Technology | The Guardian

Calls for CEO to appear reach fever pitch after Cambridge Analytica reports, paving way for showdown over Facebook accountability

Deal, worth up to £1.3bn, shows Waymo’s ambition in developing driverless ride-hailing serviceJaguar Land Rover is to supply up to 20,000 of its new electric I-Pace cars to Waymo, a subsidiary of Google owner Alphabet,to be converted into self-driving vehicles for its ride-hailing service.The tie-up, worth up to £1.3bn and announced at the New York motor show, is a further mark of Waymo’s ambition in the race with Uber and others to develop a driverless ride-hailing service – as well as a huge boost for Britain’s biggest car manufacturer as it takes it first steps into electric vehicles. Continue reading...

Chair of committee investigating fake news urges Facebook head to ‘think again if he has any care for users’Mark Zuckerberg has come under intense criticism from the UK parliamentary committee investigating fake news after the head of Facebook refused an invitation to testify in front of MPs for a third time.Related: Vote Leave 'cheating' may well have swayed EU referendum result, Wylie tells MPs - Politics live Continue reading...

New top-end phone is first to have three separate cameras on back, as well as a new full-body screen with notch at topHuawei’s latest flagship smartphone is the P20 Pro, which has not one, not two, but three cameras on the back.The new P20, and the larger, more feature-packed P20 Pro, launched at an event in Paris that indicated the Chinese company is looking to match rivals Apple and Samsung and elevate the third-largest smartphone manufacture’s premium efforts. Continue reading...

Fears draft rules could threaten users’ privacy by letting one firm collect vast amounts of dataDraft rules for age verification on pornographic websites could put users’ privacy at risk and give the world’s biggest porn publisher a power similar to that of Facebook and Twitter, critics have said.The guidance, which comes after the government passed a law last year forcing pornography sites to use age checks or face being blocked, states there is no legal requirement for sites to offer visitors a choice of age verification services. Continue reading...

Evidence from Cambridge Analytica boss provoked debate during Commons select committee, but you noted Facebook CEO’s absence

What happens when you remove the fighting from a video game and turn it into an ancient world to explore? The creators of Assassin’s Creed Origins found outEven if you’re not particularly interested in video games, you’ll probably have heard of Assassin’s Creed. They’re a series of historically themed action games that take place in digital recreations of places such as Revolution-era Paris, medieval Jerusalem and 1860s London. Playing Assassin’s Creed involves climbing up ancient buildings and mingling with the residents of cities of the past, meeting (and occasionally assassinating) historical figures as a member of an ancient, clandestine brotherhood working against the Templars.The games have been around since 2007 and have made an awful lot of money for their publisher, Ubisoft. The company employs a team of hundreds of artists, historians, writers, coders, sound designers and more to create these virtual places. An hour in the company of any of these games is enough to discern how much effort goes into their historical settings – though it’s hard to appreciate them fully when you’re busy fighting, talking or running away from guards. Continue reading...

Governor Doug Ducey tells Uber crash raises concerns about its ability to safely test technologyArizona governor Doug Ducey suspended Uber’s self-driving vehicle testing on Monday following a pedestrian fatality in a Phoenix suburb last week.Ducey told Uber’s chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi that video footage of the crash raised concerns about the company’s ability to safely test its technology in Arizona. Continue reading...

US ride-hailing firm will take 27.5% stake in Asia-based Grab and its CEO will join Grab’s boardUber is selling its south-east Asian ride-hailing and food delivery business to bigger regional rival Grab, as its seeks to cut losses ahead of a potential stock market flotation next year.The move marks the US company’s third major retreat overseas, following its exit from China in 2016 and Russia last year. Continue reading...

Google and Facebook have collected private data without oversight on a scale that no democratic government would be allowed to do. They shouldn’t be allowed eitherOne of the strangest features of the current debates about privacy on the internet is the way in which private advertising companies are able to get away with practices that no democratic government could. The security services and police are restricted in their surveillance of private citizens on the web by the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. Around 130,000 people signed a petition against it, largely because of the provision requiring internet providers to keep for up to a year records of all the websites that their users visited. One campaigner described it as “one of the most extreme surveillance laws ever passed in a democracy”.Yet the material collected in this way can only be accessed under a system of legal and political oversight: the Home Office might like more powers, but the European court of justice ruled in December 2016 that independent judicial authorisation was needed for the “general and indiscriminate retention” of personal data. All that fuss over a year’s worth of websites, when it turns out that Facebook has been storing all the contact details, the instant messages, and the phone calls of millions of its users for as long as 10 years without anyone outside the firm realising what their apparently innocuous consent implied. Continue reading...

How an extreme libertarian tract predicting the collapse of liberal democracies – written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father – inspired the likes of Peter Thiel to buy up property across the Pacific• Read the text version hereSubscribe via Acast, Apple Podcasts Audioboom, Soundcloud, Mixcloud & Sticher. Join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter and email us at podcasts@theguardian.com Continue reading...

PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC; Ubisoft

From refugees to Aids, live action role-play games are exploring critical issues. But is the idea of social change via larp a fantasy?The detention centre sits on the border. Once a low-security prison, it is in a depressing state of disrepair. The private company running the government facility plans improvements, but the flood of desperate “residents” has pushed these firmly on to the back burner.Residents are not prisoners, but a perceived scarcity of social resources means public opinion towards them is volatile; in response, the government has set an extremely small immigration quota. Residents undergo rigorous assessment in order to have their immigration applications even considered. Continue reading...

At a time of great emotional pain, Charlotte Soares was confronted by pop-up adverts on Facebook for funeral organisersThe news reminds me why I stopped using Facebook (Report, 22 March). Back in 2015-16 my mother was dying and I only used my BT email when writing to family and friends about her, never mentioning her on Facebook, the only social media I used. Suddenly I started getting pop-up adverts on Facebook for funeral organisers, will writers and monumental masons. At a time of great emotional pain, I was confronted by this every time I went on to Facebook like a slap in the face. I complained to BT that it seemed my emails were being compromised, when I thought what I wrote in them was private. They said it should be and they would investigate but I heard no more.I tried to contact Facebook to complain about inappropriate advertising which, to me, was of an emotionally abusive nature, but could find no working contact details. It left me no alternative but to come off Facebook because I could no longer trust the site. My main worry was the link between what I wrote in emails and what appeared on Facebook. I tested it by sending an email saying I was thinking of going to Italy. Hey presto, up came an advert on Facebook for Alitalia. It felt like an invasion of my privacy even if it’s only computers talking to each other with no humans aware. To use my mother’s final illness as a means to persuade me to buy things is inappropriate and caused me immense distress. Continue reading...

Some might be baffled by the cheapo Lego art style and janky controls – but, for kids, playing a game that doesn’t always work properly is all part of the funIf your kids aren’t playing Fortnite – the colourful, cartoonish shooter that has recently become a massive after-school (and work lunch-break) craze – they are probably playing Roblox. Like Minecraft, which colonised the minds of basically all school-aged children around 2012-15, Roblox lets players get creative and build things. But it goes further than Minecraft in that you can create entire games in Roblox, from racers to haunted-house adventures to competitive battle arenas. According to the developer, it has 56 million players. Continue reading...

As the use of autonomous machines increases in society, so too has the chance of robot-related fatalitiesWas killed last Sunday by an Uber autonomous car that hit the 49-year-old at approximately 40mph as she was crossing the road in Tempe, Arizona. Police confirmed there was an operator in the Volvo SUV at the time of the collision, and stated that it didn’t appear the car had slowed down. Continue reading...

The bestselling SUV from Volvo is the safest car on the road… but don’t ask it to park itselfVolvo XC60

Mark Zuckerberg kept his silence – then did little to assuage the anger in a week that laid bare the worst of Silicon ValleyEvery story has a beginning. For me, the story of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook that has unfolded so spectacularly this past week began in a cafe in Holloway, north London, at the beginning of 2017.I was having a coffee with my colleague Carole Cadwalladr. She had recently written a series of articles that set out how certain Google search terms had been “hijacked by the alt-right”. In the course of that investigation she explained how she had come across another pattern of activity apparently linking the Trump and Leave.EU campaigns, one that appeared to involve the billionaire Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon – then of Breitbart – and a secretive British company called Cambridge Analytica. She laid out the elements of what she knew, and what she didn’t, testing her conviction that “there’s definitely something there”. Continue reading...

Revelations about the depths of Facebook’s failure to protect our data have finally pulled back the curtain, observers say

Site unmasks 84 accounts used by 13 people linked to Russia’s ‘troll farm’, the Internet Research Agency, and says law enforcement has been notifiedThe blogging platform Tumblr has unmasked 84 accounts that it says were used by a shadowy Russian internet group to spread disinformation during the 2016 US election campaign.Tumblr said it uncovered the scheme in late 2017, helping an investigation that led to the indictment in February of 13 individuals linked to the Russia-based Internet Research Agency (IRA). Continue reading...

Online advertising is an effective way to get messages across, but the strategy must be smartFigures released this week by the Electoral Commission are the simplest way to demonstrate the growing influence of Facebook on British politics. Political parties nationally spent about £1.3m on Facebook during the 2015 general election campaign; two years later the figure soared to £3.2m.

Players snap up clothing items as iPhone version of free video game tops iTunes chart in 13 countriesA year ago, no one had heard of Fortnite, the online shooter game in which 100 players fight it out to be the last person standing. Now it is the biggest video game in the world, with an obsessive fanbase among schoolchildren and teenagers.Previously only available on consoles and PC, last week an iPhone version was given a limited release – and within hours it topped the iTunes chart in 13 countries. According to the market research firm Sensor Tower it made $1.5m (£1m) in revenue for Epic Games, its developer, in its first three days. Continue reading...

Jordan Erica Webber has her reservations when it comes to virtual reality in gaming. This week she battles with motion sickness and visits a VR arcade in London to see if her mind can be changed. Is there a future for these types of arcades?Subscribe and review: Acast, Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud. Join the discussion on Facebook, Twitter or email us at podcasts@theguardian.comVirtual reality has some interesting applications in news and even in healthcare. But as a gaming platform it has its issues even if you do not suffer from simulation sickness. It is isolating, shutting the player off from the outside world. And it is expensive. Continue reading...

PS4, Xbox One; Criterion / Stellar Entertainment / Electronic ArtsThe much-loved racing game returns with a revamp that makes you feel as if you’re in the best Fast and Furious movie ever madeWhen Burnout Paradise arrived in 2008, some players resented its diversion from the previous Burnout games, which focused on tight circuits and vehicular destruction. Others, however, found its open-world structure exciting and beautiful. Paradise City is a vast playground, its intricate streets, highways, tunnels and overpasses open and explorable from the start. Players are dropped into a junkyard, where they choose a car. Then they drive – and they don’t really stop.

Concerns raised about future testing as footage suggests fatal collision in Arizona was failing of system’s most basic functions

Readers respond to recent revelations about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, and suggest ways our personal data might be better safeguardedPatrick Cosgrove (Letters, 21 March) argues that the answer to the Facebook data scandal is simple – stop using Facebook. Alas, this completely misses the point. A few of us have never been a member of Facebook, but they still hold data about us, gathered from our friends and family who do have Facebook accounts. Worse, given that Facebook also buys data about people from third-party brokers, the profile they have on us is probably far more detailed and complete than we might like to think. The Facebook AI systems may know where we live, where we used to live, our work history, quite a bit about our movements, the people we know, where and how often we meet, how rich or poor we are, our interests, political outlook and so on. This is not trivial. The more they know, the more they can deduce and infer – and the more that information can be abused when it falls into the wrong hands.It was said some years ago that the credit card companies had such good profiles of us that they could predict when a marriage was going to break up before the couple did. This may well have been apocryphal, but behavioural prediction has come a long way in the last few years. I have no doubt at all that this is now a prediction that can be made with a high degree of accuracy. Continue reading...

Langlands and Bell are celebrating their 40th year together – by taking an uncompromising look at Silicon Valley’s utopian promisesBy a remarkable coincidence, on Wednesday, right as Mark Zuckerberg finally addressed the unfolding Facebook data-breach scandal, British artists Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell opened their new exhibition about the unchecked power Facebook and the other big tech companies wield.Internet Giants: Masters of the Universe, at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery until 10 June, marks the 40th year of collaboration between Langlands and Bell. It is an arresting ensemble of installations and animations, prints and architectural models. Continue reading...

We asked you whether you’re thinking of deleting your Facebook account and to share your thoughts on data privacy

Following days of silence, CEO announces Facebook will change how it shares data with third-party apps and admits ‘we made mistakes’

New footage of the crash that killed Elaine Herzberg raises fresh questions about why the self-driving car did not stopVideo of the first self-driving car crash that killed a pedestrian showed how the autonomous Uber failed to slow down as it fatally hit a 49-year-old woman walking her bike across the street.The newly released footage of the collision that killed Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, on Sunday night has raised fresh questions about why the self-driving car did not stop when a human entered its path and has sparked scrutiny of regulations in the state, which has encouraged testing of the autonomous technology. Continue reading...

WARNING: SOME VIEWERS MAY FIND THE FOOTAGE DISTRESSING Video of the first self-driving car crash that killed a pedestrian in the US shows ​how the autonomous Uber failed to slow down before it hit a 49-year-old woman walking her bike across the street. It has raised fresh questions about why the vehicle did not stop when a human entered its path. 'It’s just awful,' Tina Marie Herzberg White, a stepdaughter of the victim, told the Guardian on Wednesday. 'There should be a criminal case.' Continue reading...

Sandy Parakilas, who has claimed covert harvesting was routine at the social network, told the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee Facebook did not do enough to prevent, identify - or act upon - data breaches

The director’s latest film, shot entirely on a phone, is a dizzying deep dive into the psyche of a stalking victim kept in a mental care facility against her will. Contains spoilersThe history of Steven Soderbergh is the history of making do. The steadfast indie director likes doing his movies his way, and when money poses an obstacle to his purity of vision, he’s always quick with an industry workaround. He wanted to make a 250-minute account of Che Guevara’s life to be spread across two films and shot entirely in the Spanish language, and since Hollywood wasn’t interested, he hawked his wares with French and Spanish distributors instead. The big studios refused to release Soderbergh’s Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra unless he first recut it, so he bypassed US theaters entirely and found a welcome home at HBO. He managed to free himself from overseer shackles entirely by selling all the streaming and TV rights to Logan Lucky ahead of its release last year, using that capital to finance the film, and then divvying up the box office proceeds among his collaborators instead of suited investors.Related: Don’t call it a comeback: the celebrities who love to ‘retire’ Continue reading...

One of the world’s most popular video games is now on phones, as well as everywhere else you look. We assess how it performs on a small screenBarely six months after its launch, Fortnite: Battle Royale has become one of the most played, watched and talked about video games in the world. Now, showing an admirably ruthless efficiency, developer Epic Games is launching a smartphone version. There really is no escape.It is currently available by invitation via the dedicated website and is only for iPhones. The game employs pretty much the same user interface as the console versions, which means some of the text and icons on the menu screens are extremely small on a standard iPhone display. However, once you’re playing, the bright, colourful graphical style works well in this reduced format, allowing you to easily pick out scenic details, even from a distance. Continue reading...

The rebooted Lara Croft video game crossover is aiming to reignite moviegoers’ passion for action archaeology. So do you dig Alicia Vikander’s interpretation, or are you still in the Angelina Jolie camp?

Brian Acton adds his voice to Cambridge Analytica backlash, as US agency said to be investigating social network’s mishandling of dataFacebook’s troubles entered a fourth day with a rising chorus of people – including the co-founder of WhatsApp – joining the #DeleteFacebook movement as the Federal Trade Commission was reported to be investigating the company’s handling of personal data. Continue reading...

Loved ones are in shock over the death of Elaine Herzberg in Arizona, but questions remain as to whether Uber will be held accountable

Perhaps you think you can’t possibly replace the social network – but it can be done. Here’s what you need for a Zuck-free existenceFor many people, deleting their Facebook accounts sounds a lot like living a carbon-neutral life, recycling all your waste or going hardcore vegan: a nice idea, and probably the morally right thing to do, but way too much of a hassle to actually go through with.Facebook, after all, is how millions of people keep in touch with loved ones, plan weekends and evenings, and engage with like-minded communities. And that’s without touching on the company’s other services, Instagram and WhatsApp, which between them form a trifecta of seeming indispensability. Continue reading...

Jaguar Land Rover to demonstrate autonomous cars’ emergency braking on streetsBritain is pushing ahead with tests of self-driving cars on public roads despite mounting public concern over safety after a pedestrian was killed by one in the US.The country’s biggest carmaker, Jaguar Land Rover, has been experimenting with autonomous cars on roads in the Midlands and is set to demonstrate more of the cars’ features, including an emergency braking warning system, on urban streets this week. Continue reading...

The Cambridge Analytica revelations may be the final nudge we need to turn away from the social network. And it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to big tech harvesting private informationSorry to break it to you, but you are probably a “dumb fuck”. This is according to statements by a young Mark Zuckerberg anyway. Back in 2004, when a 19-year-old Zuckerberg had just started building Facebook, he sent his Harvard friends a series of instant messages in which he marvelled at the fact that 4,000 people had volunteered their personal information to his nascent social network. “People just submitted it ... I don’t know why ... They ‘trust me’ ... dumb fucks.”Related: Are you leaving Facebook? Share your concerns on privacy with us Continue reading...

Sandy Parakilas says numerous companies deployed these techniques – likely affecting hundreds of millions of users – and that Facebook looked the other way

The beloved feline star of the popular meme has died age eight. But does this really mean the end?Tonight he’s jamming with Kurt and Jimi. Keyboard Cat, the internet meme that bookended a thousand pratfalls, is dead.

Tempe police said car was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash and that the vehicle hit a woman who later died at a hospitalAn autonomous Uber car killed a woman in the street in Arizona, police said, in what appears to be the first reported fatal crash involving a self-driving vehicle and a pedestrian in the US.Tempe police said the self-driving car was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash and that the vehicle hit a woman, who was walking outside of the crosswalk and later died at a hospital. There was a vehicle operator inside the car at the time of the crash. Continue reading...

If you found the Cambridge Analytica data breach revelations deeply unsettling, read our guide to the maze of your privacy settingsIf the revelations that Cambridge Analytica acquired the records of 50 million Facebook users has you wondering how to protect your own personal information, you may already have discovered the maze of privacy settings the social networking site offers.First, the good news: the feature that allowed the most egregious data harvesting used by the company that gave Cambridge Analytica its data is no longer on the site. Continue reading...

Company looks for feedback on change that will make Windows Mail links open in Edge even if users have Chrome or Firefox set as default

A look at some of the most interesting discussion today, including around Cambridge Analytica and Facebook revelations

From the savagery in Salisbury to ‘dark social ads’, Russia’s hybrid warfare is here and needs a swift response. US law may have the answerThe Observer’s remarkable exposé of Cambridge Analytica must now bring down the curtain on the permissive environment for online electoral sabotage. It’s time for new laws, starting with a new UK version of the Honest Ads Act proposed in Congress, so voters finally learn who is targeting them with what “news” – and who’s writing the cheques. And that’s the amendment I’ll propose to the data protection bill this week.It’s not just the revelations about Cambridge Analytica that require us to act. The savagery in Salisbury brings with it a new truth. “Hybrid war”, fought for five years without mercy in the Ukraine, Crimea and the Baltics, has now arrived on our shores. Continue reading...

We can’t all go and live in the woods, of course. But if we resist debt, resist gadgets, and reconnect with nature, the world might just changeHaving once been an early adopter of tech, I was an unlikely early rejector. But it has now been over a year since I have phoned my family or friends, logged on to antisocial media, sent a text message, checked email, browsed online, took a photograph or listened to electronic music. Living and working on a smallholding without electricity, fossil fuels or running water, the last year has taught me much about the natural world, society, the state of our shared culture, and what it means to be human in a time when the boundaries between man and machine are blurring.My reasons for unplugging, during that time, haven’t so much changed as shifted in importance. My primary motives were – and still are – ecological. The logic was simple enough. Even if used minimally, a single smartphone (or toaster, internet server, solar panel, sex robot) relies on the entire industrial megamachine for its production, marketing and consumption. Continue reading...