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TikTok Is Sued Over Deaths of Two Young Girls in Viral ‘Blackout Challenge’ + More
TikTok Is Sued Over Deaths of Two Young Girls in Viral ‘Blackout Challenge’
Eight-year-old Lalani Erika Walton wanted to become “TikTok famous.” Instead, she wound up dead.
Hers is one of two such tragedies that prompted a linked pair of wrongful death lawsuits filed Friday in Los Angeles County Superior Court against the social media giant. The company’s app fed both Lalani and Arriani Jaileen Arroyo, 9, videos associated with a viral trend called the blackout challenge in which participants attempt to choke themselves into unconsciousness, the cases allege; both of the young girls died after trying to join in.
It’s an indication that TikTok — the wildly popular, algorithmically curated video app that has its U.S. headquarters in Culver City — is a defective product, said the Social Media Victims Law Center, the law firm behind the suits and a self-described “legal resource for parents of children harmed by social media.”
TikTok pushed Lalani and Arriani videos of the dangerous trend, is engineered to be addictive and didn’t offer the girls or their parents adequate safety features, the Law Center said, all in the name of maximizing ad revenue.
Governor Wants to Make Vaccine Mandate Permanent for New Hires
Everett Daily Herald reported:
A year ago, amid a surge in coronavirus infections, Gov. Jay Inslee mandated thousands of state workers get vaccinated against COVID-19 — or they could lose their jobs.
Now, he wants to make proof of vaccination a permanent condition of employment.
On Friday, he directed state agencies to require all new employees to be fully up-to-date on their COVID-19 vaccination prior to starting work, including any recommended boosters.
And if you’ve got a job now, you will soon need to be fully vaxxed and boosted to keep it.
California Law Student Defying COVID Vaccine Mandate Sues School, Claiming It’s Making Him Abandon Legal Career
A Santa Clara University law student defying the school’s COVID vaccination requirements filed a lawsuit this week claiming the school is blocking him from moving to a different law school for a degree.
Ryan Driggs, who does not have a lawyer for the case and is representing himself, alleged in the suit that the university, after barring him from registering for classes, is denying his transcript requests in order to keep him from “securing the economic advantages completion that his legal education would bring.”
In a March court filing from a similar lawsuit by two Santa Clara University undergraduates and a prominent anti-vaccination group, the school’s campus physician said he had reviewed 28 exemption requests, granted six on a permanent basis and two on a temporary basis, with four pending and 16 denied.
The other student plaintiff in that suit, sophomore Harlow Glenn, agreed to get her first Pfizer COVID-19 shot last year to comply with the university’s vaccine mandate, but alleged she suffered numbing in her legs, severe headaches, menstrual cycle disruptions, bloody urine, body pains and hair loss, the suit said. The university, she said, denied her requests for religious and medical exemptions from the shots.
53 Fired Austal Workers File Suit Over COVID Vaccine Mandate
Using Independence Day as a symbolic backdrop, a lawyer on Monday electronically filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of 53 former Austal workers challenging the company’s now-rescinded COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
The suit, which accused Austal USA of violating the employees’ rights under the Civil Rights Act or the Americans with Disabilities Act, seeks damages for lost pay and punitive damages. Attorney Brian Dasinger suggested that $1 million for each worker would be fair.
“We’ve decided to file on July 4th because our founders fought for independence against tyranny and declared independence on this day,” he said. “Our clients are fighting against a different kind of tyranny, a tyranny against bodily autonomy.”
Dasinger said he represents seven additional former Austal employees who will be filing suit in Florida and Mississippi. In a response to a complaint filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Austal indicated it had granted 15 medical exemptions and 25 temporary medical exemptions. The company terminated the rest, including almost 160 who submitted religious exemptions.
Army Says National Guard, Reserve Forces Must Be Vaccinated to Participate in Drills
The Army on Friday announced members of its National Guard and Reserve components must be in compliance with its COVID-19 vaccine mandate to participate in drills.
In a statement, the service said members who have refused to be vaccinated without an approved or pending exemption cannot participate in federally funded training and will not receive pay or retirement credit.
The deadline for members of the Army National Guard or Reserve to be vaccinated passed on Thursday. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin mandated vaccinations for the military in August 2021 but allowed each service to implement its own deadlines.
Freedom Convoy Protesters Show up on Canada Day to Protest COVID Mandates, Trudeau
Protesters associated with Canada’s Freedom Convoy demonstrated in Ottawa on Friday to protest COVID mandates on Canada Day.
The demonstrations in Canada’s capital city came just months after the Freedom Convoy spent three weeks camped out in the city protesting the government’s vaccine mandates and days after one of the convoy’s organizers was arrested for allegedly not following the conditions of her bail.
According to Politico, hundreds of demonstrators showed up to protest government COVID mandates and the leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who previously said protesters were “trying to blockade our economy, our democracy.”
Australia to Dump COVID Vaccine Requirements and Travel Exemptions for International Arrivals
People arriving in Australia will no longer have to declare their COVID vaccination status or obtain a travel exemption under changes to come into effect this week.
The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, announced on Sunday that the government would dump the restrictions that have been in place since the country’s borders reopened late last year, with the changes to the Biosecurity Act made following advice from the chief medical officer, Paul Kelly.
The digital pass, which was announced last September and cost an estimated $75m to develop, replaced the original passenger arrival form and required people to upload their vaccination status ahead of entering Australia. “While in time it will replace the paper-based incoming passenger card, it needs a lot more work to make it user-friendly,” she said.
Mask-wearing is still required on inbound international flights, while state and territory mask-wearing mandates also remain for domestic flights.
Roe’s Overturn Is Tech’s Privacy Apocalypse
America’s new abortion reality is turning tech firms’ data practices into an active field of conflict — a fight that privacy advocates have long predicted and company leaders have long feared.
The once-abstract privacy argument among policy experts has transformed overnight into a concrete real-world problem, superheated by partisan anger, affecting vast swaths of the U.S. population, with tangible and easily understood consequences.
Google announced Friday a new program to automatically delete the location data of users who visit “particularly personal” locations like “counseling centers, domestic violence shelters, abortion clinics, fertility centers, addiction treatment facilities, weight loss clinics, cosmetic surgery clinics and others.”
It’s not clear how, and how reliably, Google will identify the locations that trigger automatic data deletion. The company will not delete search requests automatically — users who want to protect themselves will have to do so themselves.
European Union Passes Landmark Laws to Rein in Big Tech
Today, after months of negotiations and procedural hurdles, the European Union has passed a pair of landmark bills designed to rein in Big Tech’s power. The Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are intended to promote fairer competition, improve privacy protection, as well as ban both the use of some of the more egregious forms of targeted advertising and misleading practices.
The Digital Services Act, for instance, focuses on online platforms like Facebook, Amazon and Google. They will be tasked with being more proactive both with content moderation and also to prevent the sale of illegal or unsafe goods being sold on their platforms. Users will also be able to learn how and why an algorithm recommended a certain piece of content and to challenge any moderation decision that was made algorithmically.
Finally, companies will no longer be able to use sensitive personal data for ad-targeting, sell ads to children or use dark patterns — deceptive page design that can manipulate you into saying yes to something even when you’d much rather say no, such as joining a service or preventing you from leaving the one you no longer wish to use.
Twitter Censors Post Editorial Board Member for Months
A New York Post Editorial Board member has been blocked by Twitter for months, in what he says is punishment for the paper’s decision to publish Hunter Biden’s hard drive.
“I think they are being spiteful,” said Michael Benjamin, 64. “Like this guy works at The Post and we’re not going to accommodate him no matter what he says.”
“It was a bizarre misunderstanding of a tweet supporting Ukraine that Twitter’s ‘Karen’ algorithm decided was ‘hateful.’ The suspension is unjustified and the protracted appeal is vindictive. I want the matter rectified,” Benjamin protested to the company in a March 21 email — to no avail.
Benjamin wrote about the Twitter censorship two days later, but the op-ed also went ignored.
The Big Idea: Should We Worry About Sentient AI?
One day, perhaps very far in the future, there probably will be a sentient artificial intelligence (AI). How do I know that? Because it is demonstrably possible for mind to emerge from matter, as it did first in our ancestors’ brains. Unless you insist human consciousness resides in an immaterial soul, you ought to concede it is possible for physical stuff to give life to mind. There seems to be no fundamental barrier to a sufficiently complex artificial system making the same leap. While I am confident that LaMDA (or any other currently existing AI system) falls short at the moment, I am also nearly as confident that one day, it will happen.
Of course, if that’s far off in the future, probably beyond our lifetimes, some may question why should we think about it now. The answer is that we are currently shaping how future human generations will think about AI, and we should want them to turn out caring. There will be strong pressure from the other direction. By the time AI finally does become sentient, it will already be deeply woven into human economics.
Our descendants will depend on it for much of their comfort. Think of what you rely on Alexa or Siri to do today, but much, much more. Once AI is working as an all-purpose butler, our descendants will abhor the inconvenience of admitting it might have thoughts and feelings.
Nearly 40,000 Army Guard Troops Still Unvaccinated for COVID as Shots Deadline Passes + More
Nearly 40,000 Army Guard Troops Still Unvaccinated for COVID as Deadline Passes for Them to Get the Shots
Nearly 40,000 troops in the Army National Guard were still unvaccinated against the coronavirus as the deadline passed for them to receive the shots or face being discharged from the service as mandated by the Defense Department.
The deadline, which was Thursday, primarily affects the Army National Guard. The Air Force required Air National Guard members to be fully vaccinated by Dec. 2. Approximately 11.4% of the roughly 336,000 Army National Guard troops — or more than 38,000 members — had not received a dose of the shot as of Monday, according to the National Guard.
The federal government will not pay unvaccinated Guard members starting Friday, the Pentagon has said. That means they won’t be paid when activated under federal status, which includes monthly drill weekends. Unvaccinated Guard members will also not be allowed to participate in federal missions, such as certain assignments to the U.S.-Mexico border.
However, troops might be eligible for pay while performing duties under their state assignments, depending on the state. The governors of Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, Alaska, Iowa, Mississippi and Nebraska have formally asked the Pentagon not to enforce the mandate for Guard members, with some of them filing lawsuits.
Many Preschool Apps Are Tricking Kids Into Spending More Time and Money, Study Says
If you haven’t taken a ‘test drive’ with your children’s game apps, you probably should. A recent study showed that four out of five game apps contain some form of software that tricks children into spending money or pressures them to continue playing even when they’d prefer to be doing something else.
That study analyzed the gaming apps on devices owned by 160 3- to 5-year-olds. The researchers found that with the help of appealing characters some apps would lure children into making purchases or would shame children into continuing play and picking a time to come back.
The longer play continues, the more ads children watch and the more money the app developers make, explained the study’s lead author, Dr. Jenny Radesky, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.
The Feds Don’t Know How Often They’re Using Facial Recognition
A group of House lawmakers charged with investigating the implications of biometric surveillance empaneled three experts Wednesday to testify about the future of facial recognition and other tools widely employed by the U.S. government with little regard for citizens’ privacy.
The experts described a country — and a world — that is being saturated with biometric sensors. Hampered by few, if any, real legal boundaries, companies and governments are gathering massive amounts of personal data for the purpose of identifying strangers. The reasons for this collection are so myriad and often unexplained.
As is nearly always the case, the development of technologies that make surveilling people a cinch is vastly outpacing both laws and technology that could ensure personal privacy is respected. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), as many as 18 federal agencies today rely on some form of face recognition, including six for which domestic law enforcement is an explicit use.
Push to Rein in Social Media Sweeps the States
Efforts to police speech on social media are spreading across the country, with lawmakers in 34 states pushing bills that are already setting up court battles with tech giants over the First Amendment.
State legislators have introduced more than 100 bills in the past year aiming to regulate how social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter handle their users’ posts, according to POLITICO’s analysis of data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.
However, only three bills have become law, including statutes in Texas and Florida aimed at punishing platforms that Republicans accuse of censoring conservatives — and federal courts have blocked those two states’ measures from taking effect.
The states’ efforts — in the absence of federal action — could test governments’ ability to regulate speech, while forcing some of the nation’s wealthiest tech companies to fight an array of legal battles against laws that could upend their business models. These fights will also present courts with a fundamental debate about how the First Amendment plays out in the online age, including the companies’ own rights to decide what content they host on their platforms.
Google Will Pay U.S. App Developers $90 Million in a Settlement Over App Store Policies
U.S. Android app developers will be able to claim money from a new $90 million fund Google will establish as part of a wider settlement with app makers over the tech giant’s app store practices, the company said Thursday.
The proposed settlement is designed to address app developers’ years-long allegations that Google (GOOGL) (GOOGL) imposes onerous and anticompetitive restrictions on app makers as a condition of hosting their apps on its Google (GOOGL) Play Store.
The deal, which includes several other provisions aimed at benefiting small app makers, marks another shift in the long-running tussle between large tech platforms with significant power to determine what apps wind up on consumer smartphones and the app developers who supply the software.
‘One of the Worst Downturns in Recent History’: Zuck Warns Facebook Employees to Brace for Layoffs
It appears that we are about to hit the motherlode of mass layoffs after none other than Zuck sounded the alarm. According to Reuters, Facebook-owner Meta Platforms (which will likely be undoing its name change just as bitcoin bottoms) has cut plans to hire engineers by at least 30% this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday, as he warned them to brace for a deep economic downturn.
“If I had to bet, I’d say that this might be one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history,” Zuckerberg told workers in a weekly employee Q&A session, audio of which was heard by Reuters.
“I have to underscore that we are in serious times here and the headwinds are fierce. We need to execute flawlessly in an environment of slower growth, where teams should not expect vast influxes of new engineers and budgets,” Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said.
Why Should We Trust Facebook to Build the Metaverse?
When Mark Zuckerberg announced last year that Facebook was changing its name to Meta and that, within five years, the company would transition from being primarily a social media company to a “metaverse” one, many people were skeptical, confused or downright scared.
Zuckerberg is going all-in on the idea, spending billions of dollars to develop futuristic technologies like neural interface wristbands and augmented reality smart glasses that will underpin this new virtual world.
But some see the metaverse as a distraction from the many immediate issues that Facebook and Instagram are dealing with around users’ privacy, safety and mental well-being — and are worried that these new technologies could cause more or worsen existing social problems.
To better understand the promise of the metaverse and the challenges confronting it, Recode spoke with Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta, who recently wrote an 8,000-word essay on the topic.
TikTok Confirms That China-Based Employees Can Access U.S. User Data, but Only Through an ‘Approval Process’
TikTok confirmed that China-based employees of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, have access to U.S. user data under certain circumstances in a letter obtained by The New York Times responding to nine Republican senators’ inquiries about the matter.
“Employees outside the U.S., including China-based employees, can have access to TikTok U.S. user data subject to a series of robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our U.S.-based security team,” TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew wrote in the letter.
A new light was shined on the privacy and security concerns after BuzzFeed News recently reported, based on audio of internal meetings it obtained, that ByteDance employees had repeatedly accessed U.S. user data over at least a four-month period, and that U.S.-based employees did not have permission to access it.
High Court Rejects COVID Shot Mandate Case From New York + More
High Court Rejects COVID Shot Mandate Case From New York
The Supreme Court declined on Thursday to take up a case involving a COVID-19 vaccine requirement for healthcare workers in New York that does not offer an exemption for religious reasons.
The court’s action follows a decision in December in which the justices declined an emergency request to halt the requirement. At the time, doctors, nurses and other medical workers who said they were being forced to choose between their jobs and religious beliefs.
Three conservative justices — Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — dissented earlier and did so again Thursday.
New York is one of three states, along with Maine and Rhode Island, that do not accommodate healthcare workers who object to the vaccine on religious grounds.
More Than 500 Flights Across the U.S. Are Canceled Today as Pilots Blame ‘Staff Shortage’ on COVID Vaccine Mandate
As Americans prepare for a patriotic Fourth of July weekend, they can expect airline delays and cancelations; critics blame the pilot shortage on vaccine mandates as travel chaos continues for the second week in a row. More than 500 flights have already been canceled and more than 2,000 delayed in the U.S. on Wednesday, with New Jersey‘s Newark Liberty topping the American list with 45 flights canceled.
A total of 1,800 flights have been canceled so far this week in the U.S., according to The Hill, and between June 16 and 20, there were more than 5,300 flights canceled, according to CBS News.
Pilots have also slammed airlines for creating a chaotic travel season due to COVID vaccine mandates. One Southwest pilot said during a protest — which saw 1,300 Southwest employees picketing outside of Dallas Love Field Airport earlier this month — that he thought the mandate was the main cause.
“I believe it’s because of the COVID vaccines — they’re still requiring the vaccination for all new applicants and if the new applicants say they’re not going to get vaccinated, their application is passed over,” Pilot Tom Bogart told News Nation.
New York School Districts Plan Facial Recognition Security Despite Ban
A moratorium on the use of facial recognition in New York State schools has not prevented a pair of districts from receiving approval to deploy systems that use the technology, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). The New York State Education Department (NYSED) was barred from contracting for facial recognition until July 2022 or the completion of a study on the impact of such systems on student privacy.
The Locust Valley and Thousand Islands school districts each sought and have received approval, however, to contract with surveillance camera supplier Verkada to deploy video security with biometric tools.
The Locust Valley project, according to the document requesting funds under the NYSED Smart Schools Investment Plan, puts cameras in all elementary schools and administration buildings.
Verkada’s People Analytics capabilities include face detection and searching based on face biometrics. Those features are turned off by default in Texas and Illinois, the NYCLU writes, due to biometrics regulations in those states. Not in New York.
School Surveillance Will Never Protect Kids From Shootings
If we are to believe the purveyors of school surveillance systems, K-12 schools will soon operate in a manner akin to some agglomeration of Minority Report, Person of Interest and Robocop. “Military-grade” systems would slurp up student data, picking up on the mere hint of harmful ideations, and dispatch officers before the would-be perpetrators could carry out their vile acts.
In the unlikely event that someone was able to evade the predictive systems, they would inevitably be stopped by next-generation weapon-detection systems and biometric sensors that interpret the gait or tone of a person, warning authorities of impending danger.
Not only is this not our present, it will never be our future — no matter how expansive and intricate surveillance systems become.
Much like policing itself, every failure of a surveillance or security system most typically results in people calling for more extensive surveillance. If danger is not predicted and prevented, companies often cite the need for more data to address the gaps in their systems — and governments and schools often buy into it.
Google Sign-Up ‘Fast Track to Surveillance,’ Consumer Groups Say
A Google account is essential in order to use a number of its products and services. But the coalition alleges the sign-up process steers users towards options that collect more data.
The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), which coordinates the coalition, claims the language Google uses in the registration process is “unclear, incomplete and misleading” leading many consumers to pick options that are less privacy-friendly.
As a result “tens of millions of Europeans have been placed on a fast track to surveillance when they signed up to a Google account” BEUC claims.
Amazon Is Introducing New Tech to Monitor Shoppers in Its Grocery Stores and Share Data With Advertisers
Amazon has launched a new data tracking program for its physical grocery stores to mine data on shoppers’ behavior, the company announced in a blog post on Wednesday.
Store Insights, rolled out to all Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores with the Dash Cart or Just Walk Out technology in the U.S., will feed data back to brands on shoppers’ interests — similar to data collection on e-commerce sites. The data collection and analytics aim to provide brands insights and feedback on their promotions and advertising strategies, the company said.
Amazon’s cashier-less stores themselves operate through a complex system of shopper surveillance, including AI-powered cameras that follow shoppers and weight sensors on carts. Amazon has made major investments in its cashier-less stores in the U.S. and has plans for global expansion in 2022 and 2023, according to internal documents seen by Insider.
But Amazon has also come up against privacy scandals in the past. The company’s delivery van surveillance cameras closely monitor workers down to their hand movements and facial expressions, which made some workers feel paranoid.
Facebook Could Be Sued for Addicting Children Under California Bill
Before the summer ends, California may pass the first U.S. bill that would hold social media companies liable for product features that research has found are harmful to children. If passed, the law could have far-reaching consequences, potentially impacting how kids throughout the U.S. use social media sites like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat.
On Tuesday, the bill — the Social Media Platform Duty to Act — cleared what The Wall Street Journal called “a crucial vote in the State Senate.”
Although much of prior reporting on the bill focused on its earlier goal to grant a parent’s right to sue over harm to individual children, WSJ reports that the amended version of the bill would instead “permit the state attorney general, local district attorneys and city attorneys in California’s four largest cities to sue social media companies” for unfair business practices known to harm children.
BetterMe’s ‘Childhood Trauma Test’ Is All Over TikTok. Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Take It.
TikTokkers have been sharing their results of the “Childhood Trauma Test” from BetterMe, a Ukrainian subscription-based behavioral healthcare platform, but the site’s privacy policy reveals that the test is a data collection tool.
The Childhood Trauma Test asks a series of invasive questions including, “were you often punished in childhood” and “do you easily make negative assumptions about what others are thinking about you and your actions?”
Then, in order to receive your results, you have to give the platform your email address. Your results show your levels of rejection trauma, abandonment trauma, betrayal trauma and injustice trauma. But there is no information on how the test was designed and if it’s been vetted by the mental health community. It proceeds to offer you a customized healing plan that you have to pay for, of course.
BetterMe’s privacy policy indicates that the test collects a lot of your personal data.
Congress Is Trying to Rein in Big Tech. This Lawmaker Could Stand in Their Way.
It’s hard to find lawmakers willing to publicly side with the big tech companies these days. But Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have a powerful champion left on Capitol Hill: Democratic Rep. Suzan DelBene of Washington state.
And as Congress gets increasingly close to a vote on an anti-monopoly bill that would rein in the tech titans’ power, the lawmaker from Amazon and Microsoft’s home state could be a major reason that it fails.
DelBene has used her perch as chair of the business-friendly New Democrats caucus to push back on some of the most aggressive efforts to regulate or restrain Silicon Valley, which she claims would hurt the economy and hamstring the tech industry.
Planned Parenthood Could Share Personal Data Like the ZIP Codes of Abortion Seekers With Google and Facebook, Report Says
Detailed data on abortion seekers who use Planned Parenthood’s health-center search on its website could be shared with Facebook, Google, TikTok and Hotjar, according to an investigation by privacy app Lockdown Privacy reported by The Washington Post.
Data shared with Google from Planned Parenthood’s website can include the IP address, approximate ZIP codes, the type of abortion sought and the particular clinic used by someone seeking an abortion.
Post-Roe Data Privacy Nightmare Is Way Bigger Than Period-Tracking Apps + More
The Post-Roe Data Privacy Nightmare Is Way Bigger Than Period-Tracking Apps
Since the Supreme Court’s draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade leaked, influencers, activists and privacy advocates have urged users to delete period-tracking apps from their devices and remove their information from associated services. With abortion now outlawed in several states, data from such apps could be used in criminal investigations against abortion seekers, and a missed period — or even simply an unlogged one — could be used as evidence of a crime.
These services, like many “wellness” apps, are not bound by HIPPA, and many have long histories of shady practices resulting in fines and regulatory scrutiny. Mistrust in them is well-founded. However, calls to delete period-tracking or fertility apps are obscuring what privacy experts say is a much larger issue.
While concerns about period-tracking apps are valid, they are only a small piece of a much larger problem. And deleting the services from your phone won’t be enough, on its own, to ensure your personal data can’t be used against you. But though users may be badly outmatched by a vast and largely unregulated industry, they aren’t entirely helpless.
Lia Holland, campaigns and communications director for Fight for the Future, an advocacy group focused on digital rights, and India McKinney, director of federal affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, pointed to the importance of protecting your private messages and browsing history, via encrypted messaging apps and privacy-protecting browsers.
“Your phone is tracking you so leave it at home if you don’t want it to know where you go,” says McKinney.
Popular Child-Monitoring Android Apps Have Been Secretly Tracking the Parents, Too
Mobile apps that help people monitor their children are also leaking the parents’ data to third parties, and possibly malicious actors, researchers have found.
The Cyber news research team recently took a closer look at the 10 most popular child-tracking apps. These are essentially surveillance apps, designed for parents who fear for their children’s safety and want to use their mobile devices to make sure they are safe.
Cumulatively, these apps have amassed more than 85 million downloads among them. However, none received the highest grade for privacy and one app with more than 50 million installs was even deemed a “critical risk.”
One of the problems with these apps is that they carry third-party trackers, meaning that both children and parents are having their data harvested, the researchers explained. The data can be used for a wide variety of things, but mostly it’s used for targeted advertising.
Hugely Popular NGL App Offers Teenagers Anonymity in Comments About Each Other
A new app that allows Instagram users to send anonymous messages is soaring in popularity — and renewing concerns about cyberbullying and harassment that plagued previous apps allowing teens to comment on one another without attribution.
Instagram Stories over the past week have been swamped with links to the new app: NGL Q&A, which is an abbreviation for ‘not gonna lie,’ developed by a company called DeepMoji. The link invites friends and followers to share anonymous feedback that goes directly to the app’s inbox. NGL follows in the footsteps of websites and apps like Ask.fm, Whisper, Yolo, and YMK that have built huge audiences by allowing teenagers to vent privately on social media before facing a public backlash over child-safety fears.
The resurgence of anonymous messaging comes as concerns mount over the impact of social media on the mental health of young people. Senators grilled Meta and other social media executives last year after the WSJ published leaked documents that suggest Instagram was harmful for a significant percentage of its young users.
These problems appear even more extreme with apps that promise to offer teenagers a private glimpse of what peers really think of them: a void in which bullying, harassment and threats can flourish.
Kids Happier, Healthier Away From All Those Screens: Study
U.S. News & World Report reported:
New research confirms the dangers of too much screen time for kids and teens: Those who play sports, take music lessons or socialize with friends after school are happier and healthier than children who are glued to a screen during these hours.
“Screen time, where you are sitting and watching TV or playing computer games or scrolling social media for hours on end, is so detrimental because it’s sedentary and usually not engaging,” said study author Rosa Virgara, a research associate at the University of South Australia.
She and her colleagues looked at how nearly 62,000 kids aged 4 to 9 spent their time after school. These kids also completed questionnaires about their well-being. Children who played video games, watched TV and used social media after school almost always had lower levels of well-being than their peers who took part in after-school activities, the study showed.
Youngkin Urges Defense Secretary to ‘Indefinitely Postpone’ Army Guard Vaccine Mandate
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) urged Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to “indefinitely postpone” the implementation of the department’s coronavirus vaccine mandate for Army National Guard Troops in a new letter obtained by The Hill on Tuesday.
The letter, which was also signed by Republican Virginia Reps. Bob Good, Rob Whittman, Ben Cline and Morgan Griffith, argues that the mandate will drive members of Virginia’s national guard away.
Additionally, the letter cites the recently dropped mask and vaccine mandate in other jurisdictions, natural immunity to the virus and the use of therapeutics as reasons for dropping the mandate.
A Momentous Year for Religious Liberty at the Supreme Court
In my 33 years of advocating for religious liberty, I have never seen a year like this at the U.S. Supreme Court.
This term, the Supreme Court decided on three important religious liberty cases. Each case firmly defended the right of people of faith to be free from anti-religious discrimination at the hands of government officials.
In each case, the government tried to defend its religious discrimination by relying on a mistaken understanding of the Establishment Clause. In each case, the Court rejected any interpretation of the First Amendment that treats people of faith as second-class citizens or religious expression as a second-class right.
Apple and Google Should Kick TikTok out of Their App Stores, FCC Commissioner Argues
TikTok should be thrown out of the iPhone and Android app stores in the U.S., a Republican commissioner in the Federal Communications Commission has argued in a plea for action on the part of gatekeepers Apple and Google.
Brendan Carr’s appeal to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai followed a Buzzfeed News report last week that — based on over a dozen leaked recordings from internal TikTok meetings — showed the Chinese firm had “repeatedly accessed nonpublic data about U.S. TikTok users.”
The report also indicated that TikTok’s U.S. employees “had to turn to their colleagues in China to determine how U.S. user data was flowing,” even though TikTok — whose app has huge traction among American youth — had promised the Senate that a U.S.-based security team had those controls.
“TikTok is not what it appears to be on the surface,” Carr wrote to Cook and Pichai. “It is not just an app for sharing funny videos or memes. That’s the sheep’s clothing. At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data.”
South Korea’s Seegene Creates Monkeypox PCR Test With AI
South Korean medical company says it has created a PCR test to detect the monkeypox virus using artificial intelligence. Seoul-based Seegene, which makes diagnostic products, announced its Novaplex monkeypox virus test on Tuesday.
The test, developed using the company’s AI-based automated test development system, can identify a positive case in 90 minutes, Seegene states.
Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control by Daniel Pick
In this frankly brilliant book, Daniel Pick sets out to explore why the idea of mind control became such a contested topic during the second half of the 20th century. His skills as a historian and a practicing psychoanalyst allow Pick to move beyond a methodology in which human subjects are either reduced to data points or inflated into grand actors.
One of the reasons the U.S. government was so quick to accuse the communist bloc of brainwashing was a sneaking awareness that it was doing something similar to its own population. By the early 1960s a template of the “American dream” had emerged, consisting of a corporate job for him, a kitchen bristling with mod cons for her and a college education for their sporty children.