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February 25
Understanding Eisenhower’s Warning of Technological Elite Takeover
In June 2019, Susan Gordon stood on a stage at the Washington Convention Center. Behind her loomed three giant letters, “AWS,” the abbreviation for Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of the giant Internet retailer. After three decades at the Central Intelligence Agency, Gordon had risen to one of the top jobs in the cloak-and-dagger world: principal deputy director of national intelligence. From that perch she publicly extolled the virtues of Amazon Web Services and the cloud services the tech giant provides the CIA.
She told the crowd that the intelligence community’s 2013 decision to sign a multi-year, $600 million contract with AWS for cloud computing “will stand as one of those that caused the greatest leap forward. … The investment we made so many years ago in order to be able to try and harness the power of the cloud with a partner who wanted to learn and grow with us has left us not only ready for today but positioned for tomorrow.”
The agreement was also a “real game-changer,” said André Pienaar, founder and CEO of a tech firm called C5 Capital, whose business includes reselling AWS services. “When the CIA said they were going adopt the AWS cloud platform,” Pienaar said at another AWS event. “People said if the U.S. intelligence community has the confidence to feel secure on the AWS cloud, why can’t we?”
COVID Vaccine Passports Are Being Considered. And Health Experts And Rights Groups Are Deeply Concerned.
Public health officials and civil liberty organizations are urging policymakers to resist calls for coronavirus vaccine passports, at a time when many countries are in the process of reviewing whether to introduce digital passes.
The U.S., U.K. and European Union are among those considering whether to introduce a digital passport that will allow citizens to show they have been vaccinated against Covid-19.
The certificate system could be used for traveling abroad, as well as to grant access to venues such as restaurants and bars.
It is thought a digital passport could help stimulate an economic recovery as countries prepare to relax public health measures over the coming weeks. The ailing airline industry, hit particularly hard by the spread of the virus last year, is among those calling for governments to usher in legislation that supports Covid vaccine passports.
Physicians and rights groups, however, are deeply concerned.
Big Tech Regulation: Why It Could Be a Long Road Ahead
Following Facebook’s decision to ban news outlets in Australia, which has since been reversed after the government made media code amendments, the issue of Big Tech regulation has once again been thrust into the public eye.
Tech companies make up five of the six most valuable companies in the world today. Our heavy reliance on Big Tech services, which offer undeniable positives, has only increased during the pandemic, as we work, shop and play online.
The unchecked concentration of power in “digital monopolies” is, however, also having negative impacts on people and businesses, in the form of data practices, content and media control, and misuses of market power. Examples include Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, Covid-19 conspiracy theories running rampant on social media and Google’s preferential ranking of its comparison-shopping service in its search results pages.
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February 24
Former Clinton Adviser Warns U.S. Becoming ‘Totalitarian’ Under Lockdown Orders
A former advisor to Bill Clinton said the United States is becoming a “totalitarian state” due to COVID-19 lockdown orders.
Former Democratic adviser Naomi Wolf, who aided former President Clinton during his second reelection bid, told Fox News on Monday night that the nation is “moving into a coup situation, a police state” as a result of lockdowns.
“That is not a partisan thing,” Wolf told the network. “That transcends everything that you and I might disagree or agree on. That should bring together left and right to protect our Constitution.”
In recent months, Wolf has used her Twitter account to warn about governors’ lockdown orders as well President Joe Biden’s willingness to implement additional shutdowns due to the pandemic.
“The state has now crushed businesses, kept us from gathering in free assembly to worship as the First Amendment provides, is invading our bodies … which is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, restricting movement, fining us in New York state … the violations go on and on,” she said in the Fox News interview.
Wolf further explained that authoritarianism is being implemented under the guise of safety and security.
American Airlines Launches VeriFLY — COVID Passport
American Airlines has announced its new app, VeriFLY, which includes a mobile health wallet to which flyers can upload their health information and vaccination status to get clearance to fly.
An American Airlines YouTube video also invites flyers to get an at-home COVID test (cost is $119) before checking in and boarding as opposed to visiting a local clinic for clearance.
On its website, the airline explains, “When you check in you’ll be asked to confirm you’ve been free of COVID-19 symptoms for the past 14 days. Staying home is the best way to protect yourself and others from getting sick.”
Sheryl Sandberg and Top Facebook Execs Silenced an Enemy of Turkey to Prevent a Hit to the Company’s Business
As Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria in early 2018, Facebook’s top executives faced a political dilemma.
Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People’s Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted. Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments?
It wasn’t a particularly close call for the company’s leadership, newly disclosed emails show.
“I am fine with this,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s No. 2 executive, in a one-sentence message to a team that reviewed the page. Three years later, YPG’s photos and updates about the Turkish military’s brutal attacks on the Kurdish minority in Syria still can’t be viewed by Facebook users inside Turkey.
The conversations, among other internal emails obtained by ProPublica, provide an unusually direct look into how tech giants like Facebook handle censorship requests made by governments that routinely limit what can be said publicly. When the Turkish government attacked the Kurds in the Afrin District of northern Syria, Turkey also arrested hundreds of its own residents for criticizing the operation.
WhatsApp: Users Who Don’t Accept Our New Privacy Policy Won’t Be Able to Read or Send Messages
After causing a huge virtual meltdown with the announcement of its new privacy policy, and then postponing the implementation of said policy due to online fury, WhatsApp has spent the last few weeks trying not to stir up trouble. However, it has just revealed what will happen to users who do not accept its new privacy policy by the May 15 deadline.
WhatsApp has apparently been emailing some of its merchant partners to inform them that it will “slowly ask” users to accept the new privacy policy “in order to have full functionality” of the app, according to TechCrunch, which saw an email and confirmed its veracity with WhatsApp. The email also pointed to a public WhatsApp FAQ page titled, “What happens on the effective date?”
The FAQ page states that WhatsApp will not delete the accounts of users who do not accept the new terms, but that they won’t be able to use it like they normally do.
“If you haven’t accepted by then, WhatsApp will not delete your account. However, you won’t have full functionality of WhatsApp until you accept. For a short time, you’ll be able to receive calls and notifications, but won’t be able to read or send messages from the app,” WhatsApp wrote.
FBI Seized Congressional Cellphone Records Related to Capitol Attack
Within hours of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, the FBI began securing thousands of phone and electronic records connected to people at the scene of the rioting — including some related to members of Congress, raising potentially thorny legal questions.
Using special emergency powers and other measures, the FBI has collected reams of private cellphone data and communications that go beyond the videos that rioters shared widely on social media, according to two sources with knowledge of the collection effort.
In the hours and days after the Capitol riot, the FBI relied in some cases on emergency orders that do not require court authorization in order to quickly secure actual communications from people who were identified at the crime scene. Investigators have also relied on data “dumps” from cellphone towers in the area to provide a map of who was there, allowing them to trace call records — but not content — from the phones.
Prisons Prime Testing Ground for Dehumanizing Hi-tech ‘Advances’
Prisons are among the main targets for its implementation, as they provide an ideal and literally captive market for its proof of concept.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is coming under fire again from Democratic lawmakers, as well as from the American Postal Workers Union, who are calling for President Joe Biden to pave the way for DeJoy’s removal after the Trump-appointee announced higher mailing fees and logistical changes that could further slow down mail. The U.S. Postal Service has already suffered a more than 50% drop in on-time arrivals for first-class mail deliveries, according to the service’s own data.
Nevertheless, thanks to the ubiquitous presence of high-speed internet, the personal communications of most Americans don’t seem to be fundamentally affected by the problems at USPS. Excluding the mail-in-ballots controversy leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the majority of the country remains little more than a curious spectator in what seems to be the inevitable demise of legacy long-distance message-carrying methods in the midst of a blossoming technological wonderland.
But, at least one key American demographic could well prove to be the canary in the coal mine in terms of the implications of a fully digitized mail system. The 2.3 million people currently incarcerated in America’s prison systems could be on the verge of altogether losing the privilege of receiving physical mail from friends and family if the Biden administration does nothing to stop the growing trend of handing over prison mail operations to companies like Smart Communications and its “Postal Mail Elimination” services.
A Digital Firewall in Myanmar, Built With Guns and Wire Cutters
Since the coup, the military has repeatedly shut off the internet and cut access to major social media sites, isolating a country that had only in the past few years linked to the outside world. The military regime has also floated legislation that could criminalize the mildest opinions expressed online.
So far, the Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar military is known, has depended on cruder forms of control to restrict the flow of information. But the army seems serious about setting up a digital fence to more aggressively filter what people see and do online. Developing such a system could take years and would likely require outside help from Beijing or Moscow, according to experts.
Such a comprehensive firewall may also exact a heavy price: The internet outages since the coup have paralyzed a struggling economy. Longer disruptions will damage local business interests and foreign investor confidence as well as the military’s own vast business interests.
“The military is afraid of the online activities of people so they tried to block and shut down the internet,” said Ko Zaw Thurein Tun, a president of a local chapter of the Myanmar Computer Professionals Association. “But now international bank transactions have stopped, and the country’s economy is declining. It’s like their urine is watering their own face.”
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February 22
Techno-Censorship: The Slippery Slope From Censoring ‘Disinformation’ To Silencing Truth
In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.
Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.
This is how it starts.
Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all still applies.
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”
In our case, however, it started with the censors who went after extremists spouting so-called “hate speech,” and few spoke out — because they were not extremists and didn’t want to be shamed for being perceived as politically incorrect.
Then the internet censors got involved and went after extremists spouting “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden, and few spoke out — because they were not extremists and didn’t want to be shunned for appearing to disagree with the majority.
By the time the techno-censors went after extremists spouting “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists.
Still, few spoke out.
Eventually, “we the people” will be the ones in the crosshairs.
White House Enlists Social Media Giants to Suppress Vaccine ‘Misinformation’
The White House is asking Big Tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to “clamp down on chatter that deviates from officially distributed COVID-19 information,” according to the New York Post and other news reports.
Reuters reported that Biden, concerned that “fear about taking the vaccine has emerged as a major impediment” to his administration’s pandemic plan, wants help from the social media moguls to keep “misinformation” from going viral.
“Vaccine hesitancy is a huge obstacle to getting everyone vaccinated and there are no larger players in that than the social media platforms,” a White House source told Reuters late last week.
Biden’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain had previously said information questioning the COVID vaccine has caused others to question the vaccine. But the news out of Washington last week was the first sign that officials are directly engaged with Silicon Valley in censoring social media users, according to Reuters.
“Social media tycoons are now openly serving as government surrogates in censoring factually accurate information that departs from government policies and pronouncements,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., co-founder and chair of Children’s Health Defense.
The Biden administration wants to make sure that unfavorable material does not start trending on social media or become an even broader movement, citing concerns over a recent anti-vaccine protest at Los Angeles Dodgers Stadium which was organized through a Facebook page.
How Oracle Sells Repression in China
Police in China’s Liaoning province were sitting on mounds of data collected through invasive means: financial records, travel information, vehicle registrations, social media, and surveillance camera footage. To make sense of it all, they needed sophisticated analytic software. Enter American business computing giant Oracle, whose products could find relevant data in the police department’s disparate feeds and merge it with information from ongoing investigations.
So explained a China-based Oracle engineer at a developer conference at the company’s California headquarters in 2018. Slides from the presentation, hosted on Oracle’s website, begin with a “case outline” listing four Oracle “product[s] used” by Liaoning police to “do criminal analysis and prediction.” One slide shows Oracle software enabling Liaoning police to create network graphs based on hotel registrations and track down anyone who might be linked to a given suspect. Another shows the software being used to build a police dashboard and create “security case heat map[s].” Apparent pictures of the software interface show a blurred face and various Chinese names. The concluding slide states that the software helped police, whose datasets had been “incomprehensible,” more easily “trace the key people/objects/events” and “identify potential suspect[s]” — which in China often means dissidents.
Oracle representatives have marketed the company’s data analytics for use by police and security industry contractors across China, according to dozens of company documents hosted on its website.
Coronavirus: Americans Could Still Be Wearing Face Masks Into 2022, Fauci Says
Despite predicting Americans would return to a “significant degree of normality” by fall, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that it is also “possible” people may still be wearing masks outside their homes into 2022.
“I want it to keep going down to a baseline that’s so low there is virtually no threat,” Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert and President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser for COVID-19, told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
First Government Launches Green Pass For Vaccinated
The Health Ministry on Thursday launched the long-awaited “Green Pass” certificate which will enable those vaccinated or recovered from the coronavirus to take part in various activities. At the same time, the ministry warned of serious legal penalties for those who falsify the passes.
Health Minister Yuli Edelstein, Ministry Director-General Chezy Levy, and other health officials presented the new certification and demonstrated the methods of issuing the QR-code-secured pass, which has been the target of skepticism following reports demonstrating how easy it is to falsify.
Cabinet ministers on Monday approved the reopening of stores, gyms, hotels, and other venues starting Sunday, in a major easing of sweeping lockdown measures meant to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Street-front shops, malls, markets, museums, and libraries will be open to all Israelis. But only those who have been vaccinated or have recovered from COVID-19 will be able to use gyms and pools, attend sporting and culture events, and stay at hotels.
To be allowed to open Sunday, relevant businesses must undertake to scan for the pass and only accept those carrying it.
Thousands Of Israelis Return To Normal Life With Forged ‘Green Pass’ As Vaccine Refuseniks Otherwise Barred From Venues
Israel will officially reopen businesses from gyms and hotels to malls, museums and libraries on Sunday. However, only those who can prove they have been vaccinated or had COVID-19 will be welcome in the gyms, hotels, and swimming pools, and only they will be allowed to attend sports and cultural events.
But having over 100,000 Israelis buying and selling fake passes on social media, a market the Times of Israel reported on Thursday is already moving at a healthy pace, defeats the purpose of having a vaccine pass. The passes are going for about 750 shekels ($230), according to Haaretz, and even before the businesses reopen their doors can exempt the holder from quarantine.
Bar-Zik went on at length in his post about how easy it would have been to make a secure version using the same kind of digital signature deployed all over the internet in HTTPS and other common protocols and expressed frustration that supposedly tech-forward Israel had not deployed this comparatively ancient technology in a piece of ID considered to be so important. He was far from the only cybersecurity professional to take the news public – the firm Check Point also came forward, sharing a video with Haaretz that even walked the user through the process of faking the Green Pass.
Why Europe’s COVID Vaccine Passports Won’t Work
Almost as soon as authorities in the Mediterranean announced that no one who has not been vaccinated for COVID-19 would be able to visit Sardinia, Cyprus, or the Greek islands this summer, fake vaccine certificates started popping up for sale on the black market for around €100 a piece. And now that Europe’s vaccination program is in full swing and the standardized state-mandated health cards one gets after receiving the COVID jabs are readily available to creative forgers to copy, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how a relatively cheap fake document could allow anyone who hasn’t been able or willing to get the actual vaccine but still wants a sunny beach holiday can sneak past entrance controls.
The president of the European Union Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has adamantly supported the introduction of a “COVID passport” that would allow tourists to bypass quarantines and even invasive brain-tickling swab tests if they can prove they have been inoculated. “It is a medical requirement to have a certificate proving that you have been vaccinated,” she said last week, after a measure was introduced by Greece to make vaccination passports mandatory for E.U. travel, much like it is for those traveling to many African nations to prove they have had a Yellow Fever vaccine.
Facebook Political Ad Ban Blocks Pro-vaccine Messages
Facebook’s efforts to police online ads for vaccine misinformation are unintentionally blocking messages from cities, health care providers and community and faith-based groups promoting COVID shots.
Paid-for messages from at least 110 groups aimed at raising awareness of how the vaccines work or where to get inoculated were flagged and sent to Facebook’s register of political messages, a POLITICO review of barred ads dating from last September shows.Sponsors of the ads have the option of appealing but say the process may prove too burdensome while they deal with the halting distribution of vaccines and respond to new more contagious strains of the virus. That’s led some public health experts to question if Facebook can be a viable forum for information on the pandemic as it faces pressure to combat anti-vaccination forces that have been prevalent on its platform.
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February 19
Drones With Facial Recognition Are Set to Fly
Technocracy News & Trends reported:
Some of the first drones with advanced facial recognition capabilities are being developed by Israeli surveillance companies, as American police consider whether they will soon be adding the controversial technology to their unmanned flying machines.
As a sign of the imminent arrival of biometric identification from the air, an Israeli startup, one previously-funded by Microsoft, has patented technologies for drone-based facial recognition. A patent application, published earlier this month, was filed by Tel Aviv-based AnyVision back in August 2019 in the U.S., detailing tech to help a drone find the best angles for a facial recognition shot, before trying to find a match for the target by referring to faces stored in a database. It was titled, “Adaptive positioning of drones for enhanced facial recognition,” and filed by current and former AnyVision employees, including three from Belfast, U.K.
The patent aims to iron out some of the complexities of identifying faces from a flying machine. Various obvious issues arise when trying to recognize someone from a drone: acquiring an angle at which a face can be properly captured and being able to get good-quality visuals whilst moving or hovering. Both are considerably harder than getting a match from static footage.
Civil Rights Groups Ask Biden Administration to Oppose Facial Recognition
The American Civil Liberties Union and more than 40 other groups urged President Biden in a letter Tuesday to freeze federal use of facial recognition and block federal funds from being used by state and local governments to buy or access the artificial-intelligence tools.
The groups say a Democratic-controlled government will be more receptive to their arguments of the software’s bias and privacy threats than the previous administration.
But the advocates are certain to face resistance from law enforcement and other facial recognition proponents who argue that a technology widely used to unlock phones and confirm travelers’ identities should also be made available to scan for wanted fugitives and investigate crimes.
Reject ‘No COVID Jab, No Job’, Trade Unions Urge Government
Trade unions have urged the government to speak out against “no jab, no job” contracts and warned employers that they could face legal action if they tried to force staff to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
One described the news that companies were consulting lawyers on how to make immunisation compulsory as “disgraceful” and “divisive.” Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the TUC, urged everyone to be vaccinated to support the NHS but added: “The government should make clear that making vaccination a condition of employment is the wrong approach. It may be discriminatory and open up employers to legal challenges. Ministers must remind employers to make sure their workplaces meet COVID-secure guidelines.”
LAPD Sought Ring Home Security Video Related to Black Lives Matter Protests
Emails obtained from the Los Angeles Police Department show that the department sought protest-related footage from Amazon’s Ring home camera systems in the wake of George Floyd’s killing last year, lending credence to years of warnings that pervasive private surveillance networks will enable questionable police practices.
On July 16, 2020, the footage was sought by a detective assigned to an LAPD task force dedicated to investigating “significant crimes committed during the protests and demonstrations,” according to emails obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation via public records request and shared with The Intercept. It’s unclear if the police request, relayed to customers through Amazon’s Ring subsidiary, was directed to a single camera owner or many; contemporaneous emails released by the department show that Ring’s in-house law enforcement liaisons were helping officers use an interface that would allow them to send bulk video requests to specific neighborhoods or broader geographic areas.
“The LAPD ‘Safe L.A. Task Force’ is asking for your help,” reads the message, from detective Gerry Chamberlain. “During recent protests, individuals were injured & property was looted, damaged, and destroyed. In an effort to identify those responsible, we are asking you to submit copies of any video(s) you may have for [redacted].” The request appears to have made no mention of what exactly the LAPD was pursuing; no crime, proven or alleged, is described in the unredacted portion of the request, only that the police wanted footage of an unspecified “incident” related to a protest. The redacted portion of the request does not appear to contain any substantive further description.
COVID Vaccine Passports Could Discriminate, Experts Warn
COVID-19 vaccine passports are “feasible” but not until we know more about how long immunity lasts, experts have said.
And they have the potential to discriminate against the young, pregnant or those who can’t have the jab for medical reasons.
This must be factored into any such scheme before launching, according to a Royal Society report.
It sets out 12 tests which should be met by any vaccine passport plan.
The criteria include having a way of accommodating “changes in vaccine efficacy against emerging variants.”
And a vaccine passport would need to meet ethical and legal standards including around data protection, human rights and equality and discrimination laws.
It is also vital to be clear about what the passports would be used for, whether that’s international travel or greater domestic freedoms, the report outlined.
House to Grill Facebook, Google, Twitter CEOs as Washington Seeks to Crack Down on Disinformation, Antitrust
The first hearing, to be held by the House Energy and Commerce Committee on March 25, marks the latest congressional inquiry featuring Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Democrats who lead the panel said Thursday the social media sites had allowed misinformation to spread with “real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety,” potentially alluding to the deadly riot that enveloped the U.S. Capitol last month.
“For far too long, big tech has failed to acknowledge the role they’ve played in fomenting and elevating blatantly false information to its online audiences. Industry self-regulation has failed,” Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) and other panel leaders said. “We must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.”
A second panel of lawmakers — the House Judiciary Committee — announced Thursday it would begin its own sweeping effort to crack down on big tech. Lawmakers said they would start legislative hearings next week to explore the extent to which Silicon Valley relies on its social networks, app stores and other services as choke points against competitors.
A Clearview AI Patent Application Describes Facial Recognition for Dating, and Identifying Drug Users and Homeless People
Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that claims it’s scraped 3 billion images from the internet to power its face-matching system, has proposed applying its technology to everything from policing to retail to dating, according to a 2020 patent application that became public on Thursday.
The patent filing was made in August — three months after the company said in a federal court that it would take voluntary actions to “avoid transacting with non-governmental customers anywhere.” The patent application, however, describes ways to apply its facial recognition software to the private sector as well as to law enforcement and social work, where it says it could be used to possibly identify people who use drugs or people experiencing homelessness.
Thousands of Israelis Return to Normal Life With Forged ‘Green Pass’ as Vaccine Refuseniks Otherwise Barred From Venues
Israel will officially reopen businesses from gyms and hotels to malls, museums and libraries on Sunday. However, only those who can prove they have been vaccinated or had COVID-19 will be welcome in the gyms, hotels, and swimming pools, and only they will be allowed to attend sports and cultural events.
But having over 100,000 Israelis buying and selling fake passes on social media, a market the Times of Israel reported on Thursday is already moving at a healthy pace, defeats the purpose of having a vaccine pass. The passes are going for about 750 shekels ($230), according to Haaretz, and even before the businesses reopen their doors can exempt the holder from quarantine.
Bar-Zik went on at length in his post about how easy it would have been to make a secure version using the same kind of digital signature deployed all over the internet in HTTPS and other common protocols and expressed frustration that supposedly tech-forward Israel had not deployed this comparatively ancient technology in a piece of ID considered to be so important.
What Place Should COVID-19 Vaccine Passports Have in Society?
Ada Lovelace Institute reported:
The expert deliberation found that:
- At present, vaccination status does not offer clear or conclusive evidence about any individual’s risk to others via transmission, so cannot be a robust basis for risk-based decision making, and therefore any roll-out of a digital passport is not currently justified.
- However, given that evidence on transmission will emerge, and other countries and companies are developing such systems, the UK Government must act urgently to address the public policy issues that arise, and create clear and specific guidelines and law around any appropriate uses, mechanisms for enforcement and methods of legal redress.
- While vaccine passports will be seen by some as a way to increase freedom, for those without a passport they would constitute a denial of liberties that others are being granted. Therefore the justifications both for the relaxation of current restrictions for some and also for their continuation for others should be clearly articulated.
- The Government will need to take a clear position outlining the specific purposes and use cases for which, if any, vaccine passports can be legally and legitimately used.
In allowing some uses or actively facilitating vaccine passport apps, governments must address the issues and risks arising from such schemes or the creation of related digital infrastructure, and whether and how these risks could be mitigated.
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February 18
Instagram Announces Policing of Private Direct Messages, Law Enforcement Team-Up in Latest ‘Hate Speech’ Crackdown
Instagram announced last week that they will begin policing private messages in their latest crackdown on so-called “hate speech.”
Citing “targeted footballers in the UK,” the platform announced Wednesday that they will be taking “more steps” “to help prevent” abuse and hate speech in direct messages:
“So today we’re announcing some new measures, including removing the accounts of people who send abusive messages, and developing new controls to help reduce the abuse people see in their DMs.”
The platform’s “stance on hate speech” includes a zero tolerance policy for “attacks on people based on their protected characteristics, including race or religion.”
“We strengthened these rules last year, banning more implicit forms of hate speech, like content depicting Blackface and common antisemitic tropes,” Instagram said. The company bragged that they “took action on 6.5 million pieces of hate speech on Instagram, including in DMs, 95% of which we found before anyone reported it” between July and September of last year.
‘We Need a Fundamental Reset.’ Shoshana Zuboff on Building an Internet That Lets Democracy Flourish
Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, argues the threat to our democracy won’t recede unless we address the fundamental flaws of the business model that companies like Google and Facebook have ridden to market dominance — a model built on extracting data about our behaviors, and using the insights from those data to manipulate us. Zuboff spoke to TIME on what to expect from the next 10 years.
The details of the algorithms used by big tech platforms are known to nobody outside the companies that operate them. How do you begin to regulate something like that?
We have backed ourselves into an untenable social framework, where a few giant companies own and operate the Internet. The companies are black boxes, outside of societal influence and democratic control. Their surveillance economics compel them to extract data from our lives at a massive scale. They simply claimed the right to treat our private lives as raw material for their profit. The data come from us, but they are not for us. The more they track us and engage us, the more data they gather, the better they can target, manipulate, and predict future behavior — insights that they sell to lucrative markets of business customers. Algorithms are engineered to amplify the most extreme, angry, toxic content, drawing people in to maximize data extraction.
The Internet Is Splintering
We probably don’t want internet companies deciding on the freedoms of billions of people, but we may not want governments to have unquestioned authority, either.
Some Germans might agree with a law that prohibits online posts that their government views as hate speech. But what about the Germans who feel they’re shut down for expressing such views? And what should Facebook or Google do if an increasingly authoritarian government in Turkey uses similar rules to silence its citizens, or if Poland’s anti-censorship law lets politicians smear their constituents?
Regulating online expression in any single country — let alone in the world — is a messy set of trade offs with no easy solutions. Let me lay out some of the issues:
The “splinternet” is here: The utopian idea of the internet was that it would help tear down national boundaries, but technology watchers have been warning for decades that it could instead build those barriers even higher. That vision, often called the “splinternet,” is real, said Mishi Choudhary, a lawyer who started an organization in India representing the rights of internet users and software developers.
Ron Desantis Announces Second Skirmish in ‘Big Tech’ Battle With Data Privacy Bill
Two weeks after unveiling Republicans’ proposal cracking down on social media companies, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the sequel — legislation to protect Floridians’ personal information from big tech.
The Governor announced the second part of his priority Monday alongside Lt. Gov. Jeanette Núñez, House Speaker Chris Sprowls and Rep. Fiona McFarland, the Sarasota Republican who is sponsoring the bill (HB 969).
The bill would guarantee Floridians the right to find out what information companies have on them, to have the companies delete the data, to ask companies not to sell the data and to sue businesses that violate those protections.
“The Big Tech platforms have created a surveillance economy, which enriches those platforms by free-riding on consumer data,” DeSantis said.
Earlier this month, DeSantis and Sprowls announced a bill titled the Transparency in Technology Act to protect Floridians’ right to use social media platforms, a crackdown on what he called the “big tech cartel.” That includes a daily $100,000 fine for “de-platforming” candidates for office, such as when Twitter and other sites banned former President Donald Trump.
Italy Fines Facebook 7 Mn Euros Over Data Protection
Italy’s antitrust regulator announced Wednesday a new fine of 7.0 million euros ($8.45 million) against Facebook for misleading conduct on data protection.
According to the authority, known as AGCM, the U.S. social media giant fails to properly inform users about how it collects and uses their data for commercial purposes.
AGCM had already fined Facebook 5.0 million euros in 2018, charging it with unfair trading practices, and ordered it to take corrective action.
Wednesday’s second fine came because the U.S. company ignored orders to alter its practices as requested, the Italian regulator said.
Even if Facebook no longer advertises itself as free, “immediate and clear information on the collection and use of user data for commercial purposes is still not provided,” AGCM said.
“This is information that the consumer needs to decide whether to join the service, in light of the economic value for Facebook of the data provided by the user, which represents payment for the use of the service.”
Big Tech’s Next Big Problem Could Come From People Like ‘Mr. Sweepy’
Google is facing antitrust cases from Europe’s top competition enforcer, the Justice Department and attorneys general from more than 30 states and territories.
Then there are the lawsuits from people like Mr. Sweepy.
The operator of a website called Sweepstakes Today, Mr. Sweepy — a nickname used by Craig McDaniel — says Google used its power over online advertising to bleed his website dry. In December, he filed a lawsuit against Google, saying he was entitled to “substantial” damages.
His case is one of what is expected to be a host of private antitrust lawsuits stemming from the government cases against Google and Facebook.
Technocracy Set to Compete With U.S. Rule of Law in Nevada Desert
Technocracy News and Trends reported:
In the Nevada desert, a cryptocurrency magnate hopes to turn dreams of a futuristic “smart city” into reality. To do that, he’s asking the state to let companies like his form local governments on land they own, which would grant them power over everything from schools to law enforcement.
Jeffrey Berns, CEO of Nevada-based Blockchains LLC, envisions a city where people not only purchase goods and services with digital currency but also log their entire online footprint — financial statements, medical records and personal data — on blockchain. Blockchain is a digital ledger known mostly for recording cryptocurrency transactions but also has been adopted by some local governments for everything from documenting marriage licenses to facilitating elections.
The company wants to break ground by 2022 in rural Storey County, 12 miles (19 kilometers) east of Reno. It’s proposing to build 15,000 homes and 33 million square feet (3 million square meters) of commercial and industrial space within 75 years. Berns, whose idea is the basis for draft legislation that some lawmakers saw behind closed doors last week, said traditional government doesn’t offer enough flexibility to create a community where people can invent new uses for this technology.
North Korea Reportedly Tried to Hack Pfizer To Steal COVID-19 Vaccine Tech
North Korea reportedly attempted to hack pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to steal coronavirus vaccine and treatment information. South Korea’s intelligence agency informed lawmakers of its findings during a closed-door session on Tuesday, according to multiple media reports.
“There were attempts to steal COVID vaccine and treatment technology during cyber attacks and Pfizer was hacked,” said Ha Tae-keung, a member of South Korea’s parliamentary intelligence committee, according to Reuters. It’s unclear when the hack occurred or whether it was successful.
Pfizer didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In Surprise Move, Facebook Blocks News Access in Australia
In a surprise retaliatory move Thursday, Facebook blocked Australians from sharing news stories, escalating a fight with the government over whether powerful tech companies should have to pay news organizations for content.
Australia’s government condemned the step, which also blocked some government communications, including messages about emergency services, and some commercial pages.
The digital platforms fear that what’s happening in Australia will become an expensive precedent for other countries as governments revamp laws to catch up with the fast changing digital world.
Facebook acted after the House of Representatives passed legislation that would make it and Google pay for Australian journalism, said Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. He said he was given no warning before Facebook acted. The legislation must be passed by the Senate to become law.
Spain Betting on Vaccine Passports To Revive Summer Tourism
Spain hopes the introduction of vaccination passports combined with pre-travel COVID-19 testing will allow British tourists to return to Spanish destinations this summer, a tourism ministry source told Reuters on Tuesday.
“We support the vaccination certificate but not as the only way to recuperate mobility, rather, as one of the means within a portfolio of measures including social distancing, pre-travel tests, mask-wearing,” the source said.
The government has no plans to introduce quarantines on foreign visitors, and was also counting on a wider agreement to be hammered out between Europe and Britain to remove restrictions on non-essential travel, the official added.
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February 16
Banks Will Soon Only Provide Loans to the Vaxxed
If the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gets its way, it won’t be long before you won’t be able to buy, sell or borrow without meeting certain lifestyle criteria — rules that could even lead to mandatory vaccines if you want to be able to take out a loan.
The IMF is a worldwide banking system based in Washington, D.C., that directs the flow of money throughout 190 countries. While its stated purpose is to “ensure the stability of the international monetary system,” the IMF has a new goal of controlling individuals’ banking transactions.
Specifically, the IMF is pointing toward the use of technology as a way to determine creditworthiness based on customers’ online activities. The new technology essentially would create a “social” credit system not unlike what China is already rolling out.
Ultimately, the social credit system could restrict customers’ access to their own money, as well as the ability to borrow money, all based on how their digital lives are rated and scored — and those scores quite possibly could be negatively affected for anyone refusing to differ with the opinion of the ruling class.
The bottom line is if those in power decide everyone should have every vaccine that comes along, those who don’t comply could have their banking services restricted or even blocked.
Vaccine Refusers Will Be Kept to ‘Supermarkets, Pharmacies’ When Israel Opens Up
The Health Ministry is reportedly planning to clamp down on Israelis who refuse to vaccinate against the coronavirus and impose severe sanctions on businesses that accept unvaccinated customers and on individuals who forge a document that says they have been vaccinated.
According to a Channel 12 news report Thursday night, Health Minister Yuli Edelstein wants to encourage widespread vaccination by offering advantages to those who take the shot, and also by limiting the options of those who don’t.
“Whoever doesn’t vaccinate will only go out to supermarkets or pharmacies, while the vaccinated will go to stadiums and gyms,” Edelstein was quoted as saying.
Parler Says It’s Back Without ‘Big Tech’ After Being Kicked Off Amazon
Parler.com is getting back online after being kicked off Amazon’s hosting service, with the controversial social network saying it no longer relies on “Big Tech” for its Web infrastructure. A Parler announcement today said its relaunched website is “built on sustainable, independent technology and not reliant on so-called ‘Big Tech’ for its operations.”
Amazon cut off Parler’s Web-hosting service on January 10, a few days after a Trump-incited mob stormed the US Capitol, saying that “Parler cannot comply with our terms of service and poses a very real risk to public safety.” Parler sued Amazon in response, but a federal judge denied Parler’s request for a preliminary injunction that would have forced Amazon to reinstate its services.
Now, Parler is using hosting services from a company called SkySilk. Parler said its site is available this week only to users who already had accounts. New users, on the other hand, will be able to sign up next week. While existing users can now log in to Parler, their old posts have been removed from the site, TechCrunch reported.
“When Parler was taken offline in January by those who desire to silence tens of millions of Americans, our team came together, determined to keep our promise to our highly engaged community that we would return stronger than ever. We’re thrilled to welcome everyone back,” Parler interim CEO Mark Meckler said in the announcement.
Peru’s Foreign Minister Resigns in Furor Over Secret Vaccination of Government Officials
Peru’s foreign minister has stepped down amid a furor over government officials being vaccinated against the coronavirus, even before the country began rolling out doses to health care workers.
President Francisco Sagasti said that he had accepted Elizabeth Astete’s resignation and an investigation was under way into other senior public officials who had received early doses of the Covid-19 vaccine.
Deputy health minister Luis Suárez Ognio has also resigned over reports that he got vaccinated ahead of health care workers.
The scandal broke on Thursday when Peru’s former president Martin Vizcarra, who was ousted from office on November 9 over corruption allegations, confirmed a report that he and his wife had received shots of a vaccine from the Chinese state pharmaceutical company Sinopharm in October.
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February 12
Outdoor Exercise Banned in UC Berkeley COVID-19 Lockdown
All students living in dorm-style residence halls were ordered to “self-sequester” in the lockdown initially put in place from Feb. 1-8. This week, school officials extended the lockdown through at least Feb. 15.
Students are required to stay in their rooms at all times with the exception of seeking medical care, using the bathroom or picking up food from dining kiosks, according to an email sent to students. Students may also leave their rooms for required COVID-19 tests twice weekly.
“You may NOT leave your room for solo outdoor exercise,” said the email, noting it was a change from the previous week’s rules. “We are working with the City of Berkeley to determine whether outdoor exercise may be permitted, and we will provide more information on this in the near future.”
The ban on outdoor activities goes beyond strict guidelines issued by the state. Gov. Gavin Newsom has encouraged outdoor exercise, even during strict lockdown periods.
Gov’t Should Fire Healthcare Workers Who Refuse Vaccination: Canadian Medical Journal
Provincial governments in Canada should mandate that healthcare workers who refuse to receive a COVID vaccine be sent home, according to three University of Ottawa law professors writing in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) this week.
Forcing people to be vaccinated would be a clear violation of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, law professors Colleen Boyd, Bryan Thomas, and Kumanan Wilson admit in their legal analysis of the issue published Monday. Since the Charter does not protect “economic interests and specifically the ‘right to work’,” however, it would be difficult for workers who don’t want the shot to keep their jobs if they refuse it, according to the law professors.
The policy is referred to in the United Kingdom and Australia as “no jab, no job.”
Now, questions about whether employers can fire workers who refuse experimental COVID-19 vaccines which are still in Phase III of their clinical trials have come to Canada, where a growing number of employees are wondering if their employers can mandate injections. Can the government strong-arm frontline healthcare workers into taking the shot? Will mandates affect teachers and students, plant workers and travelers? With “vaccine passports” and “digital vaccine IDs” for shopping and entertainment, as well as “vaccine incentive programs” emerging, how hard will it become to decline an injection?
Recent polls say about one in four Canadians do not want a coronavirus shot, and only 36% of Canadians said they would be willing to roll up a sleeve for one immediately; the rest would prefer to wait at least a few months to see more data.
We Asked 175 Pediatric Disease Experts if It Was Safe Enough to Open School
Many of the common preconditions to opening schools — including vaccines for teachers or students, and low rates of infection in the community — are not necessary to safely teach children in person, a consensus of pediatric infectious disease experts said in a new survey.
Instead, the 175 experts — mostly pediatricians focused on public health — largely agreed that it was safe enough for schools to be open to elementary students for full-time and in-person instruction now. Some said that was true even in communities where COVID-19 infections were widespread, as long as basic safety measures were taken. Most important, they said, were universal masking, physical distancing, adequate ventilation and avoidance of large group activities.
“There is no situation in which schools can’t be open unless they have evidence of in-school transmission,” said Dr. David Rosen, an assistant professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Washington University in St. Louis.
The risks of being out of school were far greater, many of the experts said. “The mental health crisis caused by school closing will be a worse pandemic than COVID,” said Dr. Uzma Hasan, division chief of pediatric infectious diseases at RWJBarnabas Health in New Jersey.
For the most part, these responses match current federal guidance, which does not mention vaccines, and reflect significant scientific evidence that schools are not a major source of spread for children or adults. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to release new recommendations Friday on how schools can safely operate, and the Biden administration has prioritized opening schools.
MLB Players To Wear Electronic Contact Tracing Wristbands During Spring Training
Major League Baseball players, on-field staff and non-playing personnel who require access to them at ballparks must wear electronic tracing wristbands from the start of spring training and face discipline for violations.
Players will be encouraged to get vaccines but are not required to get them.
That was part of upgraded health protocols agreed to by Major League Baseball and the players’ association to deal with the novel coronavirus pandemic.
The 108-page operations manual, agreed to Monday night and obtained by The Associated Press, expands on the 101-page version used during the shortened 2020 season.
“Every covered Individual must wear a Kinexon contact tracing device at all times while in club facilities and during club directed travel and while engaged in team activities, including group workouts and practices,” the manual says. “Repeated failure to wear the devices or repeated failure to return the devices to the Kinexon device docking station may be a basis for discipline,” the manual says.
The manual states violations of the MLB or club codes of conduct or of spring training home quarantine “are subject to potential discipline, including but not limited to suspension or forfeiture of salary for days spent away from the club while in mandatory self-isolation or quarantine resulting from the violation.”
Player discipline would be subject to the just cause provisions of the collective bargaining agreement.
CDC Considering Classifying Schools Into Color-coded Zones
The Biden administration’s guidelines for reopening schools is expected to include recommendations for phased reopening based on rates of community transmission, according to a draft internal summary by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention obtained by CBS News on Thursday.
This phased approach for reopening provides recommendations for types of instruction for K-12 schools: full in-person, hybrid, reduced attendance, and virtual-only. These will be broken into four color-coded “zones” based on coronavirus prevalence in the area.
The summary of the guidance obtained by CBS News does not stipulate the rates of community spread that determine who qualifies for each zone.
K-12 Schools are in the “Blue” zone if they have low community spread, and in the “Yellow” zone, with moderate transmission. Blue and Yellow Zones are recommended to allow for a reopening with full in-person learning, with as much social distancing as possible. Schools in the “Orange” zone, which are classified as having substantial transmission, are recommended to have hybrid learning or reduced attendance, with required social distancing.
“Red” zone schools are broken into two categories: Those that engage in regular screening testing of asymptomatic staff and students, and those that do not. “Red” zone schools that do not test should have hybrid learning or reduced attendance with mandatory physical distancing in elementary schools only; middle and high schools should be virtual-only. Schools that conduct screening testing can have hybrid learning or reduced attendance for all elementary, middle, and high schools, with required social distancing, according to the draft summary of the guidelines.
Why Is Facebook Rejecting These Fashion Ads?
Earlier this year Mighty Well, an adaptive clothing company that makes fashionable gear for people with disabilities, did something many newish brands do: It tried to place an ad for one of its most popular products on Facebook.
The product in question was a gray zip-up hoodie ($39.95) with the message: “I am immunocompromised — Please give me space.” The “immunocompromised” was in a white rectangle, kind of like Supreme’s red one. It has rave customer reviews on the company’s website.
Facebook — or rather, Facebook’s automated advertising center — did not like the ad quite so much.
It was rejected for violating policy — specifically, the promotion of “medical and health care products and services including medical devices,” though it included no such products. Mighty Well appealed the decision, and after some delay, the ruling changed.
Apple Watch Can Detect COVID-19 a Week Early, Study Finds
In the early days of the pandemic, dozens of researchers launched studies trying to see whether wearables of all sorts could potentially identify COVID-19 before symptoms began. In one such study, researchers from Mount Sinai discovered that the Apple Watch was capable of detecting the onset of COVID-19 up to seven days before current testing methods.
The study, which was published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, studied the impact of COVID-19 on several hundred healthcare workers at Mount Sinai Health System between April and September of last year. All participants wore an Apple Watch and answered daily surveys about symptoms via an app. The researchers then observed changes in the participants’ heart rate variability (HRV), which measures the changes in heartbeat and is an indicator of your autonomic nervous system.
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February 11
A Button That Tells Your Boss You’re Unhappy: Why Mental Health Wearables Could Be Bad News at Work
With gyms closed and millions cooped up and restless at home, it’s little wonder that “healthtech” is now being billed as the next big battleground over which the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google will fight. Chief among their products are wearable devices that measure your heart rate, your step count, and dozens of other data points that keep you informed about your physical health.
The increasing prevalence of these devices is to be welcomed. They help people track their workouts, setting quantifiable goals that can help them stay fit and healthy.
But the introduction of wearables that measure our mental health — like employee mood tracker “Moodbeam” — should be greeted with a more cautious optimism. Such devices will, after all, hold some of our most personal data — and constantly logging our emotional state might even be counterproductive in helping us achieve better mental health.
RFK Jr. Responds to Instagram’s Removal of His Account
Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Instagram account was deplatformed without advanced notice. Dozens of media outlets reporting on this censorship asserted the account was removed over “false COVID vaccine claims” or “vaccine misinformation.” Some reports referred to Kennedy as an “anti-vaxxer.”
Kennedy founder, chairman and chief legal counsel of Children’s Health Defense,” unequivocally rejects those characterizations as false and misleading.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD), including Kennedy advocates for vaccine safety and health freedom. CHD’s mission is to end childhood health epidemics by exposing the causes, eliminating harmful exposures, holding those responsible accountable and seeking justice for those harmed.
As Kennedy has said many times, for a democracy to function, civil debate of issues — including vaccine science — must be allowed. Censorship of that debate is anathema to democracy.
German Court: Google Can’t Favor Government’s Health Website
Topping Google‘s search rankings is the dream of online publishers far and wide. Germany’s government found a shortcut to the summit for its new health website, but a court in Munich has dragged it back down for now.
In November, Google and the Health Ministry launched a cooperation to steer German-language searches about the 160 most common illnesses to a government-funded website.
“Anyone who Googles about their health should land on our government site, and find the information that they need there,” Health Minister Jens Spahn told reporters, standing alongside Google’s vice president for Central Europe, Philipp Justus. Though the plan predated the pandemic, Spahn said COVID-19 had highlighted its importance “as if through a magnifying glass.”
“Gesund.bund.de should become the central port of call for reliable health information on the internet,” he said.
But a state court in Munich provisionally shot down the deal on Wednesday.
In essence, it found that the ministry’s bid to secure prominence for its information had been too successful, putting private providers of health information at an unfair disadvantage.
Hubert Burda Media, the company behind the NetDoktor.de website that tops many health search rankings on Google in German, filed the lawsuit. Hubert Burda was a longstanding president of the Association of German Magazine Publishers (the VDZ). Its managing director, Stephan Scherzer, told DW that the decision was a “meaningful step to securing a free press” in Germany.
Judge Gesa Lutz warned in her ruling that Google and the Health Ministry teaming up could put “serious private health websites” at risk financially and thus threaten “a reduction in freedom of the press and of opinion.” She also found that Burda had adequately demonstrated that their case was urgent and that the deal was already hurting traffic and their bottom line.
Airline Industry Fiercely Opposed to Mandatory COVID Tests for Domestic Flights
Portland Press Herald reported:
In an interview broadcast Sunday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told Axios on HBO there is an “active conversation” with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about whether to require coronavirus testing for domestic flights. Pressed Monday in a CNN interview on the likelihood of that happening, Buttigieg said “the CDC is looking at all its options.”
The federal government already requires international travelers to be tested before they board flights to the United States — a mandate that drew praise from many in the aviation industry. But requiring tests for domestic travelers raises a different set of challenges for the administration.
Fully Vaccinated People Can Skip COVID Quarantines, CDC Says
“Vaccinated persons with an exposure to someone with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 are not required to quarantine if they meet all of the following criteria,” the CDC added.
The criteria: They must be fully vaccinated — having had both shots with at least two weeks having passed since the second shot. That’s because it takes two weeks to build full immunity after the second dose of vaccine.
But the CDC says it’s not known how long protection lasts, so people who had their last shot three months ago or more should still quarantine if they are exposed. They also should quarantine if they show symptoms, the CDC said.
“This recommendation to waive quarantine for people with vaccine-derived immunity aligns with quarantine recommendations for those with natural immunity, which eases implementation,” the CDC said. The agency will update guidance as more is learned.
Facebook Dials Down the Politics for Users
After inflaming political discourse around the globe, Facebook is trying to turn down the temperature.
The social network announced on Wednesday that it had started changing its algorithm to reduce the political content in users’ news feeds. The less political feed will be tested on a fraction of Facebook’s users in Canada, Brazil and Indonesia beginning this week, and will be expanded to the United States in the coming weeks, the company said.
“During these initial tests we’ll explore a variety of ways to rank political content in people’s feeds using different signals, and then decide on the approaches we’ll use going forward,” Aastha Gupta, a Facebook product management director, wrote in a blog post announcing the test.
Facebook previewed the change last month when Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, said the company was experimenting with ways to tamp down divisive political debates among users.
Forget 5G, the U.S. and China Are Already Fighting for 6G Dominance
For companies and governments, the stakes couldn’t be higher. The first to develop and patent 6G will be the biggest winners in what some call the next industrial revolution. Though still at least a decade away from becoming reality, 6G — which could be up to 100 times faster than the peak speed of 5G — could deliver the kind of technology that’s long been the stuff of science fiction, from real-time holograms to flying taxis and internet-connected human bodies and brains.
The scrum for 6G is already intensifying even as it remains a theoretical proposition, and underscores how geopolitics is fueling technological rivalries, particularly between the U.S. and China.
“This endeavor is so important that it’s become an arms race to some extent,” said Peter Vetter, head of access and devices at Nokia Oyj’s research arm Bell Labs. “It will require an army of researchers on it to remain competitive.”
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February 9
Facebook Will Now Take Down Posts Claiming Vaccines Cause Autism
Facebook is expanding what false claims it will remove from its platforms related to COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines, and vaccines in general starting today. The company began removing debunked COVID-19 claims in December of last year and notifying customers when they had interacted with a post that has false information that same month. But now the list of potential claims that could get a post removed has grown.
Highlights from the new expanded list of false COVID-19 and vaccine-related claims that will be removed include:
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- COVID-19 is man-made
- Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they were created to protect against
- It’s safer to get a disease than to get its vaccine
- Vaccines are dangerous, toxic, or cause autism
Facebook says it will start enforcing this policy immediately, focusing on groups, pages, and accounts that share content from its new list of debunked claims. The company also says it would consider removing the sources of the posts entirely if they became repeat offenders.
What Jeff Bezos Hath Wrought
If I had to guess who inspired Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, to kick himself upstairs and appoint Andy Jassy, a deputy, as his successor as chief executive, I might wager that at least part of the blame can be laid on Lucy McBath, the freshman Georgia congresswoman, and her understated grilling of one of the world’s richest men at a July hearing held by the House antitrust subcommittee.
At the hearing, widely regarded as a watershed moment for America’s tech giants, most of the subcommittee members — and all the Democrats — had coalesced around a consensus: The business models of the four biggest tech companies depend on cementing and exploiting their statuses as gatekeepers to the internet, and scheming to bring down anyone who threatens their power to exact ever higher tolls on every minute we spend on the internet.
Only Mr. Bezos, however, had explicitly set out to become a ubiquitous “middleman” of all internet commerce. So most of the lawmakers pushed him to admit that he had systematically bought rivals and lost money selling goods and services below cost solely to destroy the competition, in violation of numerous federal laws that had long gone unenforced — or, as the antitrust scholar Lina Khan has put it, “charted the company’s growth by first drawing a map of antitrust laws, and then devising routes to smoothly bypass them.”
Travellers Face £1,750 Cost for England Quarantine Hotels
Travellers having to stay in quarantine hotels in England will be charged £1,750 for their stay, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has announced.The measures apply to UK and Irish residents returning from 33 so-called red list countries.
Those who fail to quarantine in a government sanctioned-hotel face fines of up to £10,000, Mr Hancock said.
And those who lie on their passenger locator forms about visiting a red list country face up to 10 years in jail.
Mr Hancock said similar measures were being looked at for the devolved nations.
He told the Commons 16 hotels have been contracted for the programme, which begins on Monday.
In China, an App Offered Space for Debate. Then the Censors Came.
One by one, the chatroom participants took the digital microphone as thousands quietly listened in.
A Chinese man said he did not know whether to believe the widespread reports of concentration camps for Muslims in the far western region of Xinjiang. Then a Uighur woman spoke up, calmly explaining that she was certain of the camps’ existence because her relatives had been among those interned. A man from Taiwan chimed in to urge understanding on all sides, while another from Hong Kong praised the woman for her courage in coming forward.
It was a rare moment of cross-border dialogue with people on the mainland of China, who are usually separated from the rest of the online world by the Great Firewall. For a short time, they found an open forum on the social media app, Clubhouse, to discuss contentious topics, free from the usual constraints of the country’s tightly controlled internet.
By Monday evening, the inevitable happened: The Chinese censors moved in. Many mainland users reported receiving error messages when they tried to use the platform. Some said they could only access the app by tunneling through the digital border using a VPN, or virtual private network. Within hours, more than a thousand users had tuned in to hear a discussion about the ban in a chatroom titled “Walled off, so now what?” Searches for “Clubhouse” on the popular Chinese social media platform Weibo were blocked.
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February 8
Coming Soon: The ‘Vaccine Passport’
One of President Biden’s executive orders aimed at curbing the pandemic asks government agencies to “assess the feasibility” of linking coronavirus vaccine certificates with other vaccination documents, and producing digital versions of them.
Denmark’s government said on Wednesday that in the next three to four months, it will roll out a digital passport that will allow citizens to show they have been vaccinated.
It isn’t just governments that are suggesting vaccine passports. In a few weeks, Etihad Airways and Emirates will start using a digital travel pass, developed by the International Air Transport Association, to help passengers manage their travel plans and provide airlines and governments documentation that they have been vaccinated or tested for Covid-19.
Clearview’s Facial Recognition Tech Is Illegal Mass Surveillance, Canada Privacy Commissioners Say
Clearview AI’s facial recognition amounts to mass surveillance and the company should delete the faces of Canadians from its database, Canada’s privacy commissioners said Wednesday.
Commissioner Daniel Therrien said what Clearview does — scraping photos from social media and other public sites for use by law enforcement — is “illegal” and creates a system that “inflicts broad-based harm on all members of society, who find themselves continually in a police lineup.”
The commissioners released a report that follows a yearlong investigation by several Canadian privacy agencies into Clearview’s practices, which found the company had collected highly sensitive biometric information without consent and that it “used and disclosed Canadians’ personal information for inappropriate purposes.”
Apple to Roll Out Awaited App Tracking Feature in ‘Early Spring’
Apple in early spring will roll out a long-awaited privacy feature that limits companies from tracking users across different apps, the company said Thursday.
The App Tracking Transparency feature will require apps to get the user’s permission before tracking their data across apps and websites owned by other companies, limiting the reach of targeted ads.
The feature will be rolled out in “early spring” with the release of Apple’s new iOS 14, the company said in a blog post on Data Privacy Day. Apple did not further detail the expected timetable for the release of the feature or the upcoming operating system.
Intermountain to Conduct World’s Largest DNA Mapping Effort in Children
The study will involve the voluntary collection of 50,000 DNA samples of children as young as newborns, as well as their parents and siblings who wish to participate.
“Discoveries from the study can be combined with extensive clinical data at Intermountain Healthcare and research insights from University of Utah Health. With this comprehensive approach . . . potentials for cures can emerge,” added Josh Bonkowsky, professor of Pediatrics at University of Utah Health and director of Primary Children’s Center for Personalized Medicine.
Participation is free and confidential, though some participants will have the option to receive their genetic results report if a clinically significant gene mutation is identified.
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February 4
The Coup We Are Not Talking About
Two decades ago, the American government left democracy’s front door open to California’s fledgling internet companies, a cozy fire lit in welcome. In the years that followed, a surveillance society flourished in those rooms, a social vision born in the distinct but reciprocal needs of public intelligence agencies and private internet companies, both spellbound by a dream of total information awareness. Twenty years later, the fire has jumped the screen, and on Jan. 6, it threatened to burn down democracy’s house.
I have spent exactly 42 years studying the rise of the digital as an economic force driving our transformation into an information civilization. Over the last two decades, I’ve observed the consequences of this surprising political-economic fraternity as those young companies morphed into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioral monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.
In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures.
TikTok Is Adding a Potential Misinformation Warning Label to Save Us From Ourselves
TikTok said today in a press release that it’ll be looking for content that includes unproven claims, especially those spreading during “unfolding events.” Such videos, it says, won’t reach the For You page (TikTok’s curated main feed where users scroll through random videos) and will include a warning banner reading “Caution: Video flagged for unverified content.” If a user chooses to share the video, they’ll have to click through a substantial popup asking them: “Are you sure you want to share this video?” with an “unverified content” reminder. The video’s creator also gets a notification informing them that they’ve gotten a warning label.
Seems like a lot for a massive platform that supports text, audio, and video. A spokesperson confirmed in an email to Gizmodo that the platform takes “all of those signals into account” and identifies potentially troublesome content through a mix of proactive searching, user reports, and automated detection.
In order to deem a claim “unverified,” TikTok’s moderation team sends videos to one of their fact-checking partners, PolitiFact, Lead Stories, and SciVerify. When a partner determines something to be unambiguously debunked, it’s removed outright, while “inconclusive” determinations will receive this new warning label. (These labels can’t be appealed by the content creator.)
Scientists Propose New Way to Detect Emotions Using Wireless Signals
ECG signals detect electrical activity in the heart, providing a link between the nervous system and heart rhythm. To date the measurement of these signals has largely been performed using sensors that are placed on the body, but recently researchers have been looking towards non-invasive approaches that use radio waves, to detect these signals.
Methods to detect human emotions are often used by researchers involved in psychological or neuroscientific studies but it is thought that these approaches could also have wider implications for the management of health and wellbeing.
In the future, the research team plan to work with healthcare professionals and social scientists on public acceptance and ethical concerns around the use of this technology.
At Last, the Regime That Enabled Amazon’s Monopoly Power Is Crumbling
This week, Amazon announced that Jeff Bezos will no longer be chief executive of the corporation but will instead take the position of “executive chairman.” Andy Jassy, who runs the highly profitable Amazon Web Services cloud computing division, will take the title.
It’s not clear what this announcement means, whether Bezos wants to genuinely give up power or whether he wants to continue making decisions while having someone else testify before Congress or in potential antitrust proceedings. But in truth, it doesn’t matter, because why Amazon exists in its current form, for good or ill, is a function not of one talented man, but of a legal regime that enables and encourages monopoly power. And that regime is falling apart.
The scale of Amazon’s empire is breathtaking. This week, the corporation announced that third-party businesses in the U.S. sold 1 bn products through Amazon’s marketplace. It is no longer just an online retailer, but is effectively an economy in itself, adding on to its cloud computing, retail and logistics arms everything from podcasting to low-orbit, satellite-delivered broadband to home security to microchip development to prescription drug distribution to trucking to military contracting. The corporation also mirrors the inequality in the American economy, with the world’s richest man presiding over more than a million workers, many of whom make minimum wage.
Big Tech Is So Big It Doesn’t Need Its Founders Anymore
But in any case, it’s clear that most of Big Tech has become so Big and entrenched that it no longer needs the men who made it.
That doesn’t mean they don’t pay lip service to the idea that they’re still the scrappy startups they once were: Bezos, in his step-down note to employees, insisted that it is still “Day 1” at Amazon. That’s a reference to the company’s insistence that everyone at the company — a $1 trillion company that hired more than 250,000 people in 2020 alone — should act as if they’re at a just-launched startup. Amazon also fetishizes the desks that Bezos and his early co-workers made out of wooden doors, which are supposed to symbolize the company’s lean, stay-hungry mentality.
The counter to all of that lip service: There’s a serious antitrust movement afoot that wants to break up, or at least slow down, Google, Apple, and Amazon. (Microsoft, which faced its own antitrust breakup case 20 years ago, has largely avoided the wrath of politicians, regulators, and activists this time around.)
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February 2
Police and Fire Departments in 48 U.S. States Are Reportedly Involved in Amazon’s Ring Program
If you have an Amazon Ring smart doorbell, there’s something you should know. A growing number of fire and police departments are interested in your doorbell — or to be frank, in its camera footage — especially if they feel it can help them in their investigations. In fact, there are now 2,014 departments in the program from every U.S. state except Montana and Wyoming.
According to a recent report in the Financial Times, the number of departments in Amazon’s Ring program has more than doubled last year, when the company added 1,189 departments. The program allows law enforcement officials to contact Ring users in a certain area and ask them to provide footage from their cameras that might be relevant to local investigations.
The Times reported that in 2020, the departments collectively requested videos related to more than 22,335 incidents.
Police don’t need a warrant to request the videos, and owners can decline to provide their Ring’s footage. Nonetheless, the scenario changes when subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants are involved, per the Times, because Amazon can be forced to comply with these legal requests and provide footage and “identifying data” even if the owner of the doorbell has denied access.
‘See Something, Say Something Online Act’ Punishes Big Tech for Not Snitching
A new bill revitalizes the war on terror’s favorite slogan in service of forcing tech companies to turn over more user data to the government. The “See Something, Say Something Online Act,” introduced by Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.) and co-sponsored by Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas), is the latest attack on the federal communications law known as Section 230 as well as freedom of speech and online privacy.
The legislation says any interactive computer service provider—that means social media giants, small blogs, podcast hosting services, app stores, consumer review platforms, independent political forums, crowdfunding and Patreon-style sites, dating apps, newsletter services, and much more—will lose Section 230 protections if they fail to report any known user activity that might be deemed “suspicious.”
“Suspicious” content is defined as any post, private message, comment, tag, transaction, or “any other user-generated content or transmission” that government officials later determine “commits, facilitates, incites, promotes, or otherwise assists the commission of a major crime.” Major crimes are defined as anything involving violence, domestic, or international terrorism, or a “serious drug offense.”
India Invents AI Camera Network To Track Every Physical Movement
The future of total police surveillance just got a whole lot bleaker, thanks to researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). IISc researchers have figured out a way to turn a vast network of CCTV cameras into one massive surveillance network, which can target a specific vehicle or person.
As VentureBeat reported, police can use Anveshak’s artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to track an individual’s movements by using multiple surveillance cameras from various sources.
Anveshak, the Hindi word for “investigator” gives law enforcement the ability to overlap the camera feeds from a thousand CCTV cameras to track an individual person[s].
“Anveshak has the big-picture ability to know the locations and overlap points of 1,000 camera feeds, as well as possible paths an object (such as a stolen car) or person could take through those feeds, critical details in limiting what would otherwise be an unfathomably large quantity of video data coming from multiple cameras.”
The Anveshak platform will now allow police use CCTV cameras to track or “spotlight” a person through blindspots.
The Left Should Oppose Censorship by Big Tech Companies
The fact that I was being “jailed” for the first time since I started my account fourteen years ago, and that this happened while all the major tech platforms were ramping up censorship after the Capitol riot is suggestive, but it could have been a coincidence. One of the most frustrating things about this sort of tech censorship is that there’s simply no way to know what’s happening behind the curtain.
Does any of this matter? It’s certainly an inconvenience for podcasters and streamers like me, but that surely ranks very low on any list of injustices worth losing sleep over. But these companies’ actions do matter. Social media is a key part of the information commons of the twenty-first century, but it’s been enclosed by private companies.
Even if the right standard for what should or shouldn’t be sayable on the digital commons falls somewhere short of free speech absolutism, it’s a problem that the standards we have are arbitrarily arrived at and opaquely applied by private companies whose primary allegiance is to making money rather than serving the public good, and who provide no basic due process for users to appeal suspensions or even find out what they allegedly did wrong.
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February 1
Pandemic Highlights Risk of ‘Big Employer’ Surveillance
Depending on the state, employers may or may not be required by law to notify their workers they are monitoring them via their webcams, software that tracks mouse activity or clicks, or compiling private browser data. Some of these programs, such as InterGuard, can be installed remotely, without the employee’s knowledge or consent. Big Brother, indeed.
These programs can be quite elaborate in scope. They can monitor what an employee does online; what they type; capture screenshots; timestamp what files are accessed and when; track their location via GPS; and, in some cases, measure an employee’s productivity down to the Nth degree; or even go so far as to punch them off the clock if they’re away from the computer for more than 60 seconds.
CDC Issues Sweeping Mask Mandate for Planes, Public Transportation in U.S.
Masks must be worn at train and subway stations, bus terminals and airports nationwide, as well as on planes, trains and other types of public transportation in the United States, according to a far-reaching federal public health order issued late Friday.
The order, which will take effect at 11:59 p.m. Monday, adds details to the mandate President Biden signed on his first full day in office.
The order goes beyond the “masking for interstate travel” previously announced by the White House.
A key objective, it said, is “preservation of human life.”
“Requiring masks on our transportation systems will protect Americans and provide confidence that we can once again travel safely even during this pandemic,” according to the order from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Therefore, requiring masks will help us control this pandemic and aid in re-opening America’s economy.”
Davis Wright Tremaine Will Require All Employees to Get a COVID-19 Vaccine Before Returning to the Office
Davis Wright Tremaine will require its attorneys and staff to be vaccinated if they are to return to the firm’s office, according to firm guidelines announced on Thursday. It is the first Am Law 200 firm to publicly announce such a requirement.
In China, How People Are Pushing Back On Surveillance State
Escaping Big Brother is a nearly impossible mission in China. In the name of counterterrorism, the number of surveillance cameras are exploding. The country counted some 350 million in 2018, according to IHS Markit. This number could reach 560 million next year, half of the estimated one billion surveillance cameras in use around the world. Eighteen of the world’s 20 most monitored cities are in China, according to the British company Comparitech. In Beijing alone, there are believed to be one million surveillance cameras — still less than the amount in London — if they’re estimated in ratio to the number of inhabitants (56 cameras for 1,000 citizens in the Chinese capital against 67 in the British capital).
These cameras are also getting more and more sophisticated. Many are equipped with facial recognition technology, a sector heavily invested in by Beijing in its quest to be the world leader in artificial intelligence. The facial recognition cameras have invaded daily life in China.
Gabbard: Big Tech Controls Who Gets to Have a Voice
“Let’s be clear, the John Brennans, Adam Schiffs and the oligarchs in Big Tech who are trying to undermine our constitutionally protected rights and turn our country into a police state with KGB-style surveillance are also domestic enemies — and much more powerful, and therefore dangerous, than the mob that stormed the Capitol,” Gabbard said in a video posted to social media at the time.
The former lawmaker addressed her earlier comments in a Sunday appearance on “The Next Revolution,” where she told host Steve Hilton that the crackdown on domestic terror represents a danger to every American and our constitutional rights and freedom of speech.
“The Big Tech companies and oligarchs created a virtual town square, they have invited to us come and be a part of this town square, [and] then they’ve made billions from our private information and our attention, and now are saying we’ll pick and choose which one of you get to have a voice, and which do not,” Gabbard said.
How Data Collection Is Posing New Challenges in the COVID-19 Vaccination Effort
After a long day of doling out COVID-19 vaccines, workers in Utah County toil late into the night entering data on every single dose. What they don’t finish, they come in early the next morning to file before the state’s daily 7 a.m. reporting deadline.
Even though the county’s appointment system is electronic, each vaccination generates a paper record which must be entered, one at a time, into an electronic system so that they can be transmitted to the state’s immunization registry. If there’s a delay in reporting, a shot that’s in someone’s arm might look like it’s still sitting in a freezer, or worse, that it’s been lost.
“Our throughput and our vaccination capabilities are not the challenge, truly,” Aislynn Tolman-Hill, a spokesperson for the county’s health department, told STAT. “It’s really the documentation.”
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January 29
Are Vaccine Providers Selling Your Health Data? There’s Not Much Stopping Them.
When the city of Philadelphia announced its “unique public/private partnership” to create a mass vaccination clinic with an upstart nonprofit called Philly Fighting COVID in early January, it seemed like an objectively good thing. The clinic could vaccinate thousands of people per day, and Philly Fighting COVID’s website allowed not-yet-eligible Philadelphians to preregister for vaccines by supplying their name, birthday, address, and occupation — which the city encouraged residents to do because it hadn’t made a preregistration site of its own.
It’s not looking so good now. Philadelphia ended the partnership after it was reported that the company changed its nonprofit status to for profit, and its privacy policy to say that it could sell the preregistration data its site collected (Philly Fighting COVID maintains that it had no intentions to sell data and didn’t even realize that language was in its privacy policy). Now, the city is scrambling to reassure residents that their data won’t be sold and to reschedule their vaccine appointments with other providers. Philadelphia’s district attorney and Pennsylvania’s attorney general are threatening to launch investigations. A clinic nurse has accused Philly Fighting COVID’s CEO of taking unused vaccines from the clinic.
Smart Shopping Carts on the Rise as Stores Adapt to Pandemic Era
Kroger now has 20 branded smart carts built to know what customers place inside. The wireless buggies can tally up your total, make recommendations and allow you to pay for groceries directly on the cart. The gadgets eliminate the need to stand in line around strangers or pass off items to a salesclerk.
For the past few years, connected shopping carts were billed as a way to cut down on labor costs, get customers to spend more cash and shift patrons out of stores more swiftly. However, according to Caper, the pandemic has pushed more companies to check out the trend to reduce face-to-face interactions amid the ongoing pandemic.
Will COVID-19 Sniffing Dogs Allow Fans Back Into Sporting Events?
Recently, the Miami Heat announced they are trying a new tactic to screen fans beyond the now familiar temperature checks and questionnaires. The NBA franchise will employ Covid-19 sniffing dogs. While the idea may seem far-fetched, there is some basis in science and actual application. Dogs have been employed to sniff out drugs and explosives and even some medical conditions such as cancer. Additionally, K-9 units have been employed for years to detect explosives at the Super Bowl. Fans have been routinely screened on and off-site before walking into stadiums on game day.
A dog’s nose has about 300 million scent receptors, which is 50-60 times as many as the average human. It is thought that the breakdown process in the body that occurs with infections or cancers leads to the release of odor molecules called volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These VOCs then enter the air where the scent can be picked up by a properly trained dog.
Facebook’s New ‘Supreme Court’ Overturns Firm in First Rulings
Facebook’s new Oversight Board found company content moderation policies vague and poorly communicated in its first set of decisions released Thursday, overruling the company’s actions in four of the five cases it decided in its initial round of cases.
The actions covered a range of issues that have vexed social media companies — alleged hate speech, coronavirus misinformation and references to dangerous organizations and people — and included one case in which an automated detection system apparently overreacted to an image of an uncovered female nipple in a breast cancer awareness campaign.
Taken together, the rulings suggest the oversight board is going to demand greater clarity and transparency from Facebook in the tiny sliver of cases it chooses to review. The board is also weighing Facebook’s ban of President Donald Trump following the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, though a decision in that case is not likely for months. The five cases decided Thursday all date to October or November of last year.
Facebook Said to Consider Suing Apple Over App Store Practices
Tensions between Apple and Facebook have been growing for months, rooted in how the companies are diametrically opposed on how they make money. Apple, which has made privacy a key tenet, prefers that consumers pay for their internet experience, leaving less need for advertisers. In contrast, Facebook relies on data about its users to fuel its digital advertising business.
Over time, the Apple chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, and the Facebook chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have increasingly taken thinly veiled shots at each other to underline their distaste for the other’s philosophies on advertising, targeting and privacy.
The friction ratcheted up after Apple announced changes last year to its upcoming software for iPhones that could harm Facebook’s business. Apple said that it would clamp down on some data collection practices by developers and that it would allow iPhone owners to choose whether to allow companies to track them across different apps. That would likely hurt Facebook’s ability to collect user data to target ads.Apple also recently began requiring developers to include privacy labels for their apps in the App Store, which detail an app’s information collection practices. In a recent analysis, The New York Times found that the privacy label for Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging app showed that it gathered far more information from people than another messaging app, Signal.
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January 28
U.S. ‘Actively Looking’ at Requiring COVID Testing Before Domestic Flights
“These are conversations that are ongoing,” CDC Director for the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine Marty Cetron told reporters, “and looking at what the types and locations of testing might be. We’re actively looking at it.”
This would be an expansion of the administration’s mandatory testing requirement for U.S.-bound travelers that took effect on Tuesday. All travelers flying into the U.S. must now provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test, taken no more than three days before their flight, or they will be denied boarding.
What We Learned From Apple’s New Privacy Labels
To put the labels to the test, I pored over dozens of apps. Then I focused on the privacy labels for the messaging apps WhatsApp and Signal, the streaming music apps Spotify and Apple Music and, for fun, MyQ, the app I use to open my garage door remotely.
I learned plenty. The privacy labels showed that apps that appear identical in function can vastly differ in how they handle our information. I also found that lots of data gathering is happening when you least expect it, including inside products you pay for.
But while the labels were often illuminating, they sometimes created more confusion.
Democratic Congress Prepares to Take On Big Tech
Many Democrats, as well as some Republicans, want to take on Big Tech with laws and regulations to address issues like market power, data privacy, and disinformation and hate speech. Those ambitions have only grown since the insurrection of Capitol Hill, with more members of Congress pointing to the power of the tech companies as the root cause of many problems.
The growing talk of new federal laws adds to the industry’s many headaches. Facebook and Google are fighting federal and state regulators in court over allegations of anticompetitive conduct. Regulators continue to investigate Amazon and Apple over antitrust violations. President Biden and his nominees for attorney general and commerce secretary have also promised to hold tech companies to account for the speech they host and to strengthen policing of competition violations.
Mozilla Took the Internet’s Vitals. And the Results Are Concerning.
Control of the internet, though, has become increasingly concentrated. According to the Foundation, only seven companies (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google’s parent company Alphabet, Facebook, and China’s Tencent and Alibaba) control the vast majority of the internet’s traffic and much of its infrastructure. Together, they’re among the largest companies in the world by market cap — beaten only by Saudi oil giant Aramco. The internet is a huge driver of financial value — and that value is increasingly concentrated.
This control is often hidden, too. Most people, the Foundation says, assume that when they use an independent web-based service, they’re interacting directly with that service. In many cases, though, popular apps, software platforms, and websites rely on infrastructure from the internet’s Big Seven. In the Foundation’s words, if you’re using “Netflix or Zoom, for example, you’re using Amazon Web Services” because both companies rely on Amazon to make their products work. Because so many other companies rely on them, the Big Seven’s control is probably broader-reaching and more impactful than most people realize.
It gets worse. According to the Foundation’s data, four of the most-used platforms on the internet are controlled by a single company: Facebook. The company operates Facebook itself (the internet’s most-used platform) but also Facebook Messenger (#3), WhatsApp (#4), and Instagram (#5). The only service that rivals these is YouTube, which is operated by Google and is the second most-used platform worldwide. Chinese services like TikTok and QQ are making inroads, but they’re still tiny compared with Facebook’s combined might.This creates major problems with regulation and the concentration of power — as well as stability in the event one of these services goes down. But it also creates major issues in terms of the flow of misinformation, especially during the pandemic. According to Mozilla, 8,105 YouTube videos containing COVID-19 misinformation racked up 71 million views on YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit before they were taken down. That’s almost as many people as those who watch the Superbowl — and that was only on one chunk of videos that Mozilla studied.
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January 26
Amazon, Facebook, Other Tech Giants Spent Roughly $65 Million to Lobby Washington Last Year
Amazon, Facebook, Google and four other top technology giants spent more than $65 million to lobby the U.S. government last year, shelling out record-breaking amounts in some cases to try to battle back antitrust scrutiny and new regulatory threats.
The sizable sums foreshadow the political blitz that Silicon Valley is likely to mount as President Biden and his new Democratic control in Congress start sending early signals about their plans to try to rein in the tech industry.
Amazon in 2020 spent roughly $18 million on lobbying, and Facebook spent nearly $20 million, marking the most that either company has ever devoted to pushing its political agenda in Washington, according to an analysis of federal lobbying disclosures that became available Friday. The companies filed their final updates for the year, reflecting the period between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31, at midnight Thursday.
Big Tech Is Getting Bigger, and That’s a Problem Politically
Normally, the holiday quarter is a moment for celebration, but this is no time to spike the football. Success for the tech industry now serves as a stark reminder of its dominance. While brick-and-mortar retailers and restaurants go under, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have collectively delivered a stunning $67 billion in net profit over the past two quarters.
“These tech stalwarts are gaining more market share by the day,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said this fall. “It’s A Tale of Two Cities for this group of tech companies and everyone else.”
Mexico’s Pandemic Policy: No Police. No Curfews. No Fines. No Regrets.
So was Mexico wrong? The answer is nuanced, say health experts and human rights advocates, and reflects the difficulty of balancing public health and civil rights. It’s especially tricky in a region with a history of heavy-handed policing and vast inequality. Many Latin American countries decreed strict quarantines last spring, and deployed police and soldiers to enforce them. Human rights complaints soared.
“The countries that do the best get people to comply voluntarily,” said Tom Frieden, a former head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But they are very clear about what people need to do.”
For years, governments have used law enforcement to promote public health goals such as getting people to wear seat belts or stop smoking in restaurants. The coronavirus pandemic took things to a new level. To stem the initial outbreak, China imposed the largest quarantine in history, locking down 50 million people, who were forbidden even to use their cars.
California Lifts Its Statewide COVID Stay-at-Home Orders
Monday’s change moves counties back to a tiered system of reopening, with most regions across the state expected to move into the most restrictive tier. It lifts an evening curfew and, in many areas, will allow restaurants and churches to resume outdoor operations and hair and nail salons to reopen. Local officials still could choose to impose stricter rules.
The decision came amid improving trends in the state’s rate of infections, hospitalizations and intensive care unit capacity as well as vaccinations. Newsom said on Monday that California averaged 23,283 new coronavirus cases a day over the past week, and its positivity rate was down to 8%, below that of Texas, Florida and Arizona.
Monday’s announcement follows months of a relentless case surge that exhausted the healthcare system statewide and made California the first US state to record 3m COVID-19 infections. It also comes as more than 50 wine country-based restaurants and wineries have filed a lawsuit against Newsomover the state’s restrictions on outdoor dining.
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January 25
United Airlines CEO Calls on Companies to Mandate COVID-19 Vaccination
United Airlines may make the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory for employees, and other companies should do the same, United Chief Executive Officer Scott Kirby told workers at a meeting on Thursday, according to a transcript reviewed by Reuters.
A United spokeswoman confirmed that the company was “strongly considering” making vaccines compulsory, though it isn’t a policy yet.
Third Stimulus Check: GOP Lawmaker Wants $1,400 Payment Reserved for People Who Get COVID-19 Vaccine
Rep. Steve Stivers, a Republican from Ohio, suggested checks go to people who’ve received the coronavirus vaccine.
“I hope the administration will look at that option because we actually buy something with our $1,400 — and that’s herd immunity,” Stivers said in an interview with Yahoo Finance.
He suggested the quickest way to get the economy going is to get people vaccinated and back to work or school.
“I’d be willing to accept a $1,400 stimulus check if people are willing to take the vaccine,” Stivers added.
Facebook Spent More on Lobbying Than Any Other Big Tech Company in 2020
For the full year 2020, Facebook spent more than any other Big Tech company at $19.68 million. It increased its lobbying spending by 17.8% from 2019 in a year when the Federal Trade Commission and 48 attorneys general from states and territories filed antitrust complaints against the business.
In the fourth quarter, Facebook lobbied on issues including copyright reform, election integrity, content policy, immigration and international tax policies.
Amazon spent the second most of its Big Tech peers in 2020 at $17.86 million, up 10.7% from the year before. In the fourth quarter, Amazon lobbied on issues including broadband, intellectual property, postal reform, health care and the Justice in Policing Act.
Biden to Reinstate COVID Travel Restrictions Trump Rescinded, Impose New Ban on South Africa
The ban would prevent most non-U.S. citizens from entry if they have recently been in South Africa, where a new strain of COVID-19 has been identified. The virus has killed more than 418,000 people and infected upward of 25 million across the U.S., according to an NBC News tracker.
Biden is also expected to reinstate broader restrictions that were in effect much of the past year but were rescinded by President Donald Trump days before his term ended. The limits would affect non-U.S. citizens traveling from the United Kingdom, Ireland and much of Europe in what is known as the Schengen countries, which share a common visa process. Travelers from Brazil would also be affected.
Cruise Line Says Only Vaccinated Passengers Can Sail
Saga, which caters mostly to British people over the age of 50, told CNN Travel that the vaccinated-passengers-only rule was prompted by the results of a recent customer poll, which suggested 95% of regular Saga customers would support such a policy change.
Saga Holidays’ CEO Chris Simmonds said in a statement that the decision was made partly because “many of our customers [are] amongst the first groups of people to be offered the vaccine.”
“With this in mind and having spoken with our customers, we want to ensure we are providing the safest possible experience whilst they are on holiday with us,” said Simmonds.
What ‘Vaccine Passports’ Mean for Your Summer Vacation
Some destinations — including the Seychelles, Cyprus and Romania — have already lifted quarantine requirements to visitors able to prove they’re vaccinated. Others, such as Iceland and Hungary, have opened up to people who’ve recovered from COVID-19.
This raises the prospect that proof of inoculation or immunity could be the golden ticket to rebooting travel and seems good news for people eager to book summer vacations after months of lockdown, particularly as vaccine rollouts gather pace.
They could open up the restaurants, bars, cinemas and other leisure and entertainment facilities whose closure over the past year have left many teetering on the edge of — or already victim to — financial ruin.
Tech companies such as IBM are also trying to get in on the act, developing smartphone apps or digital wallets into which individuals can upload details of COVID-19 tests and vaccinations. These are gaining support from major travel industry players.
If COVID-19 is Primarily a ‘First World’ Virus, Why is the Global South in Lockdown?
It is not COVID-19 virus, but the COVID-19 infodemic, as well as, WHO-led international policy that has triggered a deep economic, social and political crisis in the Global South at this time. The call for lockdowns, curfews and stoppage of public transport systems, often implemented by militaries based on the “Global pandemic” narrative and infodemic of COVID-19 infection figures form the John’s Hopkins University data base with contradictory messages resulted in creation of COVID-19 fear psychosis and anxiety in many tropical countries where the Corona virus is mild. As a result, millions have not been able to go to work and have lost jobs and livelihoods in countries like Sri Lanka and Thailand.
As OXFAM’s ’Hunger Virus” Report noted: COVID-19 is deepening the hunger crisis in the world’s hunger hotspots and creating new epicentres of hunger across the globe. By the end of the year 12,000 people per day could die from hunger linked to COVID-19, potentially more than will die from the disease itself.
The pandemic is the final straw for millions of people already struggling with the impacts of conflict, climate change, inequality and a broken food system that has impoverished millions of food producers and workers.
(UK) Care Homes Consider Legal Challenge to Force Their Workers to Take Vaccine
Care providers are seeking legal advice over whether they can force staff to have a coronavirus jab, as a poll reveals some young people are shunning vaccines.
The National Care Association has taken the unprecedented step of seeking a legal opinion on whether care home workers can be made to accept vaccination after thousands refused. Between 6% and 8% of the 1.5 million adult social care workforce in England are declining jabs, despite the number of coronavirus cases in care homes trebling in the past month, according to industry reporting of uptake across the country.
People Who Have Received First COVID-19 Jab Must Stay at Home for Three Weeks, Says Jonathan Van-Tam as Urges Them to Keep Following Lockdown Rules
People who have received their first COVID-19 jab must stay at home for three weeks after their injection because it can take that long for immunity to ‘kick in’, Professor Jonathan Van-Tam warned last night.
He said that while getting vaccinated was ‘something to celebrate’, recipients of the jab needed to ‘stay patient’.
The caution of England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer comes amid concern from Ministers that vaccinated people might start mixing with others or relax their social distancing too soon.
Care Home Resident Must Have Vaccine Despite Son’s Concerns, Says Judge
A West Indian woman in her 80s who is suffering from dementia and living in a care home should be given a coronavirus vaccine despite her son’s concerns, a judge has ruled.
The pensioner’s son raised concerns about the effectiveness of the vaccine and said testing had been predominantly carried out on “white people.”
He did not object to vaccination in principle but said medics should wait until more evidence had been gathered.
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January 21
Riots, Cellphones, Selfies — and Orwell
Orwell predicated his draconian vision on government’s installing a device in every home, watching, tracking and recording each life. In 2021, we are the ones installing the devices, 24/7, and not just in homes but in pockets, purses and cars.
Combine this self-generating trove of online personal information with an ever-greater number of cameras in public and private spaces, the increasing forensic ability of facial-recognition software and the mushrooming presence of smart devices in our daily lives. We have every reason for new concerns about the potential chilling effect on free expression and our rights of assembly and petition.
MUSC Pediatrician: ‘Kids Need to Be in School, and It’s Safe’
New research data by the Medical University of South Carolina shows there’s been no surge in COVID-19 cases in public schools in Charleston County following the return of in-person classes.
According to Dr. Allison Eckard with MUSC Children’s Health, only 1% of students and staff at Charleston County schools tested positive for the virus between the start of in-person school on Sept. 8 and winter break which started on Dec. 18.
MUSC officials said that added up to about 500 total cases out of about 38,000 students and staff. Health officials said the data does not include charter schools, which were not part of the assessment because they can have different rules than traditional public schools.
Why 2021 Will Be a Year of Reckoning for Big Tech
To prevail against the Big Tech titans, the government will need more than a strong legal case; it will need public support. For years, however, our idolatry of innovators was Big Tech’s ace in the hole. That’s changing. Social media disinformation and polarization, the exploitation of the gig economy, and the strip-mining of our personal information are melting away the heat shield of likability that surrounds these companies. More hearings like July’s CEO barbecue, and more revelations about the way in which these companies exploit their dominance, will burn it away for good.
The point is not that we should adopt an anti-Big Tech posture. These companies are built on a legacy of innovation and products that would have seemed like magic a generation ago. But we are the victims of their success, because the rational decision for a company with the market power of a Big Tech company in 2021 is to secure and leverage that dominance, not to risk further innovation. When that happens, the role of government is to act as a countervailing force to private capital. Like forest fires clearing out the underbrush, antitrust action oxygenates the economy by creating new competitors and opening up space for new entrants.
‘Anti-Facebook’ App MeWe Sees Surge in Downloads Amid Big Tech Scrutiny
The app that calls itself the “anti-Facebook” added 2.5 million new users last week, bringing its total userbase to 16 million — 50% of which live outside the U.S., MeWe spokesperson David Westreich told Fox Business.
“People all over the world are leaving Facebook and Twitter in droves because they are fed up with the relentless privacy violations, surveillance capitalism, political bias, targetin, and newsfeed manipulation by these companies,” Westreich ssaid. “MeWe solves these problems.”
He added that the platform “is the new mainstream social network with all the features people love and no ads, no targeting, no newsfeed manipulation, and no BS.”
How Law Enforcement Is Using Technology to Track Down People Who Attacked the U.S Capitol Building
As researchers who study criminal justice, we see that law enforcement agencies are accessing large amounts of information via technological sources to investigate the attack on the U.S. Capitol building. High-definition security cameras, facial recognition technology, location services acquired from cellphones and third-party apps, and accessing archival evidence on social media are all used to identify perpetrators of crimes and tie them to specific places and times.
While watchdog groups have raised legitimate concerns about the use of government and private-sector surveillance technology to identify people who might commit violent acts at some future point, there is much less concern raised about the use of technology to identify, arrest and prosecute individuals once these crimes have occurred.
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January 20
How to Rein in Big Tech? Tax the Behemoths.
No matter what your politics, there are reasons to be uneasy about Silicon Valley’s swift and brutal exercise of power after the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Not only was a head of state silenced but large numbers of his followers were, as well. Most disturbing, Parler, the only service that still welcomed some Trump supporters, was summarily driven out of business by Apple, Google and Amazon’s Web-hosting services.
Even if you think that President Trump had it coming, this demonstration of corporate power is troubling, especially if you believe our country’s divisions are deepened by social media business models. In this view, the platforms’ ad revenue depends on user engagement, and engagement is driven by anger, so social media serves up content calculated to leave users angry. If that’s true, the violence-marred protests over the summer and at the Capitol are powerful arguments for forcing a fundamental change in how U.S. social media companies make money.
Human Experimentation Oversight Committee Wants to Approve Israel-Pfizer Data-Sharing Deal
“It is vital to make clear that we support the COVID-19 vaccination effort, only that we ask that the rights of Israeli citizens are protected under the deal struck between Israel and U.S drugmaker Pfizer,” said Prof. Eytan Friedman, chairman of the Helsinki Committee, the statutory body that’s tasked with overseeing human medical trials in Israel.
Israel’s Ministry of Health published on Sunday a redacted copy of a 14-page contract it signed with drugmaker Pfizer for the exchange of public medical data in return for the swift supply of COVID -19 vaccines. The January 6th deal titled: Real-World Epidemiological Evidence Collaboration Agreement, details the legal and logistical workings of the collaboration, including the sharing of publicly available and de-anonymized data with the objective being to ‘measure and analyze epidemiological data arising from the product rollout to determine whether herd immunity is achieved after reaching a certain percentage of vaccination coverage in Israel.”
The agreement came under criticism by privacy rights activists who claimed Israel was sharing personal medical information without securing the participant’s permission.
DuckDuckGo Search Engine Increased Its Traffic by 62% in 2020 as Users Seek Privacy
Because DuckDuckGo doesn’t track users, it’s not clear exactly how many people use it. However, the search engine‘s CEO, Gabriel Weinberg, estimates that nearly 25 million users use the platform.
Google, for example, collects information about the apps, browsers, and devices users use to access Google services, as well as searched terms, videos watched and purchase activity. Google’s policy applies to YouTube, Android, and services offered on third-party sites, such as advertising services.
The news comes as more users flock to privacy-focused apps as companies, including Whatsapp, are changing their privacy policies. Signal and Telegram are seeing a rise in users amid these changes and the ban on the social media platform Parler.
COVID Vaccine Passports Are A Ticket To Nowhere
Today, it’s the prospect of a COVID-19 vaccine certificate that’s conjuring up digital-dictatorship fears. The idea is being pushed by the travel industry as a leap towards normality after the worst year on record for international tourism and by technology firms eager for lucrative government contracts and a gold mine of data. Yes, it’s nice to daydream about being able to travel freely again, but critics say it would introduce an unequal society in which an inoculated elite get the freedom to fly long-haul, attend concerts or dine in restaurants. Do we really want to be divided between the jabs and the jab-nots?
This might all make for a great episode of “Black Mirror,” but it’s not what advocates within the European Union, led by tourism-dependent Greece, have in mind right now. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has proposed such vaccine passports as a way to travel freely from one country to another, and also as an incentive to be vaccinated. There’s no plan to ban unvaccinated travelers.
Want to Get Away From Big Tech? Here’s How to Make the Change.
The recent ban of Parler from Apple and Google’s app stores and the Amazon shutdown of the social media app might have you thinking about Big Tech’s power. Add to this news that the messaging service WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, is grabbing more of your personal data.
Tap or click to be shocked by how much of your data WhatsApp is sending to Facebook. Millions of users have now flocked to alternative messaging platforms such as Signal and Telegram.
Germany and France Push Forward With Big Tech Crackdown, Rather Than Waiting for EU-Wide Laws
Europe may be gearing up to crack down on Big Tech with a set of new laws covering antitrust and illegal content, but its most influential countries—Germany and France—aren’t hanging around to see how that works out.
On Tuesday, Germany’s competition regulator—the Bundeskartellamt, or Federal Cartel Office—gained the ability to restrict the activities of tech firms that are of “overriding importance across markets.” For example, a dominant e-commerce giant won’t be allowed to favor its own products over those sold by third-party merchants over its platform, or to stymie its competitors by withholding certain data from them.
Turkey Slaps Advertising Ban on Twitter, Pinterest
Turkey on Tuesday slapped advertising bans on Twitter, Periscope and Pinterest over their non-compliance with a controversial new law that requires social media platforms to appoint legal representatives in the country.
The law — which human rights and media freedom groups say amounts to censorship — forces social media companies to maintain representatives in Turkey to deal with complaints about content on their platforms.
Companies that refuse to designate an official representative are subjected to fines, followed by advertising bans and could face bandwidth reductions that would make their platforms too slow to use. The ban is on selling online space for ads, which is what many social media companies make their money from.
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January 19
Workers Get Sonic ‘Dog Collars’ To Enforce Social Distancing
The French Democratic Confederation of Labour (CFDT), the largest union representing workers at Essity, a Swedish global hygiene and health company, compared the device to a dog collar, saying it is “a system comparable to that which deters dogs from barking.”
The CFDT said according to the French newspaper Le Monde, that the necklaces emit a sound of 85 decibels as soon as “social distancing is no longer respected.”
CFDT union representative Christine Duguet said that “the idea is to discipline employees and call them to order,” going on to say that the implementation of the system represents “an attack on individual freedoms.”
“Since the start of the pandemic, we have scrupulously respected distancing and wearing masks. We wear them all day, we are responsible people!” she protested.
Germany to Repurpose Refugee Camps to Detain People Who Repeatedly Flout COVID Rules by Going Out When They Should Be Quarantining
Germans who refuse to quarantine after being exposed to COVID will be held in detention centres under new rules prepared by regional authorities.
The eastern state of Saxony has confirmed plans to hold quarantine-flouters in a fenced-off section of a refugee camp set to be built next week.
The regional state claimed that the facility will only be used for people who have repeatedly flouted lockdown rules around self-isolation.
New Research Could Enable Direct Data Transfer From Computers to Living Cells
The main complication lies in finding a way to interface the digital world of computers and data with the biochemical world of genetics. At present this relies on synthesizing DNA in the lab, and while costs are falling rapidly, this is still a complicated and expensive business. Once synthesized, the sequences then have to be carefully stored in vitro until they’re ready to be accessed again, or they can be spliced into living cells using CRISPR gene editing technology.
Now though, researchers from Columbia University have demonstrated a new approach that can directly convert digital electronic signals into genetic data stored in the genomes of living cells. That could lead to a host of applications both for data storage and beyond, says Harris Wang, who led the research published in Nature Chemical Biology.
“Imagine having cellular hard-drives that can compute and physically reconfigure in real time,” he wrote in an email to Singularity Hub. “We feel that the first step is to be able to directly encode binary data into cells, without having to do in vitro DNA synthesis.
Octopus of Big Tech Is Strangling America
Over a century ago, the oil, railroad, telegraph, and power industries created huge monopolies. They set up vertically integrated cartels. And they used their enormous profits to lavish gifts on politicians, control information, and destroy competition.
Some people likened these huge trusts to octopuses whose tentacles strangled freedom. In reaction, angry workers and farmers, muckraking journalists and novelists, and crusading populist and progressive politicians passed antitrust laws.
And so they broke up the monopolies.
Today, however, progressive politicians, Wall Street, the media, academia, Hollywood and professional sports are all on the side of the mega-rich tech cartels. Partnering with Big Tech is both politically useful and financially lucrative.
Peer-Reviewed Study Shows Lockdowns Didn’t Work
A Stanford University, peer-reviewed study led by one of Stanford’s associate professors of medicine shows no evidence that the U.S. lockdowns that destroyed people’s lives for the past year were effective.
Not only that, the study found that extreme measures taken to force everyone to stay home and for businesses to close were not effective in ANY country in stopping the spread of COVID-19.
To determine their conclusions, the study looked at eight countries — the U.S. and seven in Europe — and compared them to South Korea and Sweden, which didn’t mandate lockdowns.
After You Die, Microsoft Wants to Resurrect You as a Chatbot
According to the new Microsoft patent, images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages, and written letters can all be used to “create or modify a specific index in the theme of the specific person’s personality.” From there, engineers can use the index to train a chatbot to converse like that person—yes, even if they’re already dead.
Even creepier: The application could also don the likeness of your dead loved one in a “2D or 3D model,” and utilize their voice while talking to you.
Millions Flock to Telegram and Signal as Fears Grow Over Big Tech
Over the past week, tens of millions of people have downloaded Signal and Telegram, making them the two hottest apps in the world. Signal allows messages to be sent with “end-to-end encryption,” meaning no one but the sender and receiver can read its contents. Telegram offers some encrypted messaging options, but is largely popular for its group-based chat rooms where people can discuss a variety of subjects.
Their sudden jump in popularity was spurred by a series of events last week that stoked growing anxiety over some of the big tech companies and their communication apps, like WhatsApp, which Facebook owns. Tech companies including Facebook and Twitter removed thousands of far-right accounts — including President Trump’s — after the storming of the Capitol. Amazon, Apple and Google also cut off support for Parler, a social network popular with Mr. Trump’s fans. In response, conservatives sought out new apps where they could communicate.
Israel Trades Pfizer Doses for Medical Data in Vaccine Blitz
After sprinting ahead in the race to inoculate its population against the coronavirus, Israel has struck a deal with Pfizer, promising to share vast troves of medical data with the international drug giant in exchange for the continued flow of its hard-to-get vaccine.
Proponents say the deal could allow Israel to become the first country to vaccinate most of its population, while providing valuable research that could help the rest of the world. But critics say the deal raises major ethical concerns, including possible privacy violations and a deepening of the global divide that enables wealthy countries to stockpile vaccines as poorer populations, including Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza, have to wait longer to be inoculated.
Mexican President Mounts Campaign Against Social Media Bans
Mexico’s president vowed Thursday to lead an international effort to combat what he considers censorship by social media companies that have blocked or suspended the accounts of U.S. President Donald Trump.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration is reaching out to other government to form a common front on the issue.
“I can tell you that at the first G20 meeting we have, I am going to make a proposal on this issue,” López Obrador said. “Yes, social media should not be used to incite violence and all that, but this cannot be used as a pretext to suspend freedom of expression.”
Trump’s Been Deleted From Internet, and Any One of Us Could Be Next
We’ve been told, in very clear terms, who has the power. And it is certainly not us, nor is it our elected representatives.
In fact, it’s not anyone with either democratic mandate or legal accountability, but rather a series of nameless executives, faceless bureaucrats and a succession of tech-billionaires forming a new breed of royalty.
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January 14
Why Big Tech Wants Your Body
Womble Bond Dickinson reported:
Some companies will identify you by your body movement. Some will use body information to sell you things or to combine that data with other information that places you in helpful sales categories — for example, a fit, active 20-year-old will receive different sales pitches than a heavy, sedentary 50-year old. And we will only ever see the tip of the iceberg. For example, Microsoft has applied for a patent that would use body movement and facial expressions to evaluate the success of business meetings. The possibilities are endless. And, as discussed in my blog posts from the past two weeks, body data provided to Amazon, Target or other companies can be used by that company for almost any reason.
Your body may belong to you, but the story it tells belongs to big tech.
U.S. to Require Negative Virus Tests From International Air Passengers
The new policy requires all air passengers, regardless of vaccination status, to get a test for current infection within the three days before their flight to the United States departs, and to provide written documentation of their test results or proof of having recovered from COVID-19.
Proof of immunization will not be sufficient, because the vaccines have only been shown to prevent serious illness, said Jason McDonald, a spokesman for the CDC. Vaccinated people may still become infected, in theory, and transmit the virus on a flight.
The agency will not require further testing in the three months after a positive test, so long as the traveler has not had any symptoms. In this situation, a passenger may travel with documentation of the positive test result and a letter from a health care provider or a public health official stating that the traveler now has been cleared for travel.
IMF Calls for Credit Score to Be Tied to Internet Search History
In a blog post courtesy of the International Monetary Fund, IMF researchers Arnoud Boot, Peter Hoffmann, Luc Laeven, and Lev Ratnovski called for internet search history to be tied to credit score.
Presenting their findings from a paper they wrote, the researchers argue that by using non-financial data, specifically “the history of online searches and purchases,” we can solve the problem of “certain kinds of people not having enough hard data (income, employment time, assets and debts) available.”
The authors of the piece claim that this move is a necessary innovation in order to compete with the rise of corporate cryptocurrencies such as the one in development by Facebook, who hope to launch next year. While Facebook is a monopoly that has engaged in political censorship, their power pales in comparison to that of the IMF. The International Monetary Fund is a veritable superpower with ties to the World Bank, and they oversee the entire global economy.
Humans Won’t Be Able to Control Artificial Intelligence, Scientists Warn
An international group of researchers warned of the potential risks of creating overly powerful and standalone software. Using a series of theoretical calculations, the scientists explored how artificial intelligence could be kept in check. His conclusion is that it would be impossible, according to the study published by the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research portal.
“A super-intelligent machine that controls the world sounds like science fiction. But there are already machines that carry out certain important tasks independently without the programmers fully understanding how they learned it […], a situation that could at some point become uncontrollable and dangerous for humanity, ” said Manuel Cebrian, co-author of the study, to the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
Kicking Trump Off Social Media Won’t Save Democracy, Say Antitrust Experts
“Whatever one thinks of stopping Trump fomenting violence by limiting his ability to communicate, the ability of democratically unaccountable monopolies with extraordinary control over communications infrastructure, like Facebook and Google, YouTube’s parent company, to silence political speech is exceptionally dangerous,” wrote Matt Stoller and Sarah Miller in a Guardian editorial published Monday. “It also sidesteps the underlying problem—that it’s their dominance and business model that promotes conspiratorial, fake, and violent content to millions.”
Stoller and Miller, both of American Economic Liberties Project, note that companies including Facebook and Google make billions of dollars by fostering the “ecosystem of disinformation, extremism, rage, and bigotry” that “won’t go away by banning Trump or his supporters.”
Health and Tech Groups Aim to Create Digital Covid ‘Vaccination Passport’
The Vaccination Credential Initiative, a coalition of organisations including Microsoft, Oracle and the U.S. healthcare non-profit Mayo Clinic, aims to establish standards to verify whether a person has had their shot and prevent people falsely claiming to be protected against the disease. The coalition builds on work done by one of its members, The Commons Project, to develop an internationally accepted digital certificate to prove travellers have tested negative for COVID-19. The pass developed by the non-profit, established with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, is now being used by all three major airline alliances.
Why We Should Be Frightened by Tech Companies’ Censoring of Conservatives
Companies have every legal and moral right to do what they wish with their property, of course. But one can acknowledge that while also asking whether what they do is wise, or good for America, or even good for the companies themselves. A handful of executives made another business go away, while signaling that corporate America has chosen a political side and that it’s not afraid to go further than our government. That’s unprecedented, and I’m frightened of setting that precedent now.
As with the “War on Terror,” short-term victories seem certain, and enticing; Big Tech made it harder for Trump to disrupt the inauguration, which is great. But in the longer term, we may radicalize people who were previously neutral, and thereby empower even worse foes than the ones we vanquished. The other day I heard from a never-Trump friend, a Biden voter, who is convinced that eventually, after we all get comfortable with what Big Tech has done, it will come for conservatives like him. If that happens, he — and others like him — are not going to ally with their censors, public or private.
Surveillance Tech Is Not Accomplishing the Things It’s Supposed to
Alvaro Bedoya: Historically, surveillance technology has tracked our technology — our phone calls, our cars, our computers. And increasingly, surveillance technology tracks our bodies — who we are physically in the flesh, fingerprint, iris, DNA. But really, the big area of growth is face recognition. And so you have a [Department of Homeland Security] biometric system with a heavy reliance on face, you have an FBI face-recognition network that taps into many state driver’s-license databases. And you have, right now, a focus on tracking immigrants. That, I think, is something that we need to start to reckon with after what happened at the Capitol.
Molly Wood: Well, it’s been interesting to see, too, that there’s a debate about whether to refer to those events of January 6 as terrorism, because that activates this very specific infrastructure that has very little to do with domestic white nationalism.
What We Know About the Spread of Covid Among Children — and Whether Shutting Schools Reduces the Risk
The polarizing issue of whether schools should stay open is far from clear cut, with the World Health Organization urging policymakers to be guided by a risk-based approach to maximize the benefit for the population.
School closures have a clear negative impact on children’s health, the United Nations health agency has warned, citing setbacks to children’s education and development, family income and the overall economy.
At present, the exact timing of how long schools will need to remain at least partially closed, and when they may be able to fully reopen, remains to be seen.
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January 12
Denmark Developing Digital COVID-19 ‘Vaccine Passport’
Thomson Reuters Foundation reported:
Denmark is developing a digital “vaccine passport” for people who have received a COVID-19 vaccine, a move that may enable them to travel to countries where such documentation is required during the pandemic.
“It is expected that there may be requirements from other countries to present vaccine documentation upon entry. A Danish vaccine passport can be used here,” the Health Ministry said in an emailed statement on Friday.
The passport may be rolled out in the first months of this year to be accessed through the Danish public health website, the ministry said. It was not clear whether the passport would be available via an app.
Trump Was Dangerous But the Solution is Not to Give More Political Power to Unrivalled TechGiants
That every tech company could work together to effectively block the President of the United States, however much of a dangerous person he has become (or always was) is not something to take lightly. Real power today is not with politicians or the banks, it’s with these new media and big data organisations who have fundamentally transformed lived conditions on earth. I appreciate technology has always been with us. But today it’s different. Technology has become a new religion, the unmediated power that promises to save us from ourselves. The pandemic already provided these companies with such a momentous condition of possibility for changing the lived reality of life on this planet. That we now see even the most “radical” of thinkers and activists cheer them on when they assume for themselves the ultimate political power – the ability to take command of the circulation of thoughts and ideas, however threatening, demands serious critical attention.
This is not just about joining the “free speech” debates, which have also been complicit in creating highly reductive with us or against us narratives. It’s to ask deeper questions about who ultimately decides and who has the power to effectively say a person has no use. For let’s be clear too, Trump was both useful and then utterly disposable for these firms, which will continue to profit from divisions.
California Legislation Targets Police Use of License Plate Readers
The bill’s introduction comes after alarm has grown among privacy advocates over the technology, which is used by hundreds of local police forces across the country, as well as by federal government agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice).
ALPRs use cameras mounted on police vehicles or a stationary location such as a highway overpass to collect images of license plates, documenting the image accompanied by the date, time and location of that vehicle and in some cases photographs of drivers and their passengers.
Who Should Make the Online Rules?
I can think all these tech companies made the right decision in the last few days but still feel extremely uncomfortable that they are in the position of acting as a Supreme Court — deciding for billions of people what is appropriate or legal expression and behavior.
My McDonald’s example above isn’t really equivalent. Facebook and Twitter have become so influential that the choices they make about appropriate public discourse matter far more than whom McDonald’s lets in to buy a burger.
And while these companies’ rules are extensive, they are also capriciously applied and revised solely at their whim.
On Factory Floors, a Chime and Flashing Light to Maintain Distance
The league was able to evade the virus by requiring teams to live and play their games in an isolated area known as the Bubble, at the closed Disney World resort in Florida.
But a small piece of technology also played a role: a wristband that players, coaches and trainers could wear off the court, and that was required for reporters covering the teams. A tiny digital chip in the band enforces social distancing by issuing a warning — by light and sound — when wearers get too close to one another for too long off. The bands have been picked up by the National Football League, the Pacific-12 college football conference and other sports leagues around the world.
The Munich start-up behind the N.B.A.’s wristbands, Kinexon, is happy with the publicity of helping prevent top athletes from catching the virus, even as such devices raise privacy concerns. Now it is looking toward broader arenas: factory production lines, warehouses and logistics centers where millions of people continue to work despite the pandemic.
COVID-19 Fuelling Education’s Tech Disruption, Deepening Digital Divide
Thomson Reuters Foundation reported:
The COVID-19 pandemic deepened inequities in accessing and benefiting from education but the future of learning could be a more equal one, participants told Reuters Next panels on Monday.
The pandemic hastened a rise in virtual learning and a disruption of the status quo already under way but probably won’t eliminate in-person instruction for good, they said.COVID-19 forced the University of Oxford and myriad other schools online amid COVID lockdowns. “We surprised even ourselves” in their ability to do it, Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson said.
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January 11, 2021
The Capitol Attack Doesn’t Justify Expanding Surveillance. Wired reported:
They took our Capitol, stormed the halls, pilfered our documents, and shattered the norms of our democracy. The lasting damage from Wednesday’s attack will not come from the mob itself, but from how we respond. Right now, a growing chorus is demanding we use facial recognition, cellphone tower data, and every manner of invasive surveillance to punish the mob. In the days since the attack, the airwaves have been full of former law enforcement officials claiming that surveillance is the answer, such retired FBI special agents Danny Coulson and Doug Kouns. Even many who are normally critical of policing have jumped on the surveillance bandwagon in the desire to find justice. As understandable as it feels to give police even more powers in this crisis, this would be a gigantic mistake.
We don’t need a cutting-edge surveillance dragnet to find the perpetrators of this attack: They tracked themselves. They livestreamed their felonies from the halls of Congress, recording each crime in full HD. We don’t need facial recognition, geofence, and cell tower data to find those responsible, we need police officers willing to do their job.
Defense Department Further Accelerating 5G Development. National Defense reported:
The Pentagon plans to enhance 5G technology and invest in future “Next-G” systems to support all war-fighting functions including fires, command and control, intelligence, movement and maneuver, protection, sustainment and information, Lord said in November during remarks at MITRE’s 5G Summit.
“Ubiquitous high-speed connectivity will transform the way the military operates,” she said. “Tomorrow’s warfighters will use local and expeditionary 5G networks to move massive amounts of data to connect distant sensors and weapons into a dense, resilient battlefield network.”
WhatsApp Gives Users an Ultimatum: Share Data With Facebook or Stop Using the App. Ars Technica reported:
In 2016, WhatsApp gave users a one-time ability to opt out of having account data turned over to Facebook. Now, an updated privacy policy is changing that. Come next month, users will no longer have that choice. Some of the data that WhatsApp collects includes:
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- User phone numbers
- Other people’s phone numbers stored in address books
- Profile names
- Profile pictures and
- Status message including when a user was last online
- Diagnostic data collected from app logs
Under the new terms, Facebook reserves the right to share collected data with its family of companies.
Dr. Mercola Defamed by Digital ‘Anti-Hate’ Group. Mercola reported:
In a December 22, 2020, article, The Hill claims the “anti-vaccination movement sees COVID-19 as an opportunity” to strengthen its position, stating that “As public health officials seek to reassure Americans on the safety and efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine, anti-vaccine efforts could prevent the country from reaching herd immunity.”
According to a November 9, 2020, report in The Times, the British “government regards tackling false information about COVID-19 vaccination as a rising priority,” ostensibly for the same reason. But does concern for implementation of public health policy really justify the use of cyberwarfare against those who raise questions about vaccine safety?
Wouldn’t vaccine safety be part and parcel of a successful public health campaign? Doesn’t public trust play a significant part as well? The fact that they’re trying to shut down any and all conversations about vaccines — using warfare tactics no less — suggests that the planned mass vaccination campaign has very little to do with keeping the public healthy and safe. It’s about controlling the public, for some undisclosed purpose.
Sweden’s health agency says open schools did not spur pandemic spread among children. Reuters reported:
Sweden’s decision to keep schools open during the pandemic resulted in no higher rate of infection among its schoolchildren than in neighbouring Finland, where schools did temporarily close, their public health agencies said in a joint report.’
Sweden decided to forego a hard lockdown and keep most schools and businesses open throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, a divisive strategy that set it apart from most of Europe.
Its Public Health Agency has maintained that the negative consequences of a shutdown on the economy and society outweigh the benefits, and says this also applies to schools.
Bans on Parler and Trump Show Big Tech’s Power Over Web Conversation. Bloomberg reported:
The Parler restrictions underscore how technology companies have increasingly been held accountable for the potential consequences of what happens on their services, where they have greater visibility than governments do — and the ability to take quicker action. For years, large tech companies avoided such debates by claiming to be content-neutral. Meddling and misinformation campaigns in the 2016 presidential election made it clear that these companies, and their software algorithms and content moderation, had real-world impact.
Now, pressured by lawmakers, civil rights advocates and even their own workers, the big tech companies are realizing just how much power and responsibility they have over public conversation — including over apps they didn’t create.
Such monopoly-like powers are already under scrutiny by U.S. regulators, with Google and Facebook battling government antitrust lawsuits. At the same time, the companies have come under fire for their lackadaisical practices on content moderation, when being too permissive on incendiary speech can lead to real-world violence or illegal activity.
Civil Society Groups Warn Against Anti-Protest Legislation Following Siege of U.S. Capital. Common Dreams reported:
The proposed legislation in Florida is a continuation of a national trend to attempt to criminalize Black Lives Matter, indigenous and other civil rights protest movements. The proposed Florida legislation aims to punish municipalities that reduce funding to police departments, protect Confederate monuments, legalize forms of vigilante violence against protesters, and heighten “riot” charges. Democratic State Rep. Omari Hardy called it “bad legislation that is fundamentally un-American,” and “unconstitutional.”
Across the nation, dozens of sister anti-protest bills have been passed and proposed over the past few years, many at the behest of law enforcement lobbies and unions and influential corporate lobbies.
Fight Over Closing Schools Reignites as N.Y.C. Positive Rate Tops 9%. New York Times reported:
The renewed tension over opening schools makes it even less likely that the city’s middle and high schools will reopen in the next few months. Those schools were open for just a few weeks last fall before the mayor closed them again. The city does not yet have the testing capacity to open those schools, officials have said, and the teachers’ union has said it would oppose plans to reopen middle and high schools this winter.
Since reopening in December, the city has conducted weekly testing inside the roughly 850 public schools buildings that are open, as well as at early education centers.
Facial Recognition and Beyond: Journalist Ventures Inside China’s ‘Surveillance State’. NPR reported:
Strittmatter’s new book, “We Have Been Harmonized: Life in China’s Surveillance State,” examines the role of surveillance in China’s authoritarian state. He warns that Chinese President Xi Jinping, who came to power in 2012, has embraced an ideological rigidity unknown since the days of Mao Zedong.
Strittmatter says the Chinese state has amassed an astonishing amount of data about its citizens, which it uses to punish people for even minor deviations from expected norms.
“People sometimes ask me, ‘Do we need to fear China?'” Strittmatter says. “My answer really is, in the end, we don’t need to fear China. What we need to fear — if we need to fear anything — is actually ourselves. It’s our fatalism, our resignation. We need to get up and we need to fight for our values and for our system, because I do believe it’s still the best we’ve got.”
Vaccinating the World Against COVID is Off to a Slow Start. These Firms Think A.I. and Blockchain Could Help. Fortune reported:
Once people have received inoculations, the vaccine makers and government health agencies will need to monitor these people for signs of unusual side effects or rare complications. While the vaccines have been tested on tens of thousands of people during clinical trials, there may be side effects or safety issues that only become apparent when millions receive injections. Many governments require doctors and pharmaceutical companies to file reports for any unusual symptoms patients experience after being given a drug. Even for medicines given to far smaller numbers of people, these rules can result in a large number of “adverse event” reports being submitted. The vast majority of these usually end up being false alarms, with the symptoms either unrelated to the drug in question or not an indication of any danger. But sometimes they do point to a critical safety issue that wasn’t picked up previously. Because the COVID-19 vaccine is being given to so many people, the volume of these reports is likely to be massive—far too many for humans to review fast enough to pick up any signs of a serious problem before it’s too late.
That’s why some governments are turning to A.I. to help. The British health regulator has contracted with Genpact to deploy machine learning software that can screen its official “yellow card” reports—which doctors and patients use to report unusual side effects that could be a cause for concern. The system Genpact built, which went live in December, takes in plain text and automatically codifies it, and searches for patterns that could be indicative of an emerging safety issue, flagging this to the regulator for further investigation, Sandor says.
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January 5, 2021
NY Bill Says Governor Could ‘Order the Removal’ of People With ‘Contagious Disease.’ DailyWire reported:
A bill introduced by a member of the New York State Assembly would amend the public health law, permitting the governor of the state to order the removal and/or detention of a person deemed to be a “suspected case, contact or carrier of a contagious disease” who would “pose an imminent and significant threat to the public health.” The person in question then would be “detained in a medical facility or other appropriate facility or premises designated by the governor.”
Instagram’s New Shopping Feature Exploits Users, Promotes Surveillance Capitalism. The Defender reported:
Instagram users can be as young as 13, the age required to open an account. How does personalization work for children? How does this feature affect the experience of individuals with low socioeconomic status? What principles and values is the platform adhering to in designing these recommendation algorithms, “Staff Picks” and other means of presenting products?
A major consideration is when people get recommendations to purchase items during vulnerable moments. Sharing or seeking information about a difficult, personal experience on a social media platform and then having the platform capitalize on an algorithmic understanding of the experience — which might or might not be accurate — is problematic.
Big Brother In Disguise: The Rise of a New, Technological World Order. Eurasia Review reported:
In our case, the blue pill — a one-way ticket to a life sentence in an electronic concentration camp — has been honey-coated to hide the bitter aftertaste, sold to us in the name of expediency and delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets and cell phones.
Yet we are not merely in thrall with these technologies that were intended to make our lives easier. We have become enslaved by them.
Third National Lockdown Announced in England Amid Coronavirus Surge Driven by Variant Strain. Washington Post reported:
Under the new lockdown, everyone in England will be asked to stay at home except in special circumstances. Schools and universities will close for in-class learning with immediate effect.
In his televised address, Johnson said: “I want to stress that the problem is not that schools are unsafe for children — children are still very unlikely to be severely affected by even the new variant of COVID.
“The problem is that schools may nonetheless act as vectors for transmission, causing the virus to spread between households.”
French Bill Could Ban the Unvaccinated From Public Transport. France24 reported:
Prime Minister Jean Castex on Monday got his cabinet’s backing for a bill that is designed to provide a legal framework for dealing with health crises, including the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the text, which will now be submitted to parliament, a negative COVID test or proof of a “preventative treatment, including the administration of a vaccine” could be required for people to be granted “access to transport or to some locations, as well as certain activities.”
According to opinion polls, 55 percent of French people say they will not get a COVID shot, one of the highest rates in the European Union.
Italian Doctors Are Disciplined for Anti-Vaccination Propaganda. The BMJ reported:
Antonio Magi, president of the Ordine dei Medici di Roma (Rome Doctors Guild), said that inquiries into 10 medics accused of unwarranted criticism of vaccinations had been completed, with punishments ranging from warnings to two month suspensions. The other three investigations were ongoing, he told the Ansa news agency. The disciplinary procedures followed complaints from other doctors and members of the public.
The three medics still under investigation will be asked to justify claims they have made online, on television, and on radio, to a special commission of the guild.
One of the three is Mariano Amici, who practices in Ardea, 30 km south of Rome. He describes himself as a practitioner of general medicine. He says that he is not against vaccinations as such, despite having some misgivings about the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine that is now being given in Italy. On his website he says that he is “perplexed” about the health risks from such mRNA vaccines and questions whether they are appropriate for fighting a disease that he claims has a death rate of only one in 2000.1 Most estimates put the mortality rate 10 times higher.
How Vaccine Passports Will Actually Work. MSN reported:
As we turn the corner into 2021, “the role of digital health credentials will be key to enable cross-border travel at scale,” says Christoph Wolff, head of mobility at the World Economic Forum, which has partnered with Swiss-based nonprofit the Commons Project to develop a digital health pass called CommonPass.
CommonPass is among several tech-enabled solutions that have emerged during the pandemic that will likely serve as a “vaccine passport” of sorts once proof of a COVID-19 vaccine becomes a requirement for entry into countries, onto planes, or into events.
Germany to Extend Curbs Amid Criticism Over Vaccine Rollout. Bloomberg reported:
Chancellor Angela Merkel is consulting with regional officials and health experts on Monday and Tuesday to decide on prolonging the restrictions, which include closing schools and non-essential stores. She will announce the outcome of the talks at a news conference likely sometime on Tuesday afternoon in Berlin.
Authorities have agreed to extend the curbs until Jan. 31, Bild newspaper reported, without identifying the source of the information.
Guess where Professor Lockdown Got His Ideas … China’s Police State. Daily Mail reported:
Every country that has locked down has failed to control the disease and keeps doing the same thing over and over again in the hope of getting a different result.
If lockdown is an effective policy, then the guillotine is a good cure for a headache (except that the guillotine probably does cure a headache).
The shame of it is that the lockdown fanatics did ‘get away with it’, and continue to do so. That is, quite simply, because most of the responsible people in our society did not stand up for wisdom and freedom but allowed themselves to be swept away in a flood of State-sponsored fear, like so many pawns.
Facts — Not Fear — Will Stop the Pandemic. The Hill reported:
The media relish negative news. “If it bleeds it leads” still holds, and perhaps it’s never been truer than in the COVID-19 era. Every day the news highlights the spread of the virus and tells the sad stories of some of its victims.
And yet, much of the media does not pay sufficient attention to the good news regarding improved treatments and survival of patients with the coronavirus. In contrast with the international media, the American press has been unrelentingly negative in its COVID coverage, even when there is good news to tell. That negativity is part of what fuels a culture of fear that affects local, state and federal politicians and the decisions they make.
The World of Surveillance: Who Does ‘Big Brother’ Answer to? Al Jazeera reported:
In this episode of “UpFront,” we discuss the surveillance industry and how it is operating unchecked with Ron Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog group in Canada and Luis Fernando Garcia, the director of R3D, a digital rights organisation in Mexico.
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December 22, 2020
Proof of Vaccination Will Be Very Valuable — and Easy to Abuse. Washington Post reported:
“Since the coronavirus pandemic began, bioethicists have warned about the dangers of “immunity passports”: documents attesting that a person has contracted the coronavirus in the past and therefore might carry antibodies that make them immune. The risk is that a system of passports would lead employers and others to discriminate against people who lack them — and that their value would produce perverse incentives (to contract the virus to get a job, for example). No such formal passport system has yet arisen. But the arrival of coronavirus vaccines under emergency authorization in Europe and the United States raise the issue anew.
“Until a vaccine is fully approved and widely available, we should not — except in the rarest of cases — make participation in society depend on immunity status. And yet the vaccination cards that will be issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other public health agencies worldwide will make enforcing that norm a challenge.”
Eric Clapton and Van Morrison Release Their Anti-Mask Anthem. Vanity Fair reported:
“’Stand and Deliver,’” written by Morrison and sung by Clapton, includes couplets like ‘Do you wanna be a free man / Or do you wanna be a slave? / Do you wanna wear these chains / Until you’re lying in the grave?’
“It continues ‘Magna Carta, Bill of Rights/The constitution, what’s it worth?/You know they’re gonna grind us down/Until it really hurts/Is this a sovereign nation/Or just a police state?/You better look out, people/Before it gets too late.’”
Federal Prosecutors Accuse Zoom Executive of Working With Chinese Government to Surveil Users and Suppress Video Calls. Washington Post reported:
“The case is a stunning blow for Zoom, one of the most popular new titans of American tech, which during the pandemic became one of the main ways people work, socialize and share ideas around the world. The California-based company is now worth more than $100 billion.
“But the executive’s work with the Chinese government, as alleged by FBI agents in a criminal complaint unsealed Friday in a Brooklyn federal court, highlights the often-hidden threats of censorship on a forum promoted as a platform for free speech. It also raises questions about how Zoom is protecting users’ data from governments that seek to surveil and suppress people inside their borders and abroad.”
American Teen Was Sentenced To 4 Months In Prison For Breaking COVID-19 Quarantine In The Cayman Islands. Buzzfeed News reported:
“Mack flew to Grand Cayman on Nov. 27 to visit her boyfriend, Vanjae Ramgeet, a 24-year-old resident who was participating in a Jet Ski competition, their attorney, Jonathon Hughes, told BuzzFeed News. She tested negative for COVID-19 on arrival, according to a Cayman Islands Government press release.
“As per the Caribbean nation’s regulations, Mack was required to self-isolate for 14 days at a residential address upon her arrival. She was fitted with a geofencing wristband and issued a cellphone to monitor her movements during the isolation period, Hughes said. She also signed a document that forbade her from removing her wristband and leaving her residence during the 14-day period.
“But two days after she arrived, Mack removed her geofencing bracelet and left her residence to watch Ramgeet compete at the crowded Jet Ski event.”
What Big Tech and Big Tobacco Research Funding Have in Common. VentureBeat reported:
“Amid declining sales and evidence that smoking causes lung cancer, in the 1950s tobacco companies undertook PR campaigns to reinvent themselves as socially responsible and to shape public opinions. They also started funding research into the relationship between health and tobacco. Now, Big Tech companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google are following the same playbook to fund AI ethics research in academia, according to a recently published paper by University of Toronto Center for Ethics Ph.D. student Mohamed Abdalla and Harvard Medical School student Moustafa Abdalla.
“The co-authors conclude that effective solutions to the problem will need to come from institutional institutional or governmental policy changes. The Abdalla brothers argue Big Tech companies aren’t just involved with, but are leading, ethics discussions in academic settings.”
***
December 18, 2020
Ex-Facebook Exec Suggests Everyone Who Gets Vaccinated Should Wear a Certain Color Mask. Fox Business reported:
“Former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya suggested in a tweet on Friday that everyone who gets vaccinated should ‘all wear a mask of a special design or color’ in order to let other people around them know that they have been vaccinated.
“The idea did not sit well with many on social media, who quickly blasted the idea, comparing it to Nazi Germany’s use of the Star of David.”
Here’s why some McDonald’s restaurants are putting cameras in their dumpsters. CNN reported:
“’We’ve found that most businesses and people have the right intentions about recycling, but oftentimes they just don’t know what the proper way to recycle is,’” Gates, CEO of Compology, told CNN Business’ Rachel Crane.
“To help them do it correctly, Compology puts trash-monitoring cameras and sensors inside industrial waste containers. The cameras take photos several times each day and when the container is lifted for dumping. An accelerometer helps trigger the camera on garbage day.”
United Launches Contact Tracing Initiative With CDC. Travel + Leisure reported:
“Beginning Dec. 15, Delta will ask passengers flying to the U.S. from abroad to voluntarily provide their full name, email address, address in the U.S., and two phone numbers to aid in contact tracing and public health follow-up efforts.
“The airline will then pass the information onto the CDC via U.S. Customs and Border Protection, allowing the CDC to quickly access the information and cut down the amount of time it takes to alert a passenger they may have been exposed to the virus. The reduced time could help reduce further cases of potential exposure.”
Vaccinated Israelis Will Get ‘Green Passports’ Waiving Lockdown Constraints. The Times of Israel reported:
“Among the rights for holders will be access to cultural events and eating at restaurants, and the right to not quarantine after exposure to a diagnosed virus-carrier, they said. It will be issued two weeks after a person gets the second of the two shots required for the coronavirus.
“Polls have shown that anywhere from 50 percent and 75% of Israelis say they will refuse to get the coronavirus vaccine shot, apparently out of fears that the rush to produce an inoculation may have compromised its safety. Israel is readying to begin a mass inoculation program next week, with the first vaccinations reportedly to be administered this coming Sunday, December 20.”
Why Big Tech Wants (Some) Facial Recognition Rules. Bloomberg reported:
“The world’s biggest technology companies can usually be counted on to oppose rules reining in new products, but some are making an exception for facial recognition software. The European Union and cities and states across the U.S. are taking up a wide range of ideas for restrictions or outright bans on this branch of the rapidly expanding field of artificial intelligence, including many that go further than the tech companies want. One question is whether regulation can protect innovation while preventing what Microsoft Corp. calls “a commercial race to the bottom.” Another is whose vision of privacy and security will prevail, as China pushes to export facial recognition systems capable of tracking citizens through much of their waking hours.”
Vaccine-Tracking Dashboard Launches in Ohio. Mercola reported:
“Since the vaccines are administered in two separate doses a few weeks apart, states will use various electronic tracking systems and digital registries to monitor individuals who take the shots, to make sure they get the second, and that their second dose is from the same manufacturer as the first. Some states may also choose to hand out vaccination cards to help patients keep track of their status.”
Will I Need Proof of Vaccination if I Get a COVID-19 Vaccine? WKOW27 reported:
“Anit Mukherjee of the Center for Global Development, a Washington, DC-based think tank, said ID requirements will almost certainly be needed for a return to normal, according to WISN-TV.
“’There would be gatekeepers as I call them, at different places, be it at your workplace or your office when you go in, or a stadium to watch the Bucks play, they would require some form of assurance that you have been vaccinated,’ Mukherjee told WISN.”
Big Brother is Watching; Nanjing’s Ultimate Street Surveillance. Nanjing News reported:
“Watch your step, Nanjingers! Our city has become first in China to roll out the ultimate in street surveillance; a monitoring system that gives warnings to traffic-law violators, everyone from jaywalking pedestrians to e-bike riders not wearing a helmet.“Making its recent debut in Jianye District on the streets around the Nanjing International Youth Culture Centre, the 5G-powered system’s impressive capabilities are well demonstrated in a promotional video published yesterday by the Yangtze Evening News.”
***
December 14, 2020
Amazon’s New Health Band Is Most Invasive Tech We’ve Ever Tested. Washington Post reported:
“The Halo collects the most intimate information we’ve seen from a consumer health gadget — and makes the absolute least use of it. This wearable is much better at helping Amazon gather data than at helping you get healthy and happy.”
Google to Add COVID-19 Vaccine Information Panels to Search. TechCrunch reported:
“Google announced today it’s introducing a new search feature that will surface a list of authorized vaccines in users’ locations, as well as informational panels about each individual vaccine. The feature is first being launched in the U.K., which earlier this month gave emergency authorization to the BioNTech/Pfizer coronavirus vaccine. The company says the feature will roll out to other countries as their local health authorities authorize vaccines.
“The feature itself will appear at the top of Google .com searches for COVID-19 vaccines and will present the authoritative information in a box above the search results, linking to the health authority as the source. The panel will also have two tabs. One will be the overview of the vaccine, which appears above Top Stories and links to Local and National resources, like government websites. The other will organize news related to the vaccine under a separate section.”
Huawei Worked on Several Surveillance Systems Promoted to Identify Ethnicity, Documents Show. Washington Post reported:
“Huawei has worked with dozens of security contractors to develop surveillance products, some of which were touted as being able to identify a person’s ethnicity or to help suppress potential protests, according to company marketing documents that shed light on a little-publicized corner of one of China’s most valuable tech empires.
“The revelation this week of Huawei’s role in testing artificial-intelligence surveillance technology — including a face-scanning camera system that could send a ‘Uighur alarm’ to police if it detected a member of the minority group — has sparked an international backlash against the tech giant, including from a French soccer star who publicly ended his work as a Huawei brand ambassador and urged the company to ‘condemn this mass repression.’
Federal Database for COVID-19 Vaccination Info Raises Concerns About Privacy and Vaccine Uptake. CNN reported:
“As Operation Warp Speed prepares to give the first Americans the coronavirus vaccine, states are set to turn over varying levels of non-identifiable information about vaccine recipients in order to help the federal government track the effort to eradicate the virus.
Google Launches Health Research App. TheVerge reported:
“Google announced Wednesday that it is launching a new research app for Android phones, which would allow anyone with a device to participate in medical studies. The first study run through the app, called Google Health Studies, will look at respiratory illnesses like the flu and COVID-19.
“Participants in the study will use the app to report any respiratory symptoms, the precautions they’re taking to prevent disease, and whether they’ve been tested for COVID-19 or the flu. The app will collect demographic data, like age, gender, and race as well. “Researchers in this study can examine trends to understand the link between mobility (such as the number of daily trips a person makes outside the home) and the spread of COVID-19,” Google wrote in a press release.”
Sci-Fi Surveillance: Europe’s Secretive Push Into Biometric Technology. The Guardian reported:
“Patrick Breyer didn’t expect to have to take the European commission to court. The softly spoken German MEP was startled when in July 2019 he read about a new technology to detect from facial “micro-expressions” when somebody is lying while answering questions.
“Even more startling was that the EU was funding research into this virtual mindreader through a project called iBorderCtrl, for potential use in policing Europe’s borders. In the article that Breyer read, a reporter described taking a test on the border between Serbia and Hungary. She told the truth, but the AI border guard said she had lied.
“A member of the European parliament’s civil liberties committee and one of four MEPs for the Pirate party, Breyer realised that iBorderCtrl’s ethical and privacy implications were immense. He feared that if such technology – or as he now calls it, “pseudo-scientific security hocus pocus” – was available to those in charge of policing borders, then people of colour, women, elderly people, children and people with disabilities could be more likely than others to be falsely reported as liars.”
What Is a ‘COVID-19 Passport’? Concept Raises Both Hope and Concern. NBC Today reported:
“People who get the two required doses of a COVID-19 vaccine may be given a “WHO-CDC type of card” through their clinic to serve as proof of vaccination — very similar to the paper “yellow card” currently issued after someone receives the yellow fever vaccine, Adalja said.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has so far unveiled a vaccine record card meant to serve as a reminder when the second shot is due, but is not intended to be used as a “vaccine passport.”
Coronavirus: NHS COVID-19 App Starts Offering Self-Isolate Payments. BBC reported:
“’People are not isolating because they can’t afford to or because they don’t realise that they have to – the whole system is not working,’ Paul Hunter, professor of health protection at the University of East Anglia, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
“’I think there is ample evidence that many people who should be isolating don’t feel they can for whatever reason, and I think that has to be fixed if this is going to be effectively controlled until we’ve had adequate rollout of the vaccine.’”
Paper Beats App: Vaccine Verification Will Likely Be Proven Offline. Here’s Why. NBC News reported:
“It’s an intuitive idea: an app that provides proof that a person has received a coronavirus vaccine.
“Plenty of technologists are working to make it a reality. Companies of all sizes have been pouring in resources: Microsoft, major airlines, Ticketmaster, prominent nonprofits, security companies, tech startups and blockchain companies are all taking hacks at what some call vaccine passports. Apple and Google have participated in discussions about how to create digital COVID-19 vaccine certificates, experts said, but they haven’t announced plans.
“But behind the scenes, the realities of medical records, privacy concerns and the virus itself mean such products are unlikely to be widely available in the coming months, experts said.”
December 9, 2020
CDC Call for Data on Vaccine Recipients Raises Alarm Over Privacy. New York Times reported:
“The Trump administration is requiring states to submit personal information of people vaccinated against COVID-19 — including names, birth dates, ethnicities and addresses, raising alarms among state officials who fear that a federal vaccine registry could be misused.
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is instructing states to sign so-called data use agreements that commit them for the first time to sharing personal information in existing registries with the federal government. Some states, such as New York, are pushing back, either refusing to sign or signing while refusing to share the information.
New Smartphone Tool to Track COVID Vaccine Side Effects Vulnerable to Manipulation. Washington Post reported:
“A new smartphone technology designed to provide real-time warnings of side effects in the first Americans vaccinated against the coronavirus may be vulnerable to manipulation, raising concerns malicious actors could gain access to the system to undermine confidence in the shots, federal and state health officials say.
“The text-messaging system, called v-safe, is intended to provide early indications about possible adverse reactions from the vaccines. Using the messaging program, people who have received the shots can report symptoms and other health effects, such as missed work. Their responses could prompt phone calls from a team of safety professionals.”
‘Immunity Passports’ Are Already Here. But They Come With Warnings. CNN reported:
“The World Health Organization advised against immunity passports in April. ‘There is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection,’ read its scientific brief.
“On Thursday, the WHO confirmed it has not changed its position, but Regional Advisor Dr. Siddhartha Sankar Datta said it was looking to help countries implement electronic vaccination certificates. Other experts have also raised concerns about immunity passports.”
Big Brother Is Watching and Will Profit From Mexicans Personal Data. The Yucatan Times reported:
“This new service is based on an amendment to Article 17-F of the Federal Fiscal Code that hurts fundamental rights, such as the right to protect personal data, and therefore, unconstitutional. Taxpayers submitted their biometric data to the SAT as an obligation to pay taxes, without the option to refuse or exercise the right to oppose the processing of their personal information. The design of a different treatment based on the commercial exploitation of such personal data sounds like extortion, is unfair, and lacking in responsibility.
“The service would open the door to an indiscriminate and more intense treatment of personal data protected by SAT. It would create new risks for the protection and responsible handling of information susceptible to be used for identity theft and other crimes with a strong impact on the moral and patrimonial rights of taxpayers.”
Orange County Business Can Be Fined for Not Following CDC Guidelines. Fox News reported:
“A new executive order went into effect over the weekend. It will fine businesses for not following CDC guidelines. Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings said that it is his way to get businesses to follow CDC guidelines and prevent the spread of COVID-19.”
China’s Big Brother Camera Network Complete, Computer Vision Growth to Come From Business. Biometric Update reported:
“It is a sobering development not for the fact that the West continues to debate the ethics and merits of digital surveillance and public face biometrics. China’s authoritarian surveillance model is reason enough to avoid rushing things, even in troubled democracies like the United States.
“More amazing is that a population of 1.4 billion is surveilled — not in segments, demographics or regions, but in total.
Big Brother Is Watching You; Actually Your Face. Down to Earth reported:
“Even more awe-inspiring are the technological interventions that are trying to replicate this biological process. And as it usually happens with many other technologies, these are being deployed to create and sustain a surveillance system that has never been seen before.
Our facial features — scanned through every possible source — are being converted into a gigantic data pool. Using algorithms, millions of these faces can be compared and assessed to identify or verify a person if s/he is a culprit, a dreaded terrorist under disguise, a visitor in a protected area or a rioter. At our individual level, this technology has already been deployed to connect us better with our wider virtual world.”
***
December 4, 2020
Facebook Says It Will Remove Coronavirus Vaccine Misinformation. New York Times reported:
“Facebook on Thursday said it would remove posts that contain claims about COVID-19 vaccines that have been debunked by public health experts, as the social network acts more aggressively to bat down coronavirus misinformation while falsehoods run rampant.
“The move goes a step beyond how Facebook had handled misinformation about other kinds of vaccines. The company had previously made it more difficult to find vaccine misinformation that was not related to the coronavirus by “downranking” it, essentially making it less visible in people’s news feeds.”
Time To Rein In Government’s Pandemic Overreach — Starting With CDC’s Eviction Ban. The Hill reported:
“When the history of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 is written, it will need a section on the most counterproductive and overreaching government responses. That list should include the nationwide ban on residential rental evictions imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in September.
“That’s right, public health officials have decided to claim regulatory authority over the residential real estate market. The CDC doesn’t have the authority for such a sweeping declaration, which goes far beyond the agency’s statutory mission to fight infectious diseases.”
‘Immunity Cards’ to Be Issued to All Americans; Enable CDC to Track COVID-19 Vaxx Status In Database. ZeroHedge reported:
“On Wednesday the Department of Defense released the first images of a COVID-19 vaccination record card as well as vaccination kits, according to CNN.
“’Everyone will be issued a written card that they can put in their wallet that will tell them what they had and when their next dose is due,’ says Dr. Kelly Moore, associate director of the Immunization Action Coalition. ‘Let’s do the simple, easy thing first. Everyone’s going to get that.’”
Mexico: López Obrador Says Pandemic Lockdowns Are the Tactic of Dictators. Guardian reported:
“Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador suggested on Wednesday that politicians who impose lockdowns or curfews to limit Covid-19 are acting like dictators.
“The comments came as López Obrador once again fended off questions about why he almost never wears a face mask, saying it was a question of liberty.”
Supreme Court Backs California Ministry on COVID Restrictions, Returns Case to Lower Court. National Review reported:
“The Supreme Court sided with a California ministry against Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday in a dispute over coronavirus restrictions.
“The Harvest Rock International Ministry had alleged that Newsom’s restrictions on church capacity were “draconian and unconscionable,” challenging those restrictions in a lawsuit. California attorney general Xavier Becerra stated in court papers that “temporary interference is justified by the State’s interest in limiting the transmission of COVID-19 through tailored, evidence-based policies.”
A New Technology That Will Dangerously Expand Government Spying on Citizens. Counterpunch reported:
“If you’re worried about the capability of government to conduct surveillance of citizens engaged in political assembly and protest, or even just personal activity, then you should be aware the technological capability of government surveillance is about to expand exponentially.
“The US Air Force’s Research Lab (yes, it has its own lab) has recently signed a contract to test new software of a company called SignalFrame, a Washington DC wireless tech company. The company’s new software is able to access smartphones, and from your phone jump off to access any other wireless or bluetooth device in the near vicinity.”
Delta Partners with CDC for International Traveler Contact Tracing. USA Today reported:
“Delta Air Lines has announced that it will begin coronavirus contact tracing for travelers arriving in the United States.
“The airline, which announced the news Thursday in a press release, is partnering with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the launch, which is aimed at keeping ‘international customers informed of potential COVID-19 exposure.’
“‘Along with our nine global airline partners, we are working with government agencies, health officials and aviation authorities to offer safer travel at every point in your journey,’ the news release said.”
***
December 2, 2020
Microsoft’s Creepy New ‘Productivity Score’ Gamifies Workplace Surveillance. Gizmodo reported:
“Microsoft rolled out its new “Productivity Score” feature this month, which lets bosses track how their employees use Microsoft’s suite of tools. If that sounds like an Orwellian nightmare in the making to you, you’re not alone — privacy experts are criticizing the company for essentially gamifying workplace surveillance.”
Vaccine Minister Suggests Those Who Don’t Get COVID Jabs Could Face Restrictions From Sports Events and Cinemas. Evening Standard reported:
“Health minister Nadhim Zahawi, who is responsible for the roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines in the UK, said jabs will not be compulsory.
“But he told BBC Radio 4’s the World At One that service providers will likely want people to prove that they have been vaccinated.”
Give the Coronavirus App Bonus Benefits to Increase Downloads, German State Says. Thomson Reuters Foundation reported:
“Many in privacy-conscious Germany are wary of the app, with critics warning that it could become effectively compulsory if shops and restaurants insisted on seeing it for entry, while some regard the storing of location data to establish where contacts took place and trace infection chains as intrusive.
“By offering incentives, [North Rhine-Westphalia] aims to reverse that logic in the hope that more people can be encouraged to install it.”
EFF Urges Federal Appeals Court to Rehear Case Involving Unconstitutional Baltimore Aerial Surveillance Program. Electronic Frontier Foundation reported:
“In May, the Baltimore Police Department launched its Aerial Investigation Research (AIR) Pilot Program. For six months, three surveillance aircrafts operated by a private company called Persistent Surveillance Systems flew over Baltimore — covering about 90 percent of the city — for 12 hours every day. The planes produced images that even at a resolution of “one pixel per person” allowed the police to track individual’s movements over multi-day periods, especially when combined with the police’s networks of more than 800 ground-based surveillance cameras and automated license plate readers.”
Privacy Rights Groups Criticize EU Aid in Developing Countries, Claiming Funds Pay for Government Surveillance. CPO Magazine reported:
“The European Union provides annual financial aid to many different developing countries around the world. Various privacy groups, chief among them Privacy International, are raising alarms about some of these EU aid programs. Funds, equipment and training are reportedly going to the intelligence agencies of repressive governments and being used explicitly for domestic surveillance; examples include training seminars that taught participants how to perform “man in the middle” WiFi attacks and monitor dissidents on social media.”
Police in Jackson, Mississippi, Want Access to Live Home Security Video, Alarming Privacy Advocates. NBC News reported:
“Strapped for cash and facing a sharp rise in homicides, city leaders here are expanding police surveillance powers to allow residents and business owners to send live feeds from many types of security cameras — including popular doorbell cameras — directly to the city’s real-time command center.
“The new use of this livestreaming technology by police, which is undergoing a final legal review in Jackson, is drawing interest from other small cities that don’t have the resources to build their own surveillance systems. But some have opted out, citing concerns about privacy violations. Civil liberties advocates say those concerns are valid, warning that the technology could lead to increased police scrutiny of people’s everyday activities and more arrests for low-level offenses.”
***
November 25, 2020
Secret Amazon Reports Expose the Company’s Surveillance of Labor and Environmental Groups. Vice reported:
“A trove of more than two dozen internal Amazon reports reveal in stark detail the company’s obsessive monitoring of organized labor and social and environmental movements in Europe, particularly during Amazon’s “peak season” between Black Friday and Christmas.
“The reports, obtained by Motherboard, were written in 2019 by Amazon intelligence analysts who work for the Global Security Operations Center, the company’s security division tasked with protecting Amazon employees, vendors, and assets at Amazon facilities around the world.”
We Should Be Able to Use a Dating App Without Fear of Winding Up in a Military Database. New York Times reported:
“This is the ultimate example of what’s broken in digital life: The locations of people who used apps to pray and hang their shelves wound up in U.S. military databases.
“Vice’s Motherboard publication this week reported that data on people’s movements collected by seemingly innocuous apps passed through multiple hands before being bought by U.S. defense contractors and military agencies. It’s not clear what the military is doing with the information.”
Qantas Airways Moves to Require COVID-19 Vaccine for Air Travel. Forbes reported:
“A widespread vaccine for COVID-19 hasn’t reached the public yet, but already, airlines are planning for how to handle travelers with and without immunity. On Monday, Alan Joyce, the CEO of Australian flag carrier Qantas Airways, shared that his airline would eventually only allow for vaccinated travelers to board its flights. The move would essentially lock down the spread of the virus through air travel and allow for travelers to move around the globe unhindered by quarantines, though it would only open up the carrier to the select population that had received the vaccine.”
Stars Ridicule Californian ‘Emperor’ Gov. Newsom’s ‘Ridiculous’ Thanksgiving Crackdown That Bans Singing and Limits the Holiday to a Two-Hour Outdoor Event. The Daily Mail reported:
“Celebrities have taken to social media to slam California Governor Gavin Newsom’s ‘ridiculously unenforceable’ Thanksgiving crackdown that bans singing and shouting and limits the holiday to a two-hour outdoor event.
“’If my Aunt comes over, can I throw her a slice of turkey from the window?’ mocked actor Rob Schneider as he blasted the ‘Emperor Newsom.’
“Newsom announced new safety guidelines earlier this month for all private gatherings just as Californians were gearing up for the Thanksgiving holiday.”
China’s Surveillance State Sucks Up Data. U.S. Tech Is Key to Sorting It. New York Times reported:
“The computers inside the complex, known as the Urumqi Cloud Computing Center, are among the world’s most powerful. They can watch more surveillance footage in a day than one person could in a year. They look for faces and patterns of human behavior. They track cars. They monitor phones.
“The Chinese government uses these computers to watch untold numbers of people in Xinjiang, a western region of China where Beijing has unleashed a campaign of surveillance and suppression in the name of combating terrorism.
“Chips made by Intel and Nvidia, the American semiconductor companies, have powered the complex since it opened in 2016.”
Britons Who Test Negative for COVID Twice in a Week Set to Receive ‘Freedom Pass’ Under Government Scheme to Allow Them to Live Normal Life. Daily Mail reported:
“The details of the scheme are still being ironed out by officials in Whitehall, who hope it will allow the country to get back to normal next year.
“To earn the freedom pass, people will need to be tested regularly and, provided the results come back negative, they will then be given a letter, card or document they can show to people as they move around.”
Airlines Push for ‘COVID-Free Passports’ as Vaccine Race Heats Up. Axios reported:
Per a statement from Nick Careen, IATA’s senior vice president of airport, passenger, cargo and security, the app would ‘get people traveling again safely,’ as the airline industry seeks to recover from the pandemic.
“’In the immediate term, that means giving governments confidence that systematic COVID-19 testing can work as a replacement for quarantine requirements,’ Careen said. “And that will eventually develop into a vaccine program.”
State, Federal Antitrust Lawsuits Likely to Challenge Facebook for Buying Rivals and Weaponizing Data. The Washington Post reported:
“As the state and federal probes enter their final phases, investigators have explored how Instagram and WhatsApp changed in the years after Facebook purchased them, according to the three people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a law enforcement proceeding. Government antitrust watchdogs have weighed whether to contend in lawsuits that these transactions have left users with worse services — and fewer privacy protections — than they might have had if the companies had remained independent, the sources said.”
Local Company Plays Part in Georgia Tech’s COVID-19 Surveillance Testing Program. Georgia Tech News Center reported:
“A saliva-based COVID-19 surveillance testing program developed by Georgia Tech’s researchers and aided by the ingenuity of a local company, has helped stem transmission of the virus on the Institute’s Atlanta campus.
“Omni International, a Kennesaw-based manufacturer and distributor of laboratory homogenizers, DNA purification kits, and other products used in the pharmaceutical, food, and forensics industries, has been instrumental in helping Tech implement the ambitious testing program.”
Forget Bias, the Real Danger Is Big Tech’s Overwhelming Control Over Speech. CNN reported:
Too much control over the marketplace of ideas is antithetical to democracy. That’s why America has long had rules that limit such power, like media ownership limits that prohibit the same corporation from owning a TV station and newspaper in the same place. (Trump’s Federal Communications Commission, incidentally, is currently trying to roll back those rules.) The government failed to limit consolidation and allowed Facebook and Google to morph into monopoly monsters. Big Tech didn’t simply grow by being the best; the House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee’s recent 450-page report details just how extensive their anticompetitive behavior has been.”
China Wants Passenger Tracking System for Global Travel Coronavirus Reset. Breitbart reported:
“Chinese Communist President Xi Jinping wants travelers to adopt a global QR code system to help determine their health status and travel “permissions” in a post-coronavirus pandemic travel reset.
“During the virtual G20 summit on Saturday, Xi called for a coronavirus “global mechanism” which involves international recognition of health certificates in the form of QR codes to allow people to travel freely, according to state media.”
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November 18, 2020
Klaus Schwab: Great Reset Will ‘Lead To Fusion Of Our Physical, Digital, & Biological Identity.’ ZeroHedge reported:
“The globalist hails the arrival of ‘implanted devices (that) will likely also help to communicate thoughts normally expressed verbally through a ‘built-in’ smartphone, and potentially unexpressed thoughts or moods by reading brain waves and other signals.’
“So in other words, the ‘fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity’ relates to the transhumanist singularity and a future where people have their every movement tracked and every thought read by an implantable microchip.”
Sen. Hawley Presses Zuckerberg on Whistleblower Complaint Alleging Facebook Coordination With Twitter, Google. Fox News reported:
“Hawley said a former Facebook employee ‘with direct knowledge of the company’s content moderation practices” contacted his office about an “internal platform called Tasks that Facebook uses to coordinate projects, including censorship.’
“’The platform reflects censorship input from Google and Twitter, as well,’ Hawley alleged. ‘ …Facebook censorship teams communicate with their counterparts at Twitter and Google and then enter those companies’ suggestions for censorship onto the Task platform so that Facebook can follow up with them and effectively coordinate their censorship efforts.’”
Don’t Blame Section 230 for Big Tech’s Failures. Blame Big Tech. Electronic Frontier Foundation reported:
“If lawmakers are concerned about large social media platforms’ outsized influence on the world of online speech, they ought to confront the lack of meaningful competition among those platforms and the ways in which those platforms fail to let users control or even see how they’re using our data. Undermining Section 230 won’t fix Twitter and Facebook; in fact, it risks making matters worse by further insulating big players from competition and disruption.”
Coronavirus Vaccine Rollout Could Benefit From ‘Hyperlocal Surveillance System,’ Expert Says. Fox News reported:
“A solid surveillance system at the local level would ease a distribution process that sets out to prioritize those at highest risk and most vulnerable, though, as previously mentioned, this has yet to be definitely determined.
“‘You want to make sure you have good hyperlocal surveillance systems in place where you can see, where are the areas that have a higher burden of disease and then [the] highest prevalence of COVID-19,’ she continued.”
How Cities Are Defining the Rules of Engagement for Emerging Technology. Cities Today reported:
“Technology offers great benefits to cities and citizens and will remain critical to helping tackle other challenges such as economic recovery and climate change. However, the use of algorithms, contact-tracing apps and video surveillance during the coronavirus crisis has also brought important debates into focus about not only the balance between public health/benefits and privacy but also how these systems actually work. Further, COVID-19 has laid bare the digital divide and inequalities in who benefits from – and can be disadvantaged by – technology.”
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November 13, 2020
‘Unfair Surveillance’? Online Exam Software Sparks Global Student Revolt. Thomson Reuters Foundation News reported:
“As COVID-19 restrictions force students to take remote exams, universities around the world are relying on proctoring software like Examplify. But many students are wary of the technology, including mass data collection and bias in facial recognition.”
The Post Covid World, The WEF’s Diabolical Project: ‘Resetting the Future of Work Agenda’ — After ‘The Great Reset.’ A Horrifying Future. Global Research reported:
“They call ‘Resetting the Future’ a White Paper, meaning it’s not quite a final version. It is a draft of sorts, a trial balloon, to measure people’s reactions. It reads indeed like an executioner’s tale. Many people may not read it — have no awareness of its existence. If they did, they would go up in arms and fight this latest totalitarian blueprint, offered to the world by the WEF.
“It promises a horrifying future to some 80%-plus of the (surviving) population. George Orwell’s “1984” reads like a benign fantasy, as compared to what the WEF has in mind for humanity.”
How Artificial Intelligence May Be Making You Buy Things. BBC News reported:
“‘Our AI system tracks people’s behaviour patterns rather than their purchases, and the more you shop the more the AI knows about what kinds of products you like,’ he says.
“’The AI module is designed not only to do the obvious stuff, but it learns as it goes along and becomes anticipatory. It can start to build a picture of how likely you are to try a different brand, or to buy chocolate on a Saturday.’”
On U.S. Digital Rights, Biden Presidency Could Be ‘a Real Opportunity.’ Thomson Reuters Foundation News reported:
“U.S. President-elect Joe Biden should move fast to protect digital rights by curbing the use of facial recognition and surveillance, regulating big tech and tackling discrimination perpetuated by algorithms, campaigners said this week.
“As the Democratic former vice president lays the groundwork for his administration, 10 U.S.-based digital rights and racial justice groups signed a statement setting out their policy proposals for his first 100 days in office.”
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November 12, 2020
How Ticketmaster Plans to Check Your Vaccine Status for Concerts. Billboard reported:
“Here’s how it would work, if approved: After purchasing a ticket for a concert, fans would need to verify that they have already been vaccinated (which would provide approximately one year of COVID-19 protection) or test negative for coronavirus approximately 24 to 72 hours prior to the concert. The length of coverage a test would provide would be governed by regional health authorities — if attendees of a Friday night concert had to be tested 48 hours in advance, most could start the testing process the day before the event. If it was a 24-hour window, most people would likely be tested the same day of the event at a lab or a health clinic.”
San Diego City Council backs surveillance technology ordinances. Cities Today reported:
“The move comes after San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer recently ordered sensors and cameras on the city’s 3,200 smart streetlights to be deactivated until an ordinance is in place. The Smart Streetlight Program, which originally aimed to save costs and use data to improve mobility, public safety and more, faced mounting criticism over privacy and surveillance and additional controversy recently relating to San Diego police accessing video footage from streetlights to help solve crimes.”
Contact Tracing Apps Were Big Tech’s Best Idea for Fighting COVID. Why Haven’t They Helped? Time reported:
“‘Concern about privacy is one of the things that’s suppressing adoption,” says Christian Sandvig, director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing at the University of Michigan. That’s despite the fact that the Google-Apple protocol — which doesn’t track or share users’ locations or identities — represents the ‘gold standard’ for privacy protection, Sandvig says . . .
“But many users may not see it that way, especially in an era when Americans’ trust in Big Tech is eroding and technology firms are catching flak from all sides of the political spectrum. In some instances, privacy concerns are even killing contact-tracing apps in the cradle — South Carolina, for instance, announced plans in May to deploy a Google-Apple powered contact-tracing app, only to shelve the plan the next month after lawmakers banned such software over privacy concerns.”
Video Greatly Enhances Contact Tracing at Chicago Juvenile Detention Center. Infection Control Today reported:
“Video surveillance isn’t available in most healthcare settings, at least not the sort of video surveillance employed at a juvenile detention center. The use of video surveillance greatly increased the ability of administrators and medical personnel to contact trace at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (JTDC) in Chicago, according to a preprint study in the American Journal of Infection Control.”
Compliance Revolution: Digital ID Apps to Exceed 6.2 Billion By 2025 Says Research. Finance Feeds reported:
“A new study from Juniper Research has found that the number of digital identity apps in use will exceed 6.2 billion in 2025, from just over 1 billion in 2020. The research found that civic identity apps, where government-issued identities are held in an app, will account for almost 90% of digital identity apps installed globally in 2025; driven by the increasing use of civic identity in emerging markets and the lasting impact of the pandemic.”
