Login
Bright Data Accused of Scraping Minors’ Information From Instagram
A proposed class-action suit in Israel is accusing data collection company Bright Data of selling personal information about minors that it pulled from Facebook and Instagram, allegedly in violation of local privacy laws.
Plaintiff Roni Rachmian and his 17-year-old daughter filed a claim in an Israeli court on Monday and asked that the class be extended to all users of Meta Platforms Inc.’s social media services in the country, according to the lawsuit seen by Bloomberg ahead of its filing.
They argued that their privacy was violated by Bright Data, an Israel-based company that offers social media scraping tools as a paid service. Specific demands for compensation were not set, but the lawsuit asked that a settlement be larger than ILS 2.5 million ($670,000).
Meta is separately suing Bright Data for harvesting information from Instagram and Facebook. The data collection company has responded with a counter-suit to allow it to continue the practice, maintaining that it only collects public information that isn’t login-protected. Court filings from earlier this year have revealed that Meta in the past hired Bright Data to scrape other sites, even while it condemned the practice.
A Post-Pandemic Backlash Against Vaccines
A vaccine requirement in deep-blue California that once would have seemed like an easy call has become thorny post-pandemic, POLITICO’s Rachel Bluth reports from Sacramento.
A bill that would have required the HPV vaccine for schoolchildren in California has been watered down beyond recognition, a victim of a homegrown anti-vaccine movement that’s become more organized and more successful since the pandemic.
But anti-vaccine activists didn’t do it on their own. The “most powerful thing to get [Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry] to withdraw the mandate was school districts opposing the bill,” said Joshua Coleman, who founded the group V for Vaccine to fight such requirements.
While only a handful of mostly small, rural districts formally opposed the bill, statewide education groups also started to privately pressure the Democratic lawmaker to drop or soften her proposal.
Across the country, blue-state lawmakers have nearly given up attempting to create new vaccine policies and are now simply trying to hold the line on a decade’s worth of public health gains. Attempts to add required vaccines for school kids this year sputtered in Wisconsin, California and Massachusetts, a stunning reversal after a successful push to tighten exemptions for mandated childhood vaccines.
School District Sues TikTok and Other Platforms Over Kids’ Mental Health
A Maryland school district is suing the parent companies of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube for “intentionally cultivat[ing]” harmful product features that have created “a mental health crisis among America’s youth.” These products, the suit alleges, trigger crises that lead young people to skip school, abuse alcohol or drugs, and overall act out in ways that harm Howard County’s “ability to fulfill its educational mission.”
The county says that the strain has become so unbearable that it is at a “breaking point.”
Children, specifically, have been targeted by tech giants for corporate gain, the suit reads. Meta, ByteDance, Google, Snap, and others have focused their attention on creating “self-destructive feedback loops” that exploit the developing brains of young people to boost engagement with their products. While these products are marketed as “social,” they actively promote forms of “disconnection [and] disassociation” that drive kids to forgo “the intimacy of adolescent friendships.”
Howard County is not alone in this crusade to curb big tech‘s reach in the classroom and beyond. The Verge notes that two other school districts in Maryland, as well as districts in at least seven other states, have filed similar lawsuits over the harms of social media use by young people.
WA Faces Spate of Lawsuits From Workers Fired for Refusing COVID Vaccines
Gov. Jay Inslee recently ended the COVID-19 vaccination mandate, but for some of the public workers fired for refusing to comply, the legal battle goes on.
The state is facing more than a dozen lawsuits involving at least 180 ex-employees who allege they were unjustly forced from their jobs after asserting religious or other objections to receiving the vaccines.
The plaintiffs include state troopers, nurses, psychiatrists, mental health counselors, fish biologists and bank regulators, among others. Some had decades of state service. But their careers were cut short after they declined to meet Inslee’s October 2021 deadline to get vaccinated.
In one of the latest cases, 60 former employees of the Washington State Department of Transportation, including ferry workers, engineers and snowplow drivers, sued the state on May 9 in federal court, contending they’d been illegally terminated even though they could have continued their work safely.
BIS to Use AI to Monitor Global Bank Transactions for ‘Money Laundering’
While the IMF is currently gearing up to introduce its new global central bank digital currencies (CBDC) system called the UMU (also known as the Unicoin), The Bank for International Settlements has been busy with multiple projects designed to centralize all international banks and central banks into a single umbrella network that allows for quick cross-border transactions using digital currencies. In other words, a cashless society.
One such concept, called Project Icebreaker, dealt specifically with creating a SWIFT-like bottleneck system that would allow global banks to regulate and eventually homogenize all currencies into a single one-world exchange model that would give them the power to cut out any nation or company that does not meet their ideological approval.
The latest idea from the BIS is Project Aurora, which may be even more disturbing than Icebreaker in its implications. Aurora is designed to use “machine learning” (AI) as a tool to monitor vast flows of financial transactions from all over the world in order to identify specifically flagged patterns. The BIS says that this is meant to discover criminal money laundering structures protected by “money mules.”
However, in order for the AI to sift through global transactions in real-time, corporate banks and governments would have to create extensive streamlined access to accounts and then open the doors wide for the AI to operate with impunity.
The idea of a worldwide AI-integrated bank monitoring system in the hands of the BIS or other globalist institutions is immensely dangerous. One could even imagine a future in which personal accounts are frozen regularly for any number of infractions, from financial to political.
Why AI Panic Is Not About Safety
Is artificial intelligence (AI) as dangerous as nuclear war? Some within the tech industry are now suggesting that’s the case. But even in light of real risks, a closer look reveals that tech insiders may be seeking to benefit from creating panic around AI.
A recent statement by the newly-formed Center for AI Safety warned about the risk of “extinction” of the human race, putting ChatGPT on par with pandemics and atomic weaponry. Among the statement’s signatories are many credible scientists, but of particular note are Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind. These CEOs are also courting U.S. political figures to try and secure more rules, both giving Senate testimony and directly meeting with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Why would the CEOs of companies that have spent countless dollars on AI research suddenly be warning us that they’ve been endangering the human race this whole time? If they really believe that, why did they spend so many resources on AI in the first place?
If Altman is any indication, the industry wants to be regulated, but only on the terms that it sets. That’s a phenomenon known as regulatory capture. Masked by the language of protecting the general public, AI creators are simply pursuing their own particular interests. This becomes clear when you learn about the kind of regulations Altman would prefer. According to The New York Times, he “expressed support for rules that would require makers of large, cutting-edge AI models to register for a government-issued license.”
‘Terrifying’: Massachusetts Man Banned From Facebook After Sharing Cryptic Letter About Democracy’s Demise
A Massachusetts man helped fuel one of the biggest digital dust-ups and social-media mysteries of recent years. And after he did — Chad Jones then experienced the “terrifying” power of Big Tech titans to silence the voices of ordinary Americans.
He’s now doubling down on his efforts to speak out against tyranny in the digital town square and beyond. “The idea that they’re stifling voices as part of the normal course of business is terrifying.”
He said the experience has only stiffened his resolve to speak out on social media and other platforms. He feels that “millions of Americans” learned the same lesson when they were silenced for daring to challenge Anthony Fauci, the federal government and media during the COVID-19 panic.
‘Much Easier to Say No’: Irish Town Unites in Smartphone Ban for Young Children
On the principle of strength in numbers, parents in the Irish town of Greystones have banded together to collectively tell their children they cannot have a smartphone until secondary school.
Parents’ associations across the district’s eight primary schools have adopted a no-smartphone code to present a united front against children’s lobbying.
Schools and parents in the County Wicklow town took the initiative last month amid concern smartphones were fueling anxiety and exposing children to adult material. It is a rare example of an entire town taking joint action on the issue.
The initiative has drawn interest from parents’ associations in Ireland and abroad and prompted Ireland’s health minister, Stephen Donnelly, who lives near Greystones, to recommend it as a nationwide policy.
