The heavy fortnight arrived on schedule (#126 called the quiet; the archive’s rhythm never misses).
CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA: the Observer and NYT detailed how a researcher’s personality-quiz app harvested data on ~50 million Facebook users — the quiz-takers AND their entire friend graphs, via a permissions model that was WORKING AS DESIGNED in 2014 — and how that corpus flowed to a political-targeting firm. The #094/#095 reckoning (“those are OUR systems”) has its named scandal now. The API breadth was the bug; “we changed it in 2015” is true and insufficient; #MeToo-era institutional scrutiny has found the feed. Zuckerberg’s been summoned by three governments this week. The stock shed ~$50B. Every “move fast” platform decision from 2010-2014 is getting re-litigated with 2018 stakes, and honestly — it should be. Data you SHARE is data you can’t unshare; the friend-graph made consent transitive without asking the friends. Architecture is policy (#064, corporate edition).
And Sunday night in Tempe: an Uber self-driving test vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian — Elaine Herzberg, crossing with her bicycle at night. The first pedestrian death by autonomous vehicle. The safety driver was aboard; early reporting asks what the system perceived and when. Uber halted all testing. The #086 entry (“autonomy’s postmortem era has begun”) gains its darkest file. Every AV program’s disengagement stats, sensor suites, and safety-driver protocols now face the only review that matters. A person is dead; the industry’s homework is due.
TIL: nothing this fortnight taught; it charged. Consent models and safety cases — the two least glamorous documents in tech — are the two that turned out to hold lives. Write them like it.