The Standing Rock protests concerning the Dakota Access Pipeline have brought recent awareness to the numerous complexities involved with constructing infrastructure that spans over a thousand miles in length. The clash with the Native tribes in the surrounding area over sacred ancestral land and concern for potential pollution of their primary water supply, as well …

Everyone does business with strangers. The last time you bought a burrito or watched a movie, you probably gave money to a stranger. Did you stop and think about how trusting you are to hand hard cash to someone you’ve never met? How do you know they will actually deliver the product or service you …

In London, Google is fighting a businessman in court as to whether individuals have the right to erase old convictions from online search results. Commentators believe that this is one of the first cases to test whether a person has a “right to be forgotten.” This will be the final step in a three-year legal …

In its latest attempts at coping with growing pains, the parent company of Snapchat, Snap Inc., has laid off about 100 employees. This follows the company’s decision to cut about 120 engineers earlier in March, and another 22 employees in January from the content department. Snap went public last year to much fanfare but has …

Years of stewing privacy concerns have erupted in response to Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. Cambridge Analytica obtained information collected from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without users’ permission. In 2014, information gathered on Facebook was used to create around 30 million psychographic profiles. Surprisingly, the only “problem” according to Facebook’s rules was that Cambridge …

In the past few months President Trump has announced a number of new import tariffs: in January, it was tariffs on imported washing machines and solar panels, and just recently, this March, it is tariffs on imported aluminum and steel. Aside from the tariffs on imported washing machines, this raft of import tariffs portend a …

Recently cryptocurrency has been a topic of much discussion across numerous fields. For example, the Securities and Exchange Commission is now investigating certain cryptocurrency offerings. Meanwhile Uber’s co-founder Garrett Camp wants to create his own global cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is even being discussed in the tax field. Two states, Arizona and Georgia, have proposed bills that …

Earlier this week, Pennsylvania’s Attorney General, Josh Shapiro, filed suit against Uber “for allegedly violating the state’s data breach notification law by waiting more than a year to disclose an incident that compromised the personal information of 57 million users.” To mitigate the fallout from the data breach, which occurred in late 2016, Uber paid …

Recently released studies show that people are unaware that their Facebook news feed is being filtered by the social network. Facebook uses an algorithm that looks at what videos people watch, what content they click on, and who they interact with through “likes” and “comments”, and, using that information, the algorithm filters new content to …

An “emerging contaminant” is an under-researched chemical byproduct, often from industrial processes, which has no regulatory health standards for exposure or release. Emerging contaminants such as complex, unnatural chemicals generated by modern industry are concerning because they may have long-term adverse impacts on human intelligence, reproduction, behavior, and the endocrine system’s regulation of hormones in …