In a letter to members of Congress on Monday, IBM said it is exiting the general-purpose facial recognition business and said it opposes the use of such technology for mass surveillance and racial profiling.
Why it matters: Facial recognition software is controversial for a number of reasons, including the potential for human rights violations as well as evidence that the technology is less accurate in identifying people of color.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai got personal in his address Sunday to the class of 2020, sharing his own story of coming late to the PC revolution, while also encouraging this year's graduates to take on the problems they see in modern society.
Why it matters: Pichai, also CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, remains fairly unknown outside tech circles. And his earnestness and origin story could prove to be an asset as the company faces increased regulatory scrutiny.
Bamboo Learning, a startup led by a former Amazon executive that primarily delivers educational content to Alexa-enabled smart speakers, on Monday comes to Google's rival ecosystem for the first time.
The big picture: Smart speakers offer opportunities for new categories of applications, but it remains difficult to make money in the market, which helps explain the relative dearth of startups focused on the space.
A new report from NYU finds that a heavy reliance on contractors to handle content moderation at Facebook, Google and YouTube has led to bad working conditions and a lack of attention to real-world harms caused by inflammatory or deceptive content.
Why it matters: A great deal of attention is paid to these platforms' content policies, but much of the actual moderation work is being left to people who don't even directly work for the companies.
