Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.
Nearly 40,000 Army Guard Troops Still Unvaccinated for COVID as Deadline Passes for Them to Get the Shots
Nearly 40,000 troops in the Army National Guard were still unvaccinated against the coronavirus as the deadline passed for them to receive the shots or face being discharged from the service as mandated by the Defense Department.
The deadline, which was Thursday, primarily affects the Army National Guard. The Air Force required Air National Guard members to be fully vaccinated by Dec. 2. Approximately 11.4% of the roughly 336,000 Army National Guard troops — or more than 38,000 members — had not received a dose of the shot as of Monday, according to the National Guard.
The federal government will not pay unvaccinated Guard members starting Friday, the Pentagon has said. That means they won’t be paid when activated under federal status, which includes monthly drill weekends. Unvaccinated Guard members will also not be allowed to participate in federal missions, such as certain assignments to the U.S.-Mexico border.
However, troops might be eligible for pay while performing duties under their state assignments, depending on the state. The governors of Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, Alaska, Iowa, Mississippi and Nebraska have formally asked the Pentagon not to enforce the mandate for Guard members, with some of them filing lawsuits.
Many Preschool Apps Are Tricking Kids Into Spending More Time and Money, Study Says
If you haven’t taken a ‘test drive’ with your children’s game apps, you probably should. A recent study showed that four out of five game apps contain some form of software that tricks children into spending money or pressures them to continue playing even when they’d prefer to be doing something else.
That study analyzed the gaming apps on devices owned by 160 3- to 5-year-olds. The researchers found that with the help of appealing characters some apps would lure children into making purchases or would shame children into continuing play and picking a time to come back.
The longer play continues, the more ads children watch and the more money the app developers make, explained the study’s lead author, Dr. Jenny Radesky, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital.
The Feds Don’t Know How Often They’re Using Facial Recognition
A group of House lawmakers charged with investigating the implications of biometric surveillance empaneled three experts Wednesday to testify about the future of facial recognition and other tools widely employed by the U.S. government with little regard for citizens’ privacy.
The experts described a country — and a world — that is being saturated with biometric sensors. Hampered by few, if any, real legal boundaries, companies and governments are gathering massive amounts of personal data for the purpose of identifying strangers. The reasons for this collection are so myriad and often unexplained.
As is nearly always the case, the development of technologies that make surveilling people a cinch is vastly outpacing both laws and technology that could ensure personal privacy is respected. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), as many as 18 federal agencies today rely on some form of face recognition, including six for which domestic law enforcement is an explicit use.
Push to Rein in Social Media Sweeps the States
Efforts to police speech on social media are spreading across the country, with lawmakers in 34 states pushing bills that are already setting up court battles with tech giants over the First Amendment.
State legislators have introduced more than 100 bills in the past year aiming to regulate how social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter handle their users’ posts, according to POLITICO’s analysis of data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.
However, only three bills have become law, including statutes in Texas and Florida aimed at punishing platforms that Republicans accuse of censoring conservatives — and federal courts have blocked those two states’ measures from taking effect.
The states’ efforts — in the absence of federal action — could test governments’ ability to regulate speech, while forcing some of the nation’s wealthiest tech companies to fight an array of legal battles against laws that could upend their business models. These fights will also present courts with a fundamental debate about how the First Amendment plays out in the online age, including the companies’ own rights to decide what content they host on their platforms.
Google Will Pay U.S. App Developers $90 Million in a Settlement Over App Store Policies
U.S. Android app developers will be able to claim money from a new $90 million fund Google will establish as part of a wider settlement with app makers over the tech giant’s app store practices, the company said Thursday.
The proposed settlement is designed to address app developers’ years-long allegations that Google (GOOGL) (GOOGL) imposes onerous and anticompetitive restrictions on app makers as a condition of hosting their apps on its Google (GOOGL) Play Store.
The deal, which includes several other provisions aimed at benefiting small app makers, marks another shift in the long-running tussle between large tech platforms with significant power to determine what apps wind up on consumer smartphones and the app developers who supply the software.
‘One of the Worst Downturns in Recent History’: Zuck Warns Facebook Employees to Brace for Layoffs
It appears that we are about to hit the motherlode of mass layoffs after none other than Zuck sounded the alarm. According to Reuters, Facebook-owner Meta Platforms (which will likely be undoing its name change just as bitcoin bottoms) has cut plans to hire engineers by at least 30% this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday, as he warned them to brace for a deep economic downturn.
“If I had to bet, I’d say that this might be one of the worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history,” Zuckerberg told workers in a weekly employee Q&A session, audio of which was heard by Reuters.
“I have to underscore that we are in serious times here and the headwinds are fierce. We need to execute flawlessly in an environment of slower growth, where teams should not expect vast influxes of new engineers and budgets,” Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said.
Why Should We Trust Facebook to Build the Metaverse?
When Mark Zuckerberg announced last year that Facebook was changing its name to Meta and that, within five years, the company would transition from being primarily a social media company to a “metaverse” one, many people were skeptical, confused or downright scared.
Zuckerberg is going all-in on the idea, spending billions of dollars to develop futuristic technologies like neural interface wristbands and augmented reality smart glasses that will underpin this new virtual world.
But some see the metaverse as a distraction from the many immediate issues that Facebook and Instagram are dealing with around users’ privacy, safety and mental well-being — and are worried that these new technologies could cause more or worsen existing social problems.
To better understand the promise of the metaverse and the challenges confronting it, Recode spoke with Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta, who recently wrote an 8,000-word essay on the topic.
TikTok Confirms That China-Based Employees Can Access U.S. User Data, but Only Through an ‘Approval Process’
TikTok confirmed that China-based employees of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, have access to U.S. user data under certain circumstances in a letter obtained by The New York Times responding to nine Republican senators’ inquiries about the matter.
“Employees outside the U.S., including China-based employees, can have access to TikTok U.S. user data subject to a series of robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our U.S.-based security team,” TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew wrote in the letter.
A new light was shined on the privacy and security concerns after BuzzFeed News recently reported, based on audio of internal meetings it obtained, that ByteDance employees had repeatedly accessed U.S. user data over at least a four-month period, and that U.S.-based employees did not have permission to access it.
