The COVID-19 crisis has taken the world by surprise, and its effects are widening pre-existing inequalities such as socioeconomical, educational, and digital divides. The gender gap is no exception, and research shows that lockdowns are strongly impacting women, who, on the whole, are more vulnerable to the effects of a crisis. This study analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown in Spain on families, from a gender perspective. To this end, 663 participants related to the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields were recruited to participate in the research through their connection with the Equality Office of the major technical university of Spain, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, which offers most engineering and architecture degrees. The results indicate that the great myths of gender inequality are still alive in Spain, and that a crisis of this nature can perpetuate them. However, the crisis also presents an opportunity for change. Will the STEM careers be prepared to take advantage of this opportunity, or will this crisis end up perpetuating their markedly masculine character? Are we ready for a revolution? The COVID-19 crisis and its learnings about the importance of care can open the path to change.

Editor’s note: This article was written before the publication by the EU Commission of its proposal for an artificial intelligence (AI) regulation [29] . In a first and provisional analysis of the proposed regulation, we observe that the proposed regulation incorporates some of the basic principles laid down in our article: it prioritizes fundamental rights and incorporates some human rights principles, such as accountability, and the inclusion of governance through supervisory authorities to implement and enforce the regulation. Nevertheless, we still feel that many of the suggestions present in our article, which would help to operationalize the regulation, are not addressed. One example is the reduced scope of the regulation to a list of “high risk applications,” leaving without a legal framework all other AI applications. We believe that the principles that inspire the regulation should also be applied in “lower risk applications.” Defining only the compliance process for AI developers, but leaving open the specific technical requirements that these high risk applications shall meet leaves untouched the existing gap between legal language and engineering practice. There are no described mechanisms by which all stakeholders (other than developers and implementers) can influence AI development, monitor their performance or claim redress if harmed. These shortcomings and other issues presented in our article leave the door open to loopholes that we hope the European Parliament can fix during the legislative process.

From the 1970s onward, we started to dream of the leisure society in which, thanks to technological progress and consequent increase in productivity, working hours would be minimized and we would all live in abundance. We all could devote our time almost exclusively to personal relationships, contact with nature, sciences, the arts, playful activities, and so on. Today, this utopia seems more unattainable than it did then. Since the 21st century, we have seen inequalities increasingly accentuated: of the increase in wealth in the United States between 2006 and 2018, adjusted for inflation and population growth, more than 87% went to the richest 10% of the population, and the poorest 50% lost wealth [1] . Following the crisis of 2008, social inequalities, rights violations, planetary degradation, and the climate emergency worsened and increased (see [2] ). In 2019, the world’s 2153 billionaires had more wealth than 4.6 billion people [3] . The World Bank estimates that COVID-19 will push up to 150 million people into extreme poverty [4] .

In an era marked by ubiquitous reliance on mobile applications for nearly every need, the opacity of apps’ behavior poses significant threats to their users’ privacy. Although major data protection regulations require apps to disclose their data practices transparently, previous studies have pointed out difficulties in doing so. To further delve into this issue, this article describes an automated method to capture data-sharing practices in Android apps and assess their proper disclosure according to the EU General Data Protection Regulation. We applied the method to 9,000 random Android apps, unveiling an uncomfortable reality: over 80% of Android applications that transfer personal data off device potentially fail to meet GDPR transparency requirements. We further investigate the role of third-party libraries, shedding light on the source of this problem and pointing towards measures to address it.

La Inteligencia artificial es un reto clave en la cuarta revolución industrial que vivimos. El artículo pretende analizar la compatibilidad de ésta con el derecho a la protección de datos. Para ello se analizan los principios que subyacen a la regulación y se estudia el encaje de las características de la tecnología en los mismos. Se destacan los principales derechos de los sujetos, así como las obligaciones de los responsables de los tratamientos. Especial atención se presta a la discriminación algorítmica en el caso de los perfiles y el marketing político, que supone un reto a evitar por su vulneración del principio de igualdad y justicia en el tratamiento de la información personal. Resulta esencial salvaguardar el derecho a la explicabilidad algorítmica. Se concluye con un análisis de la necesaria regulación que está en fase de discusión en Europa.