Business

A California state senator says she will introduce legislation to clarify legal protections for entrepreneurs facing sexual harassment. State Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson says the proposal, which she revealed Thursday, is in response to “recent and stunning” allegations by women entrepreneurs of harassment by venture capitalists. Such behavior is unacceptable from an industry that “prides itself …

In July, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Sharon Reardon considered whether to hold Lamonte Mims, a 19-year-old accused of violating his parole, in jail. One piece of evidence before her: the output of algorithms known as PSA that calculated the risk that Mims, who had previously been convicted of burglary, would commit a violent crime …

I sat down with Kevin Systrom, the CEO of Instagram, in June to interview him for my feature story, “Instagram’s CEO Wants to Clean Up the Internet,” and for “Is Instagram Going Too Far to Protect Our Feelings,” a special that ran on CBS this week. It was a long conversation, but here is a …

None of this is to say that automation and AI aren’t having an important impact on the economy. But that impact is far more nuanced and limited than the doomsday forecasts suggest. A rigorous study of the impact of robots in manufacturing, agriculture, and utilities across 17 countries, for instance, found that robots did reduce …

President Trump stunned the nation, members of his own party, the press, and, apparently, his staff on Tuesday with his candid remarks regarding last weekend’s deadly violence at a rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. The day before, he had reluctantly condemned the neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members who comprised much of the …

Uber Tuesday agreed to improve its privacy and security practices, and to allow outsiders to monitor its progress for 20 years. The agreement with the Federal Trade Commission would resolve complaints stemming from a 2014 incident in which a hacker gained access to the names and driver’s license numbers of more than 100,000 Uber drivers. …

Defense Secretary James Mattis has a lot on his mind these days. North Korea, obviously. China’s expanding claims on the South China sea. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. And, closer to home, the Pentagon lagging behind the tech industry in leveraging artificial intelligence. Mattis admitted to that concern Thursday during the Silicon Valley leg of a West …

Facebook is moving into short-form, professional video with Watch. It is a latecomer to the field, following similar moves by rivals such as Twitter, Snap, Spotify and Reddit. But Facebook could still wind up being a big winner. More than 30 partners, including A&E, Hearst, and MLB, will produce content for Watch, which began appearing …

Benchmark Capital was an early investor in Uber, and one of its partners sits on Uber’s board. Now, the venture capital firm is suing former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, claiming he fraudulently engineered a scheme to retain control of the company. The lawsuit, filed in Chancery Court in Delaware, centers on a plan, approved by …

Google CEO Sundar Pichai abruptly canceled a planned companywide meeting on Thursday intended to air concerns raised by a former employee’s broadside against Google’s diversity programs. The move came just minutes before the meeting was to start, as the company that aims to organize the world’s information struggles to deal with reverberations from the memo …