Parmy Olson

You don’t see them, but they’re there: hundreds of thousands of people sitting at keyboards for hours on end to keep online services humming along seamlessly. It can seem like the Internet operates entirely automatically, but it doesn’t. Humans are often hidden behind the scenes, working in real…

Over the years, as social media companies gorged themselves on the data of billions of people to fuel vast profits, the information flow never went the other way. Now the tables are turning. One of the most promising pieces of legislation in Congress tackling tech giants’ undue influence, out of…

What to Expect: The year 2022 is shaping up to be one in which Big Tech sees a bigger clampdown than ever before from regulators, stemming attempts to grow into new markets and forcing redesigns of some of their most lucrative and addictive features. Most of the action will come from Europe…

For years, Facebook and other large technology companies grew into vast digital conglomerates by making so-called killer acquisitions, small deals for companies that could one day pose a competitive threat. Internal emails between executives at Facebook show Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg…

PolyAI Ltd. is an ambitious startup that creates artificial voices to replace call center operators. Based in London, it has raised $28 million to bring AI-powered customer service to Metro Bank Plc, BP Plc and more. The idea is that instead of the nightmare of dialing random digits in a decision…

London is one of the most watched cities in the world: Its inhabitants are caught on camera about 300 times a day on average and the British capital has become a testbed for police use of live facial recognition. But the technology, which powers a multibillion-dollar market for security firms and…

Facebook Inc. managed to distance itself from the most damning document leak in its history by renaming itself as Meta Platforms Inc. last week, but that doesn’t mean it won’t face greater regulatory scrutiny around the world. Where will it get the most heat? My bet is the UK. After blundering…

The nifty app CamFind has come a long way with its artificial intelligence. It uses image recognition to identify an object when you point your smartphone camera at it. But back in 2015 its algorithms were less advanced: The app mostly used contract workers in the Philippines to quickly type what…

The woman behind Facebook’s most damning-ever leak of internal documents has a name: Frances Haugen. On Monday, ahead of Facebook’s worst site-wide outage for some time, details about Haugen emerged. She was a product manager on the company’s “civic integrity team,” where she systematically…

How do you add guardrails into a product that was built for constant interaction? A deluge of documents leaked out of Facebook led to bombshell reports in The Wall Street Journal last week highlighting harms — from unfair treatment of users to human trafficking — that the company partly ignored and…