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Amazon Is Using My Grocery Purchases to Sell Me Prescription Drugs
The weirdest thing happened to me recently. I ordered some groceries on Amazon Fresh. When you check out, Amazon recommends more things you might like to buy, usually related to your purchase.
But this time, Amazon offered up “Treatments for High Cholesterol” along with a link for an Amazon One Medical consultation as well as links to prescription medications.
That’s weird, because my doctor and my wife are the only people who know about my cholesterol numbers. They’re pretty good, too! But there are certainly data points, including my age, my food preferences, and my past purchases, maybe even news stories I’ve read elsewhere on the web, that might suggest I’d be a good candidate for a statin, the type of cholesterol-lowering medication Amazon recommended to me.
And while I’m used to Amazon recommending books I might like or cleaning products I might want to buy again, it felt pretty creepy to push prescription drugs in my direction.
Simply seeing Amazon target me for a health condition draws attention to the unnerving amount of information Amazon has gleaned from my online activity — as well as the fact that Amazon is a health care company, one that can collect troves of data and push customers toward treatments accordingly.
Google Is Training AI to ‘Hear’ When You’re Sick. Here’s How It Works.
Google’s AI arm is reportedly tapping into “bioacoustics” — a field that blends a combination of biology and sounds that, in part, help researchers gain insights on how pathogen presence affects human sound.
As it turns out, our sounds convey tell-tale information about our well-being.
According to a Bloomberg report, the search-engine giant built an AI model that uses sound signals to “predict early signs of disease.”
In places where there is difficulty accessing quality healthcare, this technology can step in as an alternative where users need nothing but their smartphone’s microphone.
It was trained on 300 million, two-second audio samples that include coughs, sniffles, sneezes and breathing patterns.
Google’s bioacoustics-based AI model is called HeAR (Heath Acoustic Representations).
France to Trial Ban on Mobile Phones at School for Children Under 15
France is to trial a ban on mobile phones at school for pupils up to the age of 15, seeking to give children a “digital pause” that, if judged successful, could be rolled out nationwide from January.
Just under 200 secondary schools will take place in the experiment that will require youngsters to hand over phones on arrival at reception.
It takes the prohibition on the devices further than a 2018 law that banned pupils at primary and secondary schools from using their phones on the premises but allowed them to keep possession of them.
Announcing the trial on Tuesday, the acting education minister, Nicole Belloubet, said the aim was to give youngsters a “digital pause.” If the trial proves successful, the ban would be introduced in all schools from January, Belloubet said.
Yelp Files Antitrust Lawsuit Against Google
Yelp sued Google on Wednesday, accusing the tech giant of violating antitrust law by abusing its monopoly over search to give itself an advantage in local search services and advertising.
It argues that Google has diverted traffic away from competitors, like Yelp, and toward its own “inferior” local search product.
“This is a case about Google, the largest information gatekeeper in existence, abandoning its stated mission to deliver the best information available to its consumers and instead forcing its own low-quality local search content on them,” the filing reads.
Yelp alleges that Google’s practices have resulted in “stagnant or diminished traffic” to it and other rivals despite “objectively superior offerings,” reducing their advertising revenue and raising costs.
“For years, Google has leveraged its monopoly in general search to pad its own bottom line at the expense of what’s best for consumers, innovation, and fair competition,” said Aaron Schur, Yelp’s general counsel, in a statement.
Court Says Section 230 Doesn’t Shield TikTok From ‘Blackout’ Challenge Lawsuit
In 2021, a 10-year-old girl named Nylah Anderson accidentally choked to death on a dog leash she had wrapped around her neck.
Anderson had been compelled to engage in this dangerous behavior by the “blackout challenge,” a viral game circulating on TikTok at the time. In 2022, Bloomberg reported that this challenge, which encouraged children to choke themselves with household items and then film their own loss of consciousness (and, in most cases, subsequent revival), had been linked to as many as 20 deaths.
A court previously held that Anderson’s mother, Tawainna Anderson, couldn’t sue TikTok because of Section 230, the controversial internet law that affords internet platforms legal immunity for the content posted by third parties on their sites. Now, a U.S. court has sought to overturn that previous ruling, saying that TikTok will have to defend itself against the lawsuit without using Section 230 as an excuse for its actions.
The opinion argues, Anderson’s daughter didn’t just happen to come across the “blackout challenge” while perusing TikTok’s site. Instead, the platform’s algorithm served Anderson’s daughter the “challenge” via her “For You Page,” which indicates that the site played an active role in distributing the material.
