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Can the U.S. Ban TikTok? Here’s What Would Happen If They Tried
The U.S. should take steps to ban the social media platform TikTok, according to comments made by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner Brendan Carr. Questions have been raised on how this could be done and what roadblocks may prevent the U.S. from being able to do this, however.
Carr cited recent revelations about how TikTok and ByteDance handle U.S. user data. He warned there should be concern about data from U.S. companies flowing back to China.
Despite the calls for TikTok to be banned, a recent Tech Crunch report highlighted why this is unlikely to happen, and how it would prove to be difficult to enforce. “It would be tremendously unpopular. The disaffected-youth vote is supremely important right now, and any President, Senator or Representative who supports such a ban would be given extreme side-eye by the youth,” the report said.
One of the other roadblocks that would likely occur is how would a ban be implemented. The FCC would have no jurisdiction on the matter. Even with a supposed national security threat, the Pentagon again would have no international jurisdiction, according to the report. Both Apple and Google can’t be forced to by Congress as they are protected by the First Amendment.
In addition to these reasons, an attempt at a ban would quickly become a messy, drawn-out contested legal battle with no guarantees of success, according to Tech Crunch. The report went on to suggest rather than a ban, the U.S. should focus on making it difficult for TikTok to operate in the country.
SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher Celebrates Disney Dropping Vaccine Mandates on 12 Shows
The Hollywood Reporter reported:
The president of Hollywood’s largest union is celebrating Disney ending vaccine mandates on several U.S.-based TV shows.
“@Disney pulls the plug on vaccine mandates! Way to go Mickey!!!” the leader of the performers’ union SAG-AFTRA and former The Nanny star Fran Drescher tweeted on Saturday. In an attached video, Drescher voiced her opposition to these mandates. “To think that every human on the planet can take one vaccine is ludicrous,” she said. “And to make that one vaccine the criteria for who is allowed to work, travel, dine, go to the theater, et cetera, is an infringement on the Disabilities Act, the freedom of religion act and body sovereignty.”
Disney recently dropped vaccine mandates on 12 TV productions on which it is the lead studio, The Hollywood Reporter confirmed on Monday. The productions were notified last week that vaccines were no longer required on “Zone A” of the production.
Deadline, which was the first to report the news on Saturday, noted that ABC’s The Rookie and The Rookie: Feds still require vaccines for Zone A, and Disney is not the lead studio on those productions.
Berkshire Health System Relents, Withdrawing Booster Mandate to 3,000 Employees
Berkshire Health Systems will no longer require its 3,000-member workforce to receive the bivalent booster against the coronavirus, ending a mandate that drew resistance, including an online petition signed by 890 people that accused the company of bullying workers.
The nonprofit announced Monday it had dropped the booster mandate. In a statement, BHS said that while data on the effectiveness of the booster shows it to be effective at greatly reducing the severity of illness, “it may be less effective at preventing transmission of the virus.”
After the mandate was announced, opposition quickly arose. One BMC nurse told The Eagle that the requirement to receive the booster, by Dec. 15, had prompted her to look for a new job.
The company said that the reality of a booster that is less helpful in preventing transmission led to its change in policy.
Faculty and Staff Not Required to Receive New Booster Shot
While students will be required to get a second booster shot before returning for the spring semester, the same mandate will not apply to faculty and staff.
Announced Oct. 27, the booster shot requirement was directed towards undergraduate, graduate and professional students in line with CDC recommendations. In order to be considered “up to date” via CDC guidelines, one must receive a primary vaccine series along with the “bivalent” booster. The new booster protects against both the original virus and several variant strains of the COVID-19 virus, which has “changed over time.”
Yet faculty and staff are not required to be “up to date” in order to work in the spring.
Yale had previously mandated an original COVID-19 vaccine series for faculty, staff and postdoctoral trainees for those returning to the University in August 2021. Last December, the University required faculty and staff to receive a booster shot as soon as they were eligible.
Lexington TV Station, Parent Company Face Lawsuit Over COVID Vaccine Mandate
Lexington Herald-Leader reported:
Two former employees of Lexington-based news station WKYT and parent company Gray Media are suing both the station and the company after they were allegedly fired for not getting vaccinated against COVID-19.
DeAnn Stephens Cox and Ashley Landis filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court last week. Cox held a variety of positions at WKYT for 27 years. Landis is a former national sales manager for the company. Cox and Landis allege in the suit that the media outlet violated the Title VII Civil Rights Act for sex and religious discrimination, the American Disabilities Act, the Kentucky Civil Rights Act and the Kentucky Wage and Hour Act after both women were fired in October 2021.
Both Cox and Landis are seeking compensatory and actual damages including past and future pay and benefits, compensatory damages for emotional distress and mental anguish, equitable relief, punitive damages and an award of attorney fees.
Residents Clash With Chinese Authorities Over COVID Rules
Police in northeastern China said that seven people have been arrested following a clash between residents and authorities enforcing COVID-19 quarantine restrictions.
The violence comes as China reports new cases nationwide, with 2,230 cases reported Tuesday in the southern manufacturing and technology hub of Guangzhou.
While the numbers remain relatively low, China has relentlessly pursued its strict “zero-COVID” policy of quarantines, lockdowns and daily or near-daily compulsory testing.
Anti-pandemic measures have prompted backlashes across the country, forming a rarely-seen challenge to Communist Party authority. It wasn’t immediately clear who was arrested after the clash. News of the arrests appeared on social media Tuesday morning but was erased by the country’s censors before noon.
China’s Digital Yuan Works Just Like Cash — With Added Surveillance
Visa has long paid to be the sole payment processor at the Olympic Games. But at the Winter Olympics in Beijing earlier this year it had competition — from the Chinese government.
Visitors could, after scanning their passports, exchange foreign bills for eCNY, a new digital currency being rolled out by the country’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China. Visitors could splash their digital cash by using a card or mobile app to pay for things around the Olympic Village.
China launched its first pilots of digital cash in 2019, but the eCNY’s appearance at the Olympics was part of a project with global ambitions. As the first major country to roll out an official digital currency at scale, China is far ahead of the U.S. and other countries, where the concept of an official form of digital cash is only in the discussion phase.
The hope for government-sanctioned digital currencies is that they will improve efficiency and spur innovation in financial services. But tech and China experts watching the country’s project say that eCNY, also known as the electronic Chinese yuan or digital yuan, also opens up new forms of government surveillance and social control. The head of U.K. intelligence agency GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, warned in a speech last month that Beijing could use its digital currency to monitor its citizens and eventually evade international sanctions.
TikTok’s Ties to China: Why Concerns Over Your Data Are Here to Stay
In 2021 Android phone users around the world spent 16.2 trillion minutes on TikTok. And while those millions and millions of users no doubt had an enjoyable time watching clips on the addictive social video app, they also generated a colossal amount of data. TikTok collects information on how you consume its content, from the device you are using to how long you watch a post for and what categories you like, and uses that information to fine-tune the algorithm for the app’s main feed.
For anyone with a passing knowledge of how platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Google function — or who has read Shoshana Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism — this data harvesting is not revelatory. However, when it comes to TikTok, the question that consumes many politicians and skeptics is where that data goes. More specifically: does all that information end up being accessed by the Chinese state?
TikTok has disputed both the accusations that it collects more data than other social media companies and that Chinese authorities could access data from its users.
As TikTok’s influence grows, and geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China remain, concerns about data and privacy are likely to stay.
Ransomware Gang Threatens to Publish Thousands of Australians’ Health Data
A ransomware group with suspected links to the notorious Russia-speaking REvil gang has threatened to release the personal information of millions of Medibank customers after the Australian private health insurance giant pledged it would not pay the cybercriminals’ ransom demand.
Medibank, Australia’s largest health insurance provider, first disclosed a “cyber incident” on Oct. 13, saying at the time that it detected unusual activity on its network and took immediate steps to contain the incident. Days later, the company said that customer data might have been exfiltrated.
In an update posted this week, the Melbourne-based Medibank admitted that the attackers accessed roughly 9.7 million customers’ personal information, including names, birth dates, email addresses and passport numbers.
The cybercriminals also accessed health claims data for almost 500,000 customers, including service provider names and locations, where customers received certain medical services and codes associated with diagnosis and procedures administered. For 5,200 users of Medibank’s My Home Hospital app, the cybercriminals accessed some personal and health claims data and, for some, next of kin contact details.
Instagram’s Video Selfie Age Verification System Goes Live in the U.K.
Instagram’s video selfie age verification system for teens went live this week in the United Kingdom, around six months after the company began testing the tool.
The verification method, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) identification tools from U.K.-based technology firm Yoti, will apply to U.K. users who try to edit their date of birth from under 18 years of age to over 18 years of age. Users altering their date of birth can alternatively opt to submit a photo of a driver’s license or other accepted ID in lieu of the selfie verification.
The tools are an attempt to assuage child safety advocates who have called on tech firms to do more to properly identify younger users on their sites but could simultaneously draw scrutiny from privacy advocates wary of Meta’s collecting of biometric identifiers.
Stalking Fears Over PimEyes Facial Search Engine
Privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch has made a complaint against the face recognition search engine PimEyes. PimEyes enables people to look for faces in images that have been posted publicly on the internet.
Big Brother Watch claims it facilitates stalking and has complained to the U.K. data and privacy watchdog. But PimEyes’ chief executive Giorgi Gobronidze says it poses fewer risks related to stalking than social media or other search engines. Big Brother Watch’s complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) claims that PimEyes has enabled “surveillance and stalking on a scale previously unimaginable.”
Starting with a person’s picture, PimEyes finds other photos of them published online. This could include images on photo-sharing sites, blog posts and news articles and on websites. Big Brother Watch says that by piecing together information associated with these images — for example, the text of a blog post, or a photo on a workplace website — a stalker could work out a person’s “place of work, or indications of the area in which they live.”
The campaigners accuse PimEyes of unlawfully processing the biometric data of millions of U.K. citizens — arguing it does not obtain permission from those whose images are analyzed.
