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Appeals Court Will Weigh Reviving Federal Employee Vaccine Mandate + More
Appeals Court Will Weigh Reviving Federal Employee Vaccine Mandate
The Biden administration on Tuesday will urge a federal appeals court to allow its mandate requiring federal employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to take effect.
The full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans, is considering whether to reverse a 2-1 April ruling by a three-judge panel allowing enforcement of the mandate. The full court put the mandate back on hold until it hears the case.
The case is one of several over federal vaccine mandates. In mid-January, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Biden’s COVID-19 vaccination-or-testing mandate for employees of large businesses but allowed a separate federal vaccine requirement for workers at healthcare facilities.
A third major vaccine requirement aimed at employees of federal contractors has been blocked in parts of the country by two appeals courts, and the administration has said it will not enforce it.
GOP Reps Demand Biden Hand Over Facebook, Twitter ‘Misinformation’
A trio of House Republicans asked President Biden on Tuesday to provide records related to communications and meetings between the executive branch and social media giants Facebook and Twitter over so-called “misinformation” on those platforms.
“We remain concerned with attempts by your administration to pressure private companies like Twitter and Facebook to censor certain speech or silence individuals with whom you disagree,” read the letter, led by House Energy & Commerce Committee ranking member Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and obtained exclusively by The Post.
The missive comes one week after a federal judge in Louisiana ordered the White House to turn over emails that press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top officials sent to social media companies.
The order from U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty was in response to a lawsuit filed by Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana arguing the Biden administration colluded with Facebook and Twitter to “censor freedom of speech” on a number of topics, including the COVID-19 pandemic and elections.
Democratic Senators Call on ICE to Stop Use of ‘Orwellian’ Facial Recognition, Surveillance
Two Democratic senators called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to discontinue its use of facial recognition and other surveillance technologies that they say threaten individual privacy rights.
Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to ICE acting Director Tae Johnson on Monday pointing to a Georgetown University report that detailed that ICE has used facial recognition and bought information from data brokers to build a “dragnet security system” to help carry out deportation proceedings.
The senators said these secretive methods have allowed ICE to obtain data about most people living in the United States.
“This surveillance network has exploited privacy-protection gaps and has enormous civil rights implications,” Markey and Wyden said. “ICE should immediately shut down its Orwellian data gathering efforts that indiscriminately collect far too much data on far too many individuals.”
Meta Dredges Sensitive Data for Over 100 Rival Companies While Still Claiming It Isn’t a Monopoly
An ongoing Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against Meta has claimed the tech giant has been anti-competitive. How does Meta respond? By demanding the sensitive data of hundreds of tech companies, including several of its biggest rivals and competitors.
Bloomberg first reported on Meta having filed 132 subpoenas of some of the biggest tech and social media companies around, including ByteDance-owned TikTok, Twitter, Reddit and Snap, whose apps remain some of Facebook and Instagram’s biggest competitors.
As much as the requests for data say they need to show how much competition Meta faces amongst its rivals, they also ask for an incredible amount of sensitive data about each apps targeted ad capability, user data, marketing strategies and contacts for their biggest advertisers.
Artificial Intelligence Is Playing a Bigger Role in Cybersecurity, but the Bad Guys May Benefit the Most
Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important role in cybersecurity — for both good and bad. Organizations can leverage the latest AI-based tools to better detect threats and protect their systems and data resources. But cyber criminals can also use the technology to launch more sophisticated attacks.
The rise in cyberattacks is helping to fuel growth in the market for AI-based security products. A July 2022 report by Acumen Research and Consulting says the global market was $14.9 billion in 2021 and is estimated to reach $133.8 billion by 2030.
Another driver of market growth was the COVID-19 pandemic and shift to remote work, according to the report. This forced many companies to put an increased focus on cybersecurity and the use of tools powered with AI to more effectively find and stop attacks.
California’s Anti-Misinformation Bill Is Well Intentioned. But It’s a Bad Idea.
If it’s egregious for politicians and celebrities to purvey misinformation, it’s far worse when the lie peddler is a physician. Surely, such an individual would be in violation of their oath and should be stripped of their medical license.
That’s the thinking behind AB 2098, a bill that passed the California legislature and is waiting to be signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). The measure would make California the first state that could take legal action against healthcare professionals for conveying false information about COVID-19 and its treatments.
While well-intentioned, this legislation will have a chilling effect on medical practice, with widespread repercussions that could paradoxically worsen patient care.
AB 2098, taken to the extreme, could put many practitioners at risk. But is it really right for physicians to be threatened with suspension or revocation of their license for offering nuanced guidance on a complex issue that is hardly settled by existing science?
Stuck in China’s COVID Lockdown, People Plead for Food, Medical Care
Frantic appeals for food and medical care are spreading across China in a grim deja vu, as tens of millions of people are put under weeks-long coronavirus lockdowns ahead of a key meeting of the ruling Communist Party.
While much of the world is moving past the pandemic, China remains stuck, with leader Xi Jinping continuing orders to maintain “zero COVID.” These lockdowns are keeping localized outbreaks from spreading but are taking an enormous economic and psychological toll on the population.
“We’ve been locked up in our home for more than 40 days. We are short of everything, especially food,” said Gulnazar, an Ili resident, whom The Washington Post is only identifying by one name because of security concerns. “There are so many difficulties, I feel like crying just by mentioning them.”
Gulnazar said local authorities locked their apartment door from the outside and opened it only when medical workers came to do coronavirus tests.
Twitter Shareholders Likely to Vote in Favor of Embattled Musk Deal
Twitter’s stockholders are making their voices heard. They’ve reportedly voted in favor of the company’s $44 billion acquisition deal with Elon Musk, according to a report from Reuters and another from The Wall Street Journal, both based on an unspecified number of anonymous sources.
The official deadline for the vote is today. A virtual Twitter shareholder meeting is set to be held at 10 a.m. Pacific/1 p.m. Eastern, and there participants will be able to cast their votes in real-time.
However, according to Reuters and WSJ, enough shareholders have already submitted their affirmative vote to make the outcome clear.
Twitter Whistleblower Details Allegations to Lawmakers
A whistleblower on Tuesday detailed a slate of explosive allegations against Twitter to congressional lawmakers, describing what he said were widespread security failures and vulnerabilities at the popular social media giant and an effort inside the company to overlook those risks in order to keep the platform viable and profitable.
As Twitter’s head of security, Peiter Zatko was a member of its executive team from late 2020 until he was fired earlier this year for alleged “ineffective leadership and poor performance” and Twitter has said he’s out to harm the company.
He told lawmakers he arrived at Twitter and discovered the company “was over a decade behind industry security standards” and prioritized monetizing advertising at the expense of widespread security vulnerabilities. “I’m here today because Twitter leadership is misleading the public lawmakers, regulators and even its own board of directors,” Zatko testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“The company’s cybersecurity failures make it vulnerable to exploitation, causing real harm to real people and when an influential media platform can be compromised by teenagers, thieves and spies, and the company repeatedly creates security problems on their own — this is a big deal for all of us.”
Smaller Tech Companies Urge Vote on Antitrust Bill
Smaller tech companies that offer more privacy options than the dominant giants on Tuesday sent a letter urging Congress to pass a key antitrust bill.
A dozen companies, including Proton, Mozilla and DuckDuckGo, asked House and Senate leaders to bring the American Innovation and Choice Online Act to a vote “as soon as possible,” arguing it would lead to more competition and therefore more privacy options for consumers.
“Massive tech platforms can exert influence over society and the digital economy because they ultimately have the power to collect, analyze and monetize exorbitant amounts of personal information.
“This is not by accident, as some of the tech giants have intentionally abused their gatekeeper positions to lock users into perpetual surveillance while simultaneously making it difficult to switch to privacy-protective alternatives,” the companies wrote, according to a copy of the letter shared with The Hill.
Chinese Police Target Tibetans for DNA Collection, Reports Allege
Chinese authorities are collecting genetic information from residents across Tibet, according to two recent reports by research organizations in the U.S. and Canada.
Why it matters: The collection of genetic data, though important for scientific research and for criminal investigations, can present serious ethical concerns regarding consent, exploitation and genetic surveillance.
Details: Chinese police have taken DNA samples from as much as one-third of Tibet’s population since June 2016, according to a report published on Tuesday by Citizen Lab, a research institute at the University of Toronto.
What they’re saying: “Without external checks on the Ministry of Public Security’s power, police in Tibet will be free to use a mass DNA database for whatever purpose they see fit,” the Citizen Lab report states.
Fauci’s Direct Line to Zuck Proves Facebook COVID Censorship Was All About Power, Not Public Health + More
Fauci’s Direct Line to Zuck Proves Facebook COVID Censorship Was All About Power, Not Public Health
The ugly picture of collusion between the feds and social media platforms around COVID just got a whole lot uglier. Recent filings from a lawsuit by the Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general against the Biden administration reveal that Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg gave Dr. Anthony Fauci his personal phone number shortly before the platform started to crack down on alleged COVID misinformation.
Is this how The Post — and many others — got banned, throttled or labeled as purveyors of misinformation for merely raising the possibility (as we did in a prescient February 2020 op-ed) that COVID originated from an accidental lab leak in Wuhan?
Leveraging state power and cozy relationships with Big Tech to suppress stories that might implicate muck-a-mucks like Fauci for spectacularly bad judgment (in this case, championing funding for viral gain-of-function research in China) is deeply unethical.
These new revelations about Fauci’s direct line to the man steering Facebook prove beyond a doubt that efforts to stamp down the lab-leak theory had nothing at all to do with public health or safety — and everything to do with back-channel deals among the elite.
Canadian Man Helps Vaccine Injured, Loved Ones Share Their Stories on Social Media
Tiago Henriques, a seasoned artificial intelligence expert who noticed that news of adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines were highly censored in the media, decided to create a Facebook group that lets the vaccine-injured and their loved ones share their stories.
Most Facebook pages on vaccine side effects and adverse events get removed very quickly by the social media platform, managing to get only a few thousand followers. With technical skills and the use of methods that stay within the confines of Facebook’s terms of service, Henriques and his team managed to keep their page up much longer, getting over 245,000 followers to date.
The Facebook group “Died Suddenly News” was created in late June 2021. Members of the private group share personal stories of people they know who have developed serious medical conditions or even died shortly after receiving the COVID-19 shots.
Henriques, who programs in languages such as Python, PyTorch, and TensorFlow, says his team has respected Facebook’s terms of service but is aware that even then their page may still be targeted and shut down. He is in the process of creating a separate platform that is not prone to censorship by social media companies.
Aaron Rodgers Says California’s Strict COVID Rules Destroyed Small Businesses in His Hometown
Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is slamming COVID-19 rules once again — this time on claims they destroyed small businesses in his hometown, he said.
In an episode of Bill Maher’s “Club Random” podcast, Rodgers calls out the state of California for strict social distancing and mask guidelines in 2020 and 2021, according to a preview of the episode shared by SFGate ahead of its Sunday premiere.
An estimated 40,000 small businesses in California were closed in September 2020, more than in any other state since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a report published by Yelp. At the time, half of these companies were permanently shuttered, the report said.
On the podcast, Rodgers also blasted Governor Gavin Newsom for his bill, AB 2098, that would make spreading misinformation or disinformation a punishable offense by a physician or surgeon.
A Day in the Surveilled Life
I will begin with a hot take: the Francis Ford Coppola movie with the most to say to us in 2022 is not The Godfather, not Godfather II, but The Conversation. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who overhears something he shouldn’t, and is in turn spied upon.
The movie ends with Harry destroying his own apartment — tearing down the walls, ripping up the floorboards — in search of a listening device he knows is there, but never finds. The last, iconic shot shows him sitting in a chair in his underwear, playing the saxophone in the ruins of his home and his privacy.
Almost 50 years later, it’s an image that’s prescient and quaint at the same time. Prescient because the notion that someone powerful is watching and/or listening to us, even in our most mundane, domestic moments, has gone from a tenet of hipster paranoia to an uncontested fact — a multi-billion-dollar postulate of twenty-first-century life.
The quaint part is that Harry Caul, or any of us, would mind that much. We participate in the process of our own surveillance every day. The devices that record us aren’t buried in our walls (well, sometimes they are, but we’ll get to that later): we strap them to our wrists, put them on our fingers, carry them in our pockets and install them in our homes.
New Zealand Drops Mask and Vaccine Mandates in Sweeping COVID Changes
New Zealand, which once eliminated the virus through the toughest pandemic rules in the world, has made relaxations similar to Australian or European conditions.
Mask-wearing will no longer be mandatory in public places, and the last vaccine mandates will be ditched in two weeks under sweeping changes announced by the prime minister on Monday.
However, the government is sticking by a seven-day isolation period for people with the virus, defying calls to shorten isolation to five days.
From Tuesday, mask-wearing will only be compulsory in healthcare settings, excepting mental health services. Also gone are the few remaining vaccine mandates, for workers and inbound travelers. Tests on arrival in New Zealand are no longer required but encouraged.
China Quarantines College Students Under Strict COVID Policy
Almost 500 students at China’s premier college for broadcast journalists have been sent to a quarantine center after a handful of COVID-19 cases were detected in their dormitory.
The 488 students at Communication University of China, along with 19 teachers and five assistants, were transferred by bus beginning Friday night.
Quarantining anyone considered to have been in contact with someone who tested positive for the virus has been a pillar of China’s strict “zero-COVID” policy. The quarantine centers include field hospitals as well as converted stadiums and exhibition centers that have been criticized for overcrowding, poor sanitation and spoiled food.
Xinjiang Lockdown: Chinese Censors Drown out Posts About Food and Medicine Shortages
Chinese censors have reportedly been ordered to flood social media with innocuous posts about Xinjiang to drown out mounting complaints of food and medication shortages in a region under lockdown for more than a month.
The Ili Kazakh autonomous prefecture, also known as Yili, is home to about 4.5 million people and is believed to have been first put into lockdown in early August, without official public announcement, after an outbreak of COVID-19. In recent days social media has hosted reams of posts about food shortages, delays or refusals of medical care.
But according to a leaked directive published by the China Digital Times, censors were told to “open a campaign of comment flooding” to drown them out.
Twitter Slams Elon Musk’s Third Attempt to Get out of the Deal as ‘Illegal.’ Next up, More Musk Texts Could Be Made Public and the Whistleblower Will Testify.
Twitter said on Monday in a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that Elon Musk‘s third attempt to cancel his $44 billion agreement to buy the social media company is “invalid and wrongful.”
On Friday, the billionaire’s legal team sent its third notice to Twitter attempting to call off the purchase agreement. In the letter, Musk’s lawyers argued that a recently reported $7.75 million severance payment given to Twitter whistleblower and ex-security chief Peiter Zatko breached the deal.
The social media company said it plans to continue to force Musk to go through with the deal at the original price.
Zatko is due to testify about his complaint on Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He has also been subpoenaed for the Twitter lawsuit. Meanwhile, Twitter shareholders are set to vote on Tuesday whether to green light Musk’s acquisition. Twitter’s board of directors has urged shareholders to approve the sale.
Mark Zuckerberg Is ‘Continuing to Derail’ Facebook, Says Harvard Expert: ‘He’s Really Lost His Way’
Mark Zuckerberg’s shortcomings as CEO are “continuing to derail” the tech giant formerly known as Facebook, according to Bill George, a senior fellow at Harvard Business School and former CEO of medical technology company Medtronic.
In short, George says bosses that lose sight of their most deeply held beliefs, values and purpose as a leader — especially in the name of money, fame or power — are doomed to fail. And after decades of researching high-profile corporate collapses, he says he sees striking similarities to Zuckerberg and Meta today.
Zuckerberg and Meta did not immediately respond to CNBC Make It’s request for comment. The Meta CEO is largely responsible for his company’s meteoric growth to this point, transforming the company he co-founded in 2004 into a tech giant with a $450.46 billion market cap, as of Monday morning.
The FTC Is Closing in on Runaway AI
Teenagers deserve to grow, develop and experiment, says Caitriona Fitzgerald, deputy director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a nonprofit advocacy group.
They should be able to test or abandon ideas “while being free from the chilling effects of being watched or having information from their youth used against them later when they apply to college or apply for a job.” She called for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to make rules to protect the digital privacy of teens.
Hye Jung Han, the author of a Human Rights Watch report about education companies selling personal information to data brokers, wants a ban on personal data-fueled advertising to children. “Commercial interests and surveillance should never override a child’s best interests or their fundamental rights, because children are priceless, not products,” she said.
Han and Fitzgerald were among about 80 people who spoke at the first public forum run by the FTC to discuss whether it should adopt new rules to regulate personal data collection, and the artificial intelligence fueled by that data.
Jack Dorsey’s Former Boss Is Building a Decentralized Twitter
When Twitter emerged in 2006, with its revolutionary 140-character microblogging platform, it didn’t take long for it to grow into the most powerful force in global information transmission. The site effectively cut out the middleman, loosening established media’s grip on shaping public opinion.
Donald Trump, formerly the most powerful person in the world, co-opted the unfiltered platform until Twitter silenced him in January 2021. Elon Musk, the wealthiest person on the planet, seriously considered buying it.
But there’s that whole great power/great responsibility equation and a growing chorus of people from decentralization idealists to governments to ticked-off consumers who feel that control of the world’s leading social networks by a few for-profit corporations is bad for society.
One of Twitter’s most outspoken critics is Evan Henshaw-Plath, 45, a little-known coder, who was Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s boss at a small tech platform called Odeo when they first started working on what was to become the microblogging site.
In August, Henshaw-Plath joined a group of 450 collaborators, privacy advocates, crypto-anarchists, libertarians and others at Camp Navarro in the towering Redwood Forest of Northern California to plot how to take back social media and the Internet itself.
Companies Are Dropping Vaccine Mandates + More
Companies Are Dropping Vaccine Mandates
Some companies are rolling back mandates for employee COVID vaccination — but few are making official public statements about it. Why it matters: These moves signal that we’ve shifted into a new chapter of the pandemic — and that employers are desperate to get people back to the office.
Companies mostly don’t want to talk about this, seeing little upside given the controversial history of mandates. But a few large employers’ plans are public: Starting this week, Goldman Sachs lifted vaccination requirements everywhere but New York City, where it still has a mandate for workplaces.
Between the lines: Things have changed a lot since these mandates were first put in place last year — a time when vaccination was seen as very effective against spreading disease. Now with the variants, that’s less true, says Dr. Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University.
But not all companies are giving up on mandates. Many hospitals and other healthcare providers do require vaccination. Boeing, Google, Edelman and Facebook told Axios Seattle reporter Melissa Santos that employees who enter the office must be vaccinated.
Meta Dissolves Team Responsible for Discovering ‘Potential Harms to Society’ in Its Own Products
Meta’s “Responsible Innovation Team,” a group meant to address “potential harms to society” caused by Facebook’s products, is no more. The Wall Street Journal reports that the team was recently “disbanded” though “most” members will stay on with other teams at the company. A Meta spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal the company was “committed to the team’s goals,” but didn’t provide a reason for the change in strategy.
The Responsible Innovation team was first formed “several years ago,” according to a 2021 blog post written by Meta’s Margaret Stewart, the Facebook VP who oversaw the team.
The team was made up of engineers as well as people with backgrounds in civil rights and ethics, and advised the company’s product teams on “potential harms across a broad spectrum of societal issues and dilemmas,” she wrote last year. Zvika Krieger, the Meta employee who led the team, departed earlier this year, according to The Journal.
The Responsible Innovation team isn’t the only team to recently be reshuffled. Earlier this summer, Meta reorganized its entire artificial intelligence (AI) team, which included folding the Responsible AI group into its Social Impact team.
Mask Mandate Ends on Domestic and International Flights as Australia Rolls Back COVID Protections
Passengers are no longer required to wear masks on domestic and inbound international flights as COVID rules ease across Australia.
The mandate ended at 12:01 a.m. on Friday, however, travelers are still advised to consider wearing them for their own safety.
Masks may still be required on outbound international flights depending on the requirements of the destination country.
And across Australia, isolation has been reduced for people infected with COVID to a minimum of five days for those with no symptoms. Workers in high-risk settings including aged care, disability and home care must still isolate for seven days.
Lawsuit Contests Montana Vaccine Mandate Ban on Tribal Land
A federal lawsuit in Montana seeks to block a state agency from enforcing on tribal lands a legislative prohibition against COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
The Glacier County Regional Port Authority filed the complaint Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Great Falls. The litigation comes after Montana Labor and Industry Department officials determined the port authority discriminated against an unvaccinated person who attempted to attend one of its meetings, in Browning.
Browning is on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Attorneys for the port authority contend that the state lacks jurisdiction on tribal lands to enforce Montana’s prohibition on vaccine mandates.
Montana’s Republican-dominated Legislature last year passed a first-in-the-nation law making it illegal to discriminate based on a person’s vaccine status in providing services, access to public accommodations or employment. The law applies to all vaccinations.
From ‘Stop the Spread’ to ‘You Do You’: NY Mask Policy Has Experts Facepalming
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority faced immediate backlash Thursday after unveiling a new mask-optional policy featuring the tagline “You do you” below a silly cartoon of a person improperly wearing a mask over just the nose, not the mouth.
Generally, the new policy lifts the MTA’s previous requirement that riders wear a face mask — properly. Earlier signage showed a cartoon person correctly wearing a mask, with the tagline “That’s the one!,” after several examples of how not to wear a mask, including over just the nose. The requirement and the sign came with the slogan: “Stop the spread. Wear a mask.”
But the new guidance dramatically flips the collective-effort messaging to a more individual-based approach to public health, with the slogan: “Masks are encouraged, but optional. Let’s respect each other’s choices.” The new signage repeats the same cartoon examples of how not to wear a mask for protection but now labels them all as acceptable.
Health experts and Twitter commenters quickly mocked and criticized the new messaging. “Nothing says ‘we’re in this together’ like ‘you do you’ on public safety messaging,” cosmologist Katie Mack replied on Twitter.
Washington’s COVID State of Emergency to End Oct. 31
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced Thursday that the state of emergency sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic will end on Oct. 31, nearly three years after the Democratic governor first issued the order.
A vast majority of the 85 orders issued — including most mask requirements, restrictions on commerce and restaurants — had already been previously lifted. An additional 13 healthcare-related orders are set to end on Oct. 27, including one that offered flexibility for locations pharmacies could store vaccines.
Ten remaining orders, including the underlying emergency order and vaccination requirements for healthcare and education workers, will remain in place until the emergency order is lifted on Oct. 31.
Inslee noted that employers can continue to require vaccination as a condition of employment if they choose, and Inslee had previously announced such requirements would remain an employment requirement for most state agencies.
For Many Weary Chinese, Lockdown Dread Trumps Fear of COVID
When COVID-19 case numbers started ticking up in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen last week, Robin Chen got in his car and fled to nearby Huizhou.
It wasn’t because he feared the virus — many of his friends overseas had caught it and recovered — but he didn’t want to lose his freedom again as speculation swirled that Shenzhen was headed for its second lockdown in six months.
Many people in China say they are weary and frustrated that China is sticking with draconian methods to stop the spread of COVID-19, pointing to how the coronavirus appears to have mutated into a less deadly form, with the vast majority of cases in China classified as having mild or no symptoms.
TikTok Unites Tech Factions Against It
TikTok has managed to get everyone in tech on the same page, wherever they stand on regulation, antitrust and all the other controversies raging in the industry.
Driving the news: While TikTok had no official presence at the Code Conference, the Chinese-owned firm was the talk of the annual gathering of tech world notables this week — serving as the foil of choice for a parade of tech executives, pundits and even some government officials.
Why it matters: Growing as other giants slow, the social app for short video has emerged as a target for Silicon Valley giants worried about losing users and also for Beltway insiders who fear the company’s ties to Beijing will undermine national security.
Be smart: It’s not what TikTok is doing today that has people most concerned, but rather what it could do with millions of users, many of them young people, and a powerful algorithm that seems perfectly tuned to reach their hearts and minds.
White House Renews Call to ‘Remove’ Section 230 Liability Shield
The White House on Thursday called on Congress to remove an important liability shield for tech companies.
President Joe Biden had previously called for revoking the liability shield, which allows platforms to disseminate content without being liable for it — known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 — on the campaign trail in January 2020.
But the latest announcement builds upon increased calls by the administration to rein in large tech companies. The announcement was made at a “listening session” at the White House about tech platform accountability.
Your turn Congress: Biden can’t get rid of the Section 230 liability shield without Congressional action. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who heads the House Energy and Commerce consumer protection panel, said she’s supportive of Biden’s calls for “fundamental reforms” to Section 230.
A spokesperson for Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the committee’s ranking member, said, “This administration is using Big Tech to silence their opponents so they can advance their own power. Any reforms of Section 230 should lead to more speech, not less.”
Google and Amazon Workers Protest Their Companies’ $1.2 Billion AI Contract With Israel
Hundreds of Google and Amazon workers on Thursday staged protests around the country to speak out against the two tech giants’ cloud contracts with the Israeli government, fearing the military could use the technology to surveil Palestinians.
The demonstration stretched across four U.S. cities — San Francisco, New York, Seattle and Durham, North Carolina — as workers protested Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract that both Google and Amazon have signed to provide Israel with artificial intelligence services and other computing tools.
The technology could be used for facial detection and “sentiment analysis,” a form of machine learning that purveyors claim can discern someone’s feelings by studying their face and speech, according to a report by The Intercept.
Twitter Whistleblower Scored $7 Million Settlement Days Before Dropping Bombshell Allegations
Twitter agreed to pay their former head of security, Peiter Zatko, $7 million in June in exchange for signing an NDA to stop him from speaking publicly about “extreme, egregious deficiencies” over a wide swath of issues — including privacy, platform integrity and content moderation.
Days later he dropped his bombshell allegations in the form of a Congressional whistleblower complaint — which is one of the few venues that trumps an NDA, according to the Wall Street Journal.
And now, Zatko’s allegations will be part of Elon Musk‘s countersuit against the company — which was launched after he filed to back out of a $44 billion deal to purchase the company amid allegations that a significant percentage of Twitter accounts are actually bots — and for which Twitter has sued Musk.
On Wednesday a judge ruled that Musk can amend his countersuit against Twitter to include Zatko’s allegations. A five-day nonjury trial is scheduled for Oct. 17 in Delaware Chancery Court.
Senior Facebook Engineers Say No One at the Company Knows Where Your Data Is Kept + More
Senior Facebook Engineers Say No One at the Company Knows Where Your Data Is Kept
Two longtime Meta engineers were grilled about how the company stores and keeps track of user data and revealed they don’t believe anyone at the company could compile all the data belonging to a single user, newly unsealed court documents revealed.
The two engineers were questioned during a court hearing as part of a consumer privacy lawsuit centered around the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018.
The questioning was led by a court-appointed technical expert who was trying to ascertain exactly what information Facebook stores about users and where it is all kept.
“I don’t believe there’s a single person that exists who could answer that question. It would take a significant team effort to even be able to answer that question,” answered Eugene Zarashaw, whose LinkedIn profile says he is an engineering director at Meta and has worked there for almost nine years.
The lawsuit against Meta was filed in 2018 and the company reached a settlement in the case in August, one month before CEO Mark Zuckerberg was due to be deposed.
Why CVS Is Spending $8 Billion to Bring Back Physician House Calls
CVS announced on Monday that it plans to buy Signify Health, a network of more than 10,000 clinicians that provide in-person evaluations and care for U.S. patients at their homes, along with virtual telehealth visits. The $8 billion acquisition is a major bet for the 59-year-old pharmacy chain. It’s also an attempt to resurrect a relatively old concept: the doctor’s house call.
CVS is just one of several companies, including Amazon and Walgreens, that has recently been investing in at-home healthcare. The reason why is simple: The number of people aged 65 and older in the U.S. could practically double by 2060, which means demand for medical care will almost certainly grow, too.
Completing a medical appointment at home can be safer for people who face difficulties leaving the house. The return of the house call is also part of a broader transformation in how healthcare is delivered and, perhaps more importantly, who delivers it. Like CVS, many of the companies investing in at-home care aren’t traditional healthcare providers, and they’re interested in using tech to take on far more than just home-based medical appointments.
If Caring About Your Digital Privacy Makes Me a Cult Member, Sign Me up
Asked about state and local police accessing millions of people’s geolocation data without warrants, an Arkansas prosecutor recently said Americans have given up any reasonable expectation of privacy when they use free phone apps — and that those who object belong to a “cult of privacy.”
Well, count me in. I am a proud member of the cult of privacy, and I want to bring you into the fold. If you would rather try to protect your privacy than being tracked in everything you do and everywhere you go, you might want to join us. Light a candle, download a VPN client and help us overthrow surveillance capitalism.
The privacy-poo-pooing prosecutor was quoted last week in an Associated Press story based on a joint investigation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I work as associate director of digital strategy. That project revealed that law enforcement agencies across the country have been paying a company called Fog Data Science to gain warrantless access to millions of people’s cell phone location data.
Religious Exemptions for COVID Vaccine to Expire for Froedtert Employees as Novavax Shot Becomes Available
Staff at Froedtert Health must receive the COVID-19 vaccine or risk termination because of the availability of the Novavax version of the vaccine.
“This protein-based vaccination option eliminates conflicts for those staff with religious or medical exemptions caused by mRNA-based vaccines and other concerns,” Froedtert said in a statement to CBS 58. “Since that staff is now eligible for a vaccination that does not conflict with their religious beliefs or medical situation, their exemption will expire.”
The hospital said the updated policy will only affect a small number of staff who had previously requested an exemption.
How COVID Spurred Governments to Snoop on Sewage
Surveying sewage for pathogens is not a new idea. Several American cities, including Charleston, Detroit and Philadelphia, tracked polio that way in the early 20th century. But the COVID-19 pandemic proved to be, as the inevitable joke goes, a “watershed moment.”
Figures from the jauntily named COVIDPoops19 project, hosted at the University of California, Merced, show that the number of survey sites has risen from just 38 in October 2020 to more than 3,500 now, scattered across 70 countries.
“It’s been the silver lining of the pandemic,” says Anna Mehrotra at the Water Environment Federation, an American organization. “We’ve done a decade’s worth of science in the first year,” says Doug Manuel, an epidemiologist at the University of Ottawa.
Now public health officials are hoping that all this newly built infrastructure can be transformed into a worldwide early-warning system for all sorts of diseases. America and Europe are dealing with an outbreak of monkeypox, an infectious disease related to smallpox that has, for the first time, spread outside its African home. Cities are already scouring wastewater for strains of the virus. In India, typhoid, dengue fever and avian influenza are high up on the list. In Malawi, cholera, rotavirus and shigella are priorities.
Western University to Delay COVID Booster Mandate to Early 2023
Western University said on Sept. 6 that it will delay imposing a COVID-19 booster requirement due to Health Canada approving a new bivalent vaccine.
The university in London, Ontario, announced in late August it would impose the booster on staff, faculty, students and some visitors. It said the measures were “aimed at preserving the in-person learning experience.”
The initial deadline for compliance was Oct. 1, but the university said it’s now being pushed to Jan. 9, 2023.
Health Canada announced on Sept. 1 that it has authorized Moderna’s bivalent vaccine, which targets the Omicron BA.1 variant. This variant is all but extinguished in Canada, with subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 being dominant.
Chengdu, Chinese City of 21 Million, Has COVID Lockdown Extended Indefinitely
Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, has extended the coronavirus lockdown of most of its districts indefinitely as it hopes to stem further transmissions in the city of 21.2 million.
The lockdown was expected to be lifted on Wednesday, but local government officials said “there are still risks of social spread in some areas,” according to Chengdu authorities.
Residents under lockdown in 16 districts, cities, counties and special zones out of the 23 under Chengdu’s jurisdiction remain under lockdown, the authorities said. They will be tested for the virus every day, authorities said late on Wednesday, without giving a date for when the lockdown would be lifted. A handful of districts were released from a full lockdown, but residents still have to undergo mass testing on Friday and Sunday.
The Facebook Button Is Disappearing From Websites as Consumers Demand Better Privacy
Until about a month ago, shoppers on Dell’s website looking for a new laptop could log in using their Facebook credentials to avoid creating a new username and password. That option is now gone. Dell isn’t alone. Other big brands, including Best Buy, Ford Motor, Pottery Barn, Nike, Patagonia, Match and Amazon’s video-streaming service Twitch have removed the ability to sign on with Facebook.
It’s a marked departure from just a few years ago, when the Facebook login was plastered all over the internet, often alongside buttons that let you sign in with Google, Twitter or LinkedIn.
Jen Felch, Dell’s chief digital and chief information officer, said people stopped using social logins, for reasons that include concerns over security, privacy and data-sharing.
The disappearing login is the latest sign of Facebook’s diminishing influence on the internet following more than a decade of spectacular growth. In the past year, the company’s business has been beset by Apple’s iOS privacy change, which made it harder to target ads, a deteriorating economy, competition from short-video service TikTok and reputational damage after a whistleblower leaked documents showing Facebook knew of the harm caused by many of its products.
Don’t Let Fearmongering Derail a New Law That Has Real Teeth to Protect Kids’ Privacy
For two decades, we have watched as the tech sector rose from quirky start-ups — many of which originated here in the state of California — to global behemoths with the power to entertain, inform, manipulate, addict and destabilize at an individual, local and global scale.
Some of those hurt most by tech’s worst effects are also the most vulnerable among us. There is no longer any question as to the nature of the harm to children around the globe, including heightened body image issues for one-in-three teenage girls on Instagram, death and injury inspired by TikTok challenges and the sexualization of children on YouTube.
With Congress at an impasse on how to rein in the titans of tech, state legislators have rightfully stepped in. The California legislature passed the Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) last week, requiring the prioritization of the safety and well-being of children in the design of online products and services. Legislators refer to it as the “Kids’ Code.” Gov. Gavin Newsom has yet to sign the bill into law.
TikTok’s Secret to Explosive Growth? ‘Billions and Billions of Dollars’ Says Snap CEO Evan Spiegel
American social media companies are increasingly feeling the squeeze from TikTok, the fastest growing video platform on the planet, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance.
TikTok has been aggressively pulling younger users away from Meta and is now more popular among teens than Instagram and Snapchat, according to August data from the Pew Research Center. (The pandemic also helped TikTok land with older audiences in the U.S. that it had previously struggled to reach.)
These American players cannot operate in China, yet they’re ceding ground to a Chinese company on their own turf — as Code Conference host and journalist Kara Swisher put it, TikTok is “eating their lunch.”
At this year’s Code Conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday, some of the world’s top tech and media CEOs, and prominent political voices, raised concerns about the power, rapid growth and surveillance capabilities of the Chinese-owned platform, in some cases calling for it to be banned altogether. TikTok was notably one of the only major, mainstream social media companies not present.
‘We Can Do Better’: Snapchat to Target Millennials After Missing Goals
Snapchat is coming for the oldies — in Gen Z terms, at least. The messaging app is focusing on attracting users in their 30s, according to a leaked memo from its co-founder and chief executive, Evan Spiegel, as part of a goal to increase usage “in at least one new large country or demographic.”
Attracting new users is part of the goal to grow Snapchat to 450 million daily active users by the end of next year. The target isn’t just millennials, though. Snapchat is also focusing on a “big five” list of large countries with low penetration: Mexico, Brazil, Italy, Spain and Japan.