糖心传媒

A man posing as a government official arrived in Fatima Bi’s village in northeast India three years ago and told her she was eligible for a subsidised cooking cylinder, but since she could not sign, he said she had to apply using her thumbprint.

Bi is one of millions of Indians who access their bank accounts with biometric data, but did not suspect when the man asked her to press her thumb onto a device. The man had already entered Bi’s bank details into the system and used her thumbprint to clean out her account.

Melissa thought her financial troubles would disappear with just a few clicks in a Philippines online lending app that promised “fast cash”.

Without access to loans from traditional banks to pay her bills, the working student tried an app last month and received money in a number of loans that were instantly approved.

As India’s online services platform Urban Company celebrated its stock market debut last week, gig workers – many of whom had staged protests in the run-up to the firm going public – worried they may be squeezed harder to please investors.

Shares of Urban Company, which offers at-home services from facials to plumbing repairs, jumped 74% last Wednesday, notching a valuation of nearly $3 billion as investors bet on its dominant position in a mostly untapped market.

Nepal’s army was in talks on Thursday with Gen Z protesters to pick an interim leader for the Himalayan nation after violent anti-corruption protests killed 30 and forced the prime minister to resign.

Soldiers were patrolling the quiet streets of Kathmandu following the capital’s in decades, triggered by a social media ban that authorities eventually repealed.

At least are excluded from the internet under a yawning digital divide that must be closed if the poorest are ever to prosper, says the world’s digital inclusion advocate.

Deemah AlYahya, head of the Digital Cooperation Organization, told Context about her plans to bridge the global  connectivity gap: an uphill task when only of people in low-income countries currently have access to the internet.

South African street vendor and widow Brenda Mtshali is furious that an automated message on her phone means she will have to skimp on food for her six children.

She is one of an estimated eligible South Africans excluded from welfare payments due to administrative obstacles, including problems with an algorithm-based income verification check, recent research has found.

Although the lid has been lifted on the brutal conditions in cyber-scam compounds across Southeast Asia, rescuing victims is still complicated and made ever more difficult because of U.S. aid cuts, says a leading expert.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been to scam centres in recent years, the United Nations has said, where they have been forced to contact people via social media and messaging apps to lure them into making fraudulent investments, a scheme known as “pig butchering.”

Fourteen years ago on June 9th 2011, the United Nations reiterated the importance of freedom of expression and the obligation of states to promote universal access to the Internet. Later in July 2016, the U.N. declared that Internet access is a basic human right that should be guaranteed and protected by states.

In the context of rapid global digitalization, the Internet serves as a “” to allow citizens to exercise their economic, political and cultural rights, according to the U.N.

The public library in Bethel, Alaska is the only place for miles around that provides free internet and computer use, and it was planning to lead the community into a new era of online access.

The staff of four had been offering popular one-on-one online assistance and was on the cusp of adding more employees to reach more residents.

Most of Jaruwat Jinnmonca’s anti-trafficking work used to focus on helping victims swept into prostitution.

Now, survivors of cyber-scam compounds dominate his time as founder of the Thailand-based Immanuel Foundation.