Big Brother News Watch
Fauci Says He Has ‘No Idea’ What Elon Musk’s Talking About After the Twitter Chief Threatened to Release the ‘Fauci Files’ + More
Anthony Fauci Says He Has ‘No Idea’ What Elon Musk’s Talking About After the Twitter Chief Threatened to Release the ‘Fauci Files’
Anthony Fauci said he has “no idea” what Elon Musk is talking about after the Twitter chief threatened to release the “Fauci Files” last Sunday.
Fauci told the CBS News podcast “The Takeout”: “I have no idea what he’s talking about. I mean, there’s a lot of misinformation, conspiracy theories and disinformation going on.”
Last Sunday, Twitter CEO Musk teased the release of the “Fauci Files” following his previous criticism of the immunologist, who was director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 until last year. “Hope you’re having a great day 1 2023!” Musk tweeted. “One thing’s for sure, it won’t be boring.”
Australian Open: Players Can Compete Even if They Have COVID — a Year After Government Deported Unvaccinated Djokovic
Tennis players competing at the Australian Open this month will still be able to take part if they test positive for COVID-19, tournament director Craig Tiley said on Monday, a major departure from the tournament’s stringent pandemic policies from the past two years that saw crowds banned from matches and nine-time champion Novak Djokovic be deported over his refusal to get vaccinated.
Australian Open players will not be required to take COVID-19 tests in order to compete in the tournament, Tiley told reporters, according to multiple news outlets. Athletes deciding to test will not need to disclose the results and can play even if they test positive for the virus, Tiley added.
The decision to allow untested, and even COVID-positive, players to compete in the Australian Open marks a major policy shift from the tournament’s strict requirements last year, when players needed to be vaccinated and undergo mandatory testing. The strict rules, which also saw fans locked out of matches to contain an outbreak, meant Novak Djokovic — then the returning champion and an open skeptic of COVID vaccines — was deported on public health grounds and unable to defend his title.
The shift also underscores Australia’s changing approach to the virus after years of implementing some of the toughest COVID curbs in the world. For two years, the country imposed strict lockdowns, severely limited internal movement and almost entirely closed its international borders, trapping tens of thousands of Australians abroad.
A Lawsuit Filed by Seattle’s Public Schools Accuses Meta, TikTok, Google and Snapchat of Creating a Youth Mental Health Crisis
Giant social media companies are accused of “creating a mental health crisis among America’s youth” in a lawsuit filed Friday by the Seattle public schools district.
The suit, which Insider has reviewed, names Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Google and their associated companies as defendants, and slams their business models, claiming they harm youths.
Seattle’s public school system said it had a responsibility to file the suit because children suffering from mental health problems perform worse in school and are less likely to attend at all, affecting the schools’ educational mission.
The lawsuit alleges that the apps “have successfully exploited the vulnerable brains of youth, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of excessive use and abuse of Defendants’ social media platforms.”
COVID-Related Tech Was Exploited for Mass Surveillance, Just as We Were Warned
New revelations show that the COVID pandemic has allowed governments and Big Tech to expand the surveillance-industrial complex that tightens the state’s grip on thought and movement.
A recent batch of Twitter internal documents released by Elon Musk via journalist David Zweig on the platform itself reveals that one of the first meetings that the Biden Administration requested with Twitter executives was on the topic of COVID vaccines and specific high-profile accounts that deviated from the official narrative.
“Twitter did suppress views — many from doctors and scientific experts — that conflicted with the official positions of the White House. As a result, legitimate findings and questions that would have expanded the public debate went missing,” Zweig wrote.
He added that “with COVID, this bias bent heavily toward establishment dogmas,” and cited examples of various experts, including prominent epidemiologists, whose views were censored as a result of being qualified by the non-scientists at Twitter as COVID “misinformation.”
House Republicans to Investigate Big Tech’s Communications With Biden Administration
House Republicans are planning to launch a new subcommittee this week that will investigate communications between Big Tech companies and the Biden administration, a source familiar with the matter confirmed to CNBC.
The anticipated launch of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, reported earlier on Monday by Axios, represents one of the many nods newly elected Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., gave to the conservative faction of the GOP caucus in his long fight to win the gavel. The Wall Street Journal’s opinion section previously reported plans for the panel.
House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who supported McCarthy in his bid for the speakership, is expected to lead the new subcommittee. The panel will investigate communications between the tech companies and the executive branch and search for signs of pressure leading to conservative censorship online.
The new subcommittee is also expected to look into other areas of potential influence and politicization in the government, including in the intelligence community and public health agencies.
U.S. Supreme Court Lets Meta’s WhatsApp Pursue ‘Pegasus’ Spyware Suit
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let Meta Platforms Inc’s (META.O) WhatsApp pursue a lawsuit accusing Israel’s NSO Group of exploiting a bug in the WhatsApp messaging app to install spy software allowing the surveillance of 1,400 people, including journalists, human rights activists and dissidents.
The justices turned away NSO’s appeal of a lower court’s decision that the lawsuit could move forward. NSO had argued that it is immune from being sued because it was acting as an agent for unidentified foreign governments when it installed the “Pegasus” spyware.
WhatsApp in 2019 sued NSO seeking an injunction and damages, accusing it of accessing WhatsApp servers without permission six months earlier to install the Pegasus software on victims’ mobile devices.
New Jersey Schools to Teach Children How to Avoid ‘Disinformation’ in the Name of ‘Democracy,’ ‘Civic Discourse’
Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed an “information literacy” law this week that mandates schools teach K-12 students how to identify “disinformation” in the name of protecting “democracy.”
The bill, signed by Murphy on Wednesday, was sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats in the legislature earlier this year.
Our democracy remains under sustained attack through the proliferation of disinformation that is eroding the role of truth in our political and civic discourse,” Murphy said in a statement. “It is our responsibility to ensure our nation’s future leaders are equipped with the tools necessary to identify fact from fiction.”
Facial Recognition’s Alarming Pitfalls
The breakneck development and deployment of facial recognition technology are outstripping efforts to corral alarming pitfalls. Why it matters: Police, retail stores, airports and sports arenas are rapidly increasing biometric surveillance. But critics say the results are too often blindly trusted, without enough double-checking of matches.
Catch up quick: The latest face-recognition surveillance technology is designed to identify people seen on security cameras in real-time, or close to it. It aims to match security camera footage of someone with images tied to that person’s identity and kept in various databases or publicly available online, such as police mugshots or social media profiles. Facial recognition also lets you unlock smartphones and tablets without a password.
Facial recognition technology has led to at least three prior false arrests — all involving Black men, Wired reported last year. The technology has long been faulted for failures to accurately identify Black faces.
Expect surveillance-based facial recognition to proliferate despite efficacy and ethics concerns, especially in high-security areas. The Transportation Security Administration is testing the tech at major airports.
DoNotPay Offers Lawyers $1 Million to Let Its AI Argue Before the Supreme Court in Their Place
Can artificial intelligence go head-to-head with human lawyers in the highest court in the land?
On Sunday, DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder made a wild proposition to any lawyer slated to argue an upcoming case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Let DoNotPay’s AI lawyer, which is built on OpenAI’s viral GPT-3 API, argue the case before the court, Browder said, in exchange for $1 million. All the human lawyer would need to do is wear AirPods and repeat to the court what DoNotPay’s robot lawyer argues.
As explained by Browder, DoNotPay is proposing this wacky — and possibly illegal — idea to prove that its robot lawyer can handle complex legal cases. Although DoNotPay’s robot lawyer is set to make its debut in a U.S. courtroom next month to help someone contest a parking ticket, Browder wants the robot to go before the Supreme Court to address hypothetical skepticism about its abilities.
China Suspends Social Media Accounts of COVID Policy Critics
China has suspended or closed the social media accounts of more than 1,000 critics of the government’s policies on the COVID-19 outbreak, as the country moves to roll back harsh anti-virus restrictions.
The popular Sina Weibo social media platform said it had addressed 12,854 violations including attacks on experts, scholars and medical workers and issued temporary or permanent bans on 1,120 accounts.
China is forging ahead with a plan to end mandatory quarantines for people arriving from abroad beginning on Sunday.
Beijing also plans to drop a requirement for students at city schools to have a negative COVID-19 test to enter campus when classes resume on Feb. 13 after the holiday break. While schools will be allowed to move classes online in the event of new outbreaks, they must return to in-person instruction as soon as possible, the city education bureau said in a statement Friday.
Thailand Introduces New Entry Regulations as China Reopens Border
Thailand will require international travelers to show proof they are fully vaccinated for COVID before flying to Thailand, according to the country’s aviation regulator, as it prepares for more tourists after China reopened its border on Sunday.
The Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand (CAAT) said in a statement on Saturday that starting early Monday, all foreign arrivals starting early on Monday must prove they are vaccinated or provide a letter certifying that they have recovered from COVID within six months.
Unvaccinated travelers must show a medical certificate explaining why they have not received the vaccine. CAAT said airlines would be responsible for checking documents before passengers board and has released a list of how many doses are required for various types of COVID-19 vaccines on its website.
The new measure will remain in effect at least until the end of January, CAAT said. The vaccination requirement was scrapped by Thailand last October but has been revived as China reopens its border following the easing of its zero-COVID policy.
Appeals Court Blocks Jen Psaki Deposition in Social Media Lawsuit + More
Appeals Court Blocks Jen Psaki Deposition in Social Media Lawsuit
A federal appeals court has blocked efforts by Republican-led states to force former White House press secretary Jen Psaki to testify about efforts by the Biden administration to urge social media firms to take down certain kinds of posts or bar users from posting.
The order on Thursday afternoon from the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is another not-so-veiled rebuke to District Court Judge Terry Doughty, who has been overseeing the suit the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed last year claiming that the administration’s pressure on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube was so intense that it amounted to censorship.
The three-judge appeals court panel said Doughty failed to give adequate weight to longstanding legal principles calling for depositions of current and former senior government officials to be limited to instances where they are truly essential.
The attorneys general and several private individuals have argued that Psaki’s statements about encouraging social media firms to take down misinformation about the coronavirus and about election fraud are grounds to subject her to questioning, but the appeals judges sharply disagreed.
ChatGPT Creator OpenAI Discussing Offer Valuing Company At $29 Billion, Report Says
OpenAI — the artificial intelligence company behind the viral ChatGPT chatbot program — is in discussions to sell shares valuing the firm at $29 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, after the launch of ChatGPT was lauded by many as a revolutionary advance in artificial intelligence despite some problems.
The valuation appears very bullish on the company’s future ability to churn out revolutionary products that are able to generate profits since Reuters reported last month that the company is only expected to make about $80 million in revenue for 2022. OpenAI has reportedly been telling investors it expects to increase its annual revenue to $1 billion by 2024.
Microsoft in 2019 invested $1 billion in OpenAI and is hoping to integrate ChatGPT software with its Bing search engine to drive traffic away from Google, according to Bloomberg. Microsoft is also actively in talks to increase its investment stake, according to the Journal.
Pentagon Has Rescinded COVID Vaccine Mandate: Spokesman
The U.S. Department of Defense has withdrawn its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, a Pentagon official said on Jan. 5.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a Biden appointee, imposed the mandate for all troops in August 2021, saying it was necessary to protect military readiness. The military had kept the mandate, which was for a primary series of a vaccine, in place even as the initial shots have proven increasingly less effective against infection and severe illness.
Even some of the original backers of the requirement, such as House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), said the mandate no longer made sense in light of such developments, and Congress inserted a provision into the 2023 defense funding bill that required Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to rescind the mandate within 30 days of its enactment.
President Joe Biden signed the bill on Dec. 23, 2022. That same day, the Pentagon said it was halting all actions related to the mandate but that it had not yet withdrawn it.
As of late 2022, nearly 8,500 troops had been discharged for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
UI Ends Vaccine, Testing Requirements
The University of Illinois has removed its COVID-19 vaccination and testing requirements for all students and employees, System President Tim Killeen announced.
Since the advent of the pandemic, unvaccinated students and employees on UI campuses were required to keep up a regular testing schedule.
In the 2021 fall semester, after the vaccines debuted, all students and staff had to receive their primary vaccination series or face stricter testing guidelines. The Urbana-Champaign campus has maintained a 95% vaccination rate since then.
235 Million Twitter Accounts Were Leaked in a Huge Data Breach
The email addresses tied to 235 million Twitter accounts have been shared in an online hacking forum, per the Washington Post. While it doesn’t look like any other information leaked out, the obvious worry here is that malicious actors could potentially expose the identities of people who like to post anonymously using said email addresses. In countries that crack down hard on political dissent, for example, that could be a huge problem for online activists.
Right now, the consensus seems to be that these accounts were scraped in late 2021 using an exploit that Twitter identified and fixed in January 2022. The cybersecurity website Have I Been Pwned added this leak to its database, so you can go there, enter your email address and find out if your account was affected by the hack.
The Twitter Purge Continues: Musk Lays off About 40 Data Scientists and Engineers Working on Ad Team
For years Twitter had operated less like a company and more like a cult compound for leftist ideologues, with free lunches, yoga rooms, smoothie, wine and espresso bars, and minimal work buffered by pointless meetings and near zero productivity.
Those days appear to be over. The latest proof? Twitter laid off “about 40 data scientists and engineers working on the advertising team” late on Wednesday night of this week, according to The Information.
Elon Musk has also been systematically releasing internal communications from the company confirming that it was working with intelligence agencies to censor users. He has promised a forthcoming “Fauci Files” disclosure of more additional internal documents slated for this week.
Federal Reserve Recommends Banks Stay Away From Crypto as Possible ‘Central Bank Digital Currency’ Is Weighed
Regulators advised banks and other financial institutions to avoid cryptocurrencies, a warning that comes after the implosion of digital asset company FTX and deliberations over a possible central bank digital currency in the United States.
Officials at the Federal Reserve have long considered the creation of a central bank digital currency which, unlike bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies, would be managed by policymakers and tethered to the dollar.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has told lawmakers that his “mind is open” to a digital dollar, noting he was “legitimately undecided” on whether the “benefits outweigh the costs” of central bank digital currencies. “We would want very broad support in society and in Congress,” he remarked.
Critics of central bank digital currencies assert that digital assets present a number of privacy and security concerns. Republican members of the House Financial Services Committee have issued a series of principles that any potential digital dollar project must fulfill, including the establishment of privacy guarantees, the promotion of private sector innovation, and the protection of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Many Fired for Refusing COVID Vaccine Await Decision in Suit Against Blue Cross Blue Shield + More
Many Fired for Refusing COVID Vaccine Await Decision in Suit Against Blue Cross Blue Shield
Lawsuits against Blue Cross Blue Shield continue to pour in, one year after hundreds of people were fired for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Two people say their religious beliefs were mocked when their exemption requests were denied, and attorneys say the verdict in cases like this could set the precedent for generations to come.
Karla Lockard filed for a religious exemption and was later told she would have an interview with a representative from the health insurance company. Three weeks later via email, she learned her exemption request was denied, and if she did not comply, she would lose her job.
Matt Housepian’s religious exemption request was also denied. He along with Lockard and about 250 others were fired, and the majority are now suing.
The U.S.’s Largest Education Department Just Blocked ChatGPT
Students and teachers at New York City schools no longer have access to OpenAI’s text generation language model ChatGPT, following fears that it may “spell the end of high school English.”
As reported by Chalkbeat, Jenna Lyle, a spokesperson for NYC’s Department of Education claimed that “negative impacts on student learning, and concerns about the accuracy and safety of content” drove the ban.
Simply put, the local education authority is worried that students will use the artificially intelligent ChatGPT to write their graded work for them, making them unlikely to engage with the material, and harder for those grading the work to tell it apart from work written entirely by a human.
If high school students are so unmotivated about the subject in front of them that they’re driven to let AI writers do the work rather than engage, that should be ringing alarm bells to educators not that their system is crumbling, but that the system was never use-appropriate in the first place.
ABC Argues Ingo Rademacher’s COVID Vaccine Refusal Wasn’t Based on Religion
The Hollywood Reporter reported:
ABC is asking an L.A. judge to toss Ingo Rademacher’s lawsuit over his firing from General Hospital for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine, arguing that the actor’s beliefs aren’t religious in nature and he was likely going to be written off anyway.
Rademacher was fired from the long-running soap in November 2021 after refusing to comply with the network’s vaccine mandate. The actor in December 2021 sued the network. His claims include religious and disability discrimination, invasion of privacy and political retaliation, all of which ABC argues don’t survive legal scrutiny.
Rademacher submitted a vaccine exemption request because of his “deeply and sincerely held moral belief that my body is endowed by my creator with natural processes to protect me and that its natural integrity cannot ethically be violated by the administration of artificially created copies of genetic material, foreign to nature and experimental.”
The network says the actor stonewalled the employee relations department during the review process and refused to give details about his religious views, claiming the questioning was discriminatory and a violation of his civil rights.
EU Agrees on Response to China’s COVID Wave — but It’s Not Mandatory
European diplomats have agreed on a raft of travel-related measures including facemasks, pre-flight testing and wastewater surveillance in response to the COVID wave currently engulfing China — raising the prospect of retaliatory action from Beijing.
However, none of the agreed measures are mandatory, leaving it to individual countries to decide whether to implement them.
The diplomats agreed that EU countries would recommend all passengers on flights to and from China wear high-grade face masks, and would issue advice to travelers on hygiene and health measures. However, the wording of the remaining actions leaves countries with a fair bit of wiggle room. They are “strongly encouraged” to introduce requirements for negative pre-departure tests 48 hours before leaving China, as well as “encouraged” to randomly test passengers arriving from China and sequence positive results.
“Lots of countries actually want a restrictive approach a lot, but scientific evidence is not too supportive of this,” one diplomat told POLITICO.
Cobb County Families Win Appeal in Lawsuit Over Mask Order
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported:
A victory for four Cobb County families in an ongoing lawsuit over COVID-19 policies in schools could mean more classroom support for students with disabilities across Georgia, said lawyers for the students.
In fall 2021, four students with medical conditions like acute myeloid leukemia and severe asthma and their parents sued the Cobb school district, school board members and Superintendent Chris Ragsdale for violating the students’ rights. The suit alleged the students were unable to attend in-person schooling and would not receive an equitable education remotely if the district didn’t implement recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including a mask mandate.
Cobb stopped requiring masks in the fall of 2021. A federal judge in the Northern District of Georgia denied the families’ request to impose stricter COVID-19 regulations in the school district. But after a yearlong appeal process, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the 11th Circuit recently reversed that decision.
Sweden to Require Negative COVID Tests for Travelers From China
Sweden will require travelers from China to show they have tested negative for COVID before they can enter the country, the Nordic country’s government said on Thursday.
“The Swedish government has this morning decided on temporary restrictions on entry for journeys from China to Sweden,” Health Minster Jakob Forssmed told reporters.
On Wednesday, the EU’s Integrated Political Crisis Response group (IPCR) recommended that member states should introduce restrictions.
WhatsApp Launches a Tool to Fight Internet Censorship
Internet shutdowns, at their worst, can involve connections being completely shut, while censorship measures can block access to specific websites or apps. Disrupting the internet is widely considered a tactic to undermine people’s human rights. There are multiple ways people can try to dodge censorship and internet shutdowns — although, there’s no one simple way to restore connectivity for millions of people at once.
Tools to help people get around censorship are increasing. Today, WhatsApp — Meta’s end-to-end encrypted messenger that’s used by more than 2 billion people a month — is expanding its anti-censorship measures.
In particular, the company is making it possible for people facing censorship to use WhatsApp through proxy connections, potentially allowing them to communicate when a country has blocked the app.
Proxies can help people avoid censorship by essentially disguising their traffic. If WhatsApp is blocked in a country, for example, officials doing the blocking are likely to stop devices communicating with WhatsApp’s infrastructure. When someone connects to a proxy server, their traffic is routed through this server before being passed to WhatsApp. The extra step dodges filters and blocks that may have been put in place.
Nature’s Soundtrack Reveals the Secrets of Degradation
Digital listening is becoming the most powerful new scientific tool for observing and preserving our natural environment. From the Arctic to the Amazon, scientists are covering the globe with networks of digital microphones. Citizen scientists are using open-source, DIY devices like the AudioMoth — a handheld device not much larger than a credit card — to listen in on nature’s sounds. These devices detect sounds inaudible to humans: from low-frequency infrasounds made by elephants and whales to high-frequency ultrasounds made by mice, bats and even plants.
In 2023, our newfound listening powers will allow us to exponentially accelerate environmental monitoring, measure the health of ecosystems, track the sonic signatures of climate change, reveal the existence of entirely new species and even rediscover species once thought to be extinct.
But these innovations are also being used to attempt to domesticate new species. At the Free University of Berlin, researchers have devised AI algorithms to train robots that buzz and hum like honeybees, successfully communicating simple commands to the hive. In 2023, these robots will be inserted into networked “smart” beehives to coordinate and direct honeybee behavior, including the choice of nectar-harvesting sites.
In 2023, the United Nations Environment Program will advance a new framework that treats environmental data as a global commons, establishing open global standards and governance frameworks for environment data as a digital public good and implicitly condemning environmental data hoarding.
The debate over the dangers of surveillance capitalism will extend into the environmental arena. We hope that the use of digital bioacoustics to expand our ability to monitor the environment, regenerate ecosystems and engage in rudimentary attempts at interspecies communication will deepen humanity’s affinity with other species, instead of enabling us to further domesticate and dominate them.
Black Man Wrongfully Jailed for a Week After Face Recognition Error, Report Says
Police in Louisiana reportedly relied on an incorrect facial recognition match to secure warrants to arrest a Black man for thefts he did not commit.
Randal Reid, 28, was in jail for almost a week after the false match led to his arrest, according to a report published Monday on NOLA.com, the website of the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate newspaper. Reid told the newspaper that he had never even been to Louisiana.
Reid was booked into the DeKalb County jail as a fugitive but was let go on Dec. 1, a jail official said.
Reid’s lawyer, Tommy Calogero, said that Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office detectives “tacitly” admitted the error and rescinded the warrant, the report said. “I think they realized they went out on a limb making an arrest based on a face,” Calogero said.
Djokovic Will Likely Miss Indian Wells and Miami Open Due to U.S. COVID Vaccine Mandate + More
Djokovic Will Likely Miss Indian Wells and Miami Open Due to U.S. COVID Vaccine Mandate
Tennis star Novak Djokovic is likely to miss the Indian Wells and Miami Open tournaments for the second year in a row as the 21-time Grand Slam winner, who has refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine, will not be able to enter the U.S. after the Transport Security Administration’s (TSA) decision to extend its vaccine mandate for all foreign travelers until at least April 10.
Djokovic has not discussed his vaccination status recently but has previously said he is careful about everything that goes into his body and he had decided not to take the COVID-19 shot based on all information available to him.
The Serbian tennis star is currently playing in the Adelaide International tennis tournament in Australia, his first tennis event in the country after he was dramatically deported last year due to his vaccination status.
Djokovic’s participation in the U.S. Open will depend on when U.S. officials decide to lift the vaccine mandate. The former world number-one player missed last year’s final Grand Slam event due to the vaccine mandate. The U.S. now remains the only Grand Slam host nation with a rule banning the entry of unvaccinated foreign visitors.
Meta’s New Year Kicks off With Over $410M+ in Fresh EU Privacy Fines
Meta is kicking off the New Year with more privacy fines and corrective orders hitting its business in Europe. The latest swathe of enforcement relates to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) complaints over the legal basis it claims to run behavioral ads.
The Facebook owner’s lead data protection watchdog in the region, the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), announced today that it’s adopted final decisions on two of these long-running inquiries — against Meta-owned social networking site, Facebook, and social photo-sharing service, Instagram.
The DPC’s press release today announces financial penalties of €210 million (~$223M) for Facebook and €180M (~$191M) for Instagram — and confirms the European Data Protection Board (EDPB)’s binding decision last month on these complaints that contractual necessity is not an appropriate basis for processing personal data for behavioral ads.
These new sanctions add to a pile of privacy fines for Meta in Europe last year — including a €265M penalty for a Facebook data-scraping breach; €405M for an Instagram violation of children’s privacy; €17M for several historical Facebook data breaches; and a €60M penalty over Facebook cookie consent violations — making for a total of €747M in (publicly disclosed) EU data protection and privacy fines handed down to the adtech giant in 2022.
TSA Quietly Extends COVID Vaccine Requirement to Enter U.S.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has quietly extended the requirement for visitors to the United States to have proof of COVID-19 vaccination.
The United States is the only Western country and one of the few remaining countries worldwide to require such proof of entry. The latest TSA security directive is effective from Jan. 9 to April 10, 2023.
It requires foreign aircraft operators to require each non-U.S., nonimmigrant citizen to present a paper or digital documentation for “proof of being fully vaccinated against COVID-19,” or documentation proving the person is excepted from taking the vaccine, before boarding a flight to the United States.
Europe’s Hot Mess Response to China’s COVID Surge
Pandemic politics is back. Three years into the COVID-19 crisis, which upended lives across the globe and led the EU to promise to work better together when the next health crisis emerged, countries have once again been involved in a political tug-of-war.
China’s decision to lift its zero-COVID policy has led to a surge in cases that has alarmed the world. But early attempts at a joint EU response were dashed when Italy announced its own border control measures on arrivals from China.
While the EU is now inching toward a coordinated approach on travel measures for arrivals from China — including pre-departure testing, masks on flights and testing wastewater for possible new variants — and is set to hold a meeting of its crisis response body on Wednesday, it comes after countries one-by-one announced unilateral measures for travelers arriving from China.
Social Media Triggers Children to Dislike Their Own Bodies, Says Study
Three out of four children as young as 12 dislike their bodies and are embarrassed by the way they look, increasing to eight in 10 young people aged 18 to 21. The findings come from a major new study warning that social media represents a significant risk to the current and future health of today’s young generations.
The findings come from a new survey of 1,024 children and young people aged 12 to 21 years old by stem4, the youth mental health charity. Based on the findings, the charity says that urgent action is needed.
Twitter Lifting Ban on Political Ads
Twitter on Tuesday announced plans to scale back its ban on political ads and allow more “cause-based” advertising on the platform.
“We believe that cause-based advertising can facilitate a public conversation around important topics. Today, we’re relaxing our ad policy for cause-based ads in the U.S. We also plan to expand the political advertising we permit in the coming weeks,” the company’s Safety team Tweeted.
“Moving forward, we will align our advertising policy with that of TV and other media outlets,” Twitter said.
Twitter Files Tip of Iceberg for Needed Church-Style Committee
The Twitter Files have revealed in stunning detail a largely successful bid by the U.S. national security apparatus to manipulate public opinion at a mass scale by imposing a censorship regime on social media platforms.
This scandal — a conspiracy to police speech in violation of the First Amendment — deserves a congressional probe to reveal the full extent of the collusion between myriad government agencies and Big Tech companies, hold the malefactors to account, and propose laws to prevent it in the future.
Yet this scandal is just one of many perpetrated by the Deep State in recent years. Numerous federal agencies have demonstrated a level of politicization and weaponization so systemic and far-reaching that it demands an expansive investigation — one that could bring about a radical restructuring of the entire security apparatus.
Apple Joins Amazon as Second Company to Lose $1 Trillion in Value in 2022
In a year marked by economic downturns and layoffs plaguing tech, two of the industry’s biggest heavyweights both lost more in terms of valuation than any other company before it. First came Amazon, and now, Apple. Combined, the two companies have shed roughly $2 trillion worth of valuation in around 12 months. If they were a country, Amazon and Apple’s recent stock valuation dip would surpass the combined GDPs of Sweden, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia and Argentina.
Apple’s recent valuation plunge, as reported on by Axios and elsewhere, marks an abrupt shift from the beginning of 2022, when the iPhone maker briefly became the first company in history to ever cross over the vaunted $3 trillion valuation goalpost.
Though pandemic disruptions in China, supply chain constrictions and rising inflation all took a toll on Apple over the year, the company’s already bleeding wound was sliced wide open Tuesday following a new report suggesting Apple internally expects less demand for its gadgets and gizmos this year. The ensuing investor panic led Apple’s stock to decline by more than 4%.
Google Chrome’s ‘Incognito’ Mode Might Not Keep You so Hidden
Google Chrome and almost all other web browsers offer an “incognito” mode, or private mode, designed to allow you to browse the web privately. As a result, any websites you visit in incognito mode will not appear in your browsing history, nor will your personal information be remembered. However, when using incognito mode, are you actually browsing completely incognito?
While using Incognito mode on Chrome, recent reports have shown that Google can still: track every search you make on Google; track every suggested link you click on; navigate you to a URL; just as buildings and houses have a street address, webpages also have unique addresses to help people locate them. On the Internet, these addresses are called URLs.
This is all because your IP address (or your unique address that identifies a device on the internet or a local network) is not concealed when using incognito mode, so your internet service provider (ISP) still handles all your Domain Name System (DNS) requests. DNS translates human-readable domain names (for example, www.amazon.com) to machine-readable IP addresses (for example, 192.0. 2.44).
This means that even though your browsing history might not show up in the history toolbar while in incognito mode, your ISP still has a detailed account of every site you visit and keeps a database of your web history. Making it possible for a third-party source, including the government, to access your browsing history.
