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Teenage Foxconn interns forced to work long hours to build Amazon Echos
A new China Labor Watch report has found that 16 to 18-year-old students from vocational schools are being threatened and physically attacked if they refuse to work 10 hour days and night shifts producing Amazon's Echo smart speaker devices (BBC News).
The teenagers – some 1,581 of them with more being actively recruited – are employed as 'interns' by Foxconn under conditions that are very much illegal under Chinese law. Foxconn told The Guardian that local managers were to blame and that it is taking immediate action, while Amazon says that it's dispatched specialist auditors to investigate the problem.
Those incessant cookie consent forms are manipulative and non-compliant
New research has found that the cookie consent notices shown to European internet users are rife with dark patterns that encourage users to blithely accept them, incomplete or incorrect information, and don't follow the EU's 'privacy by default' guidance (TechCrunch).
The supposed intent of the notices is to comply with GDPR's requirement to obtain consent before collecting data about users, but the findings indicate that this is often rendered meaningless, with some sites simply – and non-compliantly – refusing to grant access to European users unless they accept tracking cookies.
If Huawei can't build a true Android rival with Harmony OS, no-one can
Hongmeng, or Harmony OS in its international form, is the operating system that Huawei has been building for two years and just officially announced at its developer conference (WIRED). It's a multi-device OS, currently based on Linux, that’s open source, compatible with Android apps and designed to power smart displays, wearables, smart speakers, VR smartglasses, in-car systems and PCs.
Note that the list does not include smartphones, despite persistent rumours that Huawei plans to launch either a range of low-cost handsets or even a Mate 30 flagship phone with Hongmeng OS later in 2019.
US leadership drafts bill to stop social media 'censorship'
The Trump government in the US is drafting new legislation to counter what it describes as social media censorship and bias against right-wing users (Ars Technica). CNN reports that an early version of the draft executive order, called "Protecting Americans from Online Censorship", would put the Federal Communications Commission in charge of online content regulation and remove tech platforms' legal immunity when it comes to taking down objectionable content such as hate speech in good faith.
Why I'm obsessed with people who respond ‘don’t know’ to really obvious YouGov questions
According to YouGov survey results, two per cent of Brits don’t know whether they’ve lived in London before. Five per cent don’t know whether they’ve been attacked by a seagull or not (WIRED). A staggering one in 20 residents of this fine isle don’t know whether or not they pick their nose. So what’s going on here?
How inspirational quotes took over the web
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
