Bytes: What’s new in tech

Lawyers under surveillance

Lawyers are some of the earliest guinea pigs for enhanced employee-monitoring software, said Drew Harwell in The Washington Post— and some of them worry that if even law firms that defend workers’ rights are turning to the software, “why won’t every other business?” Contract attorneys are typically hired as needed by law firms and often asked to “look at sensitive files” under “strict confidentiality rules.” But working from home, they are now subject to monitoring software that uses a webcam to “record their facial movements and surroundings and will send an alert” even if the attorney’s focus begins to drift. Several lawyers complained that the software was error-prone and would “boot them out of their work if they shifted slightly in their chairs.” Another type of monitoring software, RemoteDesk, logged “every online activity a worker had done during the day, with each classified as ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive.’”

The unicorn bubble grows

The ‘unicorns’ just keep multiplying, said Nicolas Rapp and Jessica Mathews in Fortune. In 2015, when Fortune ran a cover story on the proliferation of pre-IPO companies valued at $1 billion or more, the magazine counted 80 around the world. “That figure seems quaint today.” In the second quarter alone, 136 startups achieved unicorn status, more than in all of 2020. And “it’s not just VCs sloshing money into startups: Hedge funds, mutual funds, and sovereign wealth funds are entering the private market,” competing for “stakes in the most innovative companies.” Tech investors are now often making decisions on tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in funding “in a matter of days, maybe a week.”

Public-interest satellite maps

A mapping project at Google with a huge storehouse of data has become an essential tool for climate scientists around the world, said Leslie Kaufman in Bloomberg.com. Google Earth Engine offers researchers a “vast trove of opensource satellite imagery,” updated with 20,000 fresh images per day. A team of staff scientists (Google won’t say how many) helps translate massive data sets for pro bono clients, including “conservation groups, city agencies, community advocates, and researchers.” The information has been helping science and advocacy groups track everything from “how much water is being consumed field by field” in parched regions of the American West to the locations of illegal logging on indigenous land in Peru.