Communications of the ACM
Innovation Is Overrated: A Provocation
Digital innovation is not working in the interest of the whole of society. It is time to radically rethink its purpose without…
From ACM Opinion
It's Time to Stop Paying for a VPN
Many services meant to protect your Web browsing can no longer be trusted
From ACM Opinion
A Case for Cooperation Between Machines and Humans
A computer scientist argues that the quest for fully automated robots is misguided, perhaps even dangerous. His decades of warnings are gaining more attention. ...
From ACM Opinion
A Journey, If You Dare, Into the Minds of Silicon Valley Programmers
Code seems cold and objective, the raw logic of the internet, and Silicon Valley likes it that way.
From ACM Opinion
How Silicon Valley Puts the 'Con' in Consent
The average person would have to spend 76 working days reading all of the digital privacy policies they agree to in the span of a year. Reading Amazon's terms and...
From ACM Opinion
The Robots Have Descended on Trump Country
The growing use of work robots and the deployment of artificial intelligence have been most disruptive in just those areas of the country that provided President...
From ACM Opinion
How the Blockchain Could Break Big Tech's Hold on A.I.
Pairing artificial intelligence and the blockchain might be what you would expect from a scammer looking to make a quick buck in 2018.
From ACM Opinion
It's Not Technology That's Disrupting Our Jobs
When we learn about the Industrial Revolution in school, we hear a lot about factories, steam engines, maybe the power loom.
From ACM Opinion
Why Apple Is the Future of Capitalism
With Apple Inc. now exceeding $1 trillion in market capitalization, it's tempting to understand this moment in terms of the dominance of all-too-large companies...
From ACM Opinion
Getting a Flood of G.D.P.R.-Related Privacy Policy pdates? Read Them.
You have probably noticed a flood of emails and alerts from companies in the past few weeks informing you about changes to their privacy policies.
From ACM Opinion
How Tech Can Turn Doctors Into Clerical Workers
There are times when the diagnosis announces itself as the patient walks in, because the body is, among other things, a text.
From ACM Opinion
Can Europe Lead on Privacy?
"We have a responsibility to protect your information," Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, declared recently in a full-page newspaper advertisement...
From ACM Opinion
Apple Can't Resist Playing By China's Rules
Apple is selling out. It's not about the latest version of the iPhone, but the huge cache of personal data that will be going directly to the largest, and one of...
From ACM Opinion
Facebook's Belated Awakening
Chastened by criticism that Facebook had turned a blind eye to Russia's manipulation of the social network to interfere in the 2016 election, the company's executives...
From ACM Opinion
Facebook's Ad Scandal Isn't a 'fail,' It's a Feature
What does it take to advertise on Facebook to people who openly call themselves "Jew haters" and want to know "how to burn Jews"? About $10 and 15 minutes, according...
From ACM Opinion
The Real Threat of Artificial Intelligence
What worries you about the coming world of artificial intelligence?
From ACM Opinion
The Iphone Is 10 Years Old. Here's the Story of Its Birth.
Before anybody outside Apple was aware of it, the project that would become the iPhone was referred to internally by the code name Purple.
From ACM Opinion
Google, Not the Government, Is Building the Future
One persistent criticism of Silicon Valley is that it no longer works on big, world-changing ideas.
From ACM Opinion