Buckingham Palace is seeking a Head of Digital Engagement to manage the social media accounts of Queen Elizabeth II and the Royal Family. It's a full-time job and the annual pay is £45,000 - £50,000, depending on experience of course. Perks include free lunch at the Palace! From The Royal Household job listing:

It's about never standing still and finding new ways to maintain The Queen's presence in the public eye and on the world stage. This is what makes working for the Royal Household exceptional.

The role of Royal Communications is to engage a worldwide audience with the public role and work of The Royal Family. Joining this fast paced and dynamic team, your challenge will be to lead on and develop our digital communications strategy, and ensure that we make effective use of a range of digital platforms to support these aims...

Whether you're covering a State Visit, award ceremony or Royal engagement, you'll make sure our digital channels consistently spark interest and reach a range of audiences.

(via Neatorama)

image: "The British royal family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, June 2013" by Carfax2 (CC BY-SA 3.0) Read the rest

Consumer Reports' Digital Lab does groundbreaking privacy research: they're hiring for eight positions including technologists ("resident hacker," "digital standard manager," "information security researcher," "program manager, security and testing," and "privacy testing project leader"); journalists ("digital content manager"); policy and comms ("senior researcher, digital competition" and "associate director, strategic communications — technology and privacy"). Most of the positions are NYC or SF or DC based, several allow for remote workers. (Thanks, Ben)!) Read the rest

Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy is a marvellous interdisciplinary research center, and it is advertising for "visitors" for one-year stints: postdocs, policy fellows and visiting IT professors. Read the rest

Hirevue is an "AI" company that companies contract with to screen job applicants: it conducts an hour-long videoconference session with applicants, analyzing their facial expressions, word-choices and other factors (the company does not actually explain what these are, nor have they ever subjected their system to independent scrutiny) and makes recommendations about who should get the job. Read the rest

When Eunice Adekemi Olamijuwon was transfered from her job as nursing leader at Wesley Guild Hospital in Osun, Nigeria, her staff celebrated by hanging a (now-viral) banner calling her a "mischievous tyrant" and accusing her of a litany of sins, from "arrogance" to "power intoxication" to "sadism" and "witch hunting." Read the rest

One of the coolest initiatives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is the Electronic Frontier Alliance, a network of autonomous community groups that work on local issues with support from each other and EFF: everything from getting facial recognition banned in their communities to forcing local police departments to seek public comment on new surveillance tech initiatives. Read the rest

The job listing for a vacancy in Burning Man's HR department is pretty anodyne, until you get to this: "Some of the work will be in outside weather conditions and will be exposed to fumes or airborne particles as well as possible extremes in temperature." "Possible" is really underselling it, to be honest. Read the rest

[Worried about automation and high-tech unemployment, or gig economy labor apocalypses? Techdirt's Mike Masnick and the Copia Institute have pulled together an outstanding anthology of speculative fiction about better futures for work and workers, called Working Futures, which is just out. This kind of speculation-for-good is such a cool idea, and I'm delighted to give Mike a little space to discuss it. -Cory]

Over the past decade -- as technology has advanced in two specific areas: the gig economy and artificial intelligence -- there’s been a lot of discussion about the nature of work and the future of work. I’ve been somewhat frustrated by many of these discussions, as they always tend to fall broadly into two competing camps: people insisting that all the jobs will go away and we’re all doomed, or those who insist that “everything will work itself out, it always does.” Read the rest

EFF has just posted a job listing for a development director, seeking someone to "take charge of EFF's eleven-person Development Team in their efforts to raise over $13 million each year," starting late 2019 or early 2020. Read the rest

Uber -- a bezzle -- projected $8b in losses this year; but it lost more than $5b in a single quarter, and despite an initial stock price rise (dead cat bounce?) the company's shares have tumbled by more than 10% since, hitting an all-time low. Engineers who were scheduled to interview at Uber have had those interviews canceled by the company's HR department, who told them the company now has a tech-worker hiring freeze. (Image: Tarcil, CC BY-SA, modified) (via Naked Capitalism) Read the rest

The looming threat of mass-unemployment driven by automation has been grossly overstated: while it's true that "truck driver" is one of the most common jobs in America, the vast majority of truck drivers are not long-haul drivers, which are the drivers at risk of having their jobs automated out of existence. Read the rest

Tech reporter and sf writer Brian Merchant (previously) calls our attention to the peculiar construction of the problem statement in articles about automation and obsolescence, in which "robots are coming to steal your job." Read the rest

Back in January, an Ontario court ruled that Uber's arbitration clause couldn't keep its drivers from suing it; Uber has appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, which has taken up the case and will hear arguments about whether arbitration clauses (through which the parties surrender the right to sue in court) are enforceable in "adhesion contracts" (contracts that are not negotiated, where one party has much less power than the other, such as in click-through agreements). Read the rest

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is hiring a new staff copyright/trademark litigator, and "experience with or strong interest in patent, unfair competition, administrative law, privacy and/or First Amendment litigation is preferred but not required." Read the rest

[[Editor's note: I was the Electronic Frontier Foundation's first-ever European Director, which was a crazy and amazing job at a time when the organization was much smaller; now EFF is much bigger, and international issues are a much bigger deal for us, with bad policy ideas ricocheting around the globe and needing a coordinated response; the below is from my colleague Rainey Reitman, EFF's Chief Program Officer; you can find the formal listing here -Cory ]]

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If you've got 3+ years of experience and want to cover "the growing political and cultural Big Tech backlash,' copyright clashes, the culture of Silicon Valley firms, tech-policy battles, and important tech-related court cases" then Ars Technica wants to hire you. Read the rest

During a talk at SXSW yesterday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got an audience question about automation and jobs and answered by saying, "We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem." Read the rest