The Guardian reports that Twitter's anti-porn filters have blocked Dominic Cummings' name from trending on the platform, despite Boris Johnson's chief adviser dominating British political news for almost a week. From the report: As a result of the filtering, trending topics over the past five days have instead included a variety of misspellings of his name, including #cummnings, #dominiccummigs and #sackcummimgs, as well as his first name on its own, the hashtag #sackdom, and the place names Durham, County Durham and Barnard Castle. The filter also affects suggested hashtags, meaning users who tried to type #dominiccummings were instead presented with one of the misspelled variations to auto-complete, helping them trend instead. This sort of accidental filtering has gained a name in computer science: the Scunthorpe problem, so-called because of the Lincolnshire town's regular issues with such censorship.

Bizarrely, the shortened hashtag #cumgate has also trended, since the first word of the sentence is not included in Twitter's filter list, apparently in an attempt to avoid the Scunthorpe problem applying too broadly -- for instance, by blocking words such as "scum," "cumbersome" or "cumulative." Although Twitter does not publish the contents of the word filter list, users can check whether a particular term is blocked from trending by searching for it. By default, the site blocks all photo and video results from search terms it believes may contain sensitive content, meaning a media search for "porn" or "Cummings" will, unless the search filters are turned off, return zero results. Dominic Cummings is in the spotlight because he broke lockdown rules by making a 260-mile trip from London to the north of England, at the height of the coronavirus crisis after lockdown restrictions had been imposed.

YouTube is automatically deleting comments that contain certain Chinese-language phrases related to criticism of the country's ruling Communist Party (CCP). The company confirmed to The Verge this was happening in error and that it was looking into the issue. From a report: "This appears to be an error in our enforcement systems and we are investigating," said a YouTube spokesperson. The company did not elaborate on how or why this error came to be, but said it was not the result of any change in its moderation policy. But if the deletions are the result of a simple mistake, then it's one that's gone unnoticed for six months. The Verge found evidence that comments were being deleted as early as October 2019, when the issue was raised on YouTube's official help pages and multiple users confirmed that they had experienced the same problem. Comments left under videos or in live streams that contain the words that mean "communist bandit" or "50-cent party" are automatically deleted in around 15 seconds, though their English language translations and Romanized Pinyin equivalents are not.
Palmer Luckey tweeted about this issue first.

Google last week removed three apps related to the QAnon conspiracy theory from its Play Store digital marketplace. From a report: The apps -- called QMAP, Q Alerts! and Q Alerts LITE -- were taken down for violating Google's policies against "harmful information," the company said. The removal was earlier reported by Media Matters for America, a progressive not-for-profit. The QAnon conspiracy theory has become popular among a group of supporters of President Donald Trump. One claim is that celebrities are involved in child sex trafficking and pedophilia. Another tenet is that Trump is working to take down the so-called "Deep State," a secret network that manipulates and controls government policy. The theory revolves around "Q," an anonymous user who began writing about the conspiracies on imageboard site 4chan.

WeChat, the Chinese messaging app, is systematically monitoring the content sent by international users to build up its censorship algorithms applied against accounts registered in China, a new study has found. From a report: Researchers at Citizen Lab, an academic research lab at the University of Toronto, determined that WeChat screens images and documents shared by accounts registered outside China after they are sent, then adds the digital signature -- or "hash" -- of any files deemed sensitive to a blacklist. Those files then cannot be sent or received by China-registered users. Numerous studies have identified WeChat's use of censorship tools against China-linked accounts, but this research provides proof for the first time that non-China registered users are also swept up in its surveillance apparatus. Published Thursday in a report called "We Chat, They Watch," the Citizen Lab findings are likely to add fuel to existing concerns, particularly in Washington, about data security and the international reach of information control tools used by Chinese tech companies.

EU-based Internet governance body RIPE is opposing a proposal to remodel core internet protocols, a proposal backed by the Chinese government, Chinese telecoms, and Chinese networking equipment vendor Huawei. From a report: Named "New IP," this proposal consists of a revamped version of the TCP/IP standards to accommodate new technologies, a "shutoff protocol" to cut off misbehaving parts of the internet, and a new "top-to-bottom" governance model that decentralizes the internet and puts it into the hands of a few crucial node operators. The New IP proposal was submitted last year to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and brought to the public's attention following a Financial Times report last month. The proposal received immediate criticism from the general public and privacy advocates due to its obvious attempt to hide internet censorship features behind a technical redesign of the TCP/IP protocol stack.

The New IP proposal was described as the Chinese government's attempt to export and impose its autocratic views onto the rest of the internet and its infrastructure. Millions of eyebrows were raised when authoritarian countries like Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia expressed support for the proposal. In a blog post this week, RIPE NCC, the regional Internet registry for Europe, West Asia, and the former USSR, formally expressed a public opinion against China New IP proposal. "Do we need New IP? I don't think we do," said Marco Hogewoning, the current acting Manager Public Policy and Internet Governance at the RIPE NCC. "Although certain technical challenges exist with the current Internet model, I do not believe that we need a whole new architecture to address them."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Facebook's local servers in Vietnam were taken offline early this year, slowing local traffic to a crawl until it agreed to significantly increase the censorship of "anti-state" posts for local users, two sources at the company told Reuters on Tuesday. The restrictions, which the sources said were carried out by state-owned telecommunications companies, knocked the servers offline for around seven weeks, meaning the website became unusable at times.

"We believe the action was taken to place significant pressure on us to increase our compliance with legal takedown orders when it comes to content that our users in Vietnam see," the first of the two Facebook sources told Reuters. In an emailed statement, Facebook confirmed it had reluctantly complied with the government's request to "restrict access to content which it has deemed to be illegal." The report notes that Vietnam has become one of Facebook's biggest markets in Asia. "According to Ants, a Vietnam-based market researcher, digital advertising revenue in Vietnam amounted to around $550 million in 2018, 70% of which went to U.S. social media giants Facebook and Google," reports Reuters.

There's a scene in the 1984 Tom Hanks movie Splash "showing a brief glimpse of a naked butt..." notes the Verge, "but people watching the movie on Disney Plus are greeted with an entirely different version of the scene."

And the Verge sees a larger issue: Disney used CGI hair to cover actress Daryl Hannah's body. A Disney representative confirmed to The Verge that a "few scenes" from Splash were "slighted edited to remove nudity," but they did not specify when the edits were made...

Splash has found itself in the middle of an ongoing debate over media being altered in digital spaces. It's a debate that's raged for decades; fans were upset when George Lucas edited A New Hope, making it so Greedo shot first instead of Han. People bemoaned Lucas and 20th Century Fox for not releasing the original version of the film anywhere, either. The only legal versions of A New Hope that exist for people to buy, download, or stream today feature Greedo shooting first. It wasn't just that Lucas and Fox replaced the original scene with a slightly altered one, but the original also wasn't available to purchase when reprints were made...

"As physical media gives way to streaming, large corporations have greater and greater control over what we can and cannot see," Slate's Isaac Butler wrote on the issue. "This gives them unprecedented power to disappear bothersome work.

"Whether we agree with a particular instance of memory-holing or not, this practice is deeply troubling, its history even more so."

The Tor Project's executive director Isabela Bagueros writes: Tor, like much of the world, has been caught up in the COVID-19 crisis. Like many other nonprofits and small businesses, the crisis has hit us hard, and we have had to make some difficult decisions.

We had to let go of 13 great people who helped make Tor available to millions of people around the world. We will move forward with a core team of 22 people, and remain dedicated to continuing our work on Tor Browser and the Tor software ecosystem.

The world won't be the same after this crisis, and the need for privacy and secure access to information will become more urgent. In these times, being online is critical and many people face ongoing obstacles to getting and sharing needed information. We are taking today's difficult steps to ensure the Tor Project continues to exist and our technology stays available.

We are terribly sad to lose such valuable teammates, and we want to let all our users and supporters know that Tor will continue to provide privacy, security, and censorship circumvention services to anyone who needs them.
Mashable reminds its readers that "Those wishing to make sure the specifics of their online browsing remain their own personal business can donate to Tor's non-profit organization.

"Because with more and more of our lives happening online for the foreseeable future, it's a good idea to have an organization working to protect what little digital privacy we have left."

The United Nations has backtracked on a pact with the Chinese telecommunications giant Tencent Holdings to provide videoconferencing and text services for the international organization's 75th anniversary, following backlash from U.S. officials and lawmakers as well as human rights groups. From a report: Critics claim the arrangement rewards a company that has enabled Beijing's digital surveillance efforts and stifled free speech on the internet in China. Late last month, the U.N. sparked a political firestorm when it announced plans to enlist the help of the Chinese social media and video game giant to serve as a platform for an online discussion with millions of netizens around the world on the future of the U.N. in the run-up to its 75th anniversary observance. Over the following weeks, U.S. lawmakers and human rights advocates pressed the U.N. to ditch the deal, saying it would tarnish the international organization's reputation as a champion of free expression and human rights.

In countries where websites, blogs and a free press are strictly limited, Minecraft "is still accessible by everyone," notes the official official web site for Reporters Without Borders (an international nonprofit defending freedom of information): Reporters Without Borders used this backdoor to build "The Uncensored Library": A library that is now accessible on an open server for Minecraft players around the globe. The library is filled with books, containing articles that were censored in their country of origin. These articles are now available again within Minecraft hidden from government surveillance technology inside a computer game. The books can be read by everyone on the server, but their content cannot be changed. The library is growing, with more and more books being added to overcome censorship.

On March 12 — the World Day Against Cyber Censorship — the Uncensored Library will open its doors, giving young people around the world access to independent information, through a medium they can playfully interact with. The campaign runs under the hashtag: #TruthFindsAWay...

Additional to banned articles from journalists, visitors of The Uncensored Library can find the Reporters Sans Frontières World Press Freedom Index and reports on the current press freedom situation of 180 countries in the world.
They spent three months working with the design studio BlockWorks to assemble 12.5 million blocks into a vast structure with a neoclassical architecture.

You can see it in a short film at uncensoredlibrary.com, or access it in Minecraft at visit.uncensoredlibrary.com

Proton Technologies, the company behind encrypted email provider ProtonMail, has announced plans to circumvent censorship by routing connections to its servers through third-party infrastructure, which may include Google -- a company that ProtonMail has long been critical of over its privacy practices. From a report: Proton, which was founded out of Switzerland in 2013 by academic researchers working on particle physics projects at CERN, promises ProtonMail users full privacy via client-side encryption, meaning that nobody can intercept and read their emails -- it has frequently positioned itself as the antithesis of Gmail, which serves as a vital cog in Google's advertising wheel. ProtonMail, on the other hand, has emerged as a prominent privacy-focused alternative, used by companies and individuals -- including White House staffers and activists -- wishing to sidestep snoopers.

Thus, ProtonMail has faced its fair share of censorship, with the likes of Turkey, Belarus, and Russia all blocking the service in recent times. This is something that Proton is now pushing harder to counter with its new backup solution. The new tool, which will be deployed over the next few weeks in the ProtonMail desktop and mobile apps, is designed to sidestep any blocks imposed by network administrators, internet service providers (ISPs), or governments.

As COVID-19 spreads rapidly around the world, people are eager to keep up with developments at its epicentre in Wuhan, China. But government censorship, partisan media and misinformation have led many to feel the public isn't seeing a full picture of life in a city on lockdown. So some have developed a creative solution to bypass the gatekeepers and go straight to the source: Tinder. From a report: Most Tinder users use the app to match with people nearby, for obvious reasons. But the world's most used dating app has a premium feature, Passport, that allows a user with Tinder Plus or Tinder Gold memberships to choose to swipe in any location -- like, say, Wuhan -- no matter where they are. And despite Tinder being banned in China, users say they're having luck setting their location to Wuhan, allowing them to match with and chat to residents to hear their perspective on the global story. US-based Twitter user @drethelin tweeted "Setting my tinder to Wuhan so I can get the real scoop on what's going on" on Jan. 28 -- just before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 was a public health emergency.

A petition with over 350,000 signatures is calling on Pornhub to stop posting non-consensual videos and marketing them as "pornography." Kate Isaacs writes via The Guardian: Pornhub's argument that "extremists" are lobbying to shut them down is ridiculous. I'm non-religious, liberal and sex positive and in no way "anti-porn." I started the #NotYourPorn campaign after a friend had her iCloud account hacked last year. Videos of her and an ex had been stolen from her phone and then uploaded to Pornhub. We have tried to have my friend's videos taken down: we told the company that she was underage, that she didn't consent to being on their website and still it took several weeks to remove it. Unfortunately, by then the damage was already done. When one video had been removed, an identical video with her full name attached would pop back up again. This cycle of reporting the video to Pornhub, delayed removal and subsequent re-uploading continued for months -- until she ended up on Pornhub's top five trending videos in the UK. My friend fell into a state of depression at the knowledge that she had been reduced to a search term, her body packaged up as porn and sold for profit.

Since then I have worked with 50 women who were turned into "porn stars" without their permission -- some of whom were under 18 -- when videos of them were posted on Pornhub without their consent. Before you tell yourself that this would never happen to you (because you wouldn't be so careless as to have a video of yourself like that in the first place) then I'd ask you to consider Catherine's* case. Catherine got in contact with me when she found that her ex had been secretly recording them having sex, and without her knowledge uploading these videos to Pornhub for glory -- and even a cash reward. When Catherine discovered his Pornhub page, she found videos of what appeared to be other unsuspecting victims too, all promoted under "secret recording" categories on the website. Secret recording categories can still be found on Pornhub. "Pornhub hide themselves behind freedom of expression and argue that all sexual fantasies on their site are just that: legitimate fantasies acted out by consenting adults. They have defended the "young teen" and "drunk stolen snapchat" categories as legitimate fantasy protected by freedom of speech," Isaac writes in closing.

"Let me be clear: this isn't about censorship or stifling kinks -- there are plenty of ethical porn companies who have strong systems in place to ensure everyone involved in production is a consenting adult. This is about a huge corporation profiting from non-consensual videos -- and an industry that publishes abusive content with no regulatory body or government holding them to account."

In a scathing editorial, EFF continues to oppose Ethos Capital's plan to buy the PIR's .org domain registry for $1.1 billion, arguing that "the current system is stable and functional, and changing it threatens to introduce instability and dysfunction with no countervailing benefit to the community..."

"[W]hile there is nothing currently wrong with .ORG, there is a lot that could go wrong if this deal moves forward." Ethos and PIR have repeatedly defended the proposed deal by arguing that converting PIR to a privately owned, for-profit enterprise will allow it to offer "new products and services," but without explaining what those new offerings might be. On Thursday, they finally admitted that they actually don't know what additional products and services .ORG registrants want or need, citing a lack of market research...

The for-profit PIR that Ethos envisions would be a fundamentally different organization than today's PIR, and we have serious concerns about its business model and financial stability. Nothing we've heard from PIR and Ethos has convinced us that PIR should be transformed from something that we all know works to something that's unproven. To the contrary, the Ethos deal raises concrete dangers of censorship, financial and technical instability, and price-gouging of non-commercial .ORG registrants. And despite making their case for months, proponents of the deal haven't identified any specific benefits it would impart to .ORG users.

ICANN can, and should, reject this change to the .ORG registry. But that time is running out; ICANN's current deadline to make a decision is Friday, March 20. You can still speak out: the ICANN Board is holding a public forum next week, Monday March 9 at 10am-11:30am Eastern Daylight Time. Anyone can join by videoconference and address the Board.

Chinese social media platforms, including Tencent's WeChat, censored keywords related to coronavirus as early as December [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], potentially limiting the Chinese public's ability to protect themselves from the virus. From a report: Beijing has strictly controlled access to information throughout the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed more than 3,000 people worldwide. Research by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, one of the first reports into information control during the outbreak, say the censorship started in the early stages of the crisis. Authorities blocked a wide range of speech -- including criticism of the central government -- in a bid to control the narrative and manage public sentiment. Public anger over the outbreak, the biggest crisis Xi Jinping has faced since becoming president, has largely been directed towards local rather than central government officials. But critics allege that Beijing's response severely hampered the effort to contain the outbreak. "The broad censorship of the coronavirus we found is significant because blocking general information during a health crisis can limit the public's ability to be informed and protect themselves," said Lotus Ruan, a researcher at Citizen Lab.

When Pakistan's government unveiled some of the world's most sweeping rules on internet censorship this month, global internet companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter were expected to comply or face severe penalties -- including the potential shutdown of their services. Instead, the tech giants banded together and threatened to leave the country and its 70 million internet users in digital darkness. The New York Times: Through a group called the Asia Internet Coalition, they wrote a scathing letter to Pakistan's prime minister, Imran Khan. In it, the companies warned that "the rules as currently written would make it extremely difficult for AIC Members to make their services available to Pakistani users and businesses." Their public rebellion, combined with pressure and lawsuits from local civil libertarians, forced the government to retreat. The law remains on the books, but Pakistani officials pledged this week to review the regulations and undertake an "extensive and broad-based consultation process with all relevant segments of civil society and technology companies." "Because Pakistan does not have any law of data protection, international internet firms are reluctant to comply with the rules," said Usama Khilji, director of Bolo Bhi, an internet rights organization based in Islamabad, the country's capital.

The standoff over Pakistan's digital censorship law, which would give regulators the power to demand the takedown of a wide range of content, is the latest skirmish in an escalating global battle. Facebook, Google and other big tech companies, which have long made their own rules about what is allowed on their services, are increasingly tangling with national governments seeking to curtail internet content that they consider harmful, distasteful or simply a threat to their power. India is expected to unveil new censorship guidelines any day now, including a requirement that encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp tell the government how specific messages moved within their networks. The country has also proposed a new data privacy law that would restrict the activities of tech companies while exempting the government from privacy rules.

Disney-owned Hotstar, India's largest on-demand video streaming service with more than 300 million users, has blocked the newest episode of HBO's "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" that was critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. From a report: The move has angered many of its customers ahead of Disney+'s launch in one of the world's largest entertainment markets next month. In the episode, aired hours before U.S. President Donald Trump's visit to India, Oliver talked about some of the questionable policies enforced by the ruling government in India and recent protests against "controversial figure" Modi's citizenship measures. The 19-minute news recap and commentary sourced its information from credible news outlets. The episode is available to stream in India through HBO's official channel on YouTube, where it has garnered more than 4 million views. Hotstar is the exclusive syndicating partner of HBO, Showtime and ABC in India.

Ethos Capital, the company controversially buying the .org top-level domain, says it will sign legally binding agreements banning steep fee increases for nonprofit domain holders and establishing an independent "stewardship council" that could veto attempts at censorship or inappropriate data use. "The rules would kick in if Ethos successfully acquires Public Interest Registry (PIR), a nonprofit organization that manages .org," reports The Verge. From the report: ICANN, which oversees the internet's top-level domains, is currently scrutinizing the acquisition. President and CEO Goran Marby previously expressed discomfort with the deal, and PIR announced today that it's extending the review period until March 20th. ICANN hasn't yet taken a position on the latest proposal. "We are in the process [of] analyzing the information we have received and therefore have no comment beyond the fact that we welcome Ethos' efforts to engage with the Internet Society community and .org customers, and look forward to the outcome of those discussions," said Marby in a statement to The Verge.

PIR said it would "continue to work collaboratively" to address any outstanding issues with ICANN. In addition to the details above, Ethos and PIR committed to creating a "Community Enablement Fund" to support .org initiatives, and PIR promised to publish an annual transparency report. The price restrictions, meanwhile, would forbid Ethos from raising domain registration and renewal fees by more than 10 percent per year (on average) for the next eight years. Ethos and PIR's press release quotes Sullivan praising the new agreements. "Ethos shows that it has been listening to the questions some have raised. Ethos has responded by embedding its commitments on pricing, censorship and data use policies in a legally-binding contract, and giving ICANN and the community the ability to hold Ethos to its commitments," says the statement.

Mike Godwin, the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, writes in a column: Another thing we clearly got wrong is how large platforms would rise to dominate their markets -- even though they never received the kind of bespoke regulated-monopoly partnership with governments that, generations before, the telephone companies had received. In most of today's democracies, Google dominates search and Facebook dominates social media. In less-democratic nations, counterpart platforms -- like Baidu and Weibo in China or VK in Russia -- dominate their respective markets, but their relationships with the relevant governments are cozier, so their market-dominant status isn't surprising. We didn't see these monopolies and market-dominant players coming, although we should have. Back in the 1990s, we thought that a thousand website flowers would bloom and no single company would be dominant. We know better now, particularly because of the way social media and search engines can built large ecosystems that contain smaller communities -- Facebook's Groups is only the most prominent example. Market-dominant players face temptations that a gaggle of hungry, competitive startups and "long tail" services don't, and we'd have done better in the 1990s if we'd anticipated this kind of consolidation and thought about how we might respond to it as a matter of public policy. We should have -- the concern about monopolies, unfair competition, and market concentration is an old one in most developed countries -- but I have no reflexive reaction either for or against antitrust or other market-regulatory approaches to address this concern, so long as the remedies don't create more problems than they solve.

What's new and more troubling is the revival of the idea, after more than half a century of growing freedom-of-expression protections, that maybe there's just too much free speech. There's a lot to unpack here. In the 1990s, social conservatives wanted more censorship, particularly of sexual content. Progressive activists back then generally wanted less. Today, progressives frequently argue that social media platforms are too tolerant of vile, offensive, hurtful speech, while conservatives commonly insist that the platforms censor too much (or at least censor them too much). Both sides miss obvious points. Those who think there needs to be more top-down censorship from the tech companies imagine that when censorship efforts fail, it means the companies aren't trying hard enough to enforce their content policies. But the reality is that no matter how much money and manpower (plus less-than-perfect "artificial intelligence") Facebook throws at curating hateful or illegal content on its services, and no matter how well-meaning Facebook's intentions are, a user base edging toward 3 billion people is always going to generate hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of false positives every year. On the flip side, those who want to restrict companies' ability to censor content haven't given adequate thought to the consequences of their demands. If Facebook or Twitter became what Sen. Ted Cruz calls a "neutral public forum," for example, they might become 8chan writ large. That's not very likely to make anyone happier with social media.

In 2017 Target bought a same-day home-delivery company called Shipt for $550 million. Shipt now services half of Target's stores, reports Motherboard, and employs more than 100,000 gig workers.

Unfortunately, they're working for a company that "has a track record of censoring and retaliating against workers for asking basic questions about their working conditions or expressing dissent," reports Motherboard. For example, an hour after tweeting about how there was now much more competition for assignments, one Seattle gig worker found their account suddenly "deactivated" — the equivalent of being fired — and also received an email saying they were no longer "eligible to reapply".

"They stamp out resistance by flooding the market with new workers..." complained one Shipt worker, "and they're actively monitoring all the social media groups." On its official national Facebook group, known as the Shipt Shopper Lounge, which has more than 100,000 members, Shipt moderators selected by the company frequently censor and remove posts, turn off comments sections, and ban workers who speak out about their working conditions, according to screenshots, interviews, and other documentation provided to Motherboard. The same is true on local Facebook groups, which Shipt also monitors closely, according to workers. Motherboard spoke to seven current Shipt workers, each of whom described a culture of retaliation, fear, and censorship online...

Because Shipt classifies its workers as contractors, not employees, workers pay for all of their expenses — including gas, wear and tear on their cars, and accidents — out of pocket. They say the tips on large orders from Target, sometimes with hundreds of items, can be meager. Workers say Shipt customers often live in gated and upscale communities and that the app encourages workers to tack on gifts like thank you cards, hot cocoa, flowers, and balloons onto orders (paid for out of their own pocket) and to offer to walk customer's dogs and take out their trash, as a courtesy. Shipt calls this kind of service "Bringing the Magic," which can improve workers' ratings from customers that factor into the algorithm that determines who gets offered the most lucrative orders...
Unfortunately, that new algorithm (which began rolling out last year) is opaque to the workers affected by it — though Gizmodo reported pay appears to be at least 28% lower. And Motherboard heard even higher estimates: "Our best estimate is that payouts are now 30 percent less, and up to 50 percent on orders," one Shipt worker in Kalamazoo with two years under her belt, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, told Motherboard. "I fluctuate between extreme anger and despair. It's been three weeks since this has been implemented, and one of my good friends told me that she's down the equivalent of a car payment."

Another Shipt worker in Palm Springs, California provided Motherboard with receipts for a 181-item order that included six Snapple cases, five La Croix cases, and 12 packs of soda. They had to wheel three shopping carts out of a Ralph's grocery store and deliver them -- and earned $12.68 for the job. The customer did not tip. (Under the older, more transparent pay model, they would have earned $44.19.) "That's a real slap in the face," they told Motherboard.