Category: Social Implications of Technology

The powers of big data, AI/analytics, and subtle data collection are now converging to a future only hinted at in Orwell’s 1984.

With Siri and Alexa, you are being asked to “bug your house” with a device that listens to every noise in the house.

by Marc Canellas and Rachel Haga Autonomous weapons systems (AWS) are already here. Although some of the colloquial names for…  Read More

The ability to kill a target from a “position of safety” is essentially the basic design criteria for many weapon systems.

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, the flagship publication of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology, has won a…  Read More

Should children have toys that can combine speech recognition with a Wi-Fi connection to capture and respond to them, and that potentially are able to record their conversations as well as feed them “messages”?  Welcome to the world of Hello Barbie.

The insurance company’s privacy policy does not allow them to collect the data that their web page claims this device will collect — so clearly privacy is an afterthought.

A recent CBS Sixty Minutes program interviewed folks at U.S. DARPA, including a demonstration of how a recent hacking of…  Read More

Various states in the U.S. are using big data tools, such as the Lexus-Nexus database, to identify people who are…  Read More

Cyber attacks are increasing. What might be done about this, by technologists, by citizens, or by nation states?

The issue of how video games or movies affect behavior is a recurrent topic in academic and  public discourse.

The intention of this blog-segment is to bring up a current problem caused by technology and discuss not only its…  Read More

Please join us at 4PM EDT on March 17 for a discussion on cryptocurrencies with John Villasenor, a non-resident senior fellow…  Read More

Editor: Deepak Mathur Message from the President IEEE SSIT This past year, 2013, was a busy year for me, and…  Read More

Katina Michael at the University of Wollongong, guest editor of the June 2013 Computer magazine special issue on Big Data:…  Read More

Like everyone, I listened to the news about the Boston Marathon bombings on Monday afternoon with horror. I’m not from…  Read More

My boyfriend just gave me a sous vide machine. So of course, I spent hours today reading not just about…  Read More