, a nonprofit group that seeks to deradicalize right-wing extremists. But that only worked in 14 of the 221 searches the researchers performed.

"A new study from Microsoft, released Monday, found that among the more than 31,000 workers it surveyed, 73% hoped remote work options would continue when the pandemic ends," reports CNET. "Even Gen Z applicants were slightly more likely to apply for a job with remote options than for one strictly in an office," even though they feel that they're losing out on the career growth that happens in the office. CNET reports: Gen Z workers, born roughly between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s, responded to Microsoft's surveys generally by saying they're more stressed and find they're struggling more than their peers. They tend to be single, since they're younger, leading them to feel isolated. And since they're early in their careers, they don't have financial means to create a good workspace at home if their employer won't pay for it. And they're not having those in-person meetings that sometimes help them land in career advancing projects, or even to get in good with the boss.

"Without hallway conversations, chance encounters, and small talk over coffee, it's hard to feel connected even to my immediate team, much less build meaningful connections across the company," wrote Hannah McConnaughey, a product marketing manager at Microsoft who's a Gen Z worker. "Networking as someone early in their career has gotten so much more daunting since the move to fully remote work -- especially since switching to a totally different team during the pandemic!"

Employees also say they want flexibility rather than fully remote jobs. Of the workers Microsoft surveyed, 73% said they want remote work options to stay, with 46% saying they plan to move now that they can work remotely. Still, 67% said they want more in-person work or collaboration too. In short: We don't seem to know what we want yet. [...] In its conclusions, Microsoft suggests companies invest in technology that helps bridge the physical and digital worlds, so teams can work remotely and in the office. Additionally, it says Gen Z employees need more career support.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced a new certificate program and other courses that will provide a gateway to positions at companies like Anthem, Bayer, Deloitte, Verizon and SAP. From a report: In a blog post, Pichai explained that on March 11, Coursera users will have access to a new Associate Android Developer Certification course in addition to the three new certificates in user experience (UX) design, project management and data analytics that have been available since September. "With more businesses embracing digital ways of working, it's estimated that 50% of all employees will need reskilling by 2025. As U.S. job growth returns with more people getting vaccinated, we are committed to ensuring that all Americans have the skills they need to benefit from greater economic opportunity," Pichai wrote.

"To help, today we're announcing new efforts, including opening up enrollment for our latest career certificates, expanding our employer consortium, and introducing new tools to improve the job search." Google will be providing 100,000 scholarships for its Career Certificates program and said it has already helped bring 170,000 Americans into the tech industry through their certificate platform. Once the program is completed, students will gain access to a job board populated by companies like Accenture, Infosys, Zennify, SiriusXM+ Pandora, and, of course, Google.

In the areas where Amazon operates, "low-wage workers at other businesses have seen significant wage growth since 2018..." reports the New York Times, "and not because of new minimum-wage laws." The gains are a direct result of Amazon's corporate decision to increase starting pay to $15 an hour three years ago, which appears to have lifted pay for low-wage workers in other local companies as well, according to new research from economists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Brandeis University... [T]he research illustrates how difficult it can be for low-wage workers to command higher pay in the modern American economy — until a powerful outside actor, like a large employer or a government, intervenes.

Most directly, there is little evidence in the paper that raising the minimum wage would lead to significant job loss, even in low-cost rural areas, a finding consistent with several recent studies. Other research, including a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office, has found a larger negative effect on jobs, although still smaller than many economists believed in the past.

The authors of the latest study — Ellora Derenoncourt of Berkeley and Clemens Noelke and David Weil of Brandeis — studied Amazon, Walmart and Target, which operate in areas where wages tend to be low. But even in those places, the researchers found, wage increases by the large corporate employers appear to drive up wages without driving down employment. "When you have major changes in the wage policies of large actors in the labor market, this has ripple effects," Dr. Derenoncourt said in an interview.

At the same time, Dr. Weil added, "the sky doesn't fall."

Without naming Amazon specifically, President Joe Biden on Sunday expressed support for a closely watched union vote at one of the retail giant's Alabama warehouses, calling it "vitally important." From a report: "Today and over the next few days and weeks, workers in Alabama and all across America are voting on whether to organize a union in their workplace," Biden said in a video shared to his Twitter page. "This is vitally important -- a vitally important choice, as America grapples with the deadly pandemic, the economic crisis and the reckoning on race -- what it reveals is the deep disparities that still exist in our country."

Earlier this month, close to 6,000 workers at an Amazon facility in Bessemer, Alabama, began voting by mail on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, kicking off the first major unionization effort within the company since 2014. Last November, workers at the Alabama facility notified the NLRB of their plans to hold a vote on whether to be represented by the RWDSU. [...] In the video, Biden said it's "up to the workers, full stop" to decide whether they want to join a union. He also discouraged employers from interfering in union elections. "There should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda," Biden said. No supervisor should confront employees about their union preferences. You know, every worker should have a free and fair choice to join a union...no employer can take that right away. So make your voice heard," he added.

The first church of artificial intelligence has shut its conceptual doors. From a report: Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer who avoided an 18-month prison sentence after receiving a presidential pardon last month, has closed the church he created to understand and accept a godhead based on artificial intelligence. The Way of the Future church, which Levandowski formed in 2015, was officially dissolved at the end of the year, according to state and federal records. However, the process had started months before in June 2020, documents filed with the state of California show. The entirety of the church's funds -- exactly $175,172 -- were donated to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. The nonprofit corporation's annual tax filings with the Internal Revenue Service show it had $175,172 in its account as far back as 2017. Levandowski told TechCrunch that he had been considering closing the church long before the donation. The Black Lives Matter movement, which gained momentum over the summer following the death of George Floyd while in police custody, influenced Levandowski to finalize what he had been contemplating for a while. He said the time was right to put the funds to work in an area that could have an immediate impact. "I wanted to donate to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund because it's doing really important work in criminal justice reform and I know the money will be put to good use," Levandowski told TechCrunch.

Way of the Future sparked interest and controversy -- much like Levandowski himself -- from the moment it became public in a November 2017 article in Wired. It wasn't just the formation of the church or its purpose that caused a stir in Silicon Valley and the broader tech industry. The church's public reveal occurred as Levandowski was steeped in a legal dispute with his former employer Google. He had also become the central figure of a trade secrets lawsuit between Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that is now a business under Alphabet, and Uber. The engineer was one of the founding members in 2009 of the Google self-driving project also known as Project Chauffeur and had been paid about $127 million by the search engine giant for his work, according to court documents. In 2016, Levandowski left Google and started self-driving truck startup Otto with three other Google veterans: Lior Ron, Claire Delaunay and Don Burnette. Uber acquired Otto less than eight months later.

Slashdot reader GatorSnake shares "Another take of the implications of Section 230... One person poisoned the online personas of multiple people who had 'wronged' her, with it being nearly impossible to have the false accusations removed from the sites or from Google's search results."

The New York Times reports: Mr. Babcock, a software engineer, got off the phone and Googled himself. The results were full of posts on strange sites accusing him of being a thief, a fraudster and a pedophile. The posts listed Mr. Babcock's contact details and employer. The images were the worst: photos taken from his LinkedIn and Facebook pages that had "pedophile" written across them in red type. Someone had posted the doctored images on Pinterest, and Google's algorithms apparently liked things from Pinterest, and so the pictures were positioned at the very top of the Google results for "Guy Babcock."

Mr. Babcock, 59, was not a thief, a fraudster or a pedophile. "I remember being in complete shock," he said. "Why would someone do this? Who could it possibly be? Who would be so angry?" Then he Googled his brother's name. The results were just as bad. He tried his wife. His sister. His brother-in-law. His teenage nephew. His cousin. His aunt. They had all been hit. The men were branded as child molesters and pedophiles, the women as thieves and scammers...

Ripoff Report offered "arbitration services," which cost up to $2,000, to get rid of "substantially false" information. That sounded like extortion; Mr. Babcock wasn't about to pay to have lies removed... Ripoff Report is one of hundreds of "complaint sites" — others include She's a Homewrecker, Cheaterbot and Deadbeats Exposed — that let people anonymously expose an unreliable handyman, a cheating ex, a sexual predator. But there is no fact-checking. The sites often charge money to take down posts, even defamatory ones. And there is limited accountability. Ripoff Report, like the others, notes on its site that, thanks to Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, it isn't responsible for what its users post.

"If someone posts false information about you on the Ripoff Report, the CDA prohibits you from holding us liable for the statements which others have written. You can always sue the author if you want, but you can't sue Ripoff Report just because we provide a forum for speech...."
The Times found over 100 so-called "complaint" sites with more defamatory posts — Babcock's brother-in-law calculates there've been 12,000 made by the same person. The Times ultimately attributes the posts to a disgruntled employee fired by Mr. Babcock's father — in the year 1993 — who was now using a computer in a public library at the University of Toronto.

"Under U.S. law, a foreign court generally can't force an American website to remove content..." the Times notes, leaving few options for the victims they'd interviewed. "Victims spent years begging Google, Pinterest and WordPress to take down the slanderous posts or at least make them harder to find. The companies rarely did so, until I contacted them to request comment for this article. Pinterest then removed photos... Automattic, which owns WordPress, deleted her blogs."

But not Google Images.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As far back as June, Microsoft explained in somewhat legalistic terms that it's happily recording so much Teams activity for the benefit of employers and it's up to them what they do with it. Sample wording from Redmond's fine lawyers: "Our customers are controllers for the data provided to Microsoft, as set forth in the Online Services Terms, and they determine legal bases of processing." From what I could see, Teams hoovers up all your chats, voicemails, shared meetings, files, transcriptions, your profile details including your email address and phone number, and a detailed analysis of what you were wearing on the call. (I may have made up that last one.) Cut to September and Microsoft offered a little more about the Teams Activity Report (since updated). Here's a sentence that's unsurprising but still a touch uncomfortable: "The table gives you a breakdown of usage by user." Everything from how many meetings that user organized to how many urgent messages they sent is recorded. Separate numbers are given for scheduled meetings and those that were ad hoc. Even individuals' screen-share time is there. It's remarkably detailed. But, I hear you cry, is it detailed enough?

In October, then, Redmond offered "a new analytics and reporting experience for Microsoft Teams." (This was updated last week.) I confess that just staring at this made me swivel several times in wonder. Microsoft is measuring privacy settings, device types, time stamps, reasons why someone may have been blocked, and "the number of messages a user posted in a private chat." I know you'll tell me this is all normal. This is entirely what's to be expected in today's techno-marvelous world. Yet, as far as I could tell, employees don't have too much say in all this. They're forced onto a particular platform without much control over what that platform may record about them personally, with their employer being the potential beneficiary. I imagined an individual -- or even a whole team -- being summoned by their boss and told: "You didn't respond to 47 Teams messages last month." What do you say to that? "Well, I suspect those 47 messages were sent by brown-nosing halfwits who send as many Teams messages as possible, so their innate industry shows up on your Teams analytics reports."

Joseph Cox, reporting at Vice's Motherboard: One user travelled through a park a few blocks south of an Islamic cultural center. Roughly every two minutes, their phone reported their physical location. Another was next to a bank two streets over from a different mosque. A third person was at a train station, again near a mosque. Perhaps unbeknownst to these people, Salaat First (Prayer Times), an app that reminds Muslims when to pray, was recording and selling their granular location information to a data broker, which in turn sells location data to other clients. Motherboard has obtained a large dataset of those raw, precise movements of users of the app from a source. The source who provided the dataset was concerned that such sensitive information, which could potentially track Muslims going about their day including visiting places of worship, could be abused by those who buy and make use of the data. The company collecting the location data, a French firm called Predicio, has previously been linked to a supply chain of data involving a U.S. government contractor that worked with ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the FBI.

The news about Salaat First, which has been downloaded more than 10 million times on Android, highlights not only the use of religious apps to harvest location data, but also the ease at which this sensitive information is traded in the location data industry. Motherboard is withholding some specifics about the dataset such as its exact size in order to protect the source, but the significance is clear: users of a Muslim-focused app are being tracked likely without their informed consent. "Being tracked all day provides a lot of information, and it shouldn't be usable against you, especially if you are unaware of it," the source said. Motherboard granted them anonymity to avoid repercussions from their employer.