Login
Big Brother News Watch
Your Doctor’s Office Might Be Bugged. Here’s Why + More
Your Doctor’s Office Might Be Bugged. Here’s Why
It used to be safe to assume your doctor’s visit was a completely private affair between you and your physician. This is changing with ambient artificial intelligence, a new technology that listens to your conversation and processes information. Think Amazon’s Alexa, but in your doctor’s office. An early use case is ambient AI scribing: it listens and then writes a clinical note summarizing your visit. Clinical notes are used to communicate diagnostic and treatment plans within electronic health records, and as a basis to generate your bill.
A recent report in NEJM Catalyst described the deployment of ambient AI in The Permanente Medical Group, Kaiser’s Northern California physician group. Since October 2023, ambient AI scribes have been used by more than 3,400 doctors in more than 300,000 encounters.
In the study, the doctors cited many benefits including more meaningful interactions and reductions in after-hours note-writing. Patients also reportedly liked it. Some described their physicians as more attentive, possibly because ambient AI avoids the practice of doctors writing their notes during the visit, which is distracting.
Okay, your conversation just got recorded. But where does it go? Is it stored somewhere? How is it used beyond writing my note? The AI technology companies need to address these questions and comply with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act laws. Additionally, new regulations may be needed as the technology evolves.
Moms’ Group Launches Grassroots Fight Against Social Media ‘Addiction’
A group of mothers is launching a grass-roots initiative aimed at combating what they call rising “addiction” among kids to social media and other digital tools, bringing a well-connected new entrant into the contentious debate over children’s online safety.
Parental groups have become a major political force in those discussions, making their presence felt in federal talks over potential child protection rules and at the recent blockbuster hearing with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs.
But the group — Mothers Against Media Addiction, or MAMA — is looking to bring more parents into the fold at the local and state level through grass-roots organizing.
The new initiative is financially backed by the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) nonprofit — led by influential and outspoken social media critic Tristan Harris — and is allying with key legislators driving kids’ online safety efforts at the state level.
Harris, a former Google ethicist, has emerged as a key player in federal discussions about social media’s perceived harms after appearing in “The Social Dilemma” film, which accused digital platforms of fueling tech addiction for profit.
House Bill Would Force ByteDance to Divest TikTok or Face Ban
A bipartisan House bill unveiled Tuesday would force ByteDance, the China-based parent company of TikTok, to divest the short form video app or face a ban of the platform in the U.S.
Introduced by Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), the top lawmakers on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, are the latest effort to ban TikTok over concerns about potential national security threats posed by ByteDance.
The “Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” specifically defines ByteDance and TikTok as a foreign adversary-controlled application. The bill also creates a broader framework that would allow the president to designate other foreign adversary-controlled applications.
The bill would give ByteDance more than five months after the law goes into effect to divest TikTok. If the company does not divest from TikTok, it would become illegal to distribute it through an app store or web hosting platform in the U.S., effectively banning it even among current users.
However, there are still political concerns with banning the app given its growing popularity with U.S. users, and practical concerns based on the loopholes users could use to gain access to TikTok even if it were effectively banned.
White House Lifts COVID Testing Rule for People Around President Biden
U.S. News & World Report reported:
In a move that acknowledges that COVID-19 is no longer the danger it once was, the White House on Monday lifted a COVID testing requirement for anyone who plans to be near President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and their spouses.
The change follows the relaxation of COVID isolation policies announced by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week, the Associated Press reported.
How the Government Used ‘Track F’ to Fund Censorship Tools: Report
Officials from the National Science Foundation tried to conceal the spending of millions of taxpayer dollars on research and development for artificial intelligence tools used to censor political speech and influence the outcome of elections, according to a new congressional report.
The report looking into the National Science Foundation (NSF) is the latest addition to a growing body of evidence that critics claim shows federal officials — especially at the FBI and the CIA — are creating a “censorship-industrial complex” to monitor American public expression and suppress speech disfavored by the government.
“In the name of combatting alleged misinformation regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election, NSF has been issuing multimillion-dollar grants to university and nonprofit research teams,” states the report by the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Researchers Create AI ‘Worms’ Able to Spread Between Systems — Stealing Private Data as They Go
A team of researchers has created a self-replicating computer worm that wriggles through the web to target Gemini Pro, ChatGPT 4.0, and LLaVA AI-powered apps. The researchers developed the worm to demonstrate the risks and vulnerabilities of AI-enabled applications, particularly how the links between generative AI systems can help to spread malware.
In their report, the researchers, Stav Cohen from the Israel Institute of Technology, Ben Nassi of Cornell Tech, and Ron Bitton from Intuit, came up with the name ‘Morris II’ using inspiration from the original worm that wreaked havoc on the internet in 1988.
In testing performed by the researchers, the worm was able to steal social security numbers and credit card details.
The researchers sent their paper to Google and OpenAI to raise awareness about the potential dangers of these worms, and while Google did not comment, an OpenAI spokesperson told Wired that, “They appear to have found a way to exploit prompt-injection type vulnerabilities by relying on user input that hasn’t been checked or filtered.”
OpenAI’s Growing List of Legal Headaches
Elon Musk‘s lawsuit against OpenAI is adding to a large and growing list of legal actions that could impair the company as it seeks to maintain its lead in the fast-changing world of generative AI.
Why it matters: Several of the lawsuits threaten to upend the way the company does business and, even if they aren’t successful, the courtroom battles could distract the company and take energy away from its business efforts.
Driving the news: Elon Musk’s suit, filed Thursday, claims that OpenAI has abandoned its mission by pursuing profit over its stated mission of delivering artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity.
While Musk’s suit got all the attention, OpenAI faces other fresh challenges, including a continuing investigation in Italy. The FTC has also opened an inquiry into whether OpenAI’s business arrangements with Microsoft violate antitrust law.
BlackCat Ransomware Gang Shuts Down Servers After Multi-Million Dollar UnitedHealth Payout — but Is This Really the End?
The notorious BlackCat ransomware operator (also known as ALPHV) has apparently shut down its entire infrastructure, including servers, and websites.
The circumstances leading up to the decision are unclear, but some things point to a possible exit scam.
The attack, which was reported in late February this year, forced some of Change Healthcare’s services offline and even affected local pharmacies. The company merged with Optum two years ago, in a $7.8 billion deal. Following the ransomware attack, the affiliate criminals claim, Optum paid $22 million in bitcoin (roughly 350 BTC) for sensitive data not to be released online, and for the group to provide the decryption key.
American Express Confirms Customer Details Exposed — Third-Party Data Breach Sees Info Leaked Online
Some American Express card users may have had their sensitive data exposed to hackers, the company has confirmed.
In a breach notification letter sent to affected customers, the credit card giant claimed it wasn’t American Express infrastructure that was breached, but rather systems belonging to a third-party service provider, which works with “numerous merchants.”
The data stolen included customer names, card numbers, and expiry dates. That is more than enough information to perform wire fraud or, at the least, identity theft and impersonation.
Your Face for Sale: Anyone Can Legally Gather and Market Your Facial Data Without Explicit Consent + More
Your Face for Sale: Anyone Can Legally Gather and Market Your Facial Data Without Explicit Consent
Your facial information is a unique form of personal sensitive information. It can identify you. Intense profiling and mass government surveillance receive much attention. But businesses and individuals are also using tools that collect, store and modify facial information, and we’re facing an unexpected wave of photos and videos generated with artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
The development of legal regulation for these uses is lagging. At what levels and in what ways should our facial information be protected?
Our facial information has become so valuable, data companies such as Clearview AI and PimEye are mercilessly hunting it down on the internet without our consent.
Even if you deleted all your facial data from the internet, you could easily be captured in public and appear in some database anyway. Being in someone’s TikTok video without your consent is a prime example — in Australia this is legal.
Ohio Senator Demands Google ‘Breakup’ Amid Gemini Debacle: ‘One of the Most Dangerous Companies in the World’
Lawmakers have started reacting to Google’s admitted racial and historical bias and one Republican senator wants to see the “breakup” of one of the most well-known and profitable tech companies.
“This is one of the most dangerous companies in the world. It actively solicits and forces left-wing bias down the throats of the American nation,” Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, told FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo in a “Sunday Morning Futures” exclusive interview.
The Alphabet-owned tech giant is scrambling to right the ship after pulling the plug on Gemini’s image generation features, with CEO Sundar Pichai telling employees last Tuesday the company is working “around the clock” to fix the tool’s bias, calling the images generated by the model “completely unacceptable.”
Addressing the likelihood that legislative action may be taken against Google, the senator claimed there are “growing calls” across the political spectrum for a shakedown on the tech giant, noting it’s gotten “too big, too powerful.”
Pennsylvania Collaborates With DHS and CISA to Monitor Online Election-Related Speech
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor, Josh Shapiro, announced last week that, in an effort to address perceived “threats” to electoral procedures, the state is launching an initiative in partnership with various state and federal agencies.
These partners include the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and, notably, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), an organization long accused of aiding online censorship to impede freewheeling online speech.
This program, named the Pennsylvania Election Threats Task Force, is expected to bring forth measures for the protection of the electoral system, safeguard voters from any form of intimidation, and provide accessible and trustworthy information about the election.
Accusations have been levied against CISA for serving as the epicenter of the federal government’s efforts to censor speech, which is seen as an assault on civil liberties and First Amendment rights.
DeSantis Rejects Bill to Restrict Social Media Access for Teens
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed a bill that would have barred social media companies, including Meta Platforms Inc. and TikTok Inc., from serving users under the age of 16, a move that would have made Florida the first state to enact such a ban.
The proposed legislation aimed to require social networks to block underage users from creating accounts and to deactivate existing accounts held by minors below the age threshold.
DeSantis vetoed the bill on Friday after the state legislature passed the legislation last week. Instead, state lawmakers are now pursuing softer restrictions. On Friday, they revised HB3, a bill initially targeting age verification for pornographic websites, to include provisions to forbid social media accounts for children under age 14 and stipulate parental consent for account registration by 14- and 15-year-olds.
DeSantis, in a letter to House Speaker Paul Renner, said he rejected the bill because the legislature was working through another proposal that would better protect children from “harms associated with social media” and support parents’ rights.
Court Weighs Whose Freedom of Speech Is at Risk in Content Moderation Fight
The long-running fight over perceived anti-conservative bias on social media platforms reached the U.S. Supreme Court when the justices heard oral arguments in two related cases challenging state laws in Texas and Florida limiting how internet companies police their platforms. The states say they’re combating abusive corporate behavior, the tech industry says the laws violate the First Amendment, and dozens of outside groups have weighed in with briefs tackling the debate from various angles.
Essentially, this is a disagreement about whether tech platforms are threatening their users’ freedom of speech, or are having their own freedom of speech threatened by the government. The conservative justices were split on the issue.
Justice Samuel Alito argued that the entire concept of content moderation was a euphemism for censorship carried out by private businesses, rather than the government, and suggested that “some may want to resist the Orwellian temptation to re-categorize offensive conduct in seemingly bland terms.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh threw Orwell right back at Alito, arguing that the government shouldn’t interfere in the decisions that private entities make about, say, what they allow to be posted on their websites. “When I think of Orwellian, I think of the state, not the private sector, not private individuals,” said Kavanaugh.
Before they decide on this case, the justices are planning to consider social media from a different angle. Later this month, they’ll hear arguments in a case that challenges the practice known as jawboning, in which governments suggest to social media companies what content they should consider removing. That case further complicates questions about content moderation, censorship and how the government interacts with tech companies — and it’s safe to assume it won’t be the last one to reach the court. Any final word on these issues still seems pretty far away.
Bill Banning Kids on Social Media May Throw Wrench in Senate Safety Push
A surging campaign to pass federal protections for kids online is facing new headwinds in the Senate, where an effort to bundle social media bills is stoking fears it could threaten the negotiations.
Earlier this month, a group of senators announced they secured more than 60 co-sponsors for the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a sprawling measure requiring tech companies to take steps to prevent harms to children on their sites and beef up their privacy and safety settings.
The milestone signaled that backers had clinched enough support to clear it out of the Senate, a step that would make it the most significant piece of internet regulation to do so in decades.
But now a group of lawmakers is pushing to couple the proposal with a separate bill banning kids under 13 from social media altogether, which could muddle the talks.
Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, Claiming Betrayal of Its Goal to Benefit Humanity
Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman over what he says is a betrayal of the ChatGPT maker’s founding aims of benefiting humanity rather than pursuing profits.
In a lawsuit filed at San Francisco Superior Court, billionaire Musk said that when he bankrolled OpenAI’s creation, he secured an agreement with Altman and Greg Brockman, the president, to keep the AI company as a nonprofit that would develop technology for the benefit of the public.
Under its founding agreement, OpenAI would also make its code open to the public instead of walling it off for any private company’s gains, the lawsuit says.
However, by embracing a close relationship with Microsoft, OpenAI and its top executives have set that pact “aflame” and are “perverting” the company’s mission, Musk alleges in the lawsuit.
European Regulators Crack Down on Big Tech
European regulators have launched a series of probes against Big Tech. In the latest one, Apple (AAPL.O) received a $2 billion EU antitrust fine for preventing Spotify (SPOT.N) and other music streaming services from informing users of payment options outside its App Store.
Alphabet (GOOGL.O) unit Google‘s 2.42-billion-euro ($2.7 billion) EU antitrust fine should be upheld by Europe’s top court, an adviser to the court said on Jan. 11. The European Commission fined the company in 2017 for using its own price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals.
EU antitrust regulators said in January Microsoft‘s investment of over $10 billion in ChatGPT maker OpenAI may be subject to EU merger rules, following a similar warning from the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in December.
The Government Really Is Spying on You — and It’s Legal + More
The Government Really Is Spying on You — and It’s Legal
The freakout moment that set journalist Byron Tau on a five-year quest to expose the sprawling U.S. data surveillance state occurred over a “wine-soaked dinner” back in 2018 with a source he cannot name.
The tipster told Tau the government was buying up reams of consumer data — information scraped from cellphones, social media profiles, internet ad exchanges and other open sources — and deploying it for often-clandestine purposes like law enforcement and national security in the U.S. and abroad. The places you go, the websites you visit, the opinions you post — all collected and legally sold to federal agencies.
In his new book, Means of Control, Tau details everything he’s learned since that dinner: An opaque network of government contractors is peddling troves of data, a legal but shadowy use of American citizens’ information that troubles even some of the officials involved. And attempts by Congress to pass privacy protections fit for the digital era have largely stalled, though reforms to a major surveillance program are now being debated.
“Any nightmare use for data you can think of will probably eventually happen,” Tau said. “It might not happen immediately, but it’ll happen eventually.”
Judge: LAPD Officers Fired Over COVID Vaccine Dispute Won’t Get Jobs Back
A Los Angeles police officer who was fired in 2022 after challenging the city’s COVID-19 vaccination and testing mandate is entitled to back pay but should not get her job restored, an L.A. County judge has ruled.
L.A. County Superior Court Judge Mitchell L. Beckloff said police department officials denied the former officer, Natalie Stringer, her right to respond to allegations prior to a disciplinary meeting, but the city did not violate labor laws and acted within its rights when she was terminated based on her “failure to comply with a valid condition of employment.”
Beckloff made similar findings in the cases of several other police officers and firefighters who were terminated over their vaccination status, the latest rebuff of challenges to the city’s coronavirus protocols.
Greg Yacoubian, a lawyer representing Stringer along with four other officers and two firefighters who sued the city over their vaccine protocol-related firings, said he will appeal the ruling.
Kentucky Bill Bars COVID Vaccination Mandates in Certain Situations, Citing Risk of Adverse Events
Kentuckians seeking employment, medical treatment, or enrolling as a student could not be required to receive COVID-19 or mRNA vaccinations under a new bill filed this week. Senate Bill 295, filed by Smithfield Senator Lindsey Tichenor, is being billed as a medical freedom measure.
In a statement, Tichenor argues Kentucky citizens were “forced to make compromising health decisions in order to retain their employment, gain access to medical treatment, or to enroll in schools during the response to the pandemic.” The bill would block compulsory COVID or mRNA-based vaccinations in those instances.
The lawmaker goes on to call the vaccines “ineffective” and “dangerous.”
The largest study to date of COVID vaccine safety looked at nearly 100 million vaccinated people across eight countries. The World Health Organization’s Global Vaccine Data Network examined 13 medical conditions, including myocarditis, convulsion, and Guillain-Barré syndrome — and found elevated risks associated with the vaccines.
Federal Court Dismisses Case Against Iowa Governor’s Ban on School Mask Mandates
A federal court on Tuesday dismissed a legal challenge to Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds’ policy prohibiting schools from instituting mask requirements, which was brought by families of students with disabilities during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The ruling marks the conclusion of the yearslong court battle, originating in the fall of 2021 with a lawsuit alleging that Reynolds violated federal disability law by preventing schools from adopting mask mandates as an accommodation for students with disabilities.
Reynolds celebrated the result, saying in a statement that Iowa focused on keeping kids in the classroom, “trusting parents to decide what was best for their children.”
“While children were the least vulnerable, they paid the highest price for COVID lockdowns and mandates, but Iowa was a different story,” she said.
WordPress and Tumblr Plan to Sell User Content to AI Companies
Automattic, the parent company of sites like WordPress and Tumblr, is in talks to sell content from its platforms to AI companies like MidJourney and OpenAIfor training purposes, according to a new report from 404 Media Tuesday. And while the details of the deal are still sketchy, Automattic is trying to reassure users they can opt-out at any time.
404 reports there’s conflict within Automattic as some of the content that was being scraped for the AI companies included private content not intended to be saved by the company. To complicate matters even further, advertising content that isn’t even owned by Automattic, including ads from an old Apple Music campaign, has also reportedly made its way into the training data set.
The plans at Automattic have been so controversial internally, that a product manager has even started pulling his own photos off Tumblr to make sure they’re not used to train AI, according to 404.
Facebook Whistleblower Calls Canada’s Online Harms Bill ‘One of the Best Proposed Today’
Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee who blew the whistle on the tech company by accusing it of prioritizing profit over public safety, says Canada’s new online harms legislation isn’t just good, it’s “one of the best bills that has been proposed today.”
In an interview with CTV News Channel’s Power Play host Vassy Kapelos on Tuesday, Haugen said the new bill is a meaningful step toward holding tech companies accountable for neglecting user well-being, especially among children and teens.
“We know the platforms know this is a problem but different platforms are taking different levels of effort to try to deal with this,” Haugen told Kapelos. “And that’s why we need laws like the Canadian online safety bill, to make sure Canadian researchers can ask questions (like) is the platform your kid is spending time on doing everything they can to keep that kid safe?”
“It’s less a bill that says, ‘You must take down every last dangerous thing,'” Haugen said. “It’s a bill that says, ‘If you know there are risks, you have to tell us, you can’t lie about it, and you need to tell us what your plan is for mitigating those risks, and you need to give us enough information that we know you’re making progress.'”
United Now Offers TSA PreCheck Facial Recognition at O’Hare and LAX
United Airlines passengers with TSA PreCheck can now skate through security at Chicago’s O’Hare (ORD) and Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) simply by scanning their faces, as the airline joins rivals in using TSA’s new facial recognition systems.
As first spotted by The Points Guy, United’s website states it is now offering “TSA PreCheck Touchless ID” at the two hubs, the fourth and fifth busiest airports in the U.S. The technology allows enrolled travelers to verify their identity at the airport by scanning their faces rather than presenting their boarding passes and IDs.
Even more futuristic developments are coming to airports soon. In November, the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of TSA, announced that self-screening pods are in the works for U.S. airports. These kiosks will harness facial recognition and automated gates and baggage conveyance systems to process travelers with little or no assistance from staff. The self-screening kiosks are being trialed at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas (LAS).
Canada’s Vaccine Passport, ArriveCan, Faces Major Investigations
Over last week’s end, Canadian Information Commissioner, Caroline Maynard, announced the inception of a probe into claims of the obliteration of federal government records surrounding the government’s controversial vaccine passport app, ArriveCan.
ArriveCAN is a mobile application that was initially launched in April 2020 as a tool to assist border guards in Canada. It was designed to determine if people were eligible to enter Canada and whether they met strict COVID-19 requirements.
The app became mandatory for all air travelers seven months later and was expanded to include those crossing the border by land in March 2021. It collects personal data such as name, telephone number, address, and vaccination status to help public health officials enforce government quarantine rules.
Aside from the obvious constitutional concerns, there was much debate among experts about whether the app’s requirement for travelers to remain in their homes, especially following a glitch that incorrectly notified thousands of fully vaccinated travelers to quarantine, could be a form of unlawful detention.
The ArriveCan app, which was originally budgeted at $80,000, has seen its costs balloon to over $60 million. The public backlash against the invasive and dictatorial app resulted in a major investigation into the app. But now, the focal point of this investigation is the destruction of documentation associated with the creation of the ArriveCan app and its principal contractor, GC Strategies.
TikTok’s ‘Mystery Virus’ Is a Pandemic Side Effect
Fear of a “mystery virus” is spreading through social media platforms such as TikTok, with young people saying they’re not testing positive for COVID-19, flu or RSV, but sharing symptoms of nausea, faintness and excess mucus.
Public health experts say these concerns are likely a sign of one post-pandemic condition: anxiety about getting sick.
In the past few weeks, social media users have posted online about their experiences with COVID-like symptoms including difficulty breathing, extreme fatigue and fever. Many videos show people expressing their confusion as they say tests for viruses including COVID-19, the flu and RSV come back negative.
Lori Freeman, CEO of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, said these unverified online concerns of a “mystery virus” are another indication that trust in governmental and public health authorities is still lagging.
West Virginia Lawmakers Pass Bill Allowing Religious Exemptions for School Vaccine Requirements + More
West Virginia Lawmakers Pass Bill Allowing Religious Exemptions for School Vaccine Requirements
The West Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill Monday that will eliminate school vaccine requirements for those who claim religious exemptions, but only for some schools.
Last week, the House began considering the bill, known as HB 5105, which proposed eliminating vaccine requirements for public virtual schools that do not take part in extracurricular activities or sports in public school settings.
The bill was then expanded to propose “eliminating the vaccine requirements for students of public virtual schools, private schools, or parochial schools unless the student participates in sanctioned athletic events, and creating a religious exemption from vaccine requirements,” and then further amended to specifically allow vaccine exemptions “any child whose parents or guardians present a letter stating that a child cannot be vaccinated for religious reasons.”
It’s unclear if the religious exemption will apply to students attending in-person public schools. The bill will now head to the Senate for debate and, if it passes in that chamber, to the desk of Gov. Jim Justice for signing into law.
Prior to this bill, West Virginia had no non-medical vaccine exemptions from school vaccine requirements, either for religious or philosophical beliefs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Dr. Phil Torches ‘The View’ Co-Hosts Over Impact of COVID Lockdowns on Kids: ‘That’s a Fact’
Dr. Phil McGraw slammed the leftist co-hosts of ABC’s “The View” this week during an intense discussion about the impacts of COVID lockdowns on school children. McGraw said that the mental health of children largely began declining in 2008 with the advent of smartphones and social media.
“In like ’08, ’09, smartphones came in and kids stopped living their lives and started watching people live their lives,” he said. “So we saw the biggest spike and the highest levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicidality since records have ever been kept. And it’s just continued on and on and on.”
“And then COVID hits 10 years later and the same agencies that knew that are the agencies that shut down the schools for 2 years,” he continued.
Co-host Sunny Hostin snapped back, “There was also a pandemic going on and they were trying to save their lives.” McGraw fired back, noting that school-aged children were not dying from the pandemic. Co-host Ana Navarro asked McGraw: “Are you saying no schoolchildren died of COVID?”
“I’m saying it was the safest group,” McGraw responded. “They were the less vulnerable group, and they suffered and will suffer more from the mismanagement of COVID than they will from the exposure to COVID, and that’s not an opinion, that’s a fact.”
COVID Vaccine Mandate ‘Unlawful’ for Queensland Emergency Services, Court Rules
COVID-19 vaccine mandates for Queensland police and ambulance workers were made unlawfully, the state’s supreme court has found.
The court on Tuesday delivered its judgments in three lawsuits brought by 86 parties against Queensland’s police ambulance services for their directions to workers issued in 2021 and 2022.
The prior directions required emergency service workers to receive COVID vaccines and booster shots or face potential disciplinary action up to and including termination of employment.
The court found the police commissioner, Katarina Carroll, failed to give proper consideration to human rights relevant to the decision to issue the vaccine mandate.
Unintended Consequences of NZ’s COVID Vaccine Mandates Must Inform Future Pandemic Policy — New Research
One of the more controversial policies implemented during the height of the pandemic was the vaccine mandates. Thousands of workers across a range of professions had to get vaccinated to keep their jobs.
Our research looked at whether these vaccine mandates increased COVID-19 vaccination rates among these workers, and what their employment, earnings and workplace experiences were.
The stated purpose of the mandates was to increase vaccination rates among these workers to ensure the continuity of public services.
In reality, the mandates had limited effect on increasing vaccine uptake. But they had a substantive negative effect on the employment, earnings and well-being of unvaccinated health workers.
The Future of Censorship Is AI-Generated
How the “guardrails” of GenAI are defined and deployed is likely to have a significant and increasing impact on shaping the ecosystem of information and ideas that most humans engage with. And currently, the loudest voices are those that warn about the harms of GenAI, including the mass production of hate speech and credible disinformation. The World Economic Forum has even labeled AI-generated disinformation the most severe global threat here and now.
Ironically the fear of GenAI flooding society with “harmful” content could also take another dystopian turn. One where the guardrails erected to keep the most widely used GenAI systems from generating harm turn them into instruments of hiding information, enforcing conformity, and automatically inserting pervasive, yet opaque, bias.
But as the integration of GenAI becomes ubiquitous in everyday technology it is not a given that search, word processing, and email will continue to allow humans to be fully in control. The perspectives are frightening. Imagine a world where your word processor prevents you from analyzing, criticizing, lauding, or reporting on a topic deemed “harmful” by an AI programmed to only process ideas that are “respectful and appropriate for all.”
Hopefully, such a scenario will never become reality. But the current over-implementation of GenAI guardrails may become more pervasive in different and slightly less Orwellian ways. Governments are currently rushing to regulate AI. Regulation is needed to prevent real and concrete harms and safeguard basic human rights. But regulation of social media — such as the EU’s Digital Services Act — suggests that regulators will focus heavily on the potential harms rather than the benefits of new technology. This might create strong incentives for AI companies to keep in place expansive definitions of “harm” that limit human agency.
Google Is Under Attack in the Wake of Its ‘Woke’ AI Disaster
Google has more than 90% of the search market, giving it dominant control over the world’s information flow online.
As its AI becomes an increasingly important tool in helping users find information, the company plays an outsized role in ensuring facts are surfaced accurately. But there are mounting concerns that Google’s AI model has been neutered in a way that leads it to generate inaccuracies and withhold information instead.
The first major signs of this emerged last week, as users of Google’s AI model Gemini reported issues with its image-generation feature after it failed to accurately depict images requested of it.
David Sacks, a venture capitalist at Craft Ventures, points the finger of blame for Gemini’s issues at Google’s culture. “The original mission was to index all the world’s information. Now they are suppressing information. The culture is the problem,” he told a podcast last week.
Cyberattack Stalls Prescription Dispensing at UnitedHealth
U.S. News & World Report reported:
For nearly a week, prescription drug orders have been disrupted at thousands of pharmacies as the largest health insurer in the United States tries to fully restore services following a cyberattack.
The security breach was first detected last Wednesday at Change Healthcare, a division of UnitedHealth Group, and two senior federal law enforcement officials told the New York Times that the hackers appear to be from another country.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, UnitedHealth Group said it had been forced to disconnect some of Change Healthcare’s vast digital network from its clients, and it hasn’t yet been able to restore all of those services.
Change Healthcare handles roughly 15 billion transactions a year, representing nearly one in three U.S. patient records, the Times reported.
This latest cyberattack underscores the vulnerability of healthcare data, particularly the privacy of patients’ personal information.
Visa Applies for Biometric Authentication Patent
Visa — one of the world’s two biggest payment processors — appears to be moving into biometric data-based authentication, at least according to a patent it has applied for. And Visa claims that this would be fully privacy-friendly.
Visa is in this way joining Mastercard, but also Microsoft and Google, who are all exploring ultimately similar methods, for the sake of what they say is preventing physical data theft and abuse of deepfakes.
If Visa’s patent — designed, according to the giant’s filing, to provide “biometric templates for privacy-preserving authentication” — is approved and implemented, the end result would be the replacement of PINs with biometric identification.
The method would be used at ATMs and payment checkouts, and Visa made sure to note that the technology’s use can be extended to unlocking apartments or letting people into venues like theaters, amusement parks, etc.