What a week for Facebook. The news blitz began over the weekend, as the company responded to multiple recent controversies, from livestreaming to disappearing blog posts. Then on Wednesday, security researchers at UpGuard found that two different third-party apps left more than 540 million Facebook records unprotected in the cloud. On Friday, we reported that Facebook had been letting cybercrime groups operate in plain sight. It never ends.

If you thought IBM using “quietly scraped” Flickr images to train facial recognition systems was bad, it gets worse. Our research, which will be reviewed for publication this summer, indicates that the U.S. government, researchers, and corporations have used images of immigrants, abused children, and dead people to test their facial recognition systems, all without consent.

Federal Aviation Administration managers pushed its engineers to delegate wide responsibility for assessing the safety of the 737 MAX to Boeing itself. But safety engineers familiar with the documents shared details that show the analysis included crucial flaws.

To be or not to be. That is the question. (Seriously.) David Benatar’s chapter “Why Coming Into Existence is Always a Harm” from his book Better Never To Have Been (2006) argues in favor of the latter: it’s better (for me) not to be. It seemed intuitively plausible at first,1 but upon reflection, I find myself unconvinced. I worry that Benetar-style anti-natalism involves contradiction, equivocation, or a false sense of commensurability. In this post, I’ll explain.

The story is drawing attention partly because it involves a military academy, but it also raises several ethical and legal concerns since there’s no law guiding who can make such requests and each hospital that conducts the procedure has its own set of rules.

All the war, conflict, and misery that has beset civilisation for centuries and longer may lead you to think human society is tragically defined by a constant clash of irreconcilable cultures.

The dairy sector should take 'the vegan threat to the sector' seriously, according to an industry expert. The warning comes as dairy farmers find themselves under increasing scrutiny due to the success of initiatives like Veganuary, as well as the publication of a map detailing the addresses of UK dairy farms by activist group Project Calf.

When Dr. He Jiankui announced the birth of CRISPR-edited babies last month, the world grappled with how to handle the aftermath. Should journals overlook his dangerous ethical violations and publish the results? Will he now be barred from conducting clinical trials or obtaining funding? What level of punishment is appropriate for what he did—with absolutely no remorse? China’s answer: extensive, life-consuming penalties that extend far past any scientific career.

‘I am glad,’ wrote the acclaimed American philosopher Susan Wolf, ‘that neither I nor those about whom I care most’ are ‘moral saints’. This declaration is one of the opening remarks of a landmark essay in which Wolf imagines what it would be like to be morally perfect. If you engage with Wolf’s thought experiment, and the conclusions she draws from it, then you will find that it offers liberation from the trap of moral perfection.

Harvard Business School invented the “leadership” industry—and produced a generation of corporate monsters. No wonder Sandberg, one of the school’s most prominent graduates, lacks a functioning moral compass.

AC Global Risk, a startup which has been described as selling ‘dangerous junk science,’ claims Apple is one of its clients … The Intercept reports that the firm claims that simply analysing yes/no answers to questions can, in ten minutes, determine someone’s level of risk – whether that’s as an employee or an asylum seeker.

Algorithms used by airlines to split up those travelling together unless they pay more to sit next to each other have been called “exploitative” by a government minister. Speaking to a parliamentary communications committee, Digital Minister Margot James described the software as “a very cynical, exploitative means… to hoodwink the general public”.

When was the last time you saw a creepy ad on Facebook, which seemed to know about a product you were discussing with a coworker? Or when was the last time you noticed that your Google search had been modified to suit variables like your current location and personal interests? These micro-events happen on a daily basis for most of us, and are reminders of how valuable and how ubiquitous our data really is.

Pioneering feminist and animal rights campaigner Anna Kingsford was one of the 19th century's most remarkable women. Then she was charged with using black magic to murder two vivisectionists. By Dee Cunning.

Loved by some philosophers, loathed by others, the so-called trolley problem is the quintessential moral puzzle. A runaway train is heading towards five people tied to a track. You can change a signal, diverting the train down a spur, so saving five lives. Unfortunately, one person is on the spur, and would die. What should you do? Most people – young and old, rich and poor – believe you should divert the train.

I think we can all agree that Silicon Valley needs more adult supervision right about now. Is the solution for its companies to hire a chief ethics officer? While some tech companies like Google have top compliance officers and others turn to legal teams to police themselves, no big tech companies that I know of have yet taken this step. But a lot of them seem to be talking about it, and I’ve discussed the idea with several chief executives recently. Why? Because slowly, then all at once, it feels like too many digital leaders have lost their minds.

Consider two familiar moments at a family reunion. Our host, Uncle Bill, is taking pride in his barbequing skills. But his niece Becky says that she now refuses to eat meat. A groan goes round the table; the family mostly think of this as an annoying picky preference. But if it were viewed as a moral position rather than personal preference – as they might if instead Becky were avoiding meat on religious grounds – it would usually receive a very different reaction.

A silly new app has been doing the rounds this week: Windows 95 as a standalone application. Running on Windows, macOS, and Linux, the Windows 95 "app" combines Electron (a framework for building desktop applications using JavaScript and other Web technology) with an existing x86 emulator written in JavaScript. The emulator can run a bunch of operating systems: for the app, it's preloaded with Windows 95.

We could make people less stinky, more resistant to radiation, even less dependent on food and oxygen. But would the new creature be human? By Jason Pontin.

How a dead white supremacist sparked a debate over the tactics used against the extreme right. By Vegas Tenold.