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Meta Sued for Violating Patient Privacy With Data Tracking Tool + More
Meta Sued for Violating Patient Privacy With Data Tracking Tool
Facebook’s parent company Meta and major U.S. hospitals violated medical privacy laws with a tracking tool that sends health information to Facebook, two proposed class-action lawsuits allege.
The lawsuits, filed in the Northern District of California in June and July, focus on the Meta Pixel tracking tool. The tool can be installed on websites to provide analytics on Facebook and Instagram ads. It also collects information about how people click around and input information into those websites.
An investigation by The Markup in early June found that 33 of the top 100 hospitals in the United States use the Meta Pixel on their websites. At seven hospitals, it was installed on password-protected patient portals. The investigation found that the tool was sending information about patient health conditions, doctor appointments, and medication allergies to Facebook.
In one of the lawsuits, a patient says that her medical information was sent to Facebook by the Meta Pixel tool on the University of California San Francisco and Dignity Health patient portals (those hospitals are also defendants in the suit). The patient then was served advertisements targeted to her heart and knee conditions, the lawsuit says.
Elon Musk Files Countersuit Under Seal vs Twitter Over $44 Billion Deal
Elon Musk countersued Twitter on Friday, escalating his legal fight against the social media company over his bid to walk away from the $44 billion purchase, although the lawsuit was filed confidentially.
While the 164-page document was not publicly available, under court rules a redacted version could soon be made public.
Musk’s lawsuit was filed hours after Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery ordered a five-day trial beginning Oct. 17 to determine if Musk can walk away from the deal.
Amazon’s Climate Pollution Is Getting Way Worse
Amazon’s greenhouse gas emissions ballooned big time last year despite the company’s efforts to sell itself as a leader in climate action.
Its carbon dioxide emissions grew an eye-popping 18 percent in 2021 compared to 2020, according to its latest sustainability report.
Amazon generated 71.54 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent last year, about as much pollution as 180 gas-fired power plants might pump out annually.
This is the second year in a row that Amazon’s climate pollution has grown by double digits since it made a splashy climate pledge and started reporting its emissions publicly in 2019. Comparing that year to 2021, the company’s CO2 pollution has actually grown a whopping 40 percent.
Data Brokers Resist Pressure to Stop Collecting Info on Pregnant People
Democratic lawmakers are piling pressure on data brokers to stop collecting information on pregnant people in order to protect those seeking abortions. They’re not having much luck.
For years, brokers have sold datasets on millions of expectant parents from their trimester status to their preferred birth methods. Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, that same data is becoming a political issue, with abortion-rights groups warning that states with abortion bans are likely to weaponize it.
In the three months since POLITICO reported the draft opinion against Roe, numerous congressional Democrats have sent letters to data brokers urging them to stop the practice, promised to interrogate the companies about their collections and introduced bills to restrict reproductive health data from being collected and sold.
But in the absence of federal data privacy legislation or any likely chance of it getting the support needed to pass, many brokers aren’t taking heed.
Corbett: Technocracy Is Insane, Anti-Human and It WILL Fail
It’s almost impossible to browse the news anymore without giving up all hope for the future of humanity. We’re all going to be fed into the maw of the technocratic system and have our fingers broken by our new chess-playing robot overlords and there’s nothing we can do about it.
After all, when you ask an AI image generation bot to predict what the last selfie a human ever takes will look like you get this. I guess we better just abandon all hope now, right? Not so fast.
Here’s a great big white pill for you: the technocratic system of tyranny is going to fail. This is not wishful thinking; it’s a cold statement of fact. Technocracy, in all its facets — from the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda to the brain chips and AI godheads of the transhumanists to the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) social credit surveillance state — is anti-human. It goes against nature itself. It cannot work in the long run, and it is destined to fail.
Now, this doesn’t mean that it’s a cake walk from here on out.
But it does mean that we can and will make it through these trying times. And the quicker that we wake up and realize the power to change the world for the better is in our hands — not in the hands of the would-be world controllers — the sooner this nightmare will end.
Twitter Is Dragging Elon Musk’s Billionaire Friends Into Its $44 Billion Legal Battle With a Flurry of Subpoenas
Twitter has issued a slew of subpoenas to some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names amid its legal battle with Elon Musk, The Washington Post first reported.
Twitter sent legal requests to billionaire investors Chamath Palihapitiya and Marc Andreessen on Monday, according to documents that were obtained by The Post.
The publication said Twitter also subpoenaed one of the entrepreneurs that helped Musk found PayPal, David Sacks, SpaceX and Tesla board member Stephen Jurvetson, as well as investors Jason Calacanis, Keith Rabois, and Joe Lonsdale.
The legal requests could require the men to testify in court when the five-day trial starts in October.
The New Way Police Could Use Your Google Searches Against You
For millennia, we’ve been told that asking questions was the path to enlightenment. But in the surveillance age, it might land you in jail. That’s the danger of a new search tactic that police are increasingly turning to in their constant campaign to transform our phones and devices into evidence against us: keyword warrants.
One Denver court may soon rule on whether they can continue as a policing tactic — and in the post-Roe era, the wrong decision could put abortion seekers in unprecedented danger.
Police have used web browser history and search engine data in their investigations for about as long as the data has existed, but keyword warrants are different — a digital dragnet to find every user who searches for a specific person, place or thing.
We don’t know how often they are used, but we the number of publicly known examples is only growing. And soon a Denver judge will provide one of the first decisions on their constitutionality.
Taking ‘Little Miss’ Quizzes Going Around TikTok? Be Warned, They’re Collecting Your Data
Personality quizzes called “Which Little Miss Do I Think You Are?” by user vickova and “what little miss character are you?” by imm6y have made the rounds on TikTok, both hosted by online quiz platform uQuiz.
People have been sharing their results, often using the hashtag #littlemissquiz. Users have also been tweeting screenshots of the quizzes.
Questionable results aside, these quizzes should be flagged for a more pressing reason: uQuiz is collecting a lot of the data provided.
Under the platform’s privacy policy, the site states that “personally-identifiable information” is collected, “[depending] on the function(s) that are being performed.”
If you take a quiz on the site, including the Little Miss quizzes, any information provided is collected and stored on behalf of the quiz creator.
Most Important Problems Facing U.S. Today — per Poll
Inflation, the economy, and abortion issues are among the most important problems facing the U.S., according to a new Gallup poll.
The poll found eight percent of Americans named abortion as the country’s top concern — the most since Gallup began tracking the issue in 1984.
Abortion still ranks behind three other issues, according to the poll, which surveyed 1,103 adults between July 5 and 26.
Inflation (17 percent) and dysfunctional government or bad leadership (17 percent) topped the list, with another 12 percent of Americans citing the economy in general.
Twitter Investor Sues Elon Musk in a Bid to Force Through $44 Billion Takeover + More
Twitter Investor Sues Elon Musk in a Bid to Force Through $44 Billion Takeover
It’s not only Twitter that’s trying to force Elon Musk to buy the company for $44 billion. An investor filed a proposed class action lawsuit to try stopping Musk from backing out of the deal. Luigi Crispo’s suit accuses Musk of breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty to Twitter’s shareholders, according to Bloomberg. It claims he offered feeble “rationales for reneging on his contract.” Two “corporate acquisition entities” connected to the deal are also named as defendants.
Musk last month attempted to wash his hands of his bid to buy Twitter, claiming the company made “false and misleading representations” and that it misrepresented the number of bots and fake accounts on its platform. Crispo concurred with Twitter’s claims that Musk is using false claims about bots and spam to wriggle out of the deal without a valid legal standing to do so. Also like Twitter, Crispo is seeking a court order that would require Musk to complete the buyout.
After he tried to back out, Twitter swiftly sued Musk in an attempt to make him “honor his obligations” and buy the company. Last week, Musk made a counter filing, which remains sealed for now. A judge granted Twitter’s request for an expedited trial, which is scheduled to start on October 17th and last for five days. Its shareholders will vote on the takeover on September 13th.
Most U.S. Public Schools Plan to Keep Masks Optional for Start of Classes
Students are heading to another school year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but this time, there seem to be fewer discussions and fretting about masks and other mitigation measures — despite a rise of infections sweeping the country.
Most of the largest public school districts in the United States are not requiring masks for the new school year, making masking “optional” as students return to classes and the highly transmissible BA.5 subvariant spreads.
Across the country, “schools have become more relaxed in their mask policies,” said Gladys Cruz, president-elect of the School Superintendents Association and district superintendent for Questar III in New York.
Although there is the possibility that such policies could change if COVID-19 case rates rise or fall, everyone in a district might not be receptive to change, Cruz said.
D.C. Schools Expand COVID Vaccine Mandate, Unlike Most Other Districts
D.C. students who are 12 and older must be vaccinated against the coronavirus to attend school this upcoming academic year.
The youth vaccine mandate in D.C. is among the strictest in the nation, according to health experts, and is being enacted in a city with wide disparities in vaccination rates between its White and Black children. Overall, about 85 percent of students between the ages of 12 and 15 have been vaccinated against the virus, but the rate drops to 60 percent among Black children in this age range.
If the city does not close this gap but does strictly enforce the vaccine mandate this fall, students of color — who experienced disproportionately large academic setbacks during the pandemic — could be at home in significant numbers next academic year.
“Our goal is that no child should miss a single day of school,” Asad Bandealy, the chief of the D.C. Department of Health’s Health Care Access Bureau, said at a news conference this week at Mary’s Center, a community health clinic where children can be vaccinated. “And that means we need to get started now.”
Starlink: Why is Elon Musk Launching Thousands of Satellites?
Elon Musk’s SpaceX company has been launching thousands of satellites into orbit. Many people say they’ve seen them in the skies.
They’re part of the Starlink project, which aims to provide high speed internet services from space, to remote areas on Earth.
What is Starlink and how does it work? Starlink provides internet services via a huge network of satellites. It is aimed at people who live in remote areas who cannot get high-speed internet.
“There are people in the UK in that category, but more across the world, in places like Africa,” says Dr Lucinda King, Space Projects Manager at the University of Portsmouth.
Starlink’s satellites have been put in low-level orbit around the Earth to make connection speeds between the satellites and the ground as fast as possible.
These Companies Know When You’re Pregnant — and They’re Not Keeping It Secret
In early 2012, the New York Times Magazine put out a cover story about Andrew Pole, a statistician working for Target who was tasked with inventing a way to identify potentially pregnant shoppers, even if those shoppers didn’t want the company to know. The rationale, Pole said, was that moms-to-be are a multi-million dollar market, and Target wanted a way to pepper these moneymakers with promos and coupons before its competitors did the same.
Pole obliged. After crawling through the freight of sale data from statewide shoppers on Target’s public baby registry, he came up with a “pregnancy prediction” score that the company would internally assign to each of its regular customers. If you believe the rumors (not everyone does), Target’s algos were so accurate that the company sent coupons for cribs to a teenage girl before her own father knew she was due.
A decade later, the story reads less like a quirk of capitalism and more like an ominous sign. Now it’s not just Target, every company is hounding you for data. And thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision to overthrow Roe v. Wade, a good chunk of the nation’s police and private citizens can go after people seeking abortions and the doctors that would serve them if there’s enough evidence.
No, I Will Not BeReal
Clearly, people want something from social media that they aren’t getting. It’s something they think they remember getting at one point, but which is now being held away from them by the machine. Some people describe that disappointment elliptically, saying that they are exhausted by “the algorithm” or by “surveillance capitalism.” What they’re really desperate for is connection without the anxiety of performance. They want something real.
They’ll try anything, and right now, they’re trying a French app called, appropriately, BeReal. Created in 2020 and now sitting near the top of the charts in Apple’s App Store (ahead of TikTok, Instagram, and Google Maps), it has taken off in the United States in the past several months. Its official description has a “WARNING” with 10 bullet points. “BeReal is life, Real life, and this is life without filters,” one says. “BeReal won’t make you famous. If you want to become an influencer you can stay on TikTok and Instagram,” reads another.
How it works: Once a day, at a random time, users receive a push notification telling them that it is time to “BeReal.” That means they have two minutes to post whatever they’re really doing at the moment by taking one photo with their smartphone’s outward-facing camera and one selfie at the same time. These are rendered as a single image, with one photo positioned in the top-left corner of the other.
There’s a Monkeypox Testing Bottleneck
When the first case of monkeypox was confirmed in the United States, the country’s public health laboratories had the ability to run 6,000 tests per week. That was way more capacity than needed—until monkeypox started spreading faster than public health officials had anticipated. There are now approximately 5,000 confirmed cases in the U.S.
For patients, testing is crucial, because a positive result is needed for accessing TPOXX, an antiviral medication that is being used off-label to treat monkeypox. “Having a test result is a self-advocacy tool,” says Keletso Makofane, an HIV epidemiologist at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. “If you don’t have a test result, you don’t have evidence of your condition.”
Testing has since expanded to around 80,000 tests per week, after five large commercial laboratories partnered with the federal government to boost the nation’s testing efforts. But while the ability to run more tests has improved, there are still barriers that prevent people from accessing them. And although states are required to report cases of certain diseases, monkeypox isn’t one of them. That makes it difficult for public health officials to gauge the true size of the outbreak and who the disease is infecting, in order to break the chains of transmission.
Why Meta and Alphabet Should Dance on TikTok’s Grave
The United States has a TikTok problem, and it is about to get a lot worse.
Executives at Snap (SNAP) announced on Thursday that sales and profits came-in below plan as the social media company faced competition for advertisement spending. Shares lost 39%. Investors are focused on financial metrics. That view is too small.
TikTok is short form video platform owned by ByteDance, a Chinese conglomerate. Executives in China claim the businesses operate independently. They say data for TikTok’s American members is stored in Singapore and the United States, not China. Until a month ago there was no direct evidence any personal information was ever been accessed by employees based in China.
Buzzfeed News reported last month that this is no longer true.
Leaked audio recordings from 80 internal meetings reveal that Bytedance employees repeatedly accessed non-public data from American TikTok users. Data collected from Americans is supposed to be stored on Texas-based servers controlled by Oracle (ORCL), under the Project Texas agreement.
Can Artificial Intelligence Really Help Us Talk to the Animals?
A dolphin handler makes the signal for “together” with her hands, followed by “create.” The two trained dolphins disappear underwater, exchange sounds and then emerge, flip on to their backs and lift their tails. They have devised a new trick of their own and performed it in tandem, just as requested. “It doesn’t prove that there’s language,” says Aza Raskin. “But it certainly makes a lot of sense that, if they had access to a rich, symbolic way of communicating, that would make this task much easier.”
Raskin is the co-founder and president of Earth Species Project (ESP), a California non-profit group with a bold ambition: to decode non-human communication using a form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning, and make all the knowhow publicly available, thereby deepening our connection with other living species and helping to protect them. A 1970 album of whale song galvanized the movement that led to commercial whaling being banned. What could a Google Translate for the animal kingdom spawn?
The organization, founded in 2017 with the help of major donors such as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, published its first scientific paper last December. The goal is to unlock communication within our lifetimes. “The end we are working towards is, can we decode animal communication, discover non-human language,” says Raskin. “Along the way and equally important is that we are developing technology that supports biologists and conservation now.
Twitter Reports Record High Government Demands for Account Info + More
Twitter Reports Record High Government Demands for Account Info
Twitter reported on Thursday that it received record numbers of government legal demands targeting journalists from July to December of last year.
The tech giant reported an increase of 103% in overall legal demands related to verified journalists and news outlets, such as requests to remove content or court orders. It received a total of 47,572 demands regarding 198,931 accounts. About a quarter of those demands, 11,460, were made by governments, 20% of which were from the U.S. government.
Twitter also received about 11,500 requests for information about accounts during the reporting period, a 7% drop from the previous six months.
The highest percentage of information requests coming from governments originated from the U.S. government, according to the report.
Amazon’s Dangerous Ambition to Dominate Healthcare
Patient privacy has been inviolable since the time of Hippocrates, in 400 BC. That may be about to end. Last week Amazon announced it is going to acquire One Medical, a healthcare provider with over 700,000 patients.
Big Tech has flirted with healthcare for years. Amazon’s direct entry into primary healthcare is a turning point. It will increase the perils of surveillance capitalism, with implications for everyone.
Amazon knows our guilty pleasures, what we buy, what pills we buy, and what we watch and read and listen to. Its devices listen in our homes and peep out of our (Amazon Ring) doorbells. Amazon’s “Kuiper” satellites will soon connect our Internet.
Recent scandals revealed that Amazon uses the data collected for supposedly innocent reasons in ways that betray our trust. Amazon staff say there are no limits on how Amazon uses this data internally. According to Amazon’s former head of information security: “We have no idea where our fucking data is.”
Los Angeles County Avoids New Mask Rule as COVID Stabilizes
Los Angeles County dropped a plan to impose a universal indoor mask mandate this week as COVID-19 infections and rates of hospitalizations have stabilized, a top health official said Thursday.
On Thursday, Health director Barbara Ferrer said the county managed to dodge the imposition of the broad mask rule. The county remains at the “high” CDC level of community transmission, but it could drop to “medium” in the coming weeks.
Ferrer made the announcement during a briefing at which she displayed flat and declining data graphs. She said transmission has dropped steadily since July 23, “potentially signaling the beginning of a downward trend in cases.” Hospitalizations are also down.
Benintendi Won’t Say Whether Will Get Vaccinated With Yanks
Andrew Benintendi wouldn’t say whether he will get vaccinated for COVID-19 now that he’s with the first-place New York Yankees rather than the last-place Kansas City Royals.
He was among 10 Royals who missed a four-game series at Toronto from July 14-17 because he was not vaccinated and could not enter Canada. He lost $186,813 of the $8.5 million salary.
The Yankees have a three-game series at Toronto from Sept. 26-28.
Benintendi had not yet discussed the issue with his new team. “We’ll cross that bridge if and when we have to but I have not had that conversation,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said.
Biden Ditches Mask at Meeting, Deviating From CDC COVID Guidance
President Joe Biden resumed in-person public events a day after ending his COVID isolation, deviating from federal health guidance that people recovering from the disease wear a mask for 10 days.
Biden attended a briefing Thursday afternoon indoors with several aides, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, as well as Marriott International CEO Tony Capuano. He entered with a mask but took it off and distanced himself from others in the room.
Hong Kong on COVID Tracing App: Security Flaws? What Security Flaws?
New research claims that Hong Kong’s COVID-19 contact tracing app has a host of security problems that could expose sensitive user data. The city’s response: We don’t know what you guys are talking about.
The Hong Kong government launched the LeaveHomeSafe app in November of 2020 to help track and combat the pandemic. Available for iOS and Android, the app collects information on a user’s location as they travel around the city, culling the data from barcode scans at local restaurants.
That might seem pretty innocuous, but given the political turmoil in the city over the past several years, Hong Kong residents aren’t the most trusting these days. The app quickly became a subject of controversy, when local residents began expressing concerns that the app might actually be a tool of government surveillance.
In May, the crowdfunded journalism non-profit FactWire reverse engineered the app and found evidence of a facial detection module inside the code. However, it could not be determined whether the module was actually being used or not.
Majority of Democratic, Republican Voters Support Key Antitrust Bills: Poll
A new poll found overwhelming support from voters in both parties for two key antitrust bills that are facing a dwindling deadline to pass this year.
Asked about the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, a bipartisan bill that would limit tech giants from preferencing their own products and services over rivals’, nearly 73% of respondents said they lean towards supporting the bill.
Asked about the Open App Markets Act, a bill that targets dominant app stores, more than 74% of respondents said they would lean toward supporting the legislation.
The Online Ad Market Is in Decline and It’s Dragging Down Tech Giants With It
Much of contemporary Silicon Valley was built on advertising dollars. That dependence made even the most powerful companies look at least somewhat vulnerable this week after reporting their latest earnings results.
“We seem to have entered an economic downturn that will have a broad impact on the digital advertising business,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts at the start of the company’s earnings call on Wednesday. “It’s always hard to predict how deep or how long these cycles will be, but I’d say that the situation seems worse than it did a quarter ago.”
Shares of Meta were down around 7% from the start of this week as of Friday morning. Snap shares fell more than 25% after it reported earnings last week.
WHO Calls for Big Tech to Work With It to Censor Monkeypox ‘Misinformation’ + More
WHO Calls for Big Tech to Work With It to Censor Monkeypox ‘Misinformation’
The World Health Organization (WHO), an unelected health agency that was given sweeping censorship powers during the COVID-19 pandemic, has called for all social media platforms to work with it to “prevent and counter” monkeypox “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
During a COVID-19 press briefing, WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, claimed that “stigma and discrimination can be as dangerous as any virus, and can fuel the outbreak.”
The WHO’s call for a Big Tech-WHO censorship alliance that targets monkeypox misinformation is eerily similar to the censorship alliance that occurred during COVID-19 when the WHO partnered with YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, and others to censor or label COVID-19 misinformation.
YouTube was one of the most committed censors under this alliance and removed over 800,000 videos for contradicting the WHO.
CDC Set to Make Monkeypox a Nationally Notifiable Condition
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to make monkeypox a nationally notifiable condition, directing states across the country to share surveillance data, including case numbers, according to a senior administration official and two other people with knowledge of the situation.
The new designation will take effect on Aug. 1, according to a letter the agency sent to state epidemiologists on Monday.
The move, which comes more than two months after monkeypox began spreading in the United States, offers the CDC a better understanding of how far and fast the virus is spreading. Every state will have to report a confirmed or probable monkeypox case within 24 hours, the letter states.
The administration is still debating whether to declare monkeypox a public health emergency and what ways the response could be enhanced if it did. But the administration does not need to declare monkeypox a public health emergency to make it a nationally notifiable condition, the senior administration official said.
Cincinnati Federal Judge Blocks Air Force, Air National Guard Globally From Discharging Religious Vaccine Refusers
A federal judge in Cincinnati on Wednesday blocked the Biden administration for the foreseeable future from enforcing the COVID-19 vaccine mandate globally on any servicemembers in the Air Force, Space Force and Air National Guard who requested religious exemptions.
U.S. District Court Judge Matthew McFarland’s preliminary injunction stops the military from discharging or disciplining servicemembers in this local lawsuit that now has an international impact on the military and class-action status as it heads toward trial.
Judge McFarland has criticized the Air Force, writing that they sweepingly rejected each exemption request and failed to carefully consider the merits of each.
House, Senate on Collision Course Over Children’s Privacy
The Senate took a first step toward boosting protections for children and teens online Wednesday by advancing two major bipartisan bills, as I reported. But the push is set to run into obstacles in the House, where lawmakers are working on broader privacy legislation that may be tough to reconcile with the narrower Senate bills.
Together, the Senate measures would give parents greater control over their children’s online activity, ban companies from collecting the data of users 13 to 16 years old without their consent and require that companies identify and mitigate risks their products may pose to children.
The Senate Commerce Committee approved both the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, a major milestone for children’s safety advocates.
The approach stands in sharp contrast to the one taken by House lawmakers, however, who earlier this month advanced a sweeping proposal to create what would be the nation’s first comprehensive data-privacy standards for all consumers — not just children and teens.
YouTube’s Vague ‘Misinformation’ Guidelines Have Become a Political Problem
YouTube‘s misinformation guidelines are coming in for some long overdue criticism in light of a few recent episodes that exposed just how ridiculous they are.
One reason YouTube’s censorship policies haven’t received the scrutiny over censorship that other platforms have is because a large amount of content on YouTube is not political, leading it to be perceived as a less serious medium for commentary. Most elites and powerful institutions are not active on YouTube — unlike Twitter and Facebook.
As a place where the future of the news is likely migrating, YouTube’s guidelines for what it censors are emerging as a crucial battleground in the fight for access to unbiased information. YouTubers and their audiences deserve better guidelines. The gigantic, worldwide audience on YouTube deserves to be trusted with a wide range of political opinions, no matter who is right or wrong.
‘The Entire Protein Universe’: AI Predicts Shape of Nearly Every Known Protein
From today, determining the 3D shape of almost any protein known to science will be as simple as typing in a Google search.
Researchers have used AlphaFold — the revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) network — to predict the structures of some 200 million proteins from 1 million species, covering nearly every known protein on the planet.
The data dump will be freely available on a database set up by DeepMind, Google’s London-based AI company that developed AlphaFold, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), an intergovernmental organization near Cambridge, U.K.
“Essentially you can think of it covering the entire protein universe,” DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, said at a press briefing. “We’re at the beginning of a new era of digital biology.”
Reality Crashes Down on Meta
After a decade of unprecedented growth, Meta has finally hit a wall. The tech giant told investors Wednesday that it’s planning to cut costs, slow investments and reduce headcount as it braces for what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called a “downturn” that has already begun to wreak havoc on its business.
While Meta is still massive — it now reaches more than 3.65 billion people monthly around the globe across all of its apps — its user growth and revenue growth have slowed significantly in the past few quarters.
The company on Wednesday posted its first-ever year-over-year quarterly revenue decline since it went public in 2012. That came months after it reported Facebook‘s first-ever year-over-year user drop.
Now, amid privacy changes and increased competition, the company says its strategy needs to change even as its resources become more limited.
The Fight to Save Energy by Controlling Your Thermostat (and Pool Pump)
When extreme heat settles over Central Texas, the local power company, Austin Energy, uses an unconventional tool to keep the grid from buckling: It taps into the internet to adjust the smart thermostats of 25,300 consenting customers, briefly pushing up temperatures in their homes a couple of degrees as demand on the grid peaks.
The programs are emerging as a crucial tool in stabilizing power grids under increasing risk of collapse as they confront decades of underinvestment while extreme weather pushes record demand. The grids will again be strained this week as scorching weather grips the Pacific Northwest and much of the Southeast.
Yet many power providers are slow to engage in such innovations, as a nation accustomed to cheap, abundant energy resists changing its consumption habits, and conservative lawmakers dismiss the programs as dangerous government overreach.
“It’s mind-boggling to me that we are even talking about something like this,” Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) said at a congressional hearing last month during which lawmakers considered a proposal to mandate some new water heaters be equipped with demand response capability. “I think this is better described as ‘capability to remotely control the American people’s technology.”
FTC Files to Block Facebook-Parent Meta From Buying a VR Company
The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday moved to block Facebook-parent Meta from acquiring virtual reality company Within, offering the clearest signal yet that the agency could take a tougher stance on Silicon Valley deals involving newer technologies.
In a complaint filed Wednesday in federal court, the FTC said Meta has the resources to build its own VR apps similar to those made by Within, the company behind the virtual fitness program Supernatural. Instead, the FTC claims that Meta (FB) is trying to buy the upstart company, which would “[dampen] future innovation and competitive rivalry.”
The agency, which is responsible for enforcing U.S. antitrust laws, accused the tech giant of illegally attempting to expand its “virtual reality empire.”
Google Pushes Back Deadline for Killing off Tracking Cookies in Chrome
Google has published a revised timeline for ridding Chrome of third-party tracking cookies, the technology used to gather data on web users as they browse.
In a blog post, the company explained it will now aim to begin sunsetting the controversial technology by the “second half of 2024”, which represents a delay of at least nine months.
The decision to push back the withdrawal of cookies from its web browser was informed by feedback from industry stakeholders, Google explained, many of whom felt more time was needed to evaluate the impact of the replacement systems proposed under the company’s Privacy Sandbox initiative.
Google first announced plans to eliminate tracking cookies from Chrome back in 2020, in the face of a backlash from critics who claim the technology enables flagrant breaches of privacy.