October 5, 2024

Building on Colorado’s Success: All States Need Mandatory Rideshare Transparency Reporting

Colorado has become the first state mandating transparency specifically around platform fees and driver wages from rideshare platforms like Uber and Lyft, whose opaque AI and algorithmic operations have historically evaded legal oversight. On June 5 2024, Governor Jared Polis signed SB24-075, the Transportation Network Company Transparency bill into an act, compelling these platforms to […]

New Study Analyzing Political Advertising on Facebook, Google, and TikTok

By Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Christelle Tessono, Arvind Narayanan, Mihir Kshirsagar With the 2022 midterm elections in the United States fast approaching, political campaigns are poised to spend heavily to influence prospective voters through digital advertising. Online platforms such as Facebook, Google, and TikTok will play an important role in distributing that content. But our new study […]

Will Web3 Follow in the Footsteps of the AI Hype Cycle?

For many, the global financial crisis of 2008 marked a turning point for trust in established institutions. It is unsurprising that during this same historical time period, Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency that aspired to operate independent from state manipulation, began gaining traction. Since the birth of Bitcoin, other decentralized technologies have been introduced that enable […]

Recommendations for introducing greater safeguards and transparency into CS conference funding

In Part 1 of this piece, I provided evidence of the extent to which some of the world’s top computer science conferences are financially reliant upon some of the world’s most powerful technology companies. In this second part, I lay out a set of recommendations for ways to help ensure that these entanglements of industry […]

The tech industry controls CS conference funding. What are the dangers?

Research about the influence of computing technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), on society relies heavily upon the financial support of the very companies that produce those technologies. Corporations like Google, Microsoft, and IBM spend millions of dollars each year to sponsor labs, professorships, PhD programs, and conferences in fields like computer science (CS) and […]