April 2019 - nexa - server-nexa.polito.it

Buttarelli: We need to talk about terms and conditions | European Data Protection Supervisor
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 30, 2019

April 30, 2019

https://edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/blog/we-need-talk-abou… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Is your pregnancy app sharing your intimate data with your boss?
by Giacomo Tesio April 29, 2019

April 29, 2019

https://web.archive.org/web/20190416160537/https://www.washingtonpost.com/t… Like millions of women, Diana Diller was a devoted user of the pregnancy-tracking app Ovia, logging in every night to record new details on a screen asking about her bodily functions, sex drive, medications and mood. When she gave birth last spring, she used the app to chart her baby’s first online medical data — including her name, her location and whether there had been any complications — before leaving the hospital’s recovery room. But someone else was regularly checking in, too: her employer, which paid to gain access to the intimate details of its workers’ personal lives, from their trying-to-conceive months to early motherhood. Diller’s bosses could look up aggregate data on how many workers using Ovia’s fertility, pregnancy and parenting apps had faced high-risk pregnancies or gave birth prematurely; the top medical questions they had researched; and how soon the new moms planned to return to work. “Maybe I’m naive, but I thought of it as positive reinforcement: They’re trying to help me take care of myself,” said Diller, 39, an event planner in Los Angeles for the video game company Activision Blizzard. The decision to track her pregnancy had been made easier by the $1 a day in gift cards the company paid her to use the app: That’s “diaper and formula money,” she said. [...] ...this new generation of “menstrual surveillance” tools is [...] designed largely to benefit not the women but their employers and insurers, who gain a sweeping new benchmark on which to assess their workers as they consider the next steps for their families and careers. [...] “The real benefit of self-tracking is always to the company,” Levy said. “People are being asked to do this at a time when they’re incredibly vulnerable and may not have any sense where that data is being passed.” [...] “Each time we introduced something, there was a bit of an outcry: ‘You’re prying into our lives,’ ” Ezzard said. “But we slowly increased the sensitivity of stuff, and eventually people understood it’s all voluntary, there’s no gun to your head, and we’re going to reward you if you choose to do it.” “People’s sensitivity,” he added, “has gone from, ‘Hey, Activision Blizzard is Big Brother,’ to, ‘Hey, Activision Blizzard really is bringing me tools that can help me out.’ ” [...] Ovia began as a consumer-facing app that made money in the tried-and-true advertising fashion of Silicon Valley. But three years ago, Wallace said, the company was approached by large national insurers who said the app could help them improve medical outcomes and access maternity data via the women themselves. Ovia’s corporate deals with employers and insurers have seen “triple-digit growth” in recent years, Wallace said. The company would not say how many firms it works with, but the number of employees at those companies is around 10 million, a statistic Ovia refers to as “covered lives.” [...]

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Generazione Alpha
by don Luca Peyron April 29, 2019

April 29, 2019

Uno studio non universitario ma interessante da fonte globale. Buona lettura dl Nell’era della rivoluzione digitale qual è il percepito dei genitori nei confronti dei nati sotto il segno della tecnologia? Gran parte dei genitori è senza dubbio preoccupata dall’uso massivo della tecnologia in termini di eccessiva esposizione agli schermi dei propri figli, mancanza di esercizio mentale e perdita di capacità relazionali e sociali. Ma c’è anche un altro lato della medaglia.. https://www.hotwireglobal.com/feature/understanding-generation-alpha-2-it _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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How to use a FreedomBox running open source software to regain control of your online privacy
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 28, 2019

April 28, 2019

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2019/04/how-to-use-a-freedombox-… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?
by Giacomo Tesio April 28, 2019

April 28, 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/18/ending-climate-change… Climate change activism is increasingly the domain of the young, such as 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, the unlikely face of the school strike for climate movement, which has seen many thousands of children walk out of school to demand that their parents’ generation takes responsibility for leaving them a planet to live on. In comparison, the existing political establishment looks more and more like an impediment to change. [...] Today’s children, as they become more politically aware, will be much more radical than their parents, simply because there will be no other choice for them. This emergent radicalism is already taking people by surprise. The Green New Deal (GND), a term presently most associated with 29-year-old US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has provoked a wildly unhinged backlash from the “pro free market” wing, who argue that it’s a Trojan horse, nothing more than an attempt to piggyback Marxism onto the back of climate legislation. The criticism feels ridiculous. [...] Climate change is the result of our current economic and industrial system. GND-style proposals marry sweeping environmental policy changes with broader socialist reforms because the level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below “absolutely catastrophic” is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo. Right now we can, with a massive investment of effort by 2030, just about keep the warming level below 1.5C. This is “bad, but manageable” territory. Failing to put that effort in sees the world crossing more severe temperature barriers that would lead to outcomes like ecosystem collapse, ocean acidification, mass desertification, and coastal cities being flooded into inhabitability. We will simply have to throw the kitchen sink at this. Policy tweaks such as a carbon tax won’t do it. We need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital. [...] It’s the Marxism of Groucho rather than Karl: “Who are you going to believe? The serious political professionals or your own lying eyes?” US Senator Dianne Feinstein’s meeting with schoolchildren petitioning her to take action over the issue went viral because of the way she condescended to them for, basically, asking her to leave them a planet behind to live on. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” she said, “I know what I’m doing.” The obvious response is, of course, that messing something up for 30 years is quite long enough, thanks. Long tenure without results is not the same thing as expertise.

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The new digital divide is between people who opt out of algorithms and
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 28, 2019

April 28, 2019

https://www.fastcompany.com/90336381/the-new-digital-divide-is-between-peop… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Bolsonaro chiude facoltà pubbliche di sociologia e filosofia in Brasile
by Antonio Casilli April 27, 2019

April 27, 2019

https://www.revistaforum.com.br/bolsonaro-decreta-fim-das-faculdades-de-fil…

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La competizione tecnologica che l’Europa sta perdendo – Aspenia Online
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 27, 2019

April 27, 2019

https://www.aspeniaonline.it/la-competizione-tecnologica-europa-sta-perdend… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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The Case Against Quantum Computing - IEEE Spectrum
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 27, 2019

April 27, 2019

https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/the-case-against-quantum-compu… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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The Pentagon Wants Your Thoughts About AI but May Not Listen
by J.C. DE MARTIN April 27, 2019

April 27, 2019

https://www.wired.com/story/pentagon-wants-your-thoughts-ai-may-not-listen/ (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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