Slop Happens

For blind and low-vision users, smart glasses that can read a letter aloud or identify a package on sight are nothing short of transformative. But those benefits rely on a camera that’s always on, always recording, and always sending data somewhere. Combined with facial recognition, though, they can provide far too much information to a stalker or form a grid of real time facial-recognition for a...

Your ballot is secret. Your donation history isn't. Your voter registration isn't. And in the age of algorithmic profiling, the data trail you leave before you vote may matter more than the vote itself. In this episode of Slop Happens, Bianca and Claudio dig into something that doesn't get enough attention: not whether elections get hacked on election night, but how the data surrounding them gets...

In the age of AI, it’s easy to forget that it doesn’t take sophisticated tech to build an instrument of power. In the 2000s, Venezuela gave the world a masterclass on how a simple, flat database could turn a petition into a tool of repression. In this episode of Slop Happens , we unravel the dark legacy of the Tascón List —a petition for a recall referendum that turned into a political blacklist t...

In this second episode of Slop Happens , Bianca Prins and Claudio Luís Vera welcome Maranke Wierenga , advisor on data-driven work and member of the NEN Commission on AI & Big Data , where she also chairs the Working Group on Ethics and Fundamental Rights. Together, they explore curious cases where technology fails the people it’s meant to serve. First, they dive into the COMPAS case in Florid...

Claudio and Bianca welcome you to their new podcast, Slop Happens , and discuss the weirdness that happens when technology goes wrong. One evening, Claudio sees a trippy cloud with shining debris overhead. The next day, he discovers it was a SpaceX mission that exploded and rained debris down over Florida, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. SpaceX issues a tweet on X, treating the expl...