Daily news round-up September 8th 2021
Facebook’s end-to-end encrypted messaging might prevent from detection of child sexual abuse online.
It seems obvious that Facebook users would welcome the company’s plans to secure users privacy by allowing encrypted messaging on its platforms, which would mean that nobody else, including Facebook, could see or listen to what is said or sent.
However, the National Crime Agency criticises such a move, fearing that it would prevent officers from detecting child sexual abuse online.
In 2020, the tech industry made over 21m referrals globally of child sexual abuse identified on its platforms to the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Over 20m of those reports were from Facebook, the NCA said.
Biased algorithms are one of the challenges businesses might experience when incorporating AI into their operations. One well-known example is the Apple credit card algorithm, which was found to be discriminative against women.
Another such example, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that software used by leading hospitals to prioritise kidney transplant recipients discriminated against Black patients.
Nevertheless, the algorithms’ biases depend on the data used to train algorithms. If the data show prejudice trends, it will lead to further discrimination over certain groups of people.
