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Biden White House Urged Meta to Crack Down on ‘Vaccine-Skeptical’ Content on WhatsApp Private Chat Platform
Newly-released communications between the Biden administration and Meta show an effort to crack down on so-called “vaccine-skeptical” content shared on the private communications platform WhatsApp.
Independent journalist David Zweig reported on Friday that the White House went beyond Twitter to curb COVID-related posts. Emails obtained through discovery from the ongoing Missouri v Biden legal battle show email exchanges from the White House to the tech giant began just days after President Biden took office.
Zweig stressed that unlike Facebook and Instagram, both of which are owned by Meta, WhatsApp is an encrypted direct messaging platform. Citing Meta, “90% of WhatsApp messages are from one person to another. And groups typically have fewer than 10 people.”
City Council Members Demand CUNY Lift COVID Vaccine Mandate
A bipartisan group of City Council members is demanding CUNY join much of the rest of society by rescinding its requirement that students taking in-person and hybrid courses be vaccinated for COVID-19.
“We believe it is past time CUNY follow most other major institutions and lift the vaccine mandate for students,” wrote the Council’s eight-member Common Sense Caucus in a letter Thursday to CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez.
The letter notes that while CUNY vaccination requirements remain active, the city last month rescinded an order previously requiring all municipal staffers and most city contractors to be jabbed.
That followed earlier liftings of COVID-19 vaccine mandates by the city Health Department, including for private employers, childcare providers and visitors to city public schools.
2023: The Year Digital Identities Go Mainstream
Since the pandemic, we’ve seen the use of digital identity evolve alongside our hybrid lifestyles, as more businesses and government agencies were pushed to move interactions online rather than in person.
By 2021, several countries began exploring digital vaccine passports for travel given the acute need for convenient, secure confirmation of a traveler’s health status. Although not a concern anymore for most governments and individuals, it’s a use case that drove home the value of digital identities more clearly to both private companies and government entities.
2022 was another major year for digital identity as we saw some foundational pieces fall into place. In the U.S., the TSA authorized the first few companies to use mobile IDs to pass through airport security, including Airside and Apple. Apple took this a step further to begin partnering with states that offer mobile driver’s licenses to enable storing and using them within its digital wallet, including for the TSA screening process.
These moves show an increasing trend toward a world of reusable identity — or a “verify once, share anywhere” approach to digital identity verification. In fact, according to market research firm Liminal, the global market size for shareable or reusable identity will grow from $32.8 billion in 2022 to $266.5 billion by 2027.
Utah’s Social Media Restrictions Won’t Be ‘Foolproof,’ Governor Says
Utah’s recently enacted legislation restricting the way minors use social media will not be “foolproof,” the state’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said Sunday.
The new laws, which will take effect next year, set a digital curfew on social media users younger than 18, require minors to get parental consent to sign up for accounts and demand social media companies verify the ages of users in Utah.
“We understand that there are definitely going to be enforcement issues anytime you wade into this type of industry. It’s going to be tough. We don’t expect that we’re going to be able to prevent every, you know, every young person from getting around this,” Cox said.
“Kids are really smart. That’s one of the problems,” he told host Chuck Todd.
Though he is urging Congress to enact similar federal-level laws, states must lead when it comes to social media regulation, Cox said, predicting that other states will follow Utah’s example, despite potential legal pushback from social media companies.
McCarthy Says House Will Press Ahead With TikTok Bill After CEO’s Testimony
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said that the House will move forward with a proposed TikTok ban bill after the social media platform’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, testified before Congress on Thursday.
“It’s very concerning that the CEO of TikTok can’t be honest and admit what we already know to be true — China has access to TikTok user data,” McCarthy wrote in a tweet on Sunday.
Several lawmakers in recent months have introduced legislation that would prohibit the downloading and use of TikTok in the U.S.
McCarthy said that he would support a nationwide ban on TikTok, noting there’s already a “bipartisan concern” with lawmakers on security risks the social media platform brings.
Popular Apps With Chinese Ties Can Gather More Data Than TikTok
As Congress weighs an unprecedented ban on the wildly popular Chinese-owned TikTok over supposed security concerns, millions of Americans are downloading Chinese-designed apps to their phones that pose greater privacy risks with no outcry from lawmakers or regulators.
Known as mobile virtual private networks, or VPNs, the apps create a virtual tunnel through the internet that disguises a user’s virtual and physical location, in theory rendering them anonymous to the websites they visit, the communications providers that take them there, and advertisers and government snoops trying to suck up information along the way.
But experts have warned for years that everything the VPNs hide, they can see themselves. That means users who are working not to reveal who and where they are as well as what they are doing online are surrendering that very information to the VPNs. Some VPNs have the capability to see even more, including encrypted email content and banking information, because they have been placed in a highly trusted position on user devices.
Some of the most popular VPNs have misled consumers about their practices while disguising their origins, ownership and locations, including apps based in China or controlled by Chinese nationals, according to corporate records reviewed by The Washington Post as well as interviews and researchers.
Lawsuit Claims U of L Health Shares Private Patient Data With Facebook Parent Company Meta
Louisville Courier-Journal reported:
In a lawsuit that could become a class action, the mother of a pediatric psychiatric patient alleges U of L Health shares the personal health information of patients with Meta — Facebook’s parent company — in violation of federal privacy laws.
The suit claims the data includes prescription drug histories and diagnoses, and that the information is automatically sent to Meta through computer code known as the Meta Pixel, embedded into U of L Health’s website.
The complaint notes the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a bulletin on Dec. 1 warning the practice could violate HIPAA, the federal patient privacy law, and that impermissible disclosure of personal health information can cause “myriad harm to individuals, including identity theft, financial loss, discrimination, stigma, mental anguish, or other serious negative consequences to the reputation, health, or physical safety of the individual.”
The Professor Trying to Protect Our Private Thoughts From Technology
Private thoughts may not be private for much longer, heralding a nightmarish world where political views, thoughts, stray obsessions and feelings could be interrogated and punished all thanks to advances in neurotechnology.
In a new book, The Battle for Your Brain, Duke University bioscience professor Nita Farahany argues that such intrusions into the human mind by technology are so close that a public discussion is long overdue and lawmakers should immediately establish brain protections as it would for any other area of personal liberty.
Advances in hacking and tracking thoughts, with Orwellian fears of mind control running just below the surface, is the subject of Farahany’s scholarship alongside urgent calls for legislative guarantees to thought privacy, including freedoms from “cognitive fingerprinting,” that lie within an area of ethics broadly termed “cognitive liberty.”
Farahany, who served on Barack Obama’s commission for the study of bioethical issues, believes that advances in neurotechnology mean that intrusions through the door of brain privacy, whether by way of military programs or by way of well-funded research labs at big tech companies, are at hand via brain-to-computer innovations like wearable tech.
“All of the major tech companies have massive investments in multifunctional devices that have brain sensors in them,” Farahany said. “Neural sensors will become part of our everyday technology and a part of how we interact with that technology.”
France Bans Recreational Apps Like TikTok on Government Devices
France is the latest country to take steps to ban TikTok from government-managed devices. Stanislas Guerini, the Minister of Public Transformation and Service, and his services issued a statement announcing the move and the reasoning behind this change.
But there’s a twist: Instead of simply banning only TikTok, the French government is saying that all recreational apps are now banned from work devices.
TikTok has said several times that the company doesn’t share user data with the Chinese government. The company has tried to reassure European governments by saying that it will set up and run multiple data centers to store local users’ data in Europe in the near future.
So what is a recreational app exactly? Guerini’s office told the AFP and AP news agencies that some of these apps include TikTok (obviously) as well as Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Candy Crush and other games, as well as dating apps.
Big Tech’s Big Downgrade
In recent years, Google users have developed one very specific complaint about the ubiquitous search engine: They can’t find any answers. A simple search for “best pc for gaming” leads to a page dominated by sponsored links rather than helpful advice on which computer to buy.
Meanwhile, the actual results are chock-full of low-quality, search-engine-optimized affiliate content designed to generate money for the publisher rather than provide high-quality answers. As a result, users have resorted to workarounds and hacks to try and find useful information among the ads and low-quality chum. In short, Google’s flagship service now sucks.
And Google isn’t the only tech giant with a slowly deteriorating core product. Facebook, a website ostensibly for finding and connecting with your friends, constantly floods users’ feeds with sponsored (or “recommended”) content, and seems to bury the things people want to see under what Facebook decides is relevant.
All of these miserable online experiences are symptoms of an insidious underlying disease: In Silicon Valley, the user’s experience has become subordinate to the company’s stock price. Google, Amazon, Meta, and other tech companies have monetized confusion, constantly testing how much they can interfere with and manipulate users.
