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Amazon Delivery Driver Smart Glasses Will Snap Pictures of… Everything?
A few days ago, I crossed paths with an Amazon delivery driver who was wearing some odd-looking glasses. I paused, wondering if it was a pair of the new AI smart glasses (I reported on them last year) or if he just had questionable taste in eyewear. After Wednesday’s news, my curiosity has evolved into concern.
In a Bloomberg opinion piece, reporter Dave Lee shared his thoughts on the new AI smart glasses based on an interview with Amazon executive Viraj Chatterjee, who is spearheading the rollout. According to the report, Amazon aims to have 5,000 drivers wearing the glasses by the end of 2026, expanding to more than 20,000 by the end of 2027.
The e-commerce giant says the new AI smart glasses will track a driver’s shift from beginning to end to ensure quicker, more reliable deliveries, reduce errors and streamline delivery by giving drivers hands-free guidance. But Bloomberg’s Lee said that “the company is sleepwalking into yet another invasion-of-privacy furor.”
New York Alleges Tiktok Gave Teens, Children a Placebo Safety Feature Instead of a Real One
TikTok gave teens and children access to a placebo safety feature instead of a real one that would have let them refresh their recommendations in an experiment, according to allegations in New York’s lawsuit against the social media platform.
Reuters reports that TikTok’s experiments involved thousands of users, including teens and children, who had opted to use safety features like “Algo Refresh,” a tool that allows users to reset their recommendations and stop seeing unwanted or potentially harmful content.
Although the users believed that they had activated the feature, their feeds didn’t change, unlike those of users who weren’t part of the experiment and had access to a fully functioning version of the tool.
‘Has No Friends’: Amazon Is Keeping Amazingly Detailed Records on Its Customers and They Are Downright Insulting
Would you like a rude, and perhaps slightly humorous, reminder of how much data surveillance Amazon conducts on its customers? Have we got the thing for you!
On Tuesday, one customer shared how she accidentally stumbled on an obscure section on the Amazon website that most of us overlook. It contained, to her horror, a “page of assumptions that Amazon has made about me based on my purchases and I’m literally speechless.”
In a screenshot she provided, she highlighted one standout. Amazon, with brutal objectivity, asserted that she “has flat buttocks.” “I mean it ain’t wrong but damn did you have to call me out like that?” the customer wrote in the Threads post.The post quickly went viral, racking up well over a million views. Soon, others were sharing the strange dossiers that the e-commerce giant was keeping on them — some of it invasive, some of it funny, and some of it bizarre.
A few examples were also downright insulting. The Amazon page said that one woman “has no friends” — in addition to describing her as a “fifty-year-old man.” Another customer’s page said she hasn’t “worn a medium size in anything in years.” And another said the customer “has a stomach that hangs over their vagina.”
Some got creepy. “Uses phone in the shower to read Kindle books,” Amazon said of one customer, who confirmed that the habit was true. “I mean yes but wtf,” she wrote.
Meta’s Muse AI Collects Private User Data
Meta’s Muse AI agents are gaining traction in the U.S., with the app surpassing 5 million downloads last week. So it’s worth reviewing the information Meta is gathering to power its Muse recommendations, including the specific types of personal info that Muse can infer and track, based on people’s interactions with the app.
Meta’s Muse personal agents are designed to provide guidance on virtually every aspect of users’ lives, including giving suggestions on health, finances and relationships. In order to do that, Muse needs to take in more personal data than Meta’s other apps have ever needed.
However, previous research has shown that Facebook likely knows more about users than their friends or family, so this intake of personal information seems like a potential concern. In addition, Meta has a concerning track record of repeatedly misusing people’s data, which should make this a bigger consideration.
Why Arturo Béjar Left Meta — and Blew the Whistle: ‘I Don’t Recall Mark Ever Being Empathetic’
The Social Reckoning hits cinemas this Friday, but the real world has already been working on a sequel — or rather, a threequel. Directed by Aaron Sorkin, the movie is a follow-up to The Social Network, detailing the further misadventures of Mark Zuckerberg and his social media empire, and in particular Frances Haugen, the employee who in 2021 leaked internal documents that appeared to show Facebook was aware of the harms its products had inflicted.
It’s no spoiler to reveal the film climaxes with Haugen’s testimony to the US Senate, on 5 October 2021. That very same day, Arturo Béjar, a consultant on the wellbeing team of Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook), hit send on a long-gestating email to Zuckerberg and other senior Facebook executives on a similar theme.
“I wanted to bring to your attention what I believe is a critical gap in how we as a company approach harm, and how the people we serve experience it,” Béjar began, before laying out some shocking statistics from his team’s survey. For example: 24.4% of 13-15-year-olds on Instagram said they had received unwanted advances, and 21.8% said they had been the target of bullying on the platform in the past seven days.
Most US Voters Say Trump, Congress Don’t Take AI Risks Seriously, Reuters/Ipsos Poll Finds
U.S. News & World Report reported:
Most US voters think President Donald Trump’s administration and Congress are not taking the risks of AI seriously enough and want the government to write new regulations for the technology, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The six-day survey, which ended on Monday, showed that wide swaths of the electorate see AI as a major threat to American jobs, underscoring growing skepticism of the technology from voters across the political spectrum.
The fast-advancing technology has become a matter of keen national interest amid reports of AI agents running amok and hacking into corporate computer networks, and warnings from prominent researchers that it could one day pose an existential threat to humanity. Noisy, power-hungry data centers that power AI also increasingly pose a nuisance when they pop up near neighborhoods while jacking up utility bills.
