Technology Archive

When the Trump administration began publicly bandying about the idea of barring the popular Chinese social media app TikTok from the American market a couple of weeks ago, the mere possibility of it happening sent shock waves through Chinese society. One might have expected that most of the attention, including lots of predictable fury, would have centered on nationalist sentiments—which are easily aroused in China nowadays—about the alleged unfairness with which the country is being treated by Western competitors, none more so than the United States. Unbeknownst to Americans, who mostly see it as an almost addictive platform for distracting […]

As Americans have risen up in protest against police brutality, attention has understandably focused on the racist incidents of police killing Black Americans and their implications. How these outrages have come to light, however, remains underappreciated. They might never have been exposed without new technologies like smart phones and social media, whose use for accountability is transforming human rights. Until recently, documenting human rights abuses was a time-consuming and often imprecise activity. As a law student in the early 1990s, I worked on a United Nations project, led by the international legal scholar M. Cherif Bassiouni, to document war crimes […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR Newsletter and Engagement Editor Benjamin Wilhelm curates the week’s top news and expert analysis on China. The “tech war” between the United States and China has shifted to Europe, where the United Kingdom this week announced, in an abrupt reversal, that it would ban the use of equipment from Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei in its high-speed wireless network. The British government’s decision is a major victory for the Trump administration, which has been campaigning to steer countries away from China as they develop their 5G infrastructure. Europe has been one of Huawei’s key markets as […]

In April, the Kyrgyz news outlet Kloop posted a video on YouTube showing a new app called STOP COVID-19. Developed by the government of Kyrgyzstan, it allows the authorities to follow the whereabouts of those exposed to the coronavirus. The video shows the movements of two individuals being tracked by combining their digital profiles and phone locations with their government-issued IDs. In theory, STOP COVID-19 is a valuable tool in the government’s efforts to track and trace confirmed or suspected coronavirus patients. But the app goes much further than most Kyrgyz citizens would likely be comfortable with. In addition to […]

In that foreign country that was our world before the pandemic, the so-called “sharing economy” was in full bloom. Uber and its ride-sharing competitors dominated point-to-point ground transportation. Airbnb was beating the world’s largest hotel brands in rooms rented and consumer spending. New startups were applying digital matching services to facilitate everything from food delivery to toilet rentals. And the phenomenon was global: China and India had their own ride-sharing giants, Didi Chuxing and Ola, while companies around the world—Comparto Mi Maleta in Chile, Sharemac in Germany, Gojek in Indonesia, Stashbee in the U.K. and Lynk in Kenya—connected consumers to […]