Big Brother News Watch
Appeals Court Refuses to Reinstate Vaccine Mandate in 3 States + More
Appeals Court Rules Against Vaccine Mandate in 3 States
An appeals court has affirmed a ban in three states on enforcing a federal vaccine mandate for workers who contract with the federal government.
A panel of the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati on Thursday affirmed a lower court’s ruling that said the mandate was unconstitutional. President Joe Biden’s administration is not enforcing the rule while legal battles play out around the country.
A federal judge in Louisville, Kentucky, blocked the Biden rule in November 2021 for that state and two others: Tennessee and Ohio. The mandate requires workers contracting with the federal government to wear face masks and be vaccinated for COVID-19.
The Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals issued a similar ruling in December for Indiana, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Pence: Discharged Military Members Should Be Reinstated, Get Back Pay Over Vaccine Mandates
Former Vice President Mike Pence in an exclusive interview called on the Biden administration to reinstate and provide back pay to members of the military who were discharged for refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccine now that the mandate for the shot has been lifted.
Pence, in a Wednesday interview with The Hill, called it “unconscionable” that some troops were put in a position to decide between serving their country and complying with the vaccine mandate, which was instituted in August 2021. The mandate was rescinded through a bipartisan defense policy bill signed into law late last year.
In a memo announcing the mandate had been dropped, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said those who were discharged can petition for a change in the characterization of their discharge in personnel records.
Google Claims a Supreme Court Defeat Would Transform the Internet — for the Worse
An unfavorable ruling against Google in a closely watched Supreme Court case this term about YouTube’s recommendation engine could have sweeping unintended consequences for much of the wider internet, the search giant argued in a legal filing Thursday.
Google, which owns YouTube, is fighting a high-stakes court battle over whether algorithmically generated YouTube recommendations are exempt from Big Tech’s signature liability shield, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
Section 230 broadly protects tech platforms from lawsuits over the companies’ content moderation decisions. But a Supreme Court decision that says AI-based recommendations do not qualify for those protections could “threaten the internet’s core functions,” Google wrote in its brief.
In the face of such a ruling, websites could have to choose between intentionally over-moderating their websites, scrubbing them of virtually everything that could be perceived as objectionable, or doing no moderation at all to avoid the risk of liability, Google argued.
Meta Sues ‘Predictive Policing’ Firm for Using Fake Accounts to Scrape More Than 600,000 Facebook Profiles
Meta, the company previously known as Facebook, may not have the best track record when it comes to preserving its users’ privacy, but it nonetheless wants to make damn sure other companies aren’t spying on its community without its approval.
This week, the tech giant filed a lawsuit against United Kingdom-registered scrapping and surveillance firm Voyager Labs, alleging the company created fake, unauthorized accounts and used them to collect data from Facebook and Instagram, as well as Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Telegram. The lawsuit comes just days after the U.S. The Supreme Court allowed Meta’s separate lawsuit against Israeli surveillance-for-hire giant NSO Group to proceed.
In its newest complaint, Meta claims Voyager created more than 38,000 fake accounts and used those to scrape 600,000 Facebook users’ “viewable profile information.” That profile data potentially implicates posts, likes, friends lists, photos and comments and certain data pulled from Facebook Groups and Pages.
Voyager allegedly marketed its scraping tools to companies interested in conducting surveillance on social media sites without being detected and then sold its bounty to the highest bidder.
Wisconsin, North Carolina Become Latest States to Ban TikTok From Government Devices
Wisconsin and North Carolina became the latest states to ban TikTok from government devices on Thursday, as concerns grow over potential cybersecurity risks posed by the Chinese-owned social media platform.
North Carolina also banned WeChat, a messaging platform owned by a Chinese technology company, and left the door open to banning other applications that pose an “unacceptable cybersecurity risk.”
More than 20 state governments have banned TikTok from official devices over cybersecurity concerns. Federal employees have also been barred from using the social media platform on government devices, following President Biden’s signing of the omnibus spending package.
France Fines TikTok $5.4 Million for Online Tracking Shortcomings
France on Thursday fined TikTok 5 million euros ($5.4 million) for shortcomings linked to the short video platform’s handling of online tracking known as “cookies,” which the ByteDance-owned company said it had now addressed.
French data protection watchdog CNIL said that its investigation only concerned the website tiktok.com and not the service’s much more heavily used smartphone applications.
The CNIL found that for tiktok.com’s users, it was not as easy to refuse online trackers as to accept them. The authority also found that internet users were not sufficiently informed about TikTok’s use of cookies.
Under European Union rules, websites must clearly ask for the prior consent of internet users for any use of cookies — small pieces of data stored while navigating on the Web. They should also make it easy to refuse them, according to the EU’s rules.
The Battle Over Women’s Data
2023 will be the year that the battle over data ownership takes to the streets. The United States Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade has politicalized women’s bodies — and not only in the U.S. When the ruling was debated in Westminster, several U.K. parliamentarians took the opportunity to question a woman’s bodily autonomy.
The reaction of every woman I know — and many men — was instinctive and visceral. We are being transported backward — to the 70s, or before. But there is a difference. In those eras, we didn’t have artificial intelligence and big data. We did not have digital.
We are all digital beings now. It’s been over a decade since the story broke of how supermarket Target knew a teenager was pregnant before her parents did, based on what she was purchasing. Think of the tremendous “advances” in algorithms, data collection and adtech since then. Legislation has not kept pace.
Deleting period apps is not enough. Your phone, the sites you visit, the other apps you run — all monitor you. Even in the U.K., it is perfectly legal to sell this data if it has been aggregated and supposedly anonymized. As computer scientist Latanya Sweeney famously showed, the term “anonymized data sets” should have “pseudo” in front of it. Even most data that has been deleted is recoverable.
Germany to Scrap COVID Mask Rule on Long-Distance Transport
German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach announced on Friday that, from February 2, travelers will no longer need to wear face masks on long-distance public transport in Germany.
The minister said the government had taken the decision to scrap the mask mandate several months ahead of schedule because of a reduction in the risk posed by the coronavirus.
“The pandemic situation has stabilized,” said Lauterbach, who has been under mounting pressure to drop the mandate.
The number of known or suspected infections is evening out or even falling, and the number of people hospitalized continues to decline, he explained. “The population has built up high immunity, and the experts who advise us no longer believe there will be another big, serious winter wave.”
Former ESPN Reporter Sues Network and Disney After Vaccine Mandate Led to Firing + More
Former ESPN Reporter Allison Williams Sues Network and Disney After Vaccine Mandate Led to Firing
Former ESPN reporter Allison Williams is suing the sports network after she was fired in 2021 for failing to comply with the company’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Williams and former ESPN producer Beth Faber filed a joint lawsuit against ESPN and Disney in Connecticut on Wednesday, claiming their religious beliefs were violated.
The lawsuit claims that ESPN and Disney made no efforts to accommodate Williams, who offered to work remotely, test regularly and wear a mask, although NFL teams, college football teams and certain venues didn’t exclude the unvaccinated.
Williams’ exemption request was denied in October 2021 and she was subsequently terminated a week later after refusing to get vaccinated, the suit says. Faber’s religious exemption was also denied and she was fired in September 2021 after nearly 31 years at the network. In the lawsuit, Faber said an ESPN HR representative told her “maybe God has led you to a new career, when God closes a door, he opens another.”
Social Media’s Effects on Teen Mental Health Comes Into Focus
Experts are increasingly warning of a connection between heavy social media use and mental health issues in children — a hot topic now driving major lawsuits against tech giants.
Why it matters: Seattle Public Schools’ recently filed a lawsuit against TikTok, Meta, Snap and others — which accuses the social media giants of contributing to a youth mental health crisis — and is one of hundreds of similar cases.
Driving the news: Some scientists who study technology’s effects on children say the negatives far outweigh any positives.
“Most of the large studies show that heavy users of social media are about twice as likely to be depressed as light users,” says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and leading expert on the subject, whose forthcoming book, “Generations,” describes the differences among the six current generations of Americans.
Tech Companies Want Your Kid’s Birth Date. Should You Tell Them?
Technology companies already know all about you and your family, including your location, interests and other demographic details. But recently, they have been asking a question that can feel a little too personal. Streaming services, games and social media companies want to know young children’s birth dates.
When Disney Plus started demanding that existing users enter their children’s exact birth date to continue streaming, many parents were alarmed. The app often knows a child is watching thanks to built-in settings that let you set up profiles for kids.
More tech companies are trying to confirm the exact ages of their users, including those who are under 18. In addition to streaming services like Google’s YouTube and Disney Plus, social media companies including Instagram and various games and services have been asking for birth dates.
“It’s understandable that parents feel hesitant. Companies are already collecting so much information on their users that they should be able to infer what ages they are,” said Irene Ly, policy counsel at Common Sense Media.
In the Next Pandemic, Let’s Pay People to Get Vaccinated
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that people like money. If you show them the cash, they’re generally more likely to do what you want, whether that be to stop smoking, work out or keep up with their medication.
As vaccines started to roll out of labs during the pandemic, governments began wondering: How can we encourage as many people as possible to get vaccinated against COVID-19? Countries tried a mishmash of approaches: They rolled out rigorous public health messaging, engaged with hard-to-reach communities, got celebrities to plug the vaccines and made them compulsory.
But policymakers and academics also suggested another, controversial approach — why not just offer people cold, hard cash? This reignited a thorny debate.
In a new paper published in the journal Nature, researchers Florian Schneider, Pol Campos-Mercade, Armando Meier and others addressed these concerns. In 2021, Meier and his colleagues conducted a randomized trial to see if financial incentives increased vaccine uptake. In their study, published in the journal Science in October 2021, Meier and his coauthors recruited over 8,000 people in Sweden and offered a portion of them $24 to get vaccinated within the next 30 days, while the others were offered nothing.
The researchers found that the cash incentive boosted the proportion of people who got vaccinated by about 4%. That number didn’t change significantly when factoring in age, race, ethnicity, education or income. Other research during the pandemic also found that financial incentives were effective.
Biden’s Plea to Lawmakers in Rare Op-Ed: Unite to Hold Tech Accountable
President Joe Biden called on Republicans and Democrats in Congress to unite and pass legislation that places new guardrails on the tech industry, writing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday that the administration’s current authority to rein in Big Tech isn’t enough.
Biden focused on three key areas of tech legislation he hopes to see this Congress. First, he urged lawmakers to pass federal privacy protections that limit the collection of sensitive data and advocated for banning targeted advertising to children altogether.
Next, he reiterated a more tempered version of a call he made on the campaign trail in 2020 to “fundamentally reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,” the law that protects online platforms from being held liable for their users’ posts while preserving their ability to moderate such content. He also called for more transparency around the algorithms tech companies use to determine what information users see to ensure they are not pushing unsafe content to kids or discriminating against groups of users.
Finally, Biden called for “fairer rules of the road” when it comes to competition in the tech sector.
Federal Government Proposes Greater Role in Local News
The federal government is looking to get more involved in your local news outlets, according to their latest proposal.
In a report released last week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) proposed issuing public policy to help local journalism and combat misinformation. The GAO reported that local news’ lack of economic viability was the problem causing over 2,000 local newspapers to close since the early 2000s.
The GAO proposed tax incentives or credits, direct government funding, government advertising, federal grants or loans and even government intervention with respect to dominant internet platforms to bolster local nonprofit news. Their report also proposed that the government should establish policies to shield certain “public interest journalism” from market failure.
The GAO admitted that no universal definition of “public interest journalism” exists. However, they stated that they define “public interest journalism” as that which covers issues of “public significance to engage citizens and inform democratic decision-making,” which includes investigations on “civically important topics.”
Germany Launches an Attack on Google’s Data Harvesting
German regulators are tightening the screws on Google’s data business, announcing plans to force the search giant to give users more control over how information is tracked and used across its subsidiary businesses, a threat to the tech giant’s empire in the continent’s largest economy.
The move came Wednesday from Germany’s anti-trust regulator Bundeskartellamt, German for Federal Cartel Office. In a statement, Bundeskartellamt said Google doesn’t give users enough say over how the company collects and shares data across its various services (Google Search, YouTube and Maps, for example) as well as combining that information with data collected from third-party apps and websites. This allows Google to create dossiers about users for advertising purposes, or use consumer data to develop algorithms and other products.
Bundeskartellamt said Google’s settings are too vague, and the company must provide more transparency over how and why data is collected. Google can’t discourage users from using these controls by designing its interfaces so it’s easier and faster to just say yes to whatever the company wants to do with your data.
Notably, this ruling isn’t about privacy, at least not directly. Bundeskartellamt’s mandate is competition, and the assessment finds that Google’s data harvesting practices give it an unfair advantage in the marketplace due to the company’s outsized position in the digital economy.
Meta Faces a Future of More Legal Woes and Falling Revenues
Since Facebook officially became Meta in October 2021, the company has lost more than two-thirds of its stock market value. Its difficulties can’t all be attributed to the name change, but the “Meta era” has so far brought little but bad news for Mark Zuckerberg and his company’s shareholders.
Just over a month before the rebrand, Meta, which controls the platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, hit an all-time stock market high. Just a few weeks later, the revelations of whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen proved hugely damaging. Haugen leaked thousands of internal company documents to The Wall Street Journal, revealing the extent to which the company had prioritized profit over dealing with hate, violence and misinformation on its platforms.
Throughout 2022, the problems kept piling up. The share price has been on a sharp downward spiral for 15 months now. Its revenues and ad sales are falling while regulatory scrutiny is intensifying. Then there’s the massive spending on the metaverse, which is increasingly spooking investors.
Meta was officially the worst-performing company on the S&P 500 index in 2022. Amid a wider sell-off among the major tech firms, Meta is the one struggling most of all.
EU Court: Tourists May Get Refunds Over COVID Measures
Travelers whose package tours were ruined by the imposition of restrictions to combat the COVID-19 pandemic may be entitled to at least a partial refund, the European Union’s highest court said Thursday.
The European Court of Justice weighed in after being asked for its opinion by a court in Germany. The Munich court is considering the case of two people who bought a two-week package vacation for the Spanish island of Gran Canaria starting on March 13, 2020, just as the pandemic hit Europe. They are seeking a 70% reduction in the price because of restrictions that were imposed there two days later and their early return.
The EU court found that “a traveler is entitled to a reduction in the price of his or her package where a lack of conformity of the travel services included in the package is due to restrictions that have been imposed at the travel destination to fight the spread of an infectious disease, such as COVID-19.”
Pentagon Formally Rescinds COVID Vaccine Mandate for Troops + More
Pentagon Formally Rescinds COVID Vaccine Mandate for Troops
U.S. News & World Report reported:
The Pentagon on Tuesday announced it is formally ending its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for troops after President Biden signed into law a massive defense spending bill that required the measure’s termination, bringing a close to the contentious issue that drew considerable ire from Republicans.
Notably, the memorandum dated Jan. 10 and signed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stated that standing policies regarding vaccines remain in effect. Those policies include the “ability of commanders to consider, as appropriate, the individual immunization status of personnel in making deployment, assignment and other operational decisions, including when vaccination is required for travel to, or entry into, a foreign nation.”
The mandate led to the discharge of more than 8,000 active-duty service members who refused to get the vaccine. The memo stated that for any service members “administratively discharged on the sole basis that the Service member failed to obey a lawful order to receive a vaccine for COVID-19, the Department is precluded by law from awarding any characterization less than a general (under honorable conditions) discharge.”
35% of Parents Oppose School Vaccine Mandates
According to a Dec. 2022 Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 35% of parents now oppose school vaccine mandates, up from 23% in Dec. 2019.
Just 28% of adults overall, parents or not, stated that parents should be able to opt their children out of school vaccine mandates, up from 16% in an Oct. 2019 Pew Research Poll.
Experts believe the opposition may be more about parental rights than opposition to the vaccines themselves as 80% of parents agreed that the benefits of the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine outweigh the risks.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommends getting 29 doses of 10 vaccines (plus a yearly flu shot after six months old) for kids aged 0 to six.
After Paying Twitter Millions, FBI Says Other Possible Big Tech Payments Are Protected for ‘Law Enforcement Purposes’
The FBI denied a request to make public any payments it may have made to Google or Meta because such records could reveal protected information about law enforcement.
The FBI was recently revealed to have paid the social media company Twitter $3.4 million to process requests for information on or censorship of numerous accounts on the platform. Through a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request, The Daily Wire sought similar records of payments the agency may have made to Meta, which controls Facebook and Instagram, and Google, which controls YouTube.
“The FBI can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records responsive to your request pursuant to FOIA Exemption (b)(7)(E) [5 U.S.C.§552 (b)(7)(E)]. The nature of your request implicates records the FBI may or may not compile for law enforcement purposes,” the FBI told The Daily Wire on Monday in a written response to a Dec. 20 FOIA request.
A slate of communications and records from Twitter released by its new head, Elon Musk, revealed that the FBI had a relationship with the social media giant that developed into a partnership in which the agency would pay the company to process requests for censorship and information on certain social media accounts.
Social Media Bosses Could Face Jail if They Breach Rules on Children Under U.K.’s Online Safety Bill
Tory MPs are planning an amendment to the Online Safety Bill that would make tech executives criminally liable for children’s duty of care failures. Conservative MP Miriam Cates and other MPs including Sir William Cash, Andrea Leadsom, Julian Lewis, Lia Nici, Tim Loughton, Lee Anderson and former Home Secretary Priti Patel are backing an amendment to new laws regulating online spaces that would introduce powers to jail tech bosses.
In an editorial for The Telegraph on Monday, Cates said she believes that “future generations will look back on children’s online harms the same way we look back on children who were forced to work down mines.”
Cates pointed to TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, and an investigation by the Centre for Countering Hate in December that found that TikTok was pushing suicide, self-harm and eating disorder content via its “For You” feed.
“Without urgent action, we risk passing a Bill that lacks the teeth it so desperately needs to force global tech firms to tackle the systemic issues that harm children online,” Cates wrote.
Lawsuit Pushes Addiction Case Against Social Media Firms
A major new federal lawsuit playing out this winter argues that social media platforms are “defective” products that can be held legally responsible for the harm they cause to younger users.
Why it matters: Plaintiffs in the more than 100 cases that have been consolidated into one federal courtroom say services like Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube are addictive by design — and lawyers working on the case compare their work to the fight against tobacco or opioids.
Driving the news: A new master complaint in the case, filed in the Northern District of California, is due to be filed next month. An essential question, in this case, is whether the sites named in the suits and their algorithms can be considered “products” — and if so, whether the companies can be held liable for product designs that are charged with causing or contributing to harm.
Details: One filing against Meta, brought by parents of a minor last December which will be part of the larger lawsuit, describes a “defective” Instagram design that does not warn teens the app is “designed to be addictive.”
Massachusetts Transit Agency Offers to Rehire 8 Former Employees Fired for Being Unvaccinated
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) is offering jobs back to eight former employees that it fired for refusing to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
The former MBTA employees were fired after Republican Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker issued Executive Order No. 595, in August of 2021. The order required all state-level executive branch employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19, including MBTA employees.
MBTA recently rescinded its vaccine and mask requirements for employees while, last week, the Boston Herald reported the agency would rehire eight employees who lost their jobs for refusing the prior vaccination policy. The offer to rehire the former unvaccinated MBTA employees does not include back pay at this time.
Stanford University Backs Away From Its Harmful Language List
Facing mockery, ridicule and widespread internal and external criticism, Stanford University finally took down its Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) website this week. The move is the latest in an unfolding saga that’s thrust Stanford into the spotlight on campus free speech controversies.
Claiming that the EHLI was “intended as a guide, not a mandate,” to replace racist and harmful terminology used in IT communications, Steve Gallagher, Stanford’s chief information officer, acknowledged this past Wednesday that while the “primary motivation of this initiative was always to promote a more inclusive and welcoming environment where individuals from all backgrounds feel they belong,” it was time to pull back and reconsider.
The problem with this kind of censorship is not only that it chills free speech, it trivializes language that actually is harmful and hurtful when it comes from the mouths of people who intend to be mean.
Stanford’s leadership has now weighed in and tried to distance itself from the EHLI. Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne issued a statement last week saying that the effort did not represent university policy and acknowledging that “many have expressed concern that the work of this group could be used to censor or cancel speech at Stanford.
Iran to Use Facial Recognition to Identify Women Without Hijabs
Last month, a young woman went to work at Sarzamineh Shadi, or Land of Happiness, an indoor amusement park east of Iran’s capital, Tehran. After a photo of her without a hijab circulated on social media, the amusement park was closed, according to multiple accounts in Iranian media. Prosecutors in Tehran have reportedly opened an investigation.
Shuttering a business to force compliance with Iran’s strict laws for women’s dress is a familiar tactic to Shaparak Shajarizadeh. She stopped wearing a hijab in 2017 because she views it as a symbol of government suppression, and recalls restaurant owners, fearful of authorities, pressuring her to cover her head.
But Shajarizadeh, who fled to Canada in 2018 after three arrests for flouting hijab law, worries that women like the amusement park worker may now be targeted with face recognition algorithms as well as by conventional police work.
After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failure to observe hijab laws.” Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said.
ChatGPT Writes Well Enough to Fool Scientific Reviewers
The internet’s new favorite toy, ChatGPT, accomplishes some things better than others. The machine learning-trained chatbot from OpenAI can string together sentences and paragraphs that flow smoothly on just about any topic you prompt it with. But it cannot reliably tell the truth. It can act as a believable substitute for a text-based mental health counselor. But it cannot write a passable Gizmodo article.
On the list of concerning things the AI text generator apparently can do, though, is fool scientific reviewers — at least some of the time, according to a pre-print study released Tuesday from Northwestern University and University of Chicago researchers. Published academic science relies on a process of article submission and review by human experts in relevant fields. If AI can routinely fool those reviewers, it could fuel a scientific integrity crisis, the new study authors warn.
Sixty-eight percent of the time, the reviewers correctly identified when an abstract was the product of ChatGPT. But in the remaining 32% of cases, the subjects were tricked. And that’s despite just 8% of the falsified abstracts meeting the specific formatting and style requirement for the listed journal. Plus, the reviewers falsely identified 14% of the real article abstracts as having been AI-generated.
WHO Urges Travelers to Wear Masks as New COVID Variant Spreads
Countries should consider recommending that passengers wear masks on long-haul flights, given the rapid spread of the latest Omicron subvariant of COVID-19 in the United States, World Health Organization (WHO) officials said on Tuesday.
In Europe, the XBB.1.5 subvariant was detected in small but growing numbers, WHO and Europe officials said at a press briefing.
XBB.1.5 — the most transmissible Omicron subvariant detected so far — accounted for 27.6% of COVID-19 cases in the United States for the week ended Jan. 7, health officials have said.
Tokyo Lodges Protest After China Punishes Japanese Travelers Over COVID Test Requirements
Japan has lodged a protest with Beijing over its decision to suspend the issuance of visas to Japanese citizens in retaliation for COVID testing requirements for travelers from China.
Chief cabinet secretary Hirokazu Matsuno characterized the move as an act of revenge rather than a public health measure and requested China reverse the decision. “It is regrettable that China unilaterally has taken visa suspension action for reasons other than steps for the coronavirus,” he said on Wednesday.
China’s government suspended the processing of the visas on Tuesday after the suspension of short-term visas for South Korean citizens earlier that day.
Japan and South Korea are among a number of nations, including the U.S., Australia, Canada, Morocco and a number of European countries that have announced new entry restrictions or measures for travelers from China in light of the mass outbreak of COVID-19.
More U.S. Schools Institute Mask Mandates as COVID Cases Rise + More
More U.S. Schools Institute Mask Mandates as COVID Cases Rise
More schools across the United States are putting mask mandates in place as COVID-19 cases continue to rise. Before winter break, districts in New Jersey and Pennsylvania announced they would temporarily be requiring masks among students and staff members amid a surge of respiratory illnesses.
Now schools in Massachusetts and Michigan are following suit while Chicago schools are asking students to take rapid tests before classes start.
Chelsea Public Schools in Boston announced in a letter to the community that the decision was due to Suffolk County designated as “high risk” for COVID-19 transmission as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Meanwhile, Ann Arbor Public Schools in Michigan said it was instituting a two-week mandate starting on Monday, Jan. 9, and ending Friday, Jan. 20.
Facebook and Instagram to Restrict Advertisers’ Access to Teenagers’ Data
Facebook and Instagram are to tighten restrictions around the data available to firms to target ads at teenage users, the platforms’ parent company, Meta, has said.
From February, advertisers will no longer be able to see a user’s gender or the type of posts they have engaged with as a way of targeting adverts to them. Under the enhanced restrictions, only a user’s age and location will be used to show them advertising, Meta said.
The social media firm also confirmed that new controls would be introduced in March enabling teenagers to go into the settings in both apps and choose to “see less” of certain types of adverts.
Many online safety campaigners say social media platforms need to do more to control the types of advertising shown to younger users, saying inappropriate ads can cause as much harm as offensive or abusive content posted by others.
China’s Increased Surveillance Capacity Could Be Dangerous
News from China in the past several weeks has come at a dizzying pace. First, there were once-in-a-generation protests, then a loosening of coronavirus restrictions, and now the terrible toll of the virus itself on a large and vulnerable population.
Yet, amid this extraordinary turn of events, other less dramatic but highly consequential stories have emerged about how the Chinese government has used the pandemic to dramatically increase its surveillance capabilities.
Surveillance may not seem like the main story in China these days, but history indicates that growing state surveillance warrants attention. Surveillance is a mode of state power that operates to protect the state itself, unlike the policing of crime, which is ostensibly to protect society, and historically surveillance projects have expanded well beyond their intended targets. Surveillance is insidious, secret, often silent — and incredibly dangerous, with the potential to tear societies apart.
What is new now is the unprecedented deployment of technology and the ability of states such as China, but also the United States and others, to conduct surveillance not only on dissidents or suspects but everyone.
New Jersey, Ohio Join Other States in Banning TikTok From State Devices
New Jersey and Ohio said on Monday they were joining other states in banning the use of the popular video app TikTok on government-owned and managed devices.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, a Democrat, said in addition to banning the short-video app owned by Chinese technology conglomerate ByteDance from state devices he also was banning software vendors, products, and services from more than a dozen vendors including Huawei, Hikvision, Tencent, ZTE and Kaspersky Lab.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, said in his order “these surreptitious data privacy and cybersecurity practices pose national and local security and cybersecurity threats to users of these applications and platforms and the devices storing the applications and platforms.”
Europe Turns on TikTok
In the United States, TikTok is a favorite punching bag for lawmakers who’ve compared the Chinese-owned app to “digital fentanyl” and say it should be banned.
Now that hostility is spreading to Europe, where fears about children’s safety and reports that TikTok spied on journalists using their IP locations are fueling a backlash against the video-sharing app used by more than 250 million Europeans.
As TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew heads to Brussels on Tuesday to meet with top digital policymaker Margrethe Vestager amid a wider reappraisal of EU ties with China, his company faces a slew of legal, regulatory and security challenges in the bloc — as well as a rising din of public criticism.
One of the loudest critics is French President Emmanuel Macron, who has called TikTok “deceptively innocent” and a cause of “real addiction” among users, as well as a source of Russian disinformation. Such comments have gone hand-in-hand with aggressive media coverage in France, including Le Parisien daily’s December 29 front page calling TikTok “A real danger for the brains of our children.”
Microsoft Reportedly Closing in on $10 Billion Investment Into ChatGPT Creator OpenAI
Microsoft and OpenAI, the company behind the viral artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT are in discussions for a deal that would value the latter at $29 billion, according to several reports, as the legacy technology giant throws its weight behind the latest viral sensation and encroaches on its longtime rival Google.
Microsoft has discussed making a $10 billion investment into OpenAI, Semafor reported late Monday, citing people with knowledge of the discussions.
The deal, which would eventually net Microsoft a 49% stake in the upstart firm, also includes a clause that Microsoft would receive three-quarters of OpenAI’s profits until it recovers its investment, according to Semafor, with additional investors taking 49% and OpenAI retaining the remaining 2% in equity.
BioNTech Acquires Tunisian-Born and U.K-Based AI Startup InstaDeep for £562M
German-based biotech company BioNTech SE is set to acquire InstaDeep, a Tunis-born and U.K.-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup InstaDeep for up to £562 million (~$680 million) in its largest deal yet.
Per The Financial Times, the German vaccine maker intends to use InstaDeep’s machine learning (ML) to “improve its drug discovery process, including developing personalized treatments tailored to a patient’s cancer.”
In 2019, InstaDeep formed a multi-year strategic collaboration with BioNTech to launch a joint AI innovation lab where they would deploy the latest advances in AI and ML to develop novel immunotherapies. This acquisition is a result of this long-term partnership that has seen InstaDeep become the centerpiece of a growing portfolio of initiatives around AI and ML at BioNTech.
China Halts Visas for Japan, South Korea in COVID Spat
Chinese embassies suspended issuing new visas for South Koreans and Japanese on Tuesday in apparent retaliation for COVID-19 testing requirements recently imposed by those countries on travelers from China. The embassies in Tokyo and Seoul announced the suspensions in brief online notices.
The Seoul notice, posted on the embassy’s WeChat social media account, said the ban would continue until South Korea lifts its “discriminatory entry measures” against China. The announcement covered tourist, business and some other visas.
China’s Foreign Ministry threatened countermeasures last week against countries that had announced new virus testing requirements for travelers from China. At least 10 in Europe, North America and Asia have done so recently, with officials expressing concern about a lack of information about rapidly spreading virus outbreaks in China.
It wasn’t clear why South Korea and Japan were targeted, and whether the suspensions would be expanded to other countries that have imposed virus testing on passengers from China.
South Africa Not Tightening COVID Rules Over China, Subvariant
South Africa does not see the need to implement any new COVID-19 restrictions either at home or for arrivals over an infection surge in China and the detection of the first case of Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 locally, its health minister said.
“The dominant variant of concern in China and in the world remains Omicron, and the immunity of South Africans from vaccination and natural immunity is still very strong,” Minister Joe Phaahla told reporters on Tuesday.
So far the country has only confirmed one case of the XBB.1.5 subvariant and there is no evidence that it is spreading, although the subvariant is believed to be highly contagious, Phaahla said.
