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Facial Recognition Technology Being Studied as a Way to Identify Vaccinated Dogs + More
Facial Recognition Technology Being Studied as a Way to Identify Vaccinated Dogs
Humans use facial recognition technology all the time, like for unlocking your phone, but now it’s being studied as a way to determine whether a dog has been vaccinated or not.
A facial recognition app for animals has been used here in North America to correctly identify lost pets. Now researchers used the same smartphone technology in a village in Tanzania and were able to identify vaccinated dogs with a high degree of accuracy.
The idea is that when a dog receives its rabies vaccine, it would be registered in the facial recognition app with a photo. If the vaccination status of that dog is ever in question, they can then use the app to correctly identify the dog and confirm that it has already been vaccinated.
GOP Pols Demand Pentagon Probe Into More Than $50 Million Spent on Chinese Pandemic Research Labs
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) are demanding the Defense Department’s inspector general probe more than $50 million in defense grants to Chinese pandemic research institutions — including those based in Wuhan, the city where COVID-19 emerged in 2019.
The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, which passed last month, included an amendment from the lawmakers that directed the IG’s office to review Pentagon funding of risky research on pathogens of pandemic potential or “chimeric versions” of viruses in foreign nations over the past decade.
The law specifically targets Chinese government-linked research at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing.
Through grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Manhattan-based EcoHealth Alliance used American taxpayers’ money to fund more than $1.4 million in research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology from 2014 to 2021, including risky gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses.
“We cannot trust the mad scientists at EcoHealth to get their hands on taxpayer money or bats ever again,” Ernst added. “This investigation is the first step to bringing long overdue transparency and accountability to the indefensible ways Washington is spending our defense dollars.”
iPhone Apps Secretly Harvest Data When They Send You Notifications, Researchers Find
iPhone apps including Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and X/Twitter are skirting Apple’s privacy rules to collect user data through notifications, according to tests by security researchers at Mysk Inc., an app development company.
Users sometimes close apps to stop them from collecting data in the background, but this technique gets around that protection. The data is unnecessary for processing notifications, the researchers said and seems related to analytics, advertising, and tracking users across different apps and devices.
It’s par for the course that apps would find opportunities to sneak in more data collection, but “we were surprised to learn that this practice is widely used,” said Tommy Mysk, who conducted the tests along with Talal Haj Bakry. “Who would have known that an innocuous action as simple as dismissing a notification would trigger sending a lot of unique device information to remote servers? It is worrying when you think about the fact that developers can do that on-demand.”
This isn’t the first time Mysk’s tests have uncovered data problems at Apple, which has spent untold millions convincing the world that “what happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.” In October 2023, Mysk found that a lauded iPhone feature meant to protect details about your WiFi address isn’t as private as the company promises.
New York City Mayor Classifying Social Media as ‘Public Health Hazard’
New York City has become the first major city to designate social media as an environmental toxin, or “public health hazard,” Mayor Eric Adams (D) announced Wednesday.
Adams, during his State of the City address, called out a series of social media companies and claimed they are “fueling a mental health crisis,” especially for young people.
“Companies like TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook are fueling a mental health crisis by designing their platforms with addictive and dangerous features,” he said. “We cannot stand by and let Big Tech monetize our children’s privacy and jeopardize their mental health.”
Congress Can Fulfill the Constitution’s Promise to America’s Parents
Congress has a new opportunity to fulfill the Constitution’s promise to America’s parents by protecting families from harmful federal policies.
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that the U.S. Constitution protects the fundamental rights of parents. In a landmark 1925 case, the Court reiterated that “the child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
That means that the duty-bearers, parents, are to be the primary decision-makers for their children in education, healthcare, and custody. “This primary role of parents…is now established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition,” explained the Court in a subsequent decision.
The good news is that parents are acting. They helped pass legislation in 17 states to secure the highest level of legal protection for the parent-child relationship. This will safeguard the rights of parents from state policies that exclude them from crucial decisions involving their children.
The bad news is that the White House has announced a federal policy that could gravely intrude upon parental rights in all 50 states and U.S. territories.
One Week Before Its Big Senate Hearing, Meta Announces Even More Teen Safety Controls
Meta has rolled out stricter Instagram and Facebook messenger settings, intended to push back against unsolicited DM’s from strangers in a company-wide attempt to address teen safety on its bevy of platforms.
The new default setting turns off a teen user’s ability to receive DMs from anyone they don’t follow or aren’t connected to online, including other teens, the company explained in a blog post. This also applies to minor accounts (defined as 16 years or younger in the U.S. and 18 years or younger in certain countries) added to group chats.
As Mashable’s Christianna Silva noted, the influx of new teen safety measures is presciently timed, with Meta officials set to testify alongside other major social media companies in a Senate hearing on online child exploitation taking place on Jan. 31. Other attendees include X/Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, and Discord CEO Jason Citron.
Hovering in the background are several lawsuits levied against Meta over the last year, including a recent Massachusetts case against Zuckerberg once again alleging he repeatedly blocked attempts to address teen mental health on the app.
Florida Lawmakers Vote to Restrict Children’s Access to Social Media
The Florida House of Representatives approved on Wednesday a bill aimed at barring children aged 16 and younger from social media platforms, following similar action in several states to limit online risks to young teenagers.
Passed by a bipartisan vote of 106 to 13, the measure would require social media platforms to terminate the accounts of anyone under 17 years old and use a third-party verification system to screen out the underaged.
“We must address the harmful effects social media platforms have on the development and well-being of our kids,” said Florida House Speaker Paul Renner. The bill would also require firms to permanently delete personal information collected from the terminated accounts and let parents bring civil suits against those failing to do so.
Meta (META.O), the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, opposed the legislation, usually referred to as HB1, saying it would limit parental discretion and raise data privacy concerns
Kids Spent 60% More Time on TikTok Than YouTube Last Year, 20% Tried OpenAI’s ChatGPT
No wonder YouTube launched Shorts. A new study of children’s online habits found that children ages 4 through 18 spent a global average of 112 minutes daily on TikTok’s short video app in 2023, an increase from 107 minutes the year prior. And although YouTube remains the world’s biggest streaming app among this demographic, kids spent 60% more time on TikTok last year. The data, from a new study on kids’ digital media also examined kids’ use of novel technologies, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The study, which takes into account the digital media habits of over 400,000 families and schools worldwide, hails from parent control software maker Qustodio. In its annual report, the company paints a picture of the digital habits of kids and their technology usage across mobile and desktop devices, with deep dives into select markets, including the U.S., U.K., Spain, Australia, and France.
What’s unique about its data set is that it comes from kids’ real-world usage of technology, rather than panelist questions. However, the data may not be fully representative of kids’ digital media habits, since its slice of the market represents those households and schools using its parental control software.
Notably, the firm for the first time this year looked into kids’ use of new technologies, including AI.
COVID Test Lab Leaks Details of Over a Million Patients Online + More
COVID Test Lab Leaks Details of Over a Million Patients Online
A leaked COVID-19 testing database which contains the personal details of an estimated 1.3 million people has been discovered online by a top security researcher.
The database, operated by Coronalab.eu which is owned by Microbe & Lab, an ISO-certified lab based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, was found without password protection and the documents within were all marked with the name and logo of the database owner.
Inside the database, the full names, dates of birth and passport numbers of over a million people were discovered. The owner of the database, Microbe & Lab, is an ISO-certified lab based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
The email addresses, test results, prices and locations of many other tests were also found within QR codes and .csv files. This information would be an absolute goldmine for a malicious actor, who could utilize the data to launch highly sophisticated COVID-19-related phishing attacks, commit fraud, or sell the data on.
40 Years Ago, Apple Got Our Current Tech Dystopia Dead Wrong
We are all the sledgehammer, Apple does like to tell its fans. We are all disruptors hurtling toward one great screen, breaking the iron-fisted hold that other tech firms want to impose on us.
The hellscape dystopia world of Apple’s famed “1984” commercial modeled after George Orwell’s seminal dystopia 1984 never really came to pass. As silly as it is to say, Apple was right. We didn’t win some nebulous liberation, exactly. We won a whole different soup of tech-based dystopia.
Today, tech companies pander to people’s worst impulses to siphon as much money from their users as possible. It’s a model envisioned by Aldous Huxley. His 1932 novel, Brave New World, describes how average folks would seek their own oppression for the simple, mindless pleasures of drugs and technology, reducing their capacity or even desire to fight back against that which took away their autonomy.
Yes, as much as it sounds like doomerism, today’s current tech environment tracks much more closely to Huxley’s crapsack vision than Orwell’s.
Wrongful Arrest Raises (Another) Alarm: Invasive Facial Recognition Technology’s Flaws Exposed in $10M Lawsuit
Harvey Eugene Murphy Jr, a 61-year-old man, is launching a legal battle against Macy’s and EssilorLuxottica, Sunglass Hut’s parent company, alleging a misidentification by facial recognition technology led to his unlawful arrest. Murphy’s lawsuit asserts that owing to a flawed criminal identification by a low-quality camera image, he spent days unjustly incarcerated where he underwent horrific physical and sexual violence.
In January 2022, a robbery at a Houston-based Sunglass Hut led to the theft of merchandise worth thousands. However, Murphy’s legal counsel insists that Murphy was living in California, not Texas, during that time frame.
Murphy’s lawsuit details how an EssilorLuxottica staff member in cooperation with Macy’s used facial recognition software to single out him as the thief. Following the allegation, a team member from EssilorLuxottica claimed to have identified one of two burglars involved in the heist using this technology, directing the Houston police department to halt its ongoing investigation.
According to a Guardian report, after experiencing wrongful imprisonment in the local county jail and later being transferred to the Harris County jail, his charges were dropped as his alibi was certified by his defense attorney and prosecutor. Nevertheless, the alleged horrifying physical and sexual assault he underwent hours before his release from jail left him severely traumatized.
Doomsday Clock at 90 Seconds to Midnight Amid Nuclear and AI Threats
The world remains the closest it has ever been to the symbolic hour of the apocalypse, with the Doomsday Clock set once again to 90 seconds to “midnight” for 2024.
Wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, a spiraling climate crisis and the rise of artificial intelligence are among the threats continuing to put human existence under pressure, according to the people who run the clock.
The clock, which has been used for seven decades, was created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 amid Cold War nuclear tensions — and is seen as “a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to global catastrophe caused by man-made technologies,” the group said Tuesday.
The Chicago-based nonprofit focused this year in part on the rise of AI, saying in a statement that sophisticated chatbots such as ChatGPT “led some respected experts to express concern about existential risks arising from further rapid advancements in the field.” It called for greater global governance of what it termed a “disruptive technology.”
GOP Senator Urges SCOTUS to Rein in Big Tech’s Content Censorship That Defies ‘Logic’
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is urging the Supreme Court not to buy into arguments from Big Tech platforms that they should have First Amendment freedom to censor user content while simultaneously demanding legal protection from content posted on their platforms.
Next month, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a set of cases that question whether state laws that limit Big Tech companies’ ability to moderate content on their platforms curb the companies’ First Amendment liberties.
The Missouri Republican filed a brief in the cases Tuesday, arguing the platforms want to keep liability protections granted by Congress for content on their sites, while simultaneously asking for unfettered ability to censor content, citing their First Amendment liberties.
The court “should not bless the platforms’ contradictory positions, much less constitutionalize them,” Hawley argued, adding that “doing so would effectively immunize the platforms from both civil liability in tort and regulatory oversight by legislators.”
Amazon’s Ring to Stop Letting Police Request Doorbell Video From Users
Amazon.com Inc.’s Ring home doorbell unit says it will stop letting police departments request footage from users’ video doorbells and surveillance cameras, retreating from a practice that was criticized by civil liberties groups and some elected officials.
Next week, the company will disable its Request For Assistance tool, the program that had allowed law enforcement to seek footage from users on a voluntary basis, Eric Kuhn, who runs Ring’s Neighbors app, said in a blog post on Wednesday. Police and fire departments will have to seek a warrant to request footage from users or show the company evidence of an ongoing emergency.
The move marks a course change for Ring, which from its startup days through its years as part of Amazon couched its mission almost exclusively as an effort to improve public safety through surveillance. “Our mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods has been at the core of everything we do at Ring,” founding chief Jamie Siminoff said when Amazon sealed the acquisition of his company in 2018.
Civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have long criticized Ring, accusing it of building a residential surveillance network available on demand to law enforcement and highlighting the history of biased policing in the U.S.
Court Rules in Favor of a Web Scraper, Bright Data, Which Meta Had Used and Then Sued
Meta has lost a claim in its legal battle with an Israeli tech firm, Bright Data, which it sued last year for scraping data from Facebook and Instagram via the web. The tech giant, which has a long history of suing data scraping businesses, claimed that Bright Data’s data harvesting was a violation of its terms of service — which Bright Data had agreed to by having accounts on Meta’s platforms.
However, a court has ruled in favor of Bright Data on Meta’s “breach of contract” claim, saying that Meta had not presented sufficient evidence that the firm had scraped anything but public data.
The lawsuit was particularly interesting because it revealed that Meta had earlier paid Bright Data to gather data from e-commerce websites to build brand profiles on its platforms. In other words, Meta was a customer of Bright Data’s web scraping services before it went to sue them, though it used the company’s services for a different purpose.
In a related matter, Bright Data had also been accused of collecting personal information about minors pulled from Facebook and Instagram, Bloomberg reported last year.
Such data scraping operations can put user privacy at risk as data collected by web scrapers has been previously leaked online, such as in the case where the personal data from 533 million Facebook accounts was found to have been leaked.
AGs Ask Supreme Court to Peel Back Content Moderation From Big Tech in Landmark First Amendment Case + More
GOP AGs Ask Supreme Court to Peel Back Content Moderation From Big Tech in Landmark First Amendment Case
A group of 20 Republican states are weighing in on a Supreme Court legal battle that could sharply alter the landscape of Big Tech’s content moderation. Next month, the high court will hear a set of cases that question whether state laws that limit Big Tech companies’ ability to moderate content on their platforms curb the companies’ First Amendment liberties.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey — one of the Republican AGs leading the lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging it engaged in a “vast censorship enterprise” — on Monday filed an amicus brief along with 19 of his colleagues in the cases, asking the Supreme Court to rule in favor of the laws meant to limit internet platform’s ability to moderate content.
“If the Supreme Court lets social media companies silence speech, it will set a devastating anti-free speech precedent at a time when the First Amendment is under widespread attack,” Bailey told Fox News Digital on Monday.
Separate laws that passed in Florida and Texas and are now challenged in court would require large Big Tech companies like X, formerly Twitter, and Facebook to host third-party communications but prevent those businesses from blocking or removing users’ posts based on political viewpoints.
U.S. Seeks to Stop Citizens’ Data Exploitation for Blackmail, Espionage — Bloomberg News
The United States plans to announce a new executive order to seek to prevent foreign adversaries from accessing troves of highly sensitive personal data about Americans and people connected to the U.S. government, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday.
The draft order focuses on ways that foreign adversaries are gaining access to Americans’ “highly sensitive” personal data through legal means and through intermediaries like data brokers, third-party vendor agreements, employment agreements or investment agreements, the report added.
The administration is concerned about the collection of data on political figures, journalists, academics, activists and members of marginalized communities, as well as patient data obtained through healthcare providers and researchers, the report said.
In October last year, Biden signed an executive order requiring developers of AI systems that pose risks to U.S. national security, economy and public safety to share results of safety tests with the federal government. The order goes beyond voluntary commitments AI companies had made this year.
CDC Labeled Accurate Articles as Misinformation, Documents Show
The top U.S. public health agency labeled multiple news articles as misinformation even though the articles were accurate, according to internal emails and experts. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) added the misinformation labels to articles from The Epoch Times in widely-circulated internal messages, according to copies obtained by The Epoch Times.
One of the articles reported on a peer-reviewed paper that found heart inflammation, or myocarditis, was more common after COVID-19 vaccination than after COVID-19 infection.
Nordic researchers reviewed electronic health records and counted 109 cases of myocarditis following COVID-19 infection compared to 530 after vaccination. Their study was published by the British Medical Journal.
“The Epoch Times article should not be labeled as misinformation,” Dr. Tracy Hoeg, a physician-scientist at the University of California-San Francisco, told The Epoch Times via email.
26 Billion Records Have Been Leaked in ‘Mother of All Breaches,’ but Don’t Freak Out
A database of 26 billion leaked records has been discovered, in what has been called the “Mother of all Breaches.” Fortunately, it actually isn’t as bad as it sounds.
The massive 12-terabyte leak was discovered by cybersecurity researcher Bob Dyachenko, working alongside the team at Cybernews. It isn’t clear exactly who is responsible for the database, however, it contains both credentials and sensitive data.
The leak is in fact a compiled collection of data from thousands of previous breaches and doesn’t appear to contain any new information. If you’ve kept up to date on your security, you should have little more to fear than you did yesterday. It’s also reasonable to expect that some of the records are duplicated, so there may not necessarily be 26 billion unique records.
Tencent was the most heavily impacted by the leak, with 1.5 billion records in the compilation. It was followed by the Chinese social media platform Weibo at 504 million, MySpace at 260 million, Twitter at 281 million, and Wattpad at 271 million. Other brands included LinkedIn, AdultFriendFinder, Adobe, MyFitnessPal, and Canva.
Government organizations weren’t spared either, with the U.S., Brazil, Germany, Turkey, and the Philippines among those swept up in the compiled database.
Judge Says Canada’s Use of Emergencies Act to Quell Truckers’ Protests Over COVID Was Unreasonable
A Canadian judge has ruled that the government’s use of the Emergencies Act to quell weeks of protests by truckers and others angry over COVID-19 restrictions in 2022 was unreasonable and unconstitutional.
Up to thousands of protesters clogged the streets of the capital of Ottawa and besieged Parliament Hill, demonstrating against vaccine mandates for truckers and other precautions and condemning Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government.
The act allowed authorities to declare certain areas as no-go zones. It also allowed police to freeze truckers’ personal and corporate bank accounts and compel tow truck companies to haul away vehicles.
In the decision released Tuesday, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley said the invocation of the Emergencies Act led to the infringement of constitutional rights. “I conclude that there was no national emergency justifying the invocation of the Emergencies Act and the decision to do so was therefore unreasonable,” Mosley wrote.
Fake Biden Robocall Fuels Calls for AI Regulation
A wave of misleading robocalls in the New Hampshire primary mimicking the voice of President Biden is rekindling calls for artificial intelligence regulations ahead of the 2024 general election.
As my colleague Meryl Kornfield reported Monday, voters in the state received calls ahead of the tally “from what sounded like a digitally generated voice impersonating President Biden that advised them not to vote.” The robocall told primary voters that it was “important that you save your vote for the November election.”
The robocalls spotlighted how digitally altered or AI-generated media could be used to undermine the 2024 elections and reignited calls by officials for federal action.
Netherlands’ Queen Maxima Pushes for Global Digital ID Systems for Financial Access, Vaccine Verification and More
The Dutch Queen Maxima utilized her platform during the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos to advocate for the far-reaching benefits of digital ID for various sectors. Queen Maxima highlighted that a digital ID could become a critical instrument, capable of determining vaccination statuses, facilitating school registrations, and simplifying the process of claiming government subsidies.
There has been a growing push by various global elites, including governments, tech companies, and international organizations, towards the adoption of digital identity systems. This shift is often presented as a means to increase efficiency and security. But, few talk about the major implications for surveillance and the erosion of civil liberties.
Africa is being used as the testing ground for several digital ID projects.
Of course, Queen Maxima also said that digital ID systems would be useful to act as a vaccine passport. “It is also good for school enrollment; it is also good for health — who actually got a vaccination or not; it’s very good actually to get your subsidies from the government,” she said.
France Fines Amazon $35 Million for ‘Excessively Intrusive’ Monitoring of Warehouse Staff
France’s privacy watchdog said Tuesday that it slapped Amazon’s French warehouse business with a 32 million euro fine ($35 million) for using an “excessively intrusive system” to monitor worker performance and activity.
The French Data Protection Authority, also known by its acronym CNIL, said the system allowed managers at Amazon France Logistique to track employees so closely that it resulted in multiple breaches of the European Union’s stringent privacy rules, called the General Data Protection Regulation.
The watchdog’s investigation focused on Amazon employees’ use of handheld barcode scanners to track packages at various points as they move through the warehouse, such as putting them in crates or packing them for delivery.
Amazon uses the system to manage its business and meet performance targets, but the regulator said it’s different from traditional methods for monitoring worker activity and puts them under “close surveillance” and “continuous pressure.”
Washington Takes Aim at Facial Recognition + More
Washington Takes Aim at Facial Recognition
A group of Democratic senators on Thursday demanded that the Justice Department look at how police use facial recognition tools and whether it violates civil rights laws — part of a fresh wave of scrutiny in Washington of a technology that has triggered national concerns but has never come under federal regulations.
The letter, shared exclusively with POLITICO, calls for the Justice Department to explain how the agency’s policies and practices ensure that law enforcement agencies receiving federal funds for facial recognition technology comply with civil rights protections. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) is the letter’s lead author, joined by Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and 15 other Democrats and one independent.
The Justice Department has awarded at least $3.2 million to local law enforcement agencies for facial recognition software since 2007, according to public records.
The letter comes a day after the National Academies released a 106-page report concluding that facial recognition systems have gotten so advanced that the industry requires federal oversight. In the report, a committee of 14 experts heard from stakeholders on facial recognition over nine months and concluded that the technology is a cause for concern because of both human misuse and technical shortcomings.
Montana’s Effort to Expand Religious Exemptions to Vaccines Prompts Political Standoff
Montana lawmakers are in a standoff with the state’s health department over a package of sweeping changes to childcare licensing rules that includes a disputed provision to allow religious exemptions to routine vaccinations for children and workers.
Both Republican and Democratic legislators on the Children, Families, Health, and Human Services Interim Committee voted on Jan. 18 to renew their informal objection to the proposed childcare licensing rules, which the committee has blocked since November.
The vote prevents the state’s Department of Public Health and Human Services from adopting the rules until at least March when committee members say they will debate a formal objection that could delay the rules’ adoption until spring 2025.
The most contentious provision in the 97-page rules package would require large childcare facilities to enroll children who, for religious reasons, have not been vaccinated. Montana, like 44 other states, already allows religious exemptions from immunization requirements for school-age children. But this proposal would add a religious exemption to its immunization requirements for younger kids in the state.
The FDA and FTC Need to Crack Down on TikTok and Instagram Influencers Pitching Prescription Drugs
In June, the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning letter about advertisements for the drug Recorlev for Cushing’s syndrome — its first in more than a year about webpages that make “false or misleading claims” about prescription drugs. More recently, in December the agency published guidance about TV and radio advertisements.
But the FDA is behind on something crucial: It needs to develop and clarify regulations to protect patients from potential harm and misleading information on social media platforms, particularly from influencers.
Influencers with no medical or pharmaceutical training regularly use these platforms to promote prescription drugs. Khloe Kardashian, for example, has posted ads on Instagram to promote a prescription migraine medication. So have Lady Gaga and gold-medalist Olympic athlete Aly Raisman, who recently endorsed a competing migraine medicine in an ad that began with her talking about Women’s Mental Health Month.
While these posts were clearly marked as ads in compliance with federal guidelines, simply disclosing that something was sponsored is not enough. In 2021, the FDA and Duke Margolis Center for Health Policy found that adolescents and those with chronic conditions are especially vulnerable to pharmaceutical social media direct-to-consumer advertising. This susceptibility and the lack of oversight for such ads could have adverse health consequences, especially for young adult patients.
Big Tech Wants You to Foot the Bill for Its AI Projects
Big Tech’s trend of the week is the incessant talk about AI subscriptions. Silicon Valley cannot stop throwing money into AI, but they’re a bit stuck figuring out how AI will throw money back at them. Now, Big Tech thinks it found a solution: they’re betting you will pay a monthly subscription for their AI service. And, oh boy, there’s already a lot of them.
It’s like streaming all over again: the product is expensive to make, no one wants ads in there (yet), and there are a ton of services costing $10 to $20 a month. So, are you ready to pay for a portfolio of AI services like you do for streaming?
This week, Amazon jumped on the bandwagon of AI subscriptions as well. The company is reportedly launching an AI-supercharged Alexa with a monthly subscription. The service is tentatively named “Alexa Plus”, and has a launch date set for June. Apparently, Amazon employees expressed concerns that people won’t pay for it. Same here, Amazon employees, same here.
Thousands of Businesses Found Handing Tons of User Data to Facebook
Alarming new research has found supposedly private user data is being shared between Facebook and thousands of companies through hidden tracking techniques.
In the study, users downloaded a three-year span of data from Facebook which found that on average, each individual had their data shared by 2,230 companies.
While the individuals who submitted their data for this research were not demographically adjusted, they are of a demographic group that is more inclined to be privacy conscious, hinting that the average Facebook user’s data may have been shared far wider.
The research was conducted by Consumer Reports, a non-profit, independent organization seeking to provide transparency on how consumer data is used, and found that for the 709 volunteers who submitted their data, there were 186,892 companies that shared their data with Facebook.
Face Recognition Technology Follows a Long Analog History of Surveillance and Control Based on Identifying Physical Feature
Face recognition technology is the latest and most sophisticated version of biometric surveillance: using unique physical characteristics to identify individual people. It stands in a long line of technologies — from the fingerprint to the passport photo to iris scans — designed to monitor people and determine who has the right to move freely within and across borders and boundaries.
In my book, “Do I Know You? From Face Blindness to Super Recognition,” I explore how the story of face surveillance lies not just in the history of computing but in the history of medicine, of race, of psychology and neuroscience, and in the health humanities and politics.
Viewed as a part of the long history of people-tracking, face recognition technology’s incursions into privacy and limitations on free movement are carrying out exactly what biometric surveillance was always meant to do.
The system works by converting captured faces — either static from photographs or moving from video — into a series of unique data points, which it then compares against the data points drawn from images of faces already in the system. As face recognition technology improves in accuracy and speed, its effectiveness as a means of surveillance becomes ever more pronounced.
BMJ Report Recommends ‘Behavioral Interventions’ to ‘Reduce Vaccine Hesitancy Driven by Misinformation on Social Media’
The BMJ is not short for “Behavioral Medical Journal” — but it might as well be. Now this publication, owned by the British Medical Association, is exploring how to deploy no less than “behavioral interventions” to bring about less “vaccine hesitancy.”
And the article doesn’t stop at medical arguments. The hesitancy here is specifically linked with social media-driven “misinformation.” The recommendations don’t differ greatly from what those Big Tech social subsidiaries have been including for years in their policies — and these “guidelines” were probably cooked in the same kitchen, so to speak.
Things like, boosting the visibility of “reliable health information” and more “pro-action” on these platforms “in dealing with the proliferation of misinformation.”
Here’s what BMJ says are standard behavioral approaches: encouraging vaccination by “(including) mandatory vaccination and regulation for healthcare professionals, incentives, public health communication campaigns, and engaging trusted leaders.”
Penélope Cruz Says Social Media Is ‘a Cruel Experiment’ on Children
Penélope Cruz says her two kids don’t have phones or social media accounts. In an interview with Elle, the actor opened up about what it’s like to be a mother to two preteens — a 10-year-old daughter, Luna, and a 12-year-old son, Leo.
Cruz says she tries to protect her kids — whom she shares with her husband, Spanish actor Javier Bardem — from the dangers of technology, admitting that they aren’t on social media and “don’t even have phones.”
“It’s so easy to be manipulated, especially if you have a brain that is still forming,” Cruz told Elle. “And who pays the price? Not us, not our generation, who, maybe at 25, learned how a BlackBerry worked. It’s a cruel experiment on children, on teenagers.”
Amazon’s $1.4 Billion iRobot Deal to Be Blocked by EU Antitrust Watchdog
Amazon.com Inc.’s proposed $1.4 billion acquisition of Roomba maker iRobot Corp. is expected to be blocked by the European Union’s antitrust regulator over concerns that the deal will harm other robot vacuum makers.
The e-commerce giant was told the deal was likely to be rejected at a meeting Thursday with officials from the European Commission, according to people familiar with the matter. A final decision still needs formal approval from the EU’s political leadership and is due by Feb. 14.
The deal is likely to face opposition in the U.S. as well. According to people familiar with the matter, the Federal Trade Commission has been drafting a lawsuit that would seek to block the acquisition. The FTC’s three commissioners haven’t yet voted on a challenge nor had a final meeting with Amazon to discuss the potential case, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing an ongoing probe.