Mozilla's Internet Health Report: discriminatory AI, surveilling smart cities, ad-tech

Every year, the Mozilla Foundation releases a massive "Internet Health Report" summarizing the ways in which the internet is being used to both support and subvert human thriving; though these reports cover a wide range of topics, every year the foundation chooses a small number of themes to focus on. This year, they are Let's Ask More of AI; The Power of Cities and Rethinking Digital Ads.

I was fascinated by a piece on platform cooperativism:

Often people are trying to solve deep problems and realize that handing something over to investors just isn't going to cut it. One example is Jen Horonjeff, the founder of Savvy. It's a health insights platform for patients and their families. She has a chronic illness and she was obsessed with patients having more control over their illness. She knew that whenever you hand medical processes over to investors, patients get exploited. So she turned to a coop model as a last resort to protect people, and at the same time run a business.

The economy needs variety. There may always be a need for the classic high risk and high return model of venture capitalism, but at the same time we can create more options.

(via /.)