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Defense Bill Orders Pentagon to Review Reinstatement of Troops Fired for COVID Refusal + More
Defense Bill Orders Pentagon to Review Reinstatement of Troops Fired for COVID Refusal
Congress, in a draft version of the annual defense bill, has directed the Pentagon to review the reinstatement of U.S. troops who were discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
The provision is included in the compromise version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), reached by negotiators in the Democratic-controlled Senate and Republican-controlled House and released Thursday.
The Senate added a secondary provision that requires those seeking reinstatement to have before submitted a request for a religious, administrative or medical exemption.
Lawmakers also included an amendment to create an investigatory board that will review cases of service members who were discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
Other amendments require the Pentagon to communicate the path to be reinstated to COVID-related discharged troops and the Defense Department to conduct a study of potential health consequences to service members who got the vaccine.
23andMe Changes Terms of Service to Prevent Lawsuits After Data Breach
Days after a data breach allowed hackers to steal 6.9 million 23andMe users’ personal details, the genetic testing company changed its terms of service to prevent customers from suing the firm or pursuing class-action lawsuits against it.
Why it matters: It’s unclear if 23andMe is attempting to retroactively shield itself from lawsuits alleging it acted negligently.
The big picture: Through a mechanism called acceptance by silence or inaction, 23andMe stipulated that customers must explicitly tell the company they disagree with the new terms within 30 days of being notified of the changes or they will be locked into the terms automatically.
Between the lines: Nancy Kim, a Chicago-Kent College of Law professor who is an expert in online contracts, said if 23andMe was attempting to shield itself from the fallout from the data breach, it’s unlikely that most courts would uphold such an effort.
Millions of Patient Scans and Health Records Leaked Online
Personally identifiable information (PII), as well as plenty of medical records belonging to millions of patients across the world, have been found exposed on the internet and available to anyone who knows where to look.
These are the findings of Aplite, which claimed to have found more than 3,800 accessible PACS servers. For the uninitiated, PACS is short for Picture Archiving and Communications Server, an used for storing, retrieving, and accessing medical images.
These images are called Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) and they’ve been the medical industry standard for decades. The servers were found in more than 110 countries and exposed sensitive information on roughly 16 million patients.
The data that was exposed includes patient names, genders, addresses, phone numbers, and in some cases Social Security numbers. The researchers also said that they found 43 million health records such as examination results, examination dates, and the details of the physician who conducted the examination.
Big Tech Funds the Very People Who Are Supposed to Hold It Accountable
Tech giants including Google and Facebook parent Meta have dramatically ramped up charitable giving to university campuses over the past several years — giving them influence over academics studying such critical topics as artificial intelligence, social media and disinformation.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg alone has donated money to more than 100 university campuses, either through Meta or his personal philanthropy arm, according to new research by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit watchdog group studying the technology industry. Other firms are helping fund academic centers, doling out grants to professors and sitting on advisory boards reserved for donors, researchers told The Post.
Silicon Valley’s influence is most apparent among computer science professors at such top-tier schools as Berkeley, University of Toronto, Stanford and MIT. According to a 2021 paper by University of Toronto and Harvard researchers, most tenure-track professors in computer science at those schools whose funding sources could be determined had taken money from the technology industry, including nearly 6 of 10 scholars of AI.
Academics say they are increasingly dependent on tech companies to access the large amounts of data required to study social behavior, including the spread of disinformation and hate speech. Both Meta and X, formerly Twitter, have reduced the flow of that data to researchers, requiring them to negotiate special deals to obtain access or pay far more, respectively.
Do You Know Who’s Posting Pictures of Your Kid Online?
Recently, a group of teen girls made the shocking discovery that boys in their New Jersey high school had rounded up images they’d posted of themselves on social media, and then used those pictures to generate fake nudes. The boys, who shared the nudes in a group chat, allegedly did this with the help of a digital tool powered by artificial intelligence, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The incident is a frightening violation of privacy. But it also illustrates just how rapidly AI is fundamentally reshaping expectations regarding what might happen to one’s online images. What this means for children and teens is particularly sobering.
A recent report published by the Internet Watch Foundation found that AI is increasingly being used to create realistic child sexual abuse material. Some of these images are generated from scratch, with the aid of AI-powered software. But a portion of this material is created with publicly available images of children, which have been scraped from the internet and manipulated using AI.
John Pizzuro, former commander of the New Jersey Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, told Mashable that pictures of children available online just a few years ago were difficult to manipulate with the software that existed at the time.
Now, a bad actor can seamlessly digitally excise the background of an image featuring a child, then superimpose the youth onto another background with ease, according to Pizzuro, CEO of Raven, an advocacy and lobbying group focused on combating child exploitation.
Meta Launches End-to-End Encryption for Messages on Facebook and Messenger
Meta is rolling out end-to-end encryption for calls and messages across its Facebook and Messenger platforms, the company announced Thursday, a major update considered a victory for privacy advocates but that draws concerns from law enforcement and child protection groups that the feature will hamper efforts to tackle abuse and crime.
The major privacy update means Meta will no longer be able to see the contents of messages and brings Facebook and Messenger in line with the company’s other platform, WhatsApp. Instagram is not yet covered by the new standard, though the company suggests this will happen soon. In August, Meta said it had plans to roll out the new security standard to Instagram “shortly after” its launch on Messenger, though it did not provide a timeline for this.
While privacy advocates have long sought stronger privacy standards on social platforms like Facebook and Messenger, the proposals are not universally welcome. Police and governments have warned encryption could endanger security and hamper efforts to combat crime by making it harder to monitor bad actors and obtain evidence of criminal activity.
Child safety advocates warn tougher encryption could help potential child abusers effectively hide online. The tension fits within a wider discussion in technology that pits privacy against security, with tech companies like Apple pushing back against government efforts to introduce backdoors or surveillance powers to skirt security protocols.
Fresenius Medical Care Says Data on 500,000 People Stolen in U.S.
Dialysis group Fresenius Medical Care (FMEG.DE) said on Wednesday that data including medical records on 500,000 patients and former patients were stolen from a U.S. subsidiary’s data warehouse.
“The incident may have affected approximately 500,000 patients, former patients, guarantors and 200 staff located across several states, U.S. territories and four countries,” the German company said in a statement.
China Restarts COVID Testing in Hospitals, Airports
Authorities in China have started testing people for COVID-19 again in hospitals and transportation hubs as a wave of respiratory disease tears through the country, according to local residents and government directives.
As parents and children continued to flock to pediatric clinics and emergency rooms in Beijing with severe respiratory disease, hospitals are once more performing COVID-19 tests on patients, although there has been little on the news regarding a resurgence of the virus, new variants of which are emerging globally.
Chinese health officials have acknowledged the spike in pneumonia and other respiratory cases, blaming a cocktail of pathogens including mycoplasma pneumonia, respiratory syncytial virus, seasonal influenza and COVID-19.
Now, government documents are starting to warn about a new wave of coronavirus infections in particular, with the State Council ordering local authorities to resume testing and disease monitoring at ports and airports, in schools, care homes and other institutions.
Governments Spying on Apple, Google Users Through Push Notifications — U.S. Senator + More
Governments Spying on Apple, Google Users Through Push Notifications — U.S. Senator
Unidentified governments are surveilling smartphone users via their apps’ push notifications, a U.S. senator warned on Wednesday.
In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google and Apple (AAPL.O). Although details were sparse, the letter lays out yet another path by which governments can track smartphones.
Apps of all kinds rely on push notifications to alert smartphone users to incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. These are the audible “dings” or visual indicators users get when they receive an email or their sports team wins a game. What users often do not realize is that almost all such notifications travel over Google and Apple’s servers.
That gives the two companies unique insight into the traffic flowing from those apps to their users, and in turn, puts them “in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps,” Wyden said. He asked the Department of Justice to “repeal or modify any policies” that hindered public discussions of push notification spying.
In a statement, Apple said that Wyden’s letter gave them the opening they needed to share more details with the public about how governments monitored push notifications.
Facebook and Instagram Accused of Creating a ‘Marketplace’ for Child Predators in New Lawsuit
Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, allowed Facebook and Instagram to become a “marketplace for predators in search of children,” a new lawsuit from the New Mexico attorney general alleges, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The lawsuit, filed in state court on Tuesday, also claims Meta’s algorithms recommend sexual content to children.
As outlined in the complaint, the New Mexico attorney general’s office conducted an investigation that involved creating test profiles on Facebook and Instagram that appeared to be teenagers or preteens. Not only did the office find inappropriate recommendations for each of the decoys, such as an account that openly posted adult pornography, but it also found that they attracted predators as well.
“Meta’s platforms Facebook and Instagram are a breeding ground for predators who target children for human trafficking, the distribution of sexual images, grooming, and solicitation,” the lawsuit states. “Teens and preteens can easily register for unrestricted accounts because of a lack of age verification. When they do, Meta directs harmful and inappropriate material at them.”
The Journal has published a series of reports over the past several months that found disturbing patterns on Facebook and Instagram. Most recently, the outlet published an investigation into how Facebook appears to enable and promote groups dedicated to sharing child sexual abuse material. Meta responded by expanding the child safety-related terms, phrases, and emoji it uses to find predatory networks. It also stopped recommending groups with members that “exhibit potentially suspicious behavior.”
GOP Sens. Marshall and Braun Introduce Bill to Rehire Pilots Fired for Refusing COVID Jab: ‘Dark Time in American History’
Republican Sens. Roger Marshall and Mike Braun are teaming up on legislation to reinstate pilots who were let go for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Under the bill announced Wednesday, the Federal Aviation Administration will be required to compel airline companies to rehire those pilots within 30 days of enactment.
“The Biden administration’s ‘jab or job’ vaccine mandates will go down as a dark time in American history,” Marshall, of Kansas, said in a statement.
Multiple top airline companies took action to terminate non-compliant pilots in response. United Airlines, for example, reported firing six employees. By May 2023, the Biden administration formally scrapped the policy. It’s not fully clear how many pilots fired over the vaccine remain out of work as a result.
“No one should have lost their job because they didn’t want to take the COVID vaccine,” Braun, of Indiana, said in a statement.
Texas, The Daily Wire, & The Federalist Sue U.S. State Dept for Conspiring With Newsguard to Censor American Media Companies
Following bombshell censorship revelations exposed over the last year, beginning with the Twitter Files, the state of Texas, The Daily Wire, and The Federalist have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. State Department on Tuesday, alleging that the government agency funded censorship technology designed to bankrupt domestic media outlets which have disfavored political opinions. Read the 67-page complaint here.
According to the Daily Wire‘s Luke Rosiak: The State Department is tasked with foreign relations and has no authority over domestic affairs, yet it took a government office designed for countering foreign terrorist propaganda, the Global Engagement Center (GEC), and unleashed it against Americans engaged in what it claimed was “disinformation,” according to the lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas on Tuesday night by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
It was “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history,” said the suit, which also names Secretary of State Antony Blinken and five other officials as defendants.
The outlets are being represented by The New Civil Liberties Alliance’s Mark Chenoweth, who said that “the federal government cannot do indirectly what the First Amendment forbids it from doing directly.”
The Untold Story of a Massive Hack at HHS in COVID’s Early Days
On March 15, 2020, just days after the U.S. declared a national emergency because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the computer network for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services briefly vanished from the internet. In public remarks the following day, HHS Secretary Alex Azar attributed the 10-minute outage to a cyberattack but downplayed its severity, telling reporters that “there was no data breach or no degradation in terms of our ability to function and serve our important mission here.”
With a historic crisis sweeping the country, the episode seemed unremarkable and immediately receded from public view. But the department knew at the time that the attack represented a serious and unusual cyber threat, according to two officials involved in the response: former Chief Information Officer Jose Arrieta and former Chief Information Security Officer Janet Vogel.
Arrieta and Vogel say they decided to speak on the record because they believe public discussion of the attack will help the government prepare for cybersecurity threats. Five other current or former U.S. officials involved in the government’s response provided additional details but asked not to be identified to avoid professional repercussions. Bloomberg Businessweek has also viewed internal HHS documents related to the investigation.
The duration and scale of the activity led Arrieta, Vogel and others within the government to believe the hacking campaign was a smokescreen for a state-sponsored probe of computer networks associated with the U.S.’s pandemic response, possibly to set the stage for future incursions. “It was clear that our network had been mapped and that there was an understanding of different areas within our network,” says Arrieta. “They understood where large data repositories were, and they were actively seeking to gain some type of information from those environments.”
Arrieta, Vogel and two of the officials believe the scope, complexity and timing of the attacks point to China. “I am confident and believe that this attack was a nation-state effort that was perpetrated by the CCP,” says Arrieta, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
How Tech Giants Use Money, Access to Steer Academic Research
Tech giants including Google and Facebook parent Meta have dramatically ramped up charitable giving to university campuses over the past several years — giving them influence over academics studying such critical topics as artificial intelligence, social media and disinformation.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg alone has donated money to more than 100 university campuses, either through Meta or his personal philanthropy arm, according to new research by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit watchdog group studying the technology industry. Other firms are helping fund academic centers, doling out grants to professors and sitting on advisory boards reserved for donors, researchers told The Post.
Silicon Valley’s influence is most apparent among computer science professors at such top-tier schools as Berkeley, University of Toronto, Stanford and MIT. According to a 2021 paper by University of Toronto and Harvard researchers, most tenure-track professors in computer science at those schools whose funding sources could be determined had taken money from the technology industry, including nearly 6 of 10 scholars of AI.
The proportion rose further in certain controversial subjects, the study found. Of 33 professors whose funding could be traced who wrote on AI ethics for the top journals Nature and Science, for example, all but one had taken grant money from the tech giants or had worked as their employees or contractors.
Key Moments From Former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s COVID Inquiry Evidence
The U.K.’s COVID-19 Inquiry into the government’s response to the pandemic picked up again on Wednesday morning. The hearings for the initial stage of the investigation were heard in London in June.
Today, former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who served as the nation’s leader from 2019 to 2022, was sworn in to give evidence in front of the panel. Shortly into his opening statement, he said that he was sorry for the suffering experienced by COVID victims and their families.
The inquiry was created to help examine the government’s response to the pandemic and identify potential lessons for the future. The panel will not bestow criminal blame on those involved in the decision-making process.
Johnson’s voice quivered during the hearing, causing speculation that he was on the verge of tears. This came after he was asked to what extent his decision-making was influenced by fear of imposing interventions too early and causing behavioral fatigue in the population. “We have to be realistic about 2020. That whole year. That whole tragic, tragic year,” he said before pausing as his voice seemed to break. “We did lockdown. But then it bounced back.”
6.9 Million Users of 23andMe Had Personal Information Stolen by Hackers + More
6.9 Million Users of 23andMe Had Personal Information Stolen by Hackers
An estimated 6.9 million users of the genetic testing company 23andMe had their personal information stolen by hackers in a recent data breach, a company spokesperson confirmed to The Hill on Monday.
A spokesperson for 23andMe told The Hill an estimated 5.5 million users had their data accessed from the company’s DNA Relatives feature, which helps users find and connect with family relatives who also have the feature enabled.
Hackers also breached the data of an additional 1.4 million people’s family tree profiles, which includes a variety of identifying information about the user, the spokesperson said.
AI Is Driving Google’s Healthcare Business. Washington Doesn’t Know What to Do About It.
Google wants to make your cell phone a “doctor in your pocket” that relies on the company’s artificial intelligence.
But first, the tech giant will need to convince skeptical lawmakers and the Biden administration that its health AI isn’t a risk to patient privacy and safety — or a threat to its smaller competitors.
Google has assembled a potent lobbying team to influence the rules governing AI just as regulators start writing them. But members of Congress say they’re concerned that the company is using its advanced AI in healthcare before the government has had a chance to draw up guardrails. Competitors worry Google is moving to corner the market. Both fear what could happen to patient privacy given Google’s history of vacuuming personal data.
Google’s AI scours medical records, research papers, imaging, and clinical guidelines to help doctors diagnose diseases and evaluate treatment options. The tech giant’s already selling these tools to hospitals. It’s inked a deal with the Mayo Clinic, for one — and it foresees much more, including direct-to-consumer applications.
The UN Is Threatening Privacy Under Pretense of New Cybercrime Treaty
The U.S. digital rights group EFF is describing the latest UN Cybercrime Treaty draft as “a significant step backward” and a case of “perilously broadening its scope beyond the cybercrimes specifically defined in the convention, encompassing a long list of non-cybercrimes.”
This “dance” — with some reported progress, for things to then again get worse — is not exactly new in the now lengthy process of negotiating the document, amid criticism not only from observers among the involved rights non-profits but also UN member countries.
When it all started, the Treaty was presented as a “standardized” manner for the world to combat cybercrime.
What has been happening in the meanwhile, though, is a seemingly never-ending stream of additions and expansions of the document’s original powers, to the point where it has now, in the words of EFF, “morphed into an expansive surveillance treaty.”
School Districts Across the Country Are Turning to AI for Increased Safety Measures
School districts nationwide are looking for new ways to protect their staff and students. In Louisiana’s Iberville Parish, the district partnered with a software company to stop potential shootings before anyone gets hurt.
Superintendent of Iberville Parish School District Louis Voiron said the district has committed to installing ZeroEyes gun detection artificial intelligence software into the schools’ existing cameras.
Co-founder of ZeroEyes Sam Alaimo said the software, which does not store biometric data, is in more than 100 schools across 35 states.
Experts Predict Mind-Controlled Devices May Be Common by 2040s
Experts predict that by 2040, people will control smart devices with their thoughts due to advancements in ‘smart-brain’ technology. A smart brain, or Brain-Machine Interface (BMI), is a wearable or implanted device that directly links the human brain to smart devices like phones, computers, and robotic limbs.
It would allow people to navigate the internet, send texts, and adjust thermostats by merely thinking, blurring boundaries between humans and machines.
University of New South Wales (UNSW) biomedical engineering expert Mohit Shivdasani said scientists are “very close” to mind-controlled devices becoming an everyday reality rather than a science-fiction concept.
However, biomedical researcher Christina Maher likened smart brains to someone “speaking” for people, causing invasive ethical problems. “Brain data are arguably our most private data because of what can be inferred regarding our identity and mental state,” she said.
Santa Monica College Prevails Over Vaccine Mandate Lawsuit
Santa Monica Daily Press reported:
A Santa Monica College (SMC) freshman, Carter Sparks sued SMC last year claiming the school’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for in-person learning infringed on his religious freedom and right to privacy. Sparks filed the lawsuit seeking court orders to declare the mandate unconstitutional and beyond the district’s powers, along with injunctive relief and compensatory damages.
The college argued that Sparks did not qualify for a religious exemption, stating that his application did not express a sincerely held religious opposition to vaccination. The college also said that being Catholic does not automatically entitle someone to a religious exemption given the church doesn’t have a prohibition on vaccination.
Sparks had submitted requests for religious and medical exemptions, citing natural immunity from a previous COVID-19 infection, but the college disputed the medical evidence presented in support of his claims.
The court rejected all of Spark’s claims saying he had not shown damages nor had he proven he was treated differently from other students on campus.
Chinese Censors Delete News Report Probing Return of COVID Tracking
Chinese censors have deleted a news report investigating claims that local governments had brought back a hated disease-tracking app that was used during the “zero-COVID” era to confine people to their homes, amid an ongoing wave of respiratory infections across the country, according to local media reports and residents.
The Dec. 1 Top News article cited social media posts across China as saying that local governments in Sichuan and Guangdong had both brought the app back online after retiring it following the lifting of three years of harsh COVID restrictions in December 2022, with users posting screenshots of their “green” health code from the app.
While the article remained visible in syndicated form on Sohu.com’s mobile website on Monday, it had disappeared from the Top News website.
The reports highlight public concerns that restrictive measures may make a comeback, as some suspect that the current pneumonia wave is being driven in the background by COVID-19, which affects people’s ability to fight off opportunistic infections like mycoplasma pneumonia, and has been associated with waves of other respiratory infections in children.
‘Medical Freedom’ Activists Take Aim at New Target: Childhood Vaccine Mandates + More
‘Medical Freedom’ Activists Take Aim at New Target: Childhood Vaccine Mandates
The New York Times via Yahoo!News reported:
For more than 40 years, Mississippi had one of the strictest school vaccination requirements in the nation, and its high childhood immunization rates have been a source of pride. But in July, the state began excusing children from vaccination if their parents cited religious objections after a federal judge sided with a “medical freedom” group.
Mississippi is not an isolated case. Buoyed by their success at overturning coronavirus mandates, medical and religious freedom groups are taking aim at a new target: childhood school vaccine mandates, long considered the foundation of the nation’s defense against infectious disease.
Until the Mississippi ruling, the state was one of only six that refused to excuse students from vaccination for religious or philosophical reasons. Similar legal challenges have been filed in the five remaining states: California, Connecticut, Maine, New York and West Virginia. The ultimate goal, according to advocates behind the lawsuits, is to undo vaccine mandates entirely, by getting the issue before a Supreme Court that is increasingly sympathetic to religious freedom arguments.
The legal push comes as childhood vaccine exemptions have reached a new high in the United States, according to a report released last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three percent of children who entered kindergarten last year received an exemption, the CDC said, up from 1.6% in the 2011-12 school year.
The Internet Enabled Mass Surveillance. A.I. Will Enable Mass Spying.
Spying and surveillance are different but related things. If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired that same private detective to put you under surveillance, I would get a different report: where you went, whom you talked to, what you purchased, what you did.
Before the internet, putting someone under surveillance was expensive and time-consuming. You had to manually follow someone around, noting where they went, whom they talked to, what they purchased, what they did, and what they read.
That world is forever gone. Our phones track our locations. Credit cards track our purchases. Apps track whom we talk to, and e-readers know what we read. Computers collect data about what we’re doing on them, and as both storage and processing have become cheaper, that data is increasingly saved and used. What was manual and individual has become bulk and mass. Surveillance has become the business model of the internet, and there’s no reasonable way for us to opt out of it.
Knowing that they are under constant surveillance changes how people behave. They conform. They self-censor, with the chilling effects that brings. Surveillance facilitates social control, and spying will only make this worse. Governments around the world already use mass surveillance; they will engage in mass spying as well.
Key Congress Staffers in AI Debate Are Funded by Tech Giants Like Google and Microsoft
Top tech companies with major stakes in artificial intelligence are channeling money through a venerable science nonprofit to help fund fellows working on AI policy in key Senate offices, adding to the roster of government staffers across Washington whose salaries are being paid by tech billionaires and others with direct interests in AI regulation.
The new “rapid response cohort” of congressional AI fellows is run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Washington-based nonprofit, with substantial support from Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, IBM and Nvidia, according to the AAAS. It comes on top of the network of AI fellows funded by Open Philanthropy, a group financed by billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.
Alongside the Open Philanthropy fellows — and hundreds of outside-funded fellows throughout the government, including many with links to the tech industry — the six AI staffers in the industry-funded rapid response cohort are helping shape how key players in Congress approach the debate over when and how to regulate AI, at a time when many Americans are deeply skeptical of the industry.
The apparent conflict of tech-funded figures working inside the Capitol Hill offices at the forefront of AI policy worries some tech experts, who fear Congress could be distracted from rules that would protect the public from biased, discriminatory or inaccurate AI systems.
How Meta Can — or Can Be Forced to — Avoid Addicting Kids
When 41 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia sued Meta, Facebook’s parent company, more than a month ago, their complaint was redacted to the point of illegibility. Now, an unredacted version has emerged, and it’s well worth the read.
The state AGs claim, essentially, that Meta is exploiting its younger users for profit, privately prioritizing growth over teens’ well-being, even as it claims publicly that safety is paramount: “The lifetime value of a 13 y/o teen is roughly $270,” one internal company email counsels. This mindset, the AGs say, informed the very design of the company’s products.
And it has led executives, counter to internal research, to back off proposals that would improve those products by discouraging “problematic use” — a jargony way of saying addiction. (Meta has disputed that characterization.)
Obviously, Meta is a business, and moneymaking is what businesses do. Current law does little to restrain social media services from luring users down the rabbit hole, and, for the most part, that’s how it should be. Yet there is leeway for the government to place restrictions on products that harm children’s health. The type of problematic use the complaint describes, hours spent scrolling, is precisely the kind that research shows damages minds not yet fully formed.
Houston Methodist Hospital Lifts Employee COVID Vaccine Mandate in Light of New State Law
Houston Methodist Hospital has lifted its COVID-19 vaccine mandate on hospital employees in light of a new state law prohibiting such policies recently passed by the Texas Legislature. The policy cost over 150 healthcare workers their jobs. It was implemented in 2021 by the hospital, which cited studies claiming the vaccine was “as much as 95% protective against the virus.”
Those claims are now the subject of a lawsuit brought by the Office of the Texas Attorney General (OAG) against pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, alleging the drug maker violated the Deceptive Trade Practices Act by claiming their COVID-19 vaccine had “95% efficacy” against the virus when they knew it did not and withheld information from the public that undermined the claims.
A lawsuit brought by hospital employees in 2021 against Houston Methodist over the mandate was rejected by a federal judge who wrote the mandate violated no laws and allowed it to continue.
Houston Methodist CEO David Bernard reportedly told the hospital’s employees they were replaceable, writing, “100% vaccination is more important than your freedom. Every one of you is replaceable. If you do not like what you’re doing you can leave, and we will replace your spot.”
Misinformation Expert Says She Was Fired by Harvard Under Meta Pressure
One of the world’s leading experts on misinformation says she was fired by Harvard University for criticizing Meta at a time that the school was being pledged $500 million from Mark Zuckerberg’s charity.
Joan Donovan says her funding was cut off, she could not hire assistants and she was made the target of a smear campaign by Harvard employees. In a legal filing with the U.S. Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general first published by the Washington Post, she said her right to free speech had been abrogated.
The controversial claims stem in part from Donovan’s publication of the Facebook papers, a bombshell leak of 22,000 pages of Facebook’s internal documents by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, who used to work at the company. Donovan, believing them to be of huge public interest, began publishing them on Harvard’s website for anyone to access. “From that very day forward, I was treated differently by the university to the point where I lost my job,” Donovan told the Logic.
Donovan claims that Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, both Harvard alumni, have given it hundreds of millions of dollars, including promising $500m to the school’s Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence.
Medical AI Tools Can Make Dangerous Mistakes. Can the Government Help Prevent Them?
The Wall Street Journal reported:
Doctors have started using artificial intelligence in novel ways to communicate with patients and help make diagnoses. Now the government is wrestling with how to ensure the tools do not harm.
Federal regulators are proposing a new labeling system for AI healthcare apps designed to make it easier for clinicians to spot the pitfalls and shortcomings of these tools. The Biden administration has proposed that these apps come with a “nutrition label” that discloses how the app was trained, how it performs, how it should be used and how it shouldn’t.
The labeling rule, which could be finalized before year’s end, represents one of Washington’s first tangible attempts to impose new safety requirements on artificial intelligence. Healthcare and technology companies are pushing back on it, saying the rule could compromise proprietary information and hurt competition, in a sign of how difficult it is for the government to police rapidly evolving AI systems.
23andMe Hackers Accessed a Whole Lot of User’s Personal Data
Biogenetics company 23andMe has submitted a new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) detailing the data breach it suffered in early October 2023.
In the filing, the company said that the threat actors accessed data on 0.1% of its customer base — roughly 14,000 individuals if the company’s recent claim to have “more than 14 million customers worldwide” in a recent annual earnings report is to be believed.
But it gets a bit more complicated than that. 23andme is a genetics testing and ancestry company and sometimes users share this data with other accounts via the “DNA Relatives” feature. Consequently, the attackers accessed “a significant number of files containing profile information about other users’ ancestry that such users chose to share.”
Europe’s World-Leading Artificial Intelligence Rules Are Facing a Do-or-Die Moment
Hailed as a world first, European Union artificial intelligence rules are facing a make-or-break moment as negotiators try to hammer out the final details this week — talks complicated by the sudden rise of generative AI that produces human-like work.
First suggested in 2019, the EU’s AI Act was expected to be the world’s first comprehensive AI regulations, further cementing the 27-nation bloc’s position as a global trendsetter when it comes to reining in the tech industry.
But the process has been bogged down by a last-minute battle over how to govern systems that underpin general-purpose AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot. Big tech companies are lobbying against what they see as overregulation that stifles innovation, while European lawmakers want added safeguards for the cutting-edge AI systems those companies are developing.
Meanwhile, the U.S., U.K., China and global coalitions like the Group of 7 major democracies have joined the race to draw up guardrails for the rapidly developing technology, underscored by warnings from researchers and rights groups of the existential dangers that generative AI poses to humanity as well as the risks to everyday life.