Latest Technology Posts

Uber has buried statistics on assaults and accidents on its platform for years.  Journalists and advocates have dug hard and are revealing disturbing levels of both.  As more customers are suing the company for its inadequate safety measures, Uber is responding with a ballot initiative in California that would limit its liability for accidents, and consumer attorneys are supporting measures that would increase Uber’s liability and accountability.

Do social media companies try to hook children on their products?  Do they fail to adequately protect those children from harmful content, predators, and exploitation?  Millions of parents would probably agree with the juries in California and Texas that recently answered those questions with a resounding yes.  As a result, one young plaintiff was awarded $6 million from YouTube and Meta in one case, and Meta was ordered to pay $374 million in civil penalties in the other.  Meta and YouTube have, of course, vowed to appeal.   Despite a growing awareness of the risks to children and teens online, new legislation on children’s online safety remains stalled in Congress, and a robust regulatory system is nowhere in sight.

The Pentagon is enriching the pockets of the tech billionaire owners of AI companies. While the Department of Defense/War has broken its contract with the company Anthropic, other AI companies are signing large contracts, such as Open AI and Palantir.

A single, binding global data privacy standard does not yet exist. Instead, governments and companies operate under regional systems with different priorities.

On November 25, 2025, the National Association of Attorneys General, led by Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, sent a letter on behalf of a bipartisan coalition of 36 state attorneys general to Congress. The letter urged Congress leaders to reject the proposed ban on state-level artificial intelligence (AI) laws.  The attorneys general argue that a broad federal law would prevent individual states from addressing and responding to AI risks quickly.

Tech billionaires are spending at historic levels to influence politics in California.  Google and Facebook, and their  CEO’s, are donating heavily to key races in November 2026, as are venture capitalists, cryptocurrency entrepreneurs, and Palantir’s co-founders. Whether or not the candidates they are backing win, they will have an impact.

Two new reports document the alarming rise of online violence against women and girls. Sex trafficking, sexualized images, and stalking and exploitation online are nothing new.  But Artificial Intelligence has exacerbated the problem.  Deepfakes almost exclusively target women; in fact, some of the technology used to create them, developed by mostly male teams, only works on female forms.

In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) signaled that it would use existing federal law to address algorithmic discrimination in automated decision-making services regarding hiring, lending, and tenant screening. Some tech companies argue that the FTC is overreaching in the absence of explicit AI laws. The FTC’s push highlights how federal agencies are reshaping AI governance on a case-by-case basis rather than implementing broad new laws.

The Federal-State battle over AI regulation has heated up after President Trump signed an executive order on Dec. 11 that blocks states from enforcing their own regulations on artificial intelligence. The order seeks to create a “single national framework” for AI. However state lawmakers, tech experts, and civil rights organizations are worried about what this means for the country. Many believe that federal regulations could slow down America’s competitiveness in the global AI race and will have serious implications for national security.

When Uber and Lyft came on the scene, taxi drivers protested vociferously.  Now it’s the rideshare drivers protesting, as their earnings go down and the threat of autonomous vehicles looms.  Organizing by rideshare drivers has had some success, but how effective hard-won changes will be remains to be seen.  Workers scored an apparent victory in securing collective bargaining rights in California.  But a similar law in Massachusetts has yet to yield results and the California law was a compromise that included enormous giveaways to the companies.