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Anti-Vaxxers Won COVID War; SC Bill Would Help Them Kill Childhood Vaccinations
The Post and Courier reported:
In December, the CDC began tracking a significant measles outbreak; by last week, it had grown to 45 cases in 17 jurisdictions, with the largest cluster in Florida, where the state’s surgeon general told parents they didn’t have to follow the standard procedure of keeping their unvaccinated children out of school if they didn’t want to.
And the National Conference of State Legislatures reports that rates of routine vaccinations for kindergartners declined during the pandemic nationwide. In many cases, the reasons had more to do with logistics than vaccine hesitancy, but the rates still hadn’t recovered by the 2022-23 school year. After kindergarten coverage held steady nationally for a decade at 95% for standard vaccines; it dipped to 93% last year. That might not sound like a big deal, but it reflects an increase of 250,000 unvaccinated kids and a significant increase in the chance that a given community will have insufficient herd immunity to prevent an outbreak.
It’s against this backdrop that a S.C. Senate Medical Affairs subcommittee meets this morning to double down on a two-year law the Legislature passed in 2022 to prohibit government and even private businesses from requiring their employees or customers to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
As the S.C. Daily Gazette reports, S.975 would extend those restrictions indefinitely and expand them: Employers couldn’t require employees to get any “novel vaccine” — one that hasn’t been fully approved by the FDA or that was approved within the previous 10 years. Violators would face a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison for the first offense and up to $5,000 and five years for the third offense. At the same time, the bill would reduce the penalty for people who violate quarantine orders when they’re carrying a highly infectious disease.
A Bug in an Irish Government Website That Exposed COVID Vaccination Records Took 2 Years to Publicly Disclose
Two years ago, the Irish government fixed a vulnerability in its national COVID-19 vaccination portal that exposed the vaccination records of around a million residents. But details of the vulnerability weren’t revealed until this week after attempts to coordinate public disclosure with the government agency stalled and ended.
Security researcher Aaron Costello said he discovered the vulnerability in the COVID-19 vaccination portal run by the Irish Health Service Executive (HSE) in December 2021, a year after mass vaccinations against COVID-19 began in Ireland.
In a blog post shared with TechCrunch ahead of its publication, Costello said the vulnerability in the vaccination portal — built on Salesforce’s health cloud — meant that any member of the public registering with the HSE vaccination portal could have accessed the health information of another registered user.
Costello said the vaccine administration records of over a million Irish residents were accessible to anyone else, including full names, vaccination details (including reasons for administering or refusals to take vaccines), and the type of vaccination, among other types of data. He also found internal HSE documents were accessible to any user through the portal.
Countries Closing in on Digital Currencies but U.S. Lagging, Study Shows
A total of 134 countries representing 98% of the global economy are now exploring digital versions of their currencies, with over half in advanced development, pilot or launch stages, a closely followed study on Thursday showed.
The research by the U.S.-based Atlantic Council think tank highlighted that all G20 countries with the exception of Argentina are now in one of those far-along phases although, notably, the United States is falling increasingly behind.
“The biggest headline here is that the divergence between the world’s largest central banks over CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currency) is growing,” the Atlantic Council’s Josh Lipsky said pointing to how much further ahead China, Europe and Japan were.
Supporters say digital currencies will allow new functionality and provide an alternative to physical cash, which seems in terminal decline. But they have also fueled protests in a number of countries over the potential for government snooping.
The risk of the U.S. lagging behind was “a more fractured international payments system” Lipsky added, saying Washington could also lose some of its global finance clout if other countries press on and set the new standards around CBDCs.
We’re Already Living in the Post-Truth Era
For years, experts have worried that artificial intelligence will produce a new disinformation crisis on the internet. Image-, audio-, and video-generating tools allow people to rapidly create high-quality fakes to spread on social media, potentially tricking people into believing fiction is a fact.
But as my colleague Charlie Warzel writes, the mere existence of this technology has a corrosive effect on reality: It doesn’t take a shocking, specific incident for AI to plant doubt into countless hearts and minds.
“It’s never been easier to collect evidence that sustains a particular worldview and build a made-up world around cognitive biases on any political or pop-culture issue,” Charlie writes. “It’s in this environment that these new tech tools become something more than reality blurrers: They’re chaos agents, offering new avenues for confirmation bias, whether or not they’re actually used.”
To Protect Kids Online Today, Let’s Rethink This 1990s Law
In late January, Congress hosted Big Tech chief executives on Capitol Hill for a hearing on their collective failure to protect children online. Senators expressed outrage, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was forced to apologize, but there was no consensus on what action should be taken.
That’s no surprise. Ever since the Supreme Court shot down crucial provisions of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) — Congress’s 1996 attempt to prohibit the knowing transmission of obscene content to minors — legislators on both left and right have been reluctant to pass laws to protect children in our increasingly digital world. Often, they offer the same concerns about regulations’ chilling effect on free speech that the Supreme Court cited in its 1997 Reno v. ACLU decision.
They’re mistaken in doing so. The court’s precedent isn’t as insurmountable as legislators today seem to think it is. In fact, in Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s concurring opinion in Reno, she offered a road map for future lawmakers, writing that one day, technology might make it legally possible for parts of the internet to be partitioned into “adult zones” inaccessible to minors, “much like a bouncer checks a person’s driver’s license before admitting him to a nightclub.”
Nearly three decades later, it’s time to revisit her vision. The problem the CDA was designed to address is exponentially worse today. In 1997, just 35% of households had a computer. Today, 91% of 14-year-olds have a smartphone — giving them unfettered access to the worst of the internet, which has become more toxic, violent and addictive.
Class Action Lawsuits Pile Up Over UnitedHealth Data Breach
UnitedHealth Group (UNH.N) has already been hit with at least six class action lawsuits accusing it of failing to protect millions of people’s personal data from last month’s hack of Change Healthcare, its payment processing unit, with more lawsuits likely to come.
In a motion filed late on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., plaintiffs’ lawyers asked a federal judicial panel to consolidate the six cases in federal court in Nashville, Tennessee, where Change is headquartered and said they expected more cases to be filed.
Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a U.S. health privacy law, companies have 60 days after discovering a data breach to notify affected individuals that their personal information has been compromised.
For breaches affecting more than 500 people, the company must notify federal regulators and prominent media. UnitedHealth has so far not given such a notice.
All of the lawsuits claim that Change failed to safeguard patients’ personal information, putting them at risk of identity theft and privacy violations. Some also allege that patients have been unable to fill prescriptions because their insurance claims cannot be processed, putting their health at risk.
Generative AI’s Privacy Problem
Privacy is the next battleground for the AI debate, even as conflicts over copyright, accuracy and bias continue.
Why it matters: Critics say large language models are collecting and often disclosing personal information gathered from around the web, often without the permission of those involved.
The big picture: Many businesses have grown wary of execs and employees using proprietary information to query ChatGPT and other AI bots — either banning such apps or opting for paid versions that keep business information private.
Driving the news: Several lawsuits seeking class-action status have been filed in recent months alleging Google, OpenAI and others have violated federal and state privacy laws in training and operating their AI services.
What Will the EU’s Proposed Act to Regulate AI Mean for Consumers?
The European Union’s proposed AI law was endorsed by the European parliament on Wednesday and is a milestone in regulating the technology. The vote is an important step towards introducing the legislation.
It is now expected to be rubber-stamped by a council of ministers, becoming law within weeks. However, the act will come into force in stages, with a cascade of deadlines for compliance over the next three years.
The bill matters outside the EU because Brussels is an influential tech regulator, as shown by GDPR’s impact on the management of people’s data. The AI act could do the same.
“Many other countries will be watching what happens in the EU following the adoption of the AI Act. The EU approach will likely only be copied if it is shown to work,” Guillaume Couneson, a partner at the law firm Linklaters, added.
Italy Regulator Fines TikTok $11 Million Over Content Checks
Italy’s competition watchdog has fined three units of social media giant TikTok 10 million euros ($10.94 million) in total for inadequate checks on content potentially harmful to young or vulnerable users, it said on Thursday.
TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, and other social media companies including Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms (META.O), are under pressure from regulators around the globe to protect underage users.
“TikTok has not taken adequate measures to prevent the spreading of such content, and has not fully complied with the guidelines it has adopted, reassuring customers that the platform is a ‘safe’ space,” the watchdog said.
In the United States, where it has about 170 million users, the social media app faces a ban unless its Chinese owners sell within about six months, under the terms of a draft bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday.
