[Note: If you have somehow avoided hearing about Jason Arday, see my earlier post on “Cambridge University’s Disgrace”.]
Jason Arday has apparently killed himself due to the public scandal surrounding him. This is an extreme bad outcome that nobody wanted (plagiarism and fabulism are not capital offences). Who is to blame? And what can we learn?
Toby Sterling, reporting for Reuters:
The Dutch Data Protection Authority has fined Uber €825 million ($966 million) for deactivating driver accounts through automated systems without adequately informing them, according to an August 17 decision reviewed by Reuters.
The penalty would be the second-largest issued yet under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. It is behind only a €1.2 billion fine imposed on Meta by Ireland in 2023 for unlawfully transferring European Facebook users’ data to the United States. Meta is appealing.
Uber said it would also appeal. [...]
The Dutch authority confirmed the decision later on Friday. “Uber has committed serious infringements,” in deactivating driver accounts without warning or human involvement, the organisation’s deputy chair Monique Verdier said in a statement. “From one moment to the next they no longer had any income ... A computer should not make decisions on its own that have (such) major consequences.”
This really takes the cake:
GDPR rules ban decisions made solely by computer algorithms when they have a significant impact on people’s lives, saying such decisions require meaningful human review and a way to challenge a decision.
Uber temporarily suspended accounts of some drivers who were suspected of fraud, including when its systems concluded drivers had taken unnecessary detours to inflate fares or accepted trips without intending to complete them. Uber said such suspensions were usually brief, and it did not permanently deactivate such accounts without human review. Drivers with low customer ratings were sometimes permanently deactivated by computer, the Dutch agency said. Uber disputed that, saying it had never automated permanent deactivation decisions.
The company said one reason it considers the fine disproportionate is that only a small number of drivers were affected, with 126 having been deactivated in Europe as a result of low customer ratings in 2021.
It’s possible that Reuters’s reporting is incomplete, but there’s no allegation here that the grounds for these suspensions were incorrect. Uber suspended drivers who were pulling long-haul scams against customers to run up fare prices, and doing the annoying thing where they accept a ride and then never show up, hoping the customer will eventually get frustrated and cancel the trip themselves. (My understanding is that drivers do this when they’re driving for, say, both Uber and Lyft. They’ll accept a ride from Uber and then if a more appealing offer comes from Lyft, they’ll accept that one too and just never pick up the customer they accepted from Uber.)
Per this fine, it’s unlawful in the EU for Uber to monitor its drivers for pulling scams against customers, or just never picking riders up, leaving them stranded. I mean, I’m not a member of the “Uber Labor Practices” fan club, but one of the best things about Uber compared to taxis is that they monitor for and take action against scam drivers.
This isn’t a two-sided conflict between employees (drivers) and a big corporation (Uber). It’s three-sided. Where does customer experience factor into this? The drivers were scamming customers, and Uber took action to stop it. This sounds to me like a system that works. The EU regulation doesn’t seem to factor in customers at all.
From “Court slashes $50M judgment against Alex Jones over falsely calling Sandy Hook shooting a hoax,” NPR (Aug 21, 2026):
A Texas court on Friday slashed a $50 million judgment to about $6 million against Infowars founder Alex Jones after he falsely claimed the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting was a hoax.
Of course:
The ruling does not affect a $1.25 billion judgment against Jones in Connecticut, but is a legal victory for him after he and his company, Free Speech Systems, were found liable for damages for claiming the mass shooting didn’t happen.
Of course, all types of intellectual property, including trademark and reputation rights/defamation law, should be abolished:
1. This guy is productive. Yes very productive.
2. “Mercor is building a network of experienced data scientists for potential future projects with leading AI research organizations.” And The New Statesman covers the poetry project.
3. How did the English build such beautiful villages?
4. Two Percent Podcast with Tyler Cowen, fifty-two minutes, we discuss “wellness” too.
5. New Fighting Crime podcast.
6. Does New York need new ornamental architecture?
7. Texas Tech update (NYT).
The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The N-word is very much the ultimate trigger-word right now. Despite this being a full article about this precise epithet, I am unable to easily use it. Just to be safe from malicious prosecution or algorithmic suppression, even free speech websites like the Daily Sceptic will generally use asterisks to obscure it as ‘n****r’, even though you all know perfectly well what full word the typography indicates. It’s not ‘number’ or ‘nectar’ (‘neuter’ might be quite appropriate, though).
– Steven Tucker, writing In Minnesota, words matter more than rape.
Words of Power lose their impact when overused or habitually misused, which is why “fascist” and “racist”, once useful categoric descriptions with specific meanings, now mean almost nothing beyond “someone I do not like and wish to place beyond the pale”.
However “nigger”, absolutely a word of power in a strangely inverted way, is just a crass insult. Yet it is so powerful we’re required to render it as “the N-word”, akin to saying “Adonai” rather than the true name of God. Yet bizarrely in this two-tier civilization of ours, it becomes acceptable when used by melanin enhanced rappers, in which case it becomes something more akin to “geezer” or “my crew” or various other non-taboo things, depending on context.
It’s a funny old world.
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