Educational

In September 2018, a number of people whose Google Pixel phones, Essential Phone, OnePlus 6, Nokia handsets, and other devices running Android 9 Pie discovered that the devices had, apparently autonomously, activated the software's Battery Saver feature. Google later explained that an internal

In September 2018, AI Now co-founder Meredith Whittaker sounded the alarm about the potential for abuse of the convergence of neuroscience, human enhancement, and AI in the form of brain-computer interfaces. Part of Whittaker's concern was that the only companies with the computational power

In September 2018, the 156-year-old US life insurance company John Hancock announced it would stop underwriting traditional life insurance policies, instead selling only interactive policies that track health and fitness through the data collected by wearable devices and smartphones. Interactive

Britain's £11 billion plan to offer smart meters to all homes and businesses by the end of 2020 was based in part on claims that the meters would give consumers better information about the energy they were using and offer sophisticated variable rate charging as part of working to combat climate

In 2014, Britain announced an infrastructure plan requiring all energy suppliers to offer smart meters to all homes and businesses by the end of 2020. With two years to go, at the end of 2018, the problems customers experienced after making the switch led to calls to halt the rollout, which had

In October 2018, a transparency report from the smart home company Nest, which Google acquired for $3.2 billion in 2014, found that between 2015 and 2018 Nest had been told to hand over data on 300 separate occasions relating to up to 525 Nest account holders. Nest turned over data in fewer than 20%

In October 2018, the app that supports the burglar alarm functions of Yale's "smart" locks and burglar alarms was disabled for 24 hours after an "unforeseen issue while carrying out unplanned network maintenance". Customers complained that they were unable to open or lock doors or disarm alarms, and

In October 2018 Amazon patented a new version of its Alexa virtual assistant that would analyse speech to identify signs of illness or emotion and offer to sell remedies. The patent also envisions using the technology to target ads. Although the company may never exploit the patent, the NHS had

In March 2018 the Palo Alto startup Mindstrong Health, founded by three doctors, began clinical tests of an app that uses patients' interactions with their smartphones to monitor their mental state. The app, which is being tested on people with serious illness, measures the way patients swipe, tap

In 2018, the chair of the London Assembly's police and crime committee called on London's mayor to cut the budget of the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime, which provides oversight, in order to pay for AI systems. The intention was that the efficiencies of adopting AI would free up officers'

In a 2018 interview, the Stanford professor of organisational behaviour Michal Kosinski discussed his research, which included a controversial and widely debunked 2017 study claiming that his algorithms could distinguish gay and straight faces; a 2013 study of 58,000 people that explored the

In 2018, a Duke University medical doctor who worked with Microsoft researchers to analyse millions of Bing user searches found links between some computer users' physical behaviours - tremors while using a mouse, repeated queries, and average scrolling speed - and Parkinson's disease. The hope was

In 2018, the British army used paid Facebook messages to target 16-year-olds around the day GCSE results were announced to suggest that an army career might still be open to them if their grades were sub-par. The move was criticised for targeting teenagers at their most vulnerable and stressed

In 2017, the Massachusetts attorney general's office reached an agreement under which Boston-based Copley Advertising agreed to eschew sending mobile ads to patients visiting Planned Parenthood and other health clinics. In 2015, Copley's geofencing technique used location information from

In 2018, the digital marketing company Tell All Digital began marketing technology to personal injury law firms to enable them to send mobile ads to patients they know are waiting for treatment in an emergency room and for up to a month afterwards. The technology relies on geofencing, a technique

In 2018, documents obtained by a public records request revealed that the Los Angeles Police Department required its analysts to maintain a minimum of a dozen ongoing surveillance targets identified using Palantir software and a "probable offender" formula based on an LAPD points-based predictive