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Intelligence Nominee Urges Reup of Controversial Surveillance Program + More
Intelligence Nominee Urges Reup of Controversial Surveillance Program
President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the nation’s largest intelligence-gathering organization pushed hard at his confirmation hearing Wednesday to reauthorize a controversial surveillance authority before its expiration at the end of the year.
U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the authority, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, remains essential to providing intelligence to the highest levels of government despite a history of misuse against Americans.
The administration has been arguing that Section 702, which allows intelligence agencies to snoop on emails and other electronic communications of foreigners abroad, needs to be reupped and that they’ve already made significant reforms to its use. But after disclosed memoranda revealed that the FBI had used it to spy on Americans, a number of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle have argued it needs a major revamp.
Biden nominated Haugh, currently the second in command at the U.S. Cyber Command, to lead both Cyber Command and the National Security Agency in late May, where he would succeed General Paul Nakasone, who held the same dual-command.
FTC Investigates OpenAI Over Data Leak and ChatGPT’s Inaccuracy
The Federal Trade Commission has opened an expansive investigation into OpenAI, probing whether the maker of the popular ChatGPT bot has run afoul of consumer protection laws by putting personal reputations and data at risk.
The agency this week sent the San Francisco company a 20-page demand for records about how it addresses risks related to its AI models, according to a document reviewed by The Washington Post. The salvo represents the most potent regulatory threat to date to OpenAI’s business in the United States, as the company goes on a global charm offensive to shape the future of artificial intelligence policy.
Now the company faces a new test in Washington, where the FTC has issued multiple warnings that existing consumer protection laws apply to AI, even as the administration and Congress struggle to outline new regulations. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has predicted that new AI legislation is months away.
The FTC called on OpenAI to provide detailed descriptions of all complaints it had received of its products making “false, misleading, disparaging or harmful” statements about people. The FTC is investigating whether the company engaged in unfair or deceptive practices that resulted in “reputational harm” to consumers, according to the document.
A Proposed Law Would Force Internet Companies to Spy on Their Users for the DEA
Internet drug sales have skyrocketed in recent years, allowing powerful narcotics to be peddled to American teenagers and adolescents. It’s a trend that’s led to an epidemic of overdoses and left countless young people dead.
Now, a bill scheduled for a congressional vote seeks to tackle the problem, but it comes with a major catch. Critics worry that the legislative effort to crack down on the drug trade could convert large parts of the internet into a federal spying apparatus.
The Cooper Davis Act was introduced by Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall and New Hampshire Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen in March and has been under consideration by the Senate Judiciary Committee for weeks.
Named after a 16-year-old Kansas boy who died of a fentanyl overdose two years ago, the bipartisan bill, which the committee is scheduled to vote on Thursday, has spurred intense debate. Proponents say it could help address a spiraling public health crisis; critics, meanwhile, see it as a gateway to broad and indiscriminate internet surveillance.
FBI Chief Chris Wray Grilled by GOP Over Social Media Collusion, Censorship: ‘They Lied’
House Judiciary Committee Republicans took aim Wednesday at FBI Director Christopher Wray after a federal judge ruled that the bureau colluded with social media companies to throttle free speech that “was conservative in nature.”
Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) kicked off a tense hearing by citing a Louisiana federal judge’s decision last week that revealed government agencies reached out to Big Tech to help suppress posts about COVID-19 vaccines, masking measures, lockdowns and the authenticity of first son Hunter Biden’s laptop, among other issues.
“The FBI is not in the business of moderating content or causing any social media company to suppress or censor,” Wray replied.
“That is not what the court has found,” Johnson said, adding that the FBI also suppressed online information about the so-called “lab leak theory” of COVID-19’s origins. “The FBI was the only agency in the entire intelligence community to reach the assessment that it was more likely than not that that was the explanation, but your agents pulled it off the internet, sir. That’s what the evidence in the court is.”
Professors Sue Texas Over TikTok Ban, Signaling First Amendment Fight
A group of college professors is suing Texas for banning TikTok on public-university computers and phones, saying it has undermined their ability to teach students and research one of the world’s most popular apps.
Because the ban covers faculty phones and campus WiFi networks, the professors said the ban immediately halted research projects into TikTok and derailed their plans to lead classes discussing the app’s benefits and risks.
In a lawsuit filed in Austin on Thursday against Abbott and top Texas officials, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, an advocacy group whose members include professors in Texas, argued the ban had infringed on their academic freedoms and constitutional rights.
Data Brokers to Be Barred From Selling Your Location Data Under Proposed Massachusetts Law
A law under consideration in Massachusetts would ban data brokers from selling cell phone location data, Gizmodo reports.
For those who have been living under a rock, data brokers are constantly selling cellular location data to various entities, including state, federal, foreign, and local governments. While the data is supposed to be anonymized, it can very easily be de-anonymized.
The Location Shield Act would outlaw “selling, leasing, trading, or renting location data” in the state of Massachusetts, and would require companies to obtain user consent if they want to collect or process such data. Noncompliance with the law would expose companies to state legal action via the AG’s office, along with class-action litigation.
Musk Predicts ‘Digital Superintelligence’ Will Exist in 5 to 6 Years
Elon Musk said he believes “digital superintelligence” will exist in the next five or six years, during a conversation with Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) hosted on Twitter Spaces on Wednesday.
“The definition of digital superintelligence is that it’s smarter than any human, at anything,” he added, explaining, “That’s not necessarily smarter than the sum of all humans — that’s a higher bar.”
In the conversation, the trio discussed the dangers and potential benefits of AI, and all three agreed on the need for some sort of regulatory framework — though they diverged on details.
Musk, too, expressed his desire for some sort of oversight of AI “just as we have regulation for nuclear technology. You can’t just go make a nuclear barrage, and everyone thinks that’s cool — like, we don’t think that’s cool. So, there’s a lot of regulation around things that we think are dangerous.”
Class-Action Lawsuit Says Google Stole Everyone’s Data to Train Its AI + More
Class-Action Lawsuit Says Google Stole Everyone’s Data to Train Its AI
Google got smacked with a class-action lawsuit Tuesday accusing the search giant of “stealing everything ever shared on the internet,” including copyrighted works and millions of people’s personal data. The law firm behind the case, Clarkson, said the case comes after Google changed its AI privacy policy, an update first spotted by Gizmodo. The company changed its policy to say it reserves the right to scrape all the internet’s public information to fuel its artificial intelligence projects.
“Google does not own the internet, it does not own our creative works, it does not own our expressions of our personhood, pictures of our families and children, or anything else simply because we share it online,” said Ryan Clarkson, managing partner of Clarkson, in a press release. “We have only recently learned that Google has been taking everything ever created or shared online by millions of internet users, including all our personal information, creative works, and professional works, and using all of that data to train and build commercial AI Products.”
The case comes after a nearly identical lawsuit against OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, which was filed by the same firm. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, not to mention countless other AI endeavors, are trained on the mountains of public information scraped off the internet. Companies like Google feed the data into their AI systems, and the AI produces “new” content based on what it learns.
So far, it’s up for debate, but the complaint says Google broke copyright law and collected people’s personal information without consent. The plaintiffs, known only by their initials in the lawsuit, include a New York Times best-selling author, a six-year-old boy, a software developer, a TikTok influencer, an actor, and several others.
Tax Prep Companies Shared Private Taxpayer Data With Google and Meta for Years, Congressional Probe Finds
Some of America’s largest tax-prep companies have spent years sharing Americans’ sensitive financial data with tech titans including Meta and Google in a potential violation of federal law — data that in some cases was misused for targeted advertising, according to a seven-month congressional investigation.
The report highlights what legal experts described to CNN as a “five-alarm fire” for taxpayer privacy that could lead to government and private lawsuits, criminal penalties or perhaps even a “mortal blow” for some industry giants involved in the probe including TaxSlayer, H&R Block and TaxAct.
Using visitor tracking technology embedded on their websites, the three tax-prep companies allegedly sent tens of millions of Americans’ personal information to the tech industry without consent or appropriate disclosures, according to the congressional report reviewed by CNN.
Beyond ordinary personal data such as people’s names, phone numbers and email addresses, the list of information shared also included taxpayer data — details about people’s filing status, adjusted gross income, the size of their tax refunds and even information about the buttons and text fields they clicked on while filling out their tax forms, which could reveal what tax breaks they may have claimed or which government programs they use, according to the report.
Discord Bans Teen Dating Servers and AI-Generated Child Sex Abuse Material
Discord is making major changes to its child safety policies, banning teen dating and artificial intelligence-generated child sex images. The platform, known to be popular amongst gamers, came under scrutiny last month after an NBC investigation found that child exploitation, extortion, and grooming were taking place rampantly on the site.
Now, the hub is specifically banning AI-created content that sexualizes children in any way, also doing so for text-based depictions. In a blog post, Discord said this their Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) policy has expanded to include “any text or media content that sexualizes children, including drawn, photorealistic, and AI-generated photorealistic child sexual abuse material.”
The platform has also now explicitly banned any servers dedicated to dating amongst teens, and has said that any user under the age of 18 cannot send or access any sexually explicit material. When it comes to the dating policy, the company said that “dating online can result in self-endangerment.”
Discord’s guidelines had already stated that the company would remove any spaces that “encourage or facilitate dating between teens,” but this has been clarified further. In addition, older teens who attempt to or engage in the grooming of a younger teen will be placed under review and actioned under Discord’s Inappropriate Sexual Conduct with Children and Grooming Policy.
Biden Reveals He’s Got No Defense for His Censorship Campaign
On Monday, President Joe Biden played his cards. He’s all bluff, no aces. Biden is the defendant in a lawsuit that accuses him and his team of, in Federal District Court Judge Terry Doughty’s words, “the most massive attack against free speech in the United States.”
Yet the appeal Biden filed Monday is devoid of even one convincing argument in his own defense. Count on the appeal to go nowhere. Biden’s been caught red-handed violating the Constitution.
On July 4, Doughty announced that the evidence produced so far indicates the president is operating a vast, illegal censorship scheme to muzzle his critics. Doughty knows tyranny when he sees it: He’s got the goods on the Biden administration, and he laid out his evidence in 155 pages, all meticulously footnoted.
Biden, numerous White House staff and employees of 11 federal agencies are being sued for operating a whole-of-government censorship operation to prevent you — the public — from seeing social-media postings that challenge Biden policies on issues like vaccines, climate change, inflation and more.
Maine Proposes Dropping COVID Vaccine Mandate for Healthcare Workers
Portland Press Herald reported:
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is proposing that the COVID-19 vaccine be removed from the list of required immunizations for healthcare workers. The department says the vaccination remains an important tool to protect public health, but that the requirement for healthcare workers achieved the intended benefit of savings lives, protecting healthcare capacity and limiting the spread of the virus during the height of the pandemic.
Maine is one of four remaining states with some type of COVID-19 vaccine requirement in place. The decision was welcomed by hospitals and other healthcare providers hit by worker shortages during the pandemic.
The vaccination requirement for healthcare workers went into effect on Oct. 20, 2021. Healthcare workers upset by the requirement sued the state, arguing that it was their religious right to refuse the vaccine because of their belief that fetal stem cells from abortions are used to develop the vaccines.
DHHS expects the rule will be published next Wednesday and be adopted by the end of the year following public comment. The department said it will exercise enforcement discretion regarding COVID-19 vaccination of healthcare workers during the rulemaking process.
Studies Describe Pandemic’s Lasting Influence on Children
From school closures to delays in routine immunizations, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on children are far-reaching.
Two new studies describe how Japanese children exposed to the first 2 years of the pandemic show developmental delays and note that 28% of U.S. kids had delayed or missed preventive care visits due to COVID-19, with variations by race and ethnicity.
In the first study, published yesterday in JAMA Pediatrics, researchers compared developmental outcomes at age 3 or 5 years between Japanese nursery student cohorts who were exposed to the pandemic during the follow-up with a cohort who was not.
When comparing children from before the pandemic to those exposed to the pandemic, the authors found that 3-year-olds did not have delays on the KIDS scale, but 5-year-olds exposed to the pandemic were on average 4.39 months behind in overall development compared with a cohort of 5-year-olds before 2020.
Elon Musk Forms New AI Company, With Researchers From Google, OpenAI
Twitter owner Elon Musk formally announced his new artificial intelligence company, xAI, on a new website Wednesday, officially marking his entry into the race to build supersmart computers that might take over tasks from humans.
Musk has talked about xAI for months and registered a new company with that name in Nevada in March. On Wednesday, he unveiled a team of eleven employees, drawn from OpenAI, DeepMind and the University of Toronto, a center of academic AI research. The company is separate from Twitter and Musk’s other companies SpaceX and Tesla, but would work closely with them, according to the site.
You Can Say No to a TSA Face Scan. But Even a Senator Had Trouble. + More
You Can Say No to a TSA Face Scan. But Even a Senator Had Trouble.
On his way to catch a flight, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) was asked to have his photo taken by a facial recognition machine at airport security. The Transportation Security Administration has been testing facial recognition software to verify travelers’ identification at some airports.
Use of the technology is voluntary, the TSA has told the public and Congress. If you decline, a TSA agent is supposed to verify your identification, as we have done at airport security for years.
When Merkley said no to the face scan at Washington’s Reagan National Airport, he was told it would cause a significant delay, a spokeswoman for the senator said. There was no delay. The spokeswoman said the senator showed his photo ID to the TSA agent and cleared security.
“This needs to change immediately,” Merkley said. “The TSA says the facial scans are optional, but they are operating at Reagan National as if they are mandatory, providing no signs that indicate passengers have a right to opt-out.”
New York City Mom Stands Up to Government Overreach Post-COVID: ‘Mom Army Is Stepping Into the Breach’
Jacqueline Toboroff is waving the banner of the “mom army” as it heads into battle to defend America’s children from an ever-growing, emboldened and seemingly irrational government. “The one issue that unites all moms is the safety of their kids,” Toboroff, author of the new book “Supermoms Activated: 12 Profiles of Hero Moms Leading the American Revival,” told Fox News Digital in an interview.
She suddenly jumped into action for the first time, she said, when the COVID-19 outbreak was followed by an onslaught of government mandates, social coercion and dystopian fears.
Toboroff formed online communities with other moms, became an outspoken voice in public and on social media, and in 2021 ran for public office — the New York City Council — for the first time in her life.
Her book “Supermoms Activated” profiles 12 moms from diverse backgrounds across the nation. Toboroff believes these moms, and millions of others around the nation, have the power to save the nation from what appears to be a big government-fueled downward spiral.
House Republicans Want Political Payback for COVID Vaccine Mandates for Troops, but the White House Is Refusing to Back Down
The White House on Monday dug into its defense of COVID-19 vaccine mandates for American service members, signaling a fight with House Republicans that will loom large over funding for the Pentagon.
In a lengthy statement, the White House said it would not back down from a series of penalties that service members incurred if they refused to get vaccinated. House Republicans have for months pressured the Pentagon to revisit the punishment defiant service members incurred, including those who were discharged as a result of their decision.
Congress previously forced the Pentagon to rescind the COVID-19 vaccine mandate in January. At issue now is how and to what, if any, extent reinstatement or other assistance will be offered to troops who defied the requirement. Republicans have repeatedly pushed for the reinstatement of service members that were discharged as a result of defying the mandate.
More than 8,000 active-duty service members were kicked out for refusing to get the vaccine. The disagreement also underlines that as the U.S. moves past the pandemic, debates about the government response will continue on.
Billions in NIH Grants Could Be Jeopardized by Appointments Snafu, Republicans Say
The Biden administration allegedly failed to correctly reappoint more than a dozen top-ranking National Institutes of Health leaders, House Republicans say, raising questions about the legality of billions in federal grants doled out by those officials over the last year.
Their claim, detailed Friday in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, obtained by CBS News, follows a monthslong probe led by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the Republican chair of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, into vacancies at the agency.
“The failure to reappoint the above NIH IC Directors jeopardizes the legal validity of more than $25 billion in federal biomedical research grants made in 2022 alone,” the committee wrote. After the committee’s probe was launched, Becerra signed affidavits the department says retroactively ratified and adopted the appointments.
Thousands of researchers compete every year for NIH funding, which supports a variety of projects ranging from fundamental laboratory research to human clinical trials.
The Republican-led committee’s letter comes as the Biden administration has yet to fill key vacancies in the NIH leadership. The agency has been without a director since December 2021, when Dr. Francis Collins stepped down from his post.
Discord Introduces New Opt-In Parental Controls for Teens
Discord is introducing a new Family Center opt-in tool designed to make it easy for parents and guardians to learn more about who their teens are friends with and talk to on the platform, the company announced on Tuesday. The official rollout of the parental controls comes two months after Discord was seen testing the Family Center feature.
Family Center has two major components: an activity dashboard accessible from Discord anytime and a weekly email summary containing information about your teen’s activity. Although parents will be able to see which Discord communities and users their teens are talking to, they won’t be able to see the contents of the conversations themselves in order to protect their privacy.
Although Discord is regularly used by a young audience, the platform is often left out of the larger conversation around the harm to teens caused by social media use. As execs from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snap, YouTube and TikTok have had to testify before Congress on this topic, Discord has been able to sit on the sidelines.
Discord has flown under the radar, despite the warnings from child safety experts, law enforcement and the media about the dangers the app poses to minors, amid reports that groomers and sexual predators have been using the service to target children.
HCA Healthcare Patient Data Stolen and for Sale by Hackers
Personal information for potentially tens of millions of HCA Healthcare patients has been stolen and is now available for sale on a data breach forum as of earlier this week.
HCA, one of the largest companies in the U.S., first acknowledged the breach earlier today. In a release, it warned patients that critical personal information had been compromised, including their full name, city and when and where they last saw a provider.
“This may be one of the biggest healthcare-related breaches of the year and one of the biggest of all time. That said, despite affecting millions of people, it may not be as harmful as other breaches as, based on HCA’s statement, it doesn’t seem to have impacted diagnoses or other medical information,” Brett Callow, an analyst at New Zealand-based Emsisoft, told CNBC.
Amazon Tells Court It Shouldn’t Have to Police Its Platforms for Hate Speech and Disinformation
Amazon has become the first U.S. company to challenge the European Union’s upcoming laws on online disinformation. The online retail giant filed a petition to the general court in Luxembourg on Tuesday, in relation to rules on tackling disinformation, the Financial Times first reported.
The EU’s Digital Services Act — which comes into force on August 25 — is a wide-ranging set of regulations designed to regulate big tech companies. 19 companies have been designated as “very large online platforms” or “very large online search engines” because they reach at least 45 million monthly active users.
Amazon has asked the court to annul its designation as a “very large online platform” (VLOP) under the act, according to a summary of the petition viewed by Insider.
That’s primarily because Amazon says some of these rules shouldn’t apply to it as an online retailer — rather than a social network or search engine — and that other large retailers in the EU haven’t received the same designation.
Appeals Court Says Minnesota Governor Had Authority to Impose Mask Mandate
Gov. Tim Walz had the legal authority to mandate face masks when he declared a public health emergency in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled Monday.
Walz declared a peacetime emergency in March 2020 and mandated masking in most indoor public spaces in July 2020. The conservative Upper Midwest Law Center sued, challenging the mask requirement as unconstitutional. Walz lifted the mandate in May 2021, at which point the Court of Appeals declared the case moot.
But the Minnesota Supreme Court in February sent the case back to the appeals court to settle the key legal question behind the case: whether the Minnesota Emergency Management Act of 1996 authorizes a governor to declare a peacetime emergency during a public health emergency such as the pandemic. The high court called it an “important issue of statewide significance.”
The appeals court rejected as “unreasonable” the plaintiffs’ assertions that the coronavirus “most likely” originated from a laboratory leak, so that the resulting pandemic did not occur “naturally” and therefore was not an “act of nature” under the state law.
Meta Tells Australia Inquiry It Will Label Government-Affiliated Media Accounts
Social media giant Meta Platforms (META.O), owner of Facebook and Instagram, plans to label government-affiliated media accounts on its new Twitter-like platform Threads, an executive told an Australian inquiry on foreign interference on Tuesday.
The disclosure comes less than a week after Meta launched Threads, which is widely seen as similar to the microblogging site Twitter.
Twitter has removed tags from government-affiliated accounts since billionaire Elon Musk took it private in 2022, bringing complaints about degrading users’ media literacy.
Judge Denies Justice Dept.’s Request for Stay of Social Media Injunction + More
Judge Denies Justice Dept.’s Request for a Stay of Social Media Injunction
A federal judge on Monday denied the Justice Department’s request to stay an order limiting the Biden administration’s communication with social media companies over free speech concerns.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee in Louisiana, rejected the DOJ’s bid to stay an injunction while it works to appeal the decision barring talk between administration officials and social media companies. The Justice Department filed a notice of appeal last week, which will go to the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Although this Preliminary Injunction involves numerous agencies, it is not as broad as it appears,” Doughty, a Trump-appointed judge, wrote in his denial of the stay. “It only prohibits something the Defendants have no legal right to do — contacting social media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner, the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms.”
Doughty also said the Republican state attorneys general who brought the lawsuit are likely to prove that a variety of government agencies and government officials “coerced, significantly encouraged, and/or jointly participated” in suppressing social media posts that included anti-vaccination views and questioned the results of the 2020 elections.
Utah Governor Says He Is Getting Ready to Sue Social Media Companies for ‘Harms’ to Kids
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R) said on Sunday that he’s getting ready to sue social media companies for their sites’ “harms” toward young children in his state.
In an appearance on CBS’s Face The Nation, Cox told moderator Margaret Brennan that he and other state officials are looking at all social media companies. He added that in the coming months, the state will file lawsuits against those platforms to hold them accountable for their actions.
Cox signed legislation earlier this year that restricts minors in the state from using social media platforms without parental permission.
Utah Senate Bill 152 would require social media platforms to verify that users in the state are 18 years or older in order to open an account. The bill, which is set to take effect in March 2024, also states that those residents under the age limit would need to open an account with a parent or guardian’s permission.
AI Doctors? Google Already Testing AI Chatbots Similar to Bard, ChatGPT in Hospitals
Google has been testing its medical AI chatbot, Med-PaLM 2, in hospitals, including the Mayo Clinic research hospital. According to a report by WSJ, the AI chatbot was being tested since April. Med-PaLM 2 is an AI tool designed to provide answers to medical questions. It is an updated version of PaLM 2, which was announced at Google I/O in May. The chatbot is trained on a curated set of medical expert demonstrations to improve its healthcare conversation capabilities.
The report cites an internal mail saying Google’s Med-PaLM 2 can be particularly helpful in countries with limited access to doctors. However, there are some accuracy issues with the chatbot, as highlighted in a research paper published by Google in May. Physicians found more inaccuracies and irrelevant information in the answers provided by Med-PaLM 2 compared to those provided by other doctors.
Despite the accuracy issues, Med-PaLM 2 performed well in other metrics, such as showing evidence of reasoning, providing consensus-supported answers, and demonstrating correct comprehension. The issue of inaccuracies have also plagued other popular chatbots available to the public including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s own Bard.
Furthermore, the report claims that customers testing Med-PaLM 2 will have control over their data, which will be encrypted, and Google will not have access to it.
Mark Zuckerberg Hides His Kids’ Faces on Social Media, and Tech Experts Say You Should Do the Same
On July 4th, Mark Zuckerberg posted a family photo with an eye-catching feature: emojis covering two of his daughters’ faces.
Presumably a step to protect their privacy, Zuckerberg isn’t the only one thinking about how parents’ use of social media can impact their children. Leah Plunkett — author of “Sharenthood” and an attorney whose work focuses on the privacy rights of children and families — told CNN she thinks more parents need to follow in Zuckerberg’s footsteps.
Safety risks include exposing kids to potential identity theft and facial recognition technology, CNN reports.
Plunkett also said artificial intelligence can now use pictures of someone as an infant to identify them when they’re older. Notably, Zuckerberg did not cover his infant daughter’s face.
The rise of AI isn’t the only reason to be wary — experts also say that other social media users may pose a danger.
Google Class Action Lawsuit Payments Start Arriving
Google has begun paying out compensation to Illinois residents as part of a $100 million settlement deal, resulting from claims the internet giant had been “storing biometric data” without the necessary consent, in violation of state law.
On June 2 a Cook County Circuit Court, where the case had been heard, ordered that payments must begin “on or before July 7, 2023,” with NBC Chicago reporting those entitled to compensation received $95.38 each.
The legal action stems from Illinois’ 2008 Biometric Information Privacy Act, which banned companies from collecting biometric information, such as individual finger prints and photographs, without the necessary authorization.
Court documents filed on May 31 revealed 687,484 Illinois residents had submitted valid claims for compensation, and would be entitled to around $95 each. This money was what was left of the $100 million settlement, once court fees and legal expenses had been deducted.
Europe Signs Off on a New Privacy Pact That Allows People’s Data to Keep Flowing to U.S.
The European Union signed off Monday on a new agreement over the privacy of people’s personal information that gets pinged across the Atlantic, aiming to ease European concerns about electronic spying by American intelligence agencies.
The EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework has an adequate level of protection for personal data, the EU’s executive commission said. That means it’s comparable to the 27-nation’s own stringent data protection standards, so companies can use it to move information from Europe to the United States without adding extra security.
U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order in October to implement the deal after reaching a preliminary agreement with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Washington and Brussels made an effort to resolve their yearslong battle over the safety of EU citizens’ data that tech companies store in the U.S. after two earlier data transfer agreements were thrown out.
Instagram’s Threads App Reaches 100 Million Users Within Just Five Days
Instagram’s text-based app Threads has achieved the mark of 100 million signups in just five days. The Twitter rival was launched on June 6 (or June 5 in the Americas), according to a tracker.
Mark Zuckerberg noted on the first day that the app attracted 2 million signups in two hours, 5 million signups in four hours and 10 million registered users in seven hours.
The next morning, the CEO of Meta noted that more than 30 million people had signed up to try the new app. Threads’ growth is noteworthy given that it hasn’t even launched in the EU yet because of privacy reasons.
How AI Will Turbocharge Misinformation — and What We Can Do About It
Attention-grabbing warnings of artificial intelligence‘s existential threats have eclipsed what many experts and researchers say is a much more imminent risk: A near-certain rise in misinformation.
Why it matters: The struggle to separate fact from fiction online didn’t start with the rise of generative AI — but the red-hot new technology promises to make misinformation more abundant and more compelling.
“Taken together, Generative AI has the potential to accelerate the spread of both mis- and disinformation, and exacerbate the ongoing challenge of finding information we can trust online,” University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, an expert in the field, said.
Between the lines: Misinformation can take many forms, from deepfake photos and video to text-based articles as well as memes that combine text and images.