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The CDC Must Answer for Its Mental Health Scandal
The recklessness of the U.S. government’s policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, which sowed fear and confusion in the minds of millions of Americans, is beginning to come to light thanks to the ongoing hearings by the House Oversight Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
The consequences of school closings will be the topic of this week’s hearing. What we now know is that in 2021, almost 60% of female high school students experienced “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.” One in four “fantasized a possible suicide plan.”
These alarming statistics come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Youth Risk Behavior Survey, released a few weeks ago. Since then, concerned social scientists have analyzed and evaluated the data about our troubled youth to come up with a possible cause.
It’s ironic that the report came from the CDC, the agency most likely to blame for this new wave of depression and despondency among young people. The CDC’s COVID-19 policies shut children in their homes for almost two years, isolating them from peers and extended family, forcing them to lose ground educationally due to solitary online classes, creating anxiety by constant doom-and-gloom overstatements and forcing vaccines on already immune children.
IRS Visited Twitter Files Journalist Matt Taibbi’s Home Same Day as Congressional Testimony
An IRS agent stopped by the home of Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi the same day of his congressional testimony on the weaponization of the government, according to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, who’s demanding an explanation over the oddly timed visit.
Jordan sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel and the Department of Treasury on Monday in hopes of getting to the bottom of why the federal agent appeared at Taibbi’s New Jersey home on March 9 and left a note, according to an editorial in The Wall Street Journal that cited the letter.
The note reportedly instructed Taibbi to call the IRS four days later. When he did, an agent told him his 2018 and 2021 tax returns had both been rejected due to identity theft concerns.
Taibbi has been deeply involved in researching and reporting the Twitter Files — based off a trove of internal documents at the social media giant meant to expose unfair bias in the company’s past content moderation and the social media giant’s previous contact with government officials.
Following China: JP Morgan Chase Wants People to Pay for Goods With Face Scans
JPMorgan Chase has announced plans to pilot a new payment technology that would allow customers to pay with their palm or face instead of a traditional credit or debit card.
Following similar technological implementations in China, if the pilot program goes well, the bank intends to roll out the service to its broader base of U.S. merchant clients and usher in a new wave of biometric payments that privacy enthusiasts have been concerned about.
The rise of biometric technology, which uses unique body measurements to authenticate a person’s identity, is being pushed by corporations to make this the default payment method across the world.
Over the past few years, China has become a global leader in the implementation of this biometric recognition payment technology. The payment method has transformed the way millions of people conduct transactions daily.
Cops Used Creepy Clearview AI a Million Times, CEO Says
Clearview AI, the shady U.S. facial recognition firm whose surveillance tech is used by at least 2,400 law enforcement agencies, says police have run nearly a million searches using its service.
The company’s database of images scraped from social media sites now reportedly numbers around 30 billion, a staggering 50% increase from figures reported just last year. Despite repeated fines and years of pushback from civil liberties organizations, the figures suggest business is still booming for Clearview.
Clearview’s data collection methods have come under fire from privacy advocates who believe the company collects billions of face scans without first obtaining content. That means anyone’s publicly available Facebook or Instagram selfies could, in theory, one day be used by law enforcement to connect them with a crime.
“It’s appalling that a company could steal billions of our photos, but it’s even worse that the police are paying them for that data,” Surveillance Technology Oversight Project Executive Director Albert Fox Cahn told Gizmodo. “The police should be investigating Clearview AI for theft, not awarding it contracts. This sort of surveillance capitalism chills democracy and puts us all at risk.”
Americans Hooked on Chinese Apps
The standoff between the U.S. government and TikTok underscores a growing problem for policymakers: Chinese apps are booming in America, but most U.S. apps aren’t able to operate in China.
Why it matters: Mobile apps are one of the most powerful vectors for expanding trade and exporting soft power, given how widely accessible they are, how much time is spent on them, and how little regulatory oversight there is online.
Chinese companies are able to “leverage China’s one billion internet users to test user preferences and optimize their AI models at home, then export the tech overseas,” The Wall Street Journal notes. But given censorship demands in China, American tech firms can’t reciprocate.
Driving the news: In the past 30 days, four of the top 10 most-downloaded apps in the U.S. across Apple’s iOS store and the Google Play store are owned by Chinese companies.
Amazon Subsidiaries Worry Data Protection Advocates
It’s no secret that Amazon has masses of data on customers, sourced mainly from millions of Prime subscribers. But it also gets data from subsidiaries that mediate many aspects of daily life.
From customers’ reading habits on Amazon Kindle to the groceries they like to buy on Prime, Amazon has perfected the art of tracking. The software is so good at predicting user preferences that third parties can hire its algorithms through Amazon Forecast.
But it doesn’t stop there. The big tech titan has purchased more than 100 companies since it was created. The firms enable it to gather more consumer data to inform predictions. Amazon’s technology has shifted from simply waiting for and responding to your requests to anticipating them. In a demo of Amazon’s Alexa, when you ask the voice assistant to book movie tickets, it follows up by asking whether you want to make a dinner reservation or call an Uber.
But “it is potentially problematic if Amazon is sharing data between the different companies it owns,” Simon David Hirsbrunner, from the human-centered computing research group of Freie Universität Berlin, told DW, as consumer data is collected in different contexts. “Amazon’s data scientists might not be able to identify and manage privacy issues dependent on these specific contexts.”
Technology Addiction Has Created a Self-Help Trap
The past can answer one of today’s most perplexing problems. Why, despite multiple reports from Silicon Valley whistleblowers revealing that technology companies are using manipulative designs to prolong our time online, do we feel personally responsible? Why do we still blame ourselves and keep seeking new self-help methods to decrease our time online?
We can learn from the past because in this case, the tech companies did not innovate. Instead, the technology industry manipulated us following an old playbook, put together by other powerful industries, including the tobacco and food industries.
When the tobacco and food industries confronted allegations that their products harmed their consumers, they defended themselves by raising the powerful American social icon of self-choice and personal responsibility.
This meant emphasizing that consumers are free to make choices and, as a result, are responsible for the outcomes. Smokers and their families sued the tobacco industry for the devastation of smoking, including lung cancer and early death. But, for decades, they failed to win their lawsuits because the tobacco industry argued successfully that they chose to smoke and, therefore, they are responsible for the results.
The tech industry is already applying this strategy by appealing to our deeply ingrained cultural beliefs of personal choice and responsibility. Tech companies do this directly when faced with allegations that they are addicting users.
COVID App for England and Wales Discontinued as Usage Dwindles
The COVID contact-tracing app for England and Wales, which was downloaded 31 million times during the course of the pandemic, is being wound down later this week.
Coming about three years since the first nationwide lockdown, the move is part of a drive to encourage people to “learn to live” with the virus. Users of the app will receive a notification on Tuesday telling them it is being discontinued. They will no longer receive alerts informing them when they have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19.
Dwindling usage meant the app was in danger of becoming defunct, as COVID measures — such as free tests — were removed and vaccination take-up grew. However, the NHS app will continue to allow people to request a certificate proving their COVID vaccination status as part of any requirements for international travel.
The COVID app was launched to let people check in at venues using a QR code, inform them what restrictions were in force based on their location, and keep track of how many days they had left to isolate if they had been in contact with someone who had tested positive. The latest figures show the app has been downloaded 31,681,000 times, of which just 103,885 downloads were this year.
Generative AI Set to Affect 300 Million Jobs Across Major Economies
The latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence could lead to the automation of a quarter of the work done in the U.S. and eurozone, according to research by Goldman Sachs.
The investment bank said on Monday that “generative” AI systems such as ChatGPT, which can create content that is indistinguishable from human output, could spark a productivity boom that would eventually raise annual global gross domestic product by 7% over a 10-year period.
But if the technology lived up to its promise, it would also bring “significant disruption” to the labor market, exposing the equivalent of 300 million full-time workers across big economies to automation, according to Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnani, the paper’s authors. Lawyers and administrative staff would be among those at greatest risk of becoming redundant.
In the U.S., this should apply to 63% of the workforce, they calculated. A further 30% working in physical or outdoor jobs would be unaffected, although their work might be susceptible to other forms of automation. But about 7% of U.S. workers are in jobs where at least half of their tasks could be done by generative AI and are vulnerable to replacement.
WeChat: The CCP’s Ultimate Tool to Control Chinese Americans
While the world is awakening to the threat of TikTok, WeChat is another Chinese social media platform that is infiltrating and monitoring a huge population of Chinese people overseas.
Lydia Liu is a Chinese American who found herself becoming a victim of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) censorship through WeChat, a Chinese-owned social media video-sharing app.
When WeChat banned her official account, she felt the CCP had deprived her of her rights as an American to speak freely about American affairs. “The CCP’s long arm has stretched way too far,” she told The Epoch Times on March 21.
By excluding foreign players such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and PayPal from the Chinese market, the CCP has exploited WeChat — a complex amalgamation of the above-mentioned apps’ features — as a powerful tool for social control. The app dictates what users see, what they say and even their purchasing power in the Chinese-speaking world.
