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DeSantis Calls for Biden to Let Djokovic Compete in U.S. Despite Vaccination Status + More
DeSantis Calls for Biden to Let Djokovic Compete in U.S. Despite Vaccination Status
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) called on President Biden to allow Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic to compete in the Miami Open despite him being unvaccinated for COVID-19.
DeSantis sent a letter to Biden on Tuesday demanding that he exempt Djokovic — who is a 22-time Grand Slam winner — from the United States’ vaccination policy, which states that noncitizens who are not immigrants and traveling to the U.S. by air must be vaccinated. He said that the only thing keeping Djokovic from playing is Biden’s “misguided, unscientific and out-of-date” vaccination policy.
“It has been reported that Novak Djokovic has formally applied and been denied permission from your administration to enter the United States so that he may compete at the upcoming Miami Open tennis tournament,” DeSantis wrote in the letter. “This denial is unfair, unscientific and unacceptable. It’s time to put pandemic politics aside and give the American people what they want — let him play.”
The Florida governor also questioned the president on whether Djokovic could enter the United States by boat because the current policy only covers air travel. He told Biden to confirm with him no later than Friday if the tennis player could enter the country via boat.
Djokovic was able to play in the Australian Open in January, just one year after he was deported from the country due to his vaccination status. He did not participate in the U.S. Open last year due to being unvaccinated.
COVID Backlash Hobbles Public Health and Future Pandemic Response
When the next pandemic sweeps the United States, health officials in Ohio won’t be able to shutter businesses or schools, even if they become epicenters of outbreaks. Nor will they be empowered to force Ohioans who have been exposed to go into quarantine. State officials in North Dakota are barred from directing people to wear masks to slow the spread. Not even the president can force federal agencies to issue vaccine or testing mandates to thwart its march.
At least 30 states, nearly all led by Republican legislatures, have passed laws since 2020 that limit public health authority, according to a Washington Post analysis of laws collected by Kaiser Health News and the Associated Press as well as the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University.
Health officials and governors in more than half the country are now restricted from issuing mask mandates, school closures and other protective measures or must seek permission from their state legislatures before renewing emergency orders, the analysis showed.
The Alabama legislature barred businesses from requiring proof of COVID vaccination. In Tennessee, officials cannot close churches during a state of emergency. Florida made it illegal for schools to require coronavirus vaccinations.
California Offers Bipartisan Road Map for Protecting Kids Online Even as Big Tech Fights Back
In California, a Democrat and a Republican figured out how to pass the country’s toughest online privacy law protecting kids. If their experience is any indication, though, federal legislators can expect fierce pushback from Big Tech if they heed President Joe Biden’s call for similar action on a national scale.
The law, modeled after legislation in the United Kingdom, will ban websites from profiling users in California under the age of 18, tracking their locations or nudging them to provide personal information. It will also require online services to automatically put privacy settings at their highest levels on sites that kids access when the law goes into effect next year.
Passed with unanimous bipartisan support, the measure presents a road map for federal lawmakers to stop social media companies from targeting kids. But the tech industry’s response, including a recent lawsuit that describes the law as having global ramifications, demonstrates how hard its powerful lobby will work to undermine or dilute regulation.
Gov. Gavin Newsom last year signed the law, which imposes strict guardrails on online services that children use. Its greatest reach, some privacy experts believe, lies in the requirement that online services must consider what’s best and safest for kids from the very start — meaning that companies will have to design their websites based on privacy rules to protect users.
Meta Doesn’t Want to Police the Metaverse. Kids Are Paying the Price.
For years, Meta has argued the best way to protect people in virtual reality is by empowering them to protect themselves — giving users tools to control their own environments, such as the ability to block or distance other users. It’s a markedly less aggressive, and costly, stance than the one it takes with its social media networks, Facebook and Instagram, which are bolstered by automated and human-backed systems to root out hate speech, violent content and rule-breaking misinformation.
Meta Global Affairs President Nick Clegg has likened the company’s metaverse strategy to being the owner of a bar. If a patron is confronted by “an uncomfortable amount of abusive language,” they’d simply leave, rather than expect the bar owner to monitor the conversations.
But experts warn this moderation strategy could prove dangerous for the kids flocking to Horizon Worlds, which users say is rife with bigotry, harassment and sexually explicit content. Though officially Meta bars children under 18 from its flagship VR app, researchers and users report kids and teens are using the program in droves, operating accounts held by adults or lying about their ages.
In some cases, adolescent users are ill-equipped to handle dicey situations they find in the metaverse, according to researchers. Others report young users inappropriately harassing other people while they are outside the watchful eyes of adults. Meanwhile, emerging research suggests victims of harassment and bullying in virtual reality often experience similar psychological effects as they would in real-life attacks.
Despite the risks, Meta is still pitching the metaverse to younger and younger users, drawing ire from child-welfare activists and regulators. After Meta disclosed it’s planning to open up Horizon Worlds to younger users, between 13 and 17, some lawmakers urged the company to drop the plan.
Borg — TikTok’s Binge Drinking Trend — Is Blamed for Putting College Students in the Hospital
College campuses’ latest party trend may be to blame for putting students in danger, a university warns. Officials at the University of Massachusetts Amherst announced Saturday that its fire department handled 28 ambulances linked to “a significant number of alcohol intoxication cases.”
That night, students were seen “carrying plastic gallon containers, believed to be ‘borgs.’”
These containers, also known as “blackout rage gallons,” contain a mix of alcohol, water and electrolytes. The #borg TikTok trend, which has accumulated over 82 million views, depicts people dumping out about half of the gallon’s water and filling it up with alcohol, typically a liquor like vodka, along with juice or electrolytes.
However, diluting the alcohol can make people falsely assume they aren’t drinking as much as they really are, especially for people who add caffeine, George F. Koob, the director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health, tells Good Morning America. But there are safer ways to drink, and the alcohol in something as hefty as a borg will still have drastic effects.
‘Shameful Case of Weaponization’: Musk Responds to FTC Demands for Journalist Info
Elon Musk has responded to the Journal’s report on the invasive FTC probe, as revealed by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. “A shameful case of weaponization of a government agency for political purposes and suppression of the truth!” Musk tweeted Tuesday evening.
Musk called the Biden administration’s ‘casual violation of the First Amendment’ (as Jay Bhattacharya put it), calling it a “serious attack on the Constitution by a federal agency.”
The Federal Trade Commission has demanded that Twitter hand over internal communications related to owner Elon Musk, including detailed information about mass layoffs he instituted shortly after his purchase of the social media giant.
And what did the FTC cite as justification? Concerns that staff reductions could compromise the company’s ability to protect users, the Wall Street Journal reports. “We are concerned these staff reductions impact Twitter’s ability to protect consumers’ information,” wrote an FTC official in a Nov. 10 letter to Twitter attorneys, shortly after the company’s initial wave of layoffs.
DHS Agency Appears to Be ‘Burying’ Evidence of Involvement With ‘Domestic Censorship Activities’: Expert
A federal agency in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that’s been scrutinized for what critics argue is suppression of dissenting political views under the guise of combating disinformation now appears to be “burying” evidence of its alleged censorship, experts and watchdog groups say.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, has come under fire for working with Big Tech companies to flag and take down social media posts related to elections, COVID vaccines, and a range of other issues that were deemed mis-, dis-, and malinformation (MDM).
Now it appears the agency may be concealing its efforts to monitor domestic content posted by regular Americans and focusing exclusively on its campaign to combat foreign actors in what some observers say is a move designed to hide government overreach, according to research compiled by Mike Benz, the Foundation for Freedom Online’s executive director.
Collision Course: How an Explosion in Artificial Intelligence Could Threaten Human Agency
As Artificial Intelligence continues to expand its role in our daily lives, experts are now concerned about the future of human agency and our simple decision-making processes — and a phenomenon uniquely American could catapult us into that future quicker than we realize.
The Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center sought the opinions of many different kinds of experts — all of which have expertise with automation as it relates to their occupation — on the extent to which we will have control in tech-aided decisions.
The Pew survey asked 540 academics, developers, researchers, and policy experts the following: “By 2035, will smart machines, bots and systems powered by artificial intelligence be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making that is relevant to their lives?”
The results of this nonscientific canvassing: 56% of these experts did not agree that humans will remain in control of most tech-aided decision-making and 44% said they agreed that humans will remain in control of most tech-aided decision-making.
Big Companies Seeing Tax Benefits From Law Change Some of Them Fought
The Wall Street Journal reported:
Some large technology and pharmaceutical companies are telling investors that a new tax law change is reducing their tax rates. It’s the same tax-law change corporate executives at many companies have been urging Congress to reverse.
The provision requires companies to spread their deductions for research expenses over at least five years instead of writing them off immediately. As a result, many companies, particularly manufacturers and defense contractors, are facing higher tax bills now.
But there is a counterintuitive benefit for some companies—including Qualcomm Inc., Alphabet Inc., Pfizer Inc., Moderna Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. —that derive domestic profit from overseas sales, according to securities filings. Those companies now qualify for a bigger tax break for exports because of the way the research-deduction change alters their tax calculations. That bigger export break reduces the effective tax rates they report to investors and thus improves their bottom-line profit.
U.S. Expected to Ease COVID Testing for Arrivals From China
The U.S. is preparing to relax COVID-19 testing restrictions for travelers from China as soon as Friday, according to two people familiar with the decision.
The people, who were not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Biden administration had decided to roll back the testing requirements as cases, hospitalizations and deaths were declining in China and the U.S. had gathered better information about the surge. The Washington Post was the first to report on Tuesday about the easing of requirements.
NY Court Workers Fired for Refusing COVID Vax Must Be Rehired With Back Pay as State Board Scraps Mandate + More
NY Court Workers Fired for Refusing COVID Vax Must Be Rehired With Back Pay as State Board Scraps Mandate
New York court workers must be rehired — and given back pay with interest — if they were fired because they refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine, the state’s Public Employment Relations Board has ruled.
Under terms of the decision issued last month, the Unified Court System must immediately “cease and desist” from enforcing policies that require all non-judicial employees to be vaccinated or undergo regular testing. In addition, anyone “who lost accrued leave, compensation or employment” will have to be made “whole,” with interest paid “at the maximum legal rate,” according to the Feb. 24 decision obtained by The Post.
The decision affects at least about 25 court officers who were fired, said Dennis Quirk, president of the New York State Court Officers Association, one of 10 unions that challenged the mandate.
It’s unclear whether the decision will affect other state and Big Apple government employees who refused to get vaccinated, some of whom are suing New York City. A spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams said the ruling won’t apply to city workers because it was “based on a different set of facts and laws” than those governing Big Apple employees.
FBI, Pentagon Helped Research Facial Recognition for Street Cameras, Drones
The FBI and the Defense Department were actively involved in research and development of facial recognition software that they hoped could be used to identify people from video footage captured by street cameras and flying drones, according to thousands of pages of internal documents that provide new details about the government’s ambitions to build out a powerful tool for advanced surveillance.
The documents, revealed in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the American Civil Liberties Union filed against the FBI, show how closely FBI and Defense officials worked with academic researchers to refine artificial-intelligence techniques that could help in the identification or tracking of Americans without their awareness or consent.
Program leaders worked with FBI scientists and some of the nation’s leading computer-vision experts to design and test software that would quickly and accurately process the “truly unconstrained face imagery” recorded by surveillance cameras in public places, including subway stations and street corners, according to the documents, which the ACLU shared with The Washington Post.
The internal emails, presentations and other records offer an unmatched look at the way the nation’s top law enforcement agency and military have aggressively pursued a technology that could be used to undermine Americans’ privacy and already has a counterpart in mass surveillance systems in London, Moscow and across China.
Pentagon Still Probing What Caused ‘Havana Syndrome,’ Even After Spy Agencies Found No Smoking Gun
The Defense Department is continuing to conduct its own research into what the government calls “anomalous health incidents,” including what may have caused them and whether a weapon is responsible, according to five people familiar with the effort.
The research into the mysterious ailment referred to as “Havana Syndrome” that has affected more than 1,000 government employees over the past several years is continuing despite an intelligence community assessment released last week that said there was no evidence to support the theory that the incidents were caused by a foreign adversary wielding a weapon.
The illness was first reported in late 2016 when a group of U.S. diplomats serving at the U.S. embassy in Havana, Cuba, experienced severe headaches, temporary loss of hearing, vertigo and other symptoms similar to traumatic brain injury. Since then, hundreds more U.S. government personnel have reported these incidents, which many victims and experts still believe are the result of a directed-energy weapon.
The Pentagon is working on developing “defenses” against the syndrome and is investigating to see if it is possible that a weapon could be responsible, an intelligence official told reporters in a briefing on the findings last week.
Bill That Would Ban COVID Vaccine Mandates Heads to House Floor
The Missouri House Rules Committee passed a bill Monday that would ban vaccine mandates by organizations across the state. House bill 700 passed in a vote of 7 “ayes” and 2 “noes.”
If passed by the General Assembly, public school districts, public charter schools, public bodies, political subdivisions, state departments, judicial officer, peace officer or anyone appointed by the governor, would not be allowed to mandate and require the following: COVID-19 vaccinations, a dose of messenger ribonucleic acid, receive any treatment or procedure intended or designed to edit or alter human deoxyribonucleic acid or the human genome and have placed under the student’s skin any mechanical or electronic device.
GOP Panel Ready to Block New Student Vaccination Mandates
Wisconsin Republicans are preparing to again block a new policy from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers that requires students to get vaccinated twice against meningitis and tightening student chickenpox vaccination mandates.
The Legislature’s GOP-controlled rules committee is set to hold a public hearing on the policy Tuesday. A committee vote to block the policy could soon follow, perhaps within days.
State health officials in February announced they were trying again to implement regulations this fall that require students entering 7th grade to get vaccinated against meningitis. Students entering 12th grade must get a booster shot. Previously, the agency did not require students to get vaccinated against meningitis at all.
The health department also requires students to get vaccinated against chickenpox to enter every grade from kindergarten through 6th grade. In the past, a child was exempt if parents contacted the school district and said the child has already had the disease. Under the regulations beginning this fall, parents must provide evidence of infection from a healthcare provider to secure an exemption.
Biden’s Federal Employee Vaccine Mandate Faces a New Religious Discrimination Challenge
Government Executive reported:
A group consisting of nearly 10,000 federal employees has launched a new lawsuit against the Biden administration for its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, saying the currently paused requirement violates multiple laws that protect religious freedom.
In its new case, Feds for Medical Freedom alleged even unvaccinated employees at State who have received a religious exemption from the mandate have been left out of trainings, official events and balls, meetings and team-building exercises. They have been “berated,” harassed, coerced and ridiculed, according to the complaint. Requirements for unvaccinated workers to wear masks, quarantine at new posts or to enter vaccination status into a public calendar have outed employees who sought exemptions and led to further mistreatment, the employees said.
Several of the plaintiffs said they never received a decision on their exemption request, causing more stress and uncertainty. The adjudication process is paused across government as the mandate awaits resolution in court, but Feds for Medical Freedom said the delayed accommodation violated the Civil Rights Act. It said the same of the differential treatment, lost opportunities to travel and requirements to wear masks and test for COVID.
Eric Adams: NYC Shoppers Need to Ditch Masks to Show They Aren’t Crooks
Mayor Eric Adams wants the Big Apple’s retailers to make customers remove their masks in a bid to stem the ongoing shoplifting epidemic — but some merchants are wary of how they’re going to enforce that.
“We are putting out a clear call to all of our shops: Do not allow people to enter the store without taking off their face mask,” Adams said Monday on 1010 WINS radio. “And then once they’re inside, they can continue to wear it if they so desire to do so.
Adams said the move would help cops “use the technology we have available to identify those shoplifters and those who are committing serious crimes.”
When told his plan was “really putting the onus on the stores,” Adams said the NYPD was helping out by “beefing up our coverage in those BID [Business Improvement District] areas, those high-shopping areas, and we’re also beefing up our surveillance and practices.”
New Bill Will Give the Commerce Secretary the Power to Ban TikTok, Sen. Warner Says
A new bipartisan bill will empower the secretary of Commerce to take action against technology companies based in six foreign adversary nations, which would include China-based TikTok owner ByteDance, including banning them altogether, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said in an interview Tuesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
The six countries included in the bill are China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba, Warner said.
Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a Republican-sponsored bill with similar goals along party lines. Still, several Democrats on the committee said they would like to support such a proposal, but hoped for more time and collaboration in crafting it.
Warner said he believes the risk that the Chinese government could direct TikTok to push or suppress certain messages is based on the potential for harm due to Chinese government access to U.S. users, rather than currently known issues. But, he said, the proposal would require the intelligence community to seek to declassify as much as possible if the administration wants to opt for a ban, to make the case to the public for why a technology truly is a national security risk.
Is the U.S. Government Ready for the Rise of Artificial Intelligence?
We’re at a Frankenstein moment. An artificial intelligence boom is taking over Silicon Valley, with hi-tech firms racing to develop everything from self-driving cars to chatbots capable of writing poetry.
In recent weeks, members of Congress have sounded the alarm over the dangers of AI but no bill has been proposed to protect individuals or stop the development of AI’s most threatening aspects.
Sam Altman — the CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for some of the most mind-blowing recent advances in AI — believes no company, including his, should be trusted to solve these problems. The boundaries of AI should be decided, he says, not by “Microsoft or OpenAI, but society, governments, something like that.”
But does anyone trust the government to do this? If not, how can “society” manage it? Where can we look for a model of how to protect ourselves from the downsides of an emerging technology with such extraordinary upsides, without stifling it?
The Privacy Loophole in Your Doorbell
The police said they were conducting a drug-related investigation on a neighbor, and they wanted videos of “suspicious activity” between 5 and 7 p.m. one night in October. Michael Larkin, a business owner in Hamilton, Ohio, cooperated and sent clips of a car that drove by his Ring camera more than 12 times in that time frame.
He thought that was all the police would need. Instead, it was just the beginning. They asked for more footage, now from the entire day’s worth of records. And a week later, Larkin received a notice from Ring itself: The company had received a warrant, signed by a local judge. The notice informed him it was obligated to send footage from more than 20 cameras — whether or not Larkin was willing to share it himself.
As networked home surveillance cameras become more popular, Larkin’s case, which has not previously been reported, illustrates a growing collision between the law and people’s own expectation of privacy for the devices they own — a loophole that concerns privacy advocates and Democratic lawmakers, but which the legal system hasn’t fully grappled with.
Questions of who owns private home security footage, and who can get access to it, have become a bigger issue in the national debate over digital privacy. And when law enforcement gets involved, even the slim existing legal protections evaporate.
Novak Djokovic Denied Entry Into U.S. Again Over COVID Vaccine Status + More
Novak Djokovic Denied Entry Into U.S. Again Over COVID Vaccine Status
The Novak Djokovic vaccine saga has extended into 2023. The world No. 1 Serbian tennis star was denied entry into the United States due to his being unvaccinated against COVID-19, forcing him to withdraw from the BNP Paribas Open, which starts Wednesday in Indian Wells, Ca.
Djokovic had requested a vaccine waiver but was denied by Homeland Security. It’s not the first time that Djokovic has been forced out of competition due to his vaccination status.
The 35-year-old was forced to withdraw from the 2022 Australian Open after arriving in Melbourne, first having his visa canceled and then being deported out of the country.
Djokovic also did not play in the 2022 U.S. Open, which Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz ended up winning.
America’s COVID Response Was Based on Lies
Almost all of America’s leaders have gradually pulled back their COVID mandates, requirements, and closures — even in states like California, which had imposed the most stringent and longest-lasting restrictions on the public. At the same time, the media has been gradually acknowledging the ongoing release of studies that totally refute the purported reasons behind those restrictions. This overt reversal is falsely portrayed as “learned” or “new evidence.” Little acknowledgment of error is to be found.
We have seen no public apology for promulgating false information, or for the vilification and delegitimization of policy experts and medical scientists like myself who spoke out correctly about data, standard knowledge about viral infections and pandemics, and fundamental biology.
The historical record is critical. We have seen a macabre Orwellian attempt to rewrite history and to blame the failure of widespread lockdowns on the lockdowns’ critics, alongside absurd denials of officials’ own incessant demands for them.
The tragic failure of reckless, unprecedented lockdowns that were contrary to established pandemic science, and the added massive harms of those policies on children, the elderly, and lower-income families, are indisputable and well-documented in numerous studies. This was the biggest, the most tragic, and the most unethical breakdown of public health leadership in modern history.
California to Alter COVID Rules in Healthcare Settings: Masks and Vaccinations Not Required
With the COVID-19 state of emergency a thing of the past, California health officials on Friday unveiled plans to relax guidance on masking in high-risk settings and to end vaccination requirements for healthcare workers.
Among the changes announced by the California Department of Public Health is the end of statewide mask requirements in healthcare and other indoor high-risk settings — including correctional facilities and emergency and homeless shelters — beginning April 3.
Effective the same day, California will no longer require COVID-19 vaccinations for healthcare workers, including those in adult and direct care settings, correctional facilities and detention centers.
In other changes, starting March 13, an individual who tests positive for COVID-19 can exit isolation after five days, provided they feel well, symptoms are improving, and they have been fever-free for 24 hours.
Washington, Oregon to End Healthcare Settings Mask Mandate
Washington and Oregon will soon drop mask requirements in healthcare settings, state health officials said Friday, moving to lift the last major masking requirements meant to curb the spread of COVID-19.
Mandates in both states will end on April 3, meaning healthcare workers, patients and visitors will no longer be required to wear a mask in facilities including hospitals, urgent care centers and dental and doctors’ offices. Washington’s mask requirements in correctional facilities will also end on April 3.
Some healthcare settings may decide to continue requiring masks even after the statewide requirements are lifted, officials said.
Twitter Discloses Another Possible Government Censorship Effort
An old saying, attributed to Henry David Thoreau, maintains that you do not have to find a trout in your glass to know someone is watering down the milk. This week Americans found a veritable school of trout in their milk — an unintentional demonstration by the Biden administration of why such a gathering of fish is often called a “lie.”
In the 17th release of the “Twitter Files,” journalist Matt Taibbi disclosed that the U.S. government is funding a group that has supported the censorship of dissenting viewpoints on social media, including those of U.S. citizens. This week, Taibbi reported that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) may have supported a different disinformation blacklisting operation.
Yet, even Twitter censors reportedly balked at the size of the suggested blacklists and lack of supporting evidence. One list submitted by the GEC included several CNN journalists and Western government accounts, according to Taibbi.
The most chilling aspect of these latest two controversies is that they involve the blacklisting of individuals and groups. We have citizens who were unaware that their government was flagging them to be silenced or suspended from sharing their views on subjects ranging from Indian corruption to COVID to election fraud.
Matt Hancock Wanted to ‘Frighten Everyone’ Into Following COVID Rules
Matt Hancock told aides he wanted to “frighten the pants off everyone” to ensure compliance with COVID-19 restrictions, according to the latest batch of leaked messages which reveal discussions over when to “deploy” details of a new strain.
The WhatsApp exchanges suggest the then health secretary and others discussed how to use an announcement about the Kent variant of the virus to scare the public into changing their behavior.
The messages, published in the Sunday Telegraph, show that cabinet secretary Simon Case suggested in January 2021 that the “fear” factor would be “vital” in stopping the spread of the virus.
A Privacy Hero’s Final Wish: An Institute to Redirect AI’s Future
About a week before the privacy and technology luminary Peter Eckersley unexpectedly died last September, he reached out to artificial intelligence entrepreneur Deger Turan. Eckersley wanted to persuade Turan to be the president of Eckersley’s brainchild, a new institute that aimed to do nothing less ambitious than course-correct AI’s evolution to safeguard the future of humanity.
In the preceding days, while still fully expecting to recover, Eckersley had already told the board of his nascent organization — the AI Objectives Institute, or AOI — that Turan would be its president. The 44-year-old technologist and activist had also written a rough, incomplete will in Google Docs, in the unlikely event of his death. It began by naming AOI as the inheritor of all his U.S.-based assets. “We started something important,” Eckersley wrote. “I’d want to see whether the people involved could get it a little further.”
Turan had never actually had the chance to tell Eckersley he accepted his request. But as soon as he learned of Eckersley’s death, he knew that the role at AOI was not only the most important work he could be doing but also a way to help establish a central pillar of his friend’s legacy. “So I said yes,” Turan says. “Let’s do this — not a little further, but all the way.”
Eckersley envisioned the institute as an incubator and applied laboratory that would work with major AI labs to take on the problem Eckersley had come to believe was, perhaps, even more, important than the privacy and cybersecurity work to which he’d devoted decades of his career: redirecting the future of artificial intelligence away from the forces causing suffering in the world, toward what he described as “human flourishing.”
A Better Kind of Social Media Is Possible — if We Want It
Talk to almost anyone today about social media, and you’ll hear that it’s toxic. One might diagnose it with having an excess of outrage, another with too little free speech. Some bemoan the invasion of privacy, the scourge of lies and hate, the capricious rule of technology titans, and the trashing of attention spans. And some feel that no matter how delicious any morsel it offers, the indulgence leaves a bad aftertaste.
The pendulum has fully swung from early Pollyanna predictions that social media would unite families and topple repressive regimes to today’s declarations that it is depressing teenagers and destroying democracy. Frustration is widespread; calls for change across the political aisle. Pioneers have decamped from Twitter and Facebook to join experimental platforms such as Mastodon and Post, despite clunky features and the sacrifice of caches of followers and friends.
But for many of us, the dream of digital town squares where we openly discuss important matters has lost its luster. Messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, where chats take place in private groups, have for years been more popular than broadcasting thoughts to a public feed. And who can blame teenagers for preferring TikTok? Even on a good day, a whimsical video has more appeal than a heated exchange with a vitriolic stranger.
Where all this momentum leads is anyone’s guess. But there’s no going back to a world before Facebook, however pretty it might look in the foggy rearview mirror. What we should hope for instead is a new era of social media — one that serves the best interests of society instead of exploiting its worst impulses. To get there will require new business models and funding sources — and probably some smart and not heavy-handed legislation. It also will require something sorely lacking from most social media conversations today: imagination.
TikTok ‘Acting Too Slow’ to Tackle Self-Harm and Eating Disorder Content
TikTok has been urged to strengthen its content moderation policies around suicide and eating disorder material by organizations including the NSPCC and the Molly Rose Foundation.
The groups claimed TikTok had not acted swiftly enough following the publication of research suggesting the app’s recommendation algorithm pushes self-harm and eating disorder content to teenagers within minutes of them expressing interest in the topics.
In a letter to TikTok’s head of safety, the organizations asked the app to take “meaningful action” including improving moderation of eating disorder and suicide content; working with experts to develop a “comprehensive” approach to removing harmful content; supporting users who may be struggling with eating disorders or suicidal thoughts; and regular reporting on the steps being taken to address those issues.
DHS Has a Program Gathering Domestic Intelligence — and Virtually No One Knows About It
For years, the Department of Homeland Security has run a virtually unknown program gathering domestic intelligence, one of many revelations in a wide-ranging tranche of internal documents reviewed by POLITICO. Those documents also reveal that a significant number of employees in DHS’s intelligence office have raised concerns that the work they are doing could be illegal.
Under the domestic-intelligence program, officials are allowed to seek interviews with just about anyone in the United States. That includes people held in immigrant detention centers, local jails and federal prisons. DHS’s intelligence professionals have to say they’re conducting intelligence interviews, and they have to tell the people they seek to interview that their participation is voluntary. But the fact that they’re allowed to go directly to incarcerated people — circumventing their lawyers — raises important civil liberties concerns, according to legal experts.
That specific element of the program, which has been in place for years, was paused last year because of internal concerns. DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which runs the program, uses it to gather information about threats to the U.S., including transnational drug trafficking and organized crime. But the fact that this low-profile office is collecting intelligence by questioning people in the U.S. is virtually unknown.
Senators Urge Meta to Halt Launch of Metaverse App for Teens + More
Democratic Senators Urge Meta to Halt Launch of Metaverse App for Teens, Citing Company’s ‘Failure to Protect’ Young Users
Two Democratic Senators are pressuring Meta to halt plans to open the Metaverse to teenagers by lowering the age limit to its “Horizon Worlds” app, criticizing the company’s past handling of youth data and privacy.
In a joint letter to Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumental demanded the company scrap plans to expand access to the app — a virtual reality program set in the Metaverse — for teens aged 13 to 17 as soon as this month. Currently, the app only allows users aged 18 and up.
In a statement to Insider, a Meta spokesperson said its Quest VR platform — the virtual reality headset needed to access Horizon — “has always been designed for people ages 13+” and thus ” it makes sense” for the company to expand to younger demographics.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta plans to release the Horizon Worlds app to teens in order to expand its user base. In an internal memo cited by the Journal, Horizon vice president Gabriel Aul told staff that improving user retention among youth users was a top priority.
In their letter, Markey and Blumenthal harped on Meta’s past endeavors regarding children and young adults, arguing that the company poses a threat to the well-being of American teens.
FTC Set to Fine BetterHelp $7.8 Million for Sending Facebook Your Mental Health Data
The Federal Trade Commission is poised to ban the mental health app BetterHelp from sharing medical information with Facebook, Snapchat, and other online advertisers. A proposed order issued Thursday includes a $7.8 million fine and limits the ways BetterHelp can share mental health data going forward. It’s part of a new push by the FTC to reign in the internet’s rampant problems with health privacy.
“When a person struggling with mental health issues reaches out for help, they do so in a moment of vulnerability and with an expectation that professional counseling services will protect their privacy,” said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a press release. “Instead, BetterHelp betrayed consumers’ most personal health information for profit.”
The FTC says BetterHelp pushed its users to hand over sensitive health information so it could turn around and target them with ads, making false promises about privacy along the way.
This isn’t the first time mental health apps landed in hot water over their data practices. Talkspace in particular is accused of some alarming privacy problems, but numerous mental health app privacy investigations, including into BetterHelp, have uncovered the mishandling of medical data and widespread misrepresentations about the privacy truth.
Actor Tim Robbins Backs Woody Harrelson on Ending COVID Protocols: ‘Time to End This Charade’
“The Shawshank Redemption” actor Tim Robbins blasted COVID-19 protocols on Twitter Thursday, calling them a “charade” and declaring it’s time to end them.
The politically outspoken actor publicly expressed support for fellow Hollywood actor Woody Harrelson’s recent anti-vaccine statements that he made in a New York Times interview last week. Sharing an article about the actor’s statements, Robbins tweeted, “Woody is right. Time to end this charade. @sagaftra @ActorsEquity.”
Harrelson expressed his frustrations with Hollywood coronavirus safety measures in the interview, telling the Times they’re “absurd.”
When asked what’s absurd about them, he responded, “The fact that they’re still going on! I don’t think that anybody should have the right to demand that you’re forced to do the testing, forced to wear the mask and forced to get vaccinated three years on.”
ChatGPT Is Exciting, but Microsoft’s Influence Is Cause for Concern
The artificial intelligence dream has landed in our everyday lives, and the ethical discussions around AI have ramped up as a consequence, especially concerning how much data these AI services are collecting from users. After all, where there is mass storage of possibly sensitive information, there are cybersecurity and privacy concerns.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which is newly equipped with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and is currently being rolled out, has brought its own set of concerns, as Microsoft hasn’t had the best track record when it comes to respecting its customers’ privacy.
Microsoft has occasionally been challenged about its management and access to user data, although notably less so than its contemporaries like Apple, Google and Facebook, even though it deals in a great deal of user information — including when it sells targeted ads.
Microsoft isn’t the only company under scrutiny over how it collects and handles user data when it comes to AI chatbots. OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, also disclosed that it reviews user conversations.
Tech companies would do well to pay extra attention to make sure our personal data is as secure as possible — or lose the trust of their customers and potentially kill off their fledgling AI ambitions.
After Dobbs, Democrats Roll Out Health and Location Data Protections
Democrats introduced a bill Thursday to protect sensitive health and location data from being sold to online advertisers.
The Upholding Protections for Health and Online Location Data (UPHOLD) Privacy Act aims to resolve lingering concerns over the online safety of abortion-seeking patients. Introduced by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the bill would ban the use of personally identifiable health data from being used for targeted advertising and bar the sale of precision location data to data brokerages.
Following the reversal of Roe v. Wade last June, privacy groups feared that companies collecting and selling sensitive health and precise geolocation data could put reproductive healthcare patients at risk, especially in states that restrict abortion access. In May, a Vice report seemingly confirmed these fears, identifying a data firm that sold location data related to visits to Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics.
‘Spy Balloon in Your Phone’: Growing Calls to Ban TikTok Threaten Its Future
The Chinese spy balloon that hovered over the U.S. last month did not just damage relations between Beijing and Washington, it also cast a shadow over the future of TikTok.
Last week, a U.S. congressional committee backed legislation that would give the U.S. president the power to ban the Chinese-owned social video app. The Republican chair of the committee, Michael McCaul, said the incident had reinforced fears of Chinese state surveillance, describing TikTok as a “spy balloon in your phone”.
It came days after Canada announced it would join the U.S. in barring TikTok from government mobile devices because of security concerns. The EU’s executive arm and the European Parliament have also banned the app from staff phones.
It is unclear how a U.S.-wide ban on TikTok would be implemented and the bill provides few guidelines or limitations. “It means that they can do whatever they think they need to do to prevent citizens from engaging with a company that meets the relevant criteria,” said American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) senior policy counsel Jenna Leventoff.
Big Lies, Big Data and the Rise of Bigger Brother
The Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright recently discussed a new “international socialist conspiracy” that has taken the world by storm. “Fringe forces of the far left,” he noted, “are plotting to take away our freedom to be stuck in traffic jams, to crawl along clogged ring roads and trawl the streets in search of a parking spot.” The name of this “chilling global movement?” he asked, sarcastically and somewhat contemptuously: The “15-minute city (FMC).” Wainwright believes these cities are simply part of a “mundane planning theory.” He’s wrong.
Also known as smart cities, FMCs are places where everything imaginable, from your place of work to your favorite pizzeria, is accessible either by foot or bike (not by car, though; they will be verboten) in 15 minutes or less. What’s so bad about this? On first inspection, very little. We are, after all, creatures of comfort. We live in a world where the mantra “Too Long, Didn’t Read (TL;DR)” now reigns supreme. We crave convenience; we crave expediency. However, expediency isn’t always a good thing; sometimes it’s downright dangerous.
This is especially true when people, either consciously or otherwise, trade their freedom for ease of access to certain services. FMCs may make it easier for citizens to get from A to B, but these creations will also make it easier for those in power to spy on us, harvest our data and enable Big Brother to become Bigger Brother.
As I write this, FMCs are being actively championed by the World Economic Forum (WEF), the group behind the “Great Reset” and the idea of owning nothing, having absolutely no privacy and being very happy. This fact alone should concern all readers.
Chinese City Claims to Have Destroyed 1 Billion Pieces of Personal Data Collected for COVID Control
A Chinese city says it has destroyed a billion pieces of personal data collected during the pandemic, as local governments gradually dismantle their coronavirus surveillance and tracking systems after abandoning the country’s controversial zero-COVID policy.
The one billion pieces of data were collected for purposes including COVID tests, contact tracing and the prevention of imported cases — and they were only the first batch of such data to be disposed, the statement said.
China collects vast amounts of data on its citizens — from gathering their DNA and other biological samples to tracking their movements on a sprawling network of surveillance cameras and monitoring their digital footprints.
But since the pandemic, state surveillance has pushed deeper into the private lives of Chinese citizens, resulting in unprecedented levels of data collection. Following the dismantling of zero-COVID restrictions, residents have grown concerned over the security of the huge amount of personal data stored by local governments, fearing potential data leaks or theft.
Dozens of Medical Groups Launch Effort to Battle Health Misinformation
U.S. News & World Report reported:
Alarmed by the increasing spread of medical misinformation, 50 U.S. medical and science organizations have announced the formation of a new group that aims to debunk fake health news.
To tackle the problem, the coalition noted that all member organizations will work towards ensuring that all patients can “have equitable access to and confidence in the accurate, understandable and relevant information necessary to make personally appropriate health decisions.”
To that end, the coalition’s founders say they will strive to improve health and scientific literacy; fact-check and correct misinformation and disinformation, and boost public trust in fact-based science.