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Heading Into Wimbledon, Novak Djokovic’s Vaccine Stance Could Cost Him All-Time Grand Slam Record

USA TODAY reported:

There have been strange periods throughout the career of Novak Djokovic where his motivation waxed and waned, his body didn’t cooperate or his temper got him thrown out of a U.S. Open he would have been heavily favored to win. But never has Djokovic tried to navigate as complicated a moment as the 2022 season has brought upon him.

Despite still being considered the best player in the world and the favorite heading into Wimbledon, which begins Monday, he has lost the No. 1 ranking and will slip further regardless of what he does over the next two weeks (more on that in a moment).

After finally tying Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal with 20 major titles last July and having a shot to win the calendar Grand Slam, he surprisingly finds himself now two behind Nadal. And unless the U.S. government changes its policy barring people who haven’t had a COVID-19 vaccination from entering the country, Djokovic will not be in New York for the U.S. Open this year or perhaps ever again.

It is abundantly clear that Djokovic has no intention of getting vaccinated and is prepared to skip half the Grand Slams (and several other significant tournaments) if the U.S. and Australia continue to have strict vaccine mandates for visitors entering their borders.

Are You Ready to Be Surveilled Like a Sex Worker?

Wired reported:

Friday’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is one of the most devastating rulings to come out of Washington. It’s also the next step in a larger campaign to expand state surveillance and erode the right to privacy — a campaign that sex workers have been fighting for decades.

A dim silver lining is that sex workers, fully aware that the general public is unconcerned with our well-being, have already been forced to develop strategies and guides on how to evade detection despite the heightened scrutiny, strategies that can help abortion seekers and more as the carceral state expands.

HIPAA Won’t Protect You if Prosecutors Want Your Reproductive Health Records

STAT News reported:

With Roe v. Wade now overturned, patients are wondering whether federal laws will shield their reproductive health data from state law enforcement, or legal action more broadly. The answer, currently, is no.

If there’s a warrant, court order or subpoena for the release of those medical records, then a clinic is required to hand them over. And patients and providers may be made legally vulnerable by the enormous trail of health-related data we all generate through their devices every day.

“People think HIPAA protects a lot more health information than it actually does,” said Kayte Spector-Bagdady, a professor of bioethics and law at the University of Michigan.

It all comes down to state law. She said the federal privacy rule contains exceptions that could allow prosecutors to compel businesses to relinquish information relevant to a criminal investigation — and the same is true for other kinds of legal action, too.

Army Guard Troops Risk Dismissal as Vaccine Deadline Looms

Associated Press reported:

Up to 40,000 Army National Guard soldiers across the country — or about 13% of the force — have not yet gotten the mandated COVID-19 vaccine, and as the deadline for shots looms, at least 14,000 of them have flatly refused and could be forced out of the service.

Guard soldiers have until Thursday to get the vaccine. According to data obtained by The Associated Press, between 20% to 30% of the Guard soldiers in six states are not vaccinated, and more than 10% in 43 other states still need shots.

Guard leaders say states are doing all they can to encourage soldiers to get vaccinated by the time limit. And they said they will work with the roughly 7,000 who have sought exemptions, which are almost all for religious reasons.

In ‘Zero-COVID’ China, a Daughter’s Struggle to Get Her Father Medicine Hits a Nerve

CNN World reported:

What was meant to be a simple errand, a daughter driving her aging father to the hospital to pick up his medicine, has pulled a small city on China’s border with North Korea — and its nearly two-month COVID-19 lockdown — into the national spotlight, after the pair ran afoul of pandemic rules.

Video of the scene — whose related hashtag has been viewed over a billion times on China’s Twitter-like platform Weibo — shows a confrontation between the driver, identified by police as a 41-year-old woman surnamed Hao, her father and a local police officer, who stopped Hao at a security checkpoint because she did not have proper clearance.

In the video, shot in the northeastern city of Dandong, Hao has gotten out of her car and can be heard yelling — with palpable angst — that she already took a COVID-19 test, and that her housing community gave her permission to leave to go the hospital to pick up the medicine.

Pandemic Lockdowns, Closures Tough on People With Disabilities

U.S. News & World Report reported:

When the early days of the pandemic prompted social distancing measures and gym closures, people with certain disabilities had a much harder time getting exercise and their mental health suffered, new research shows.

Researchers studying those impacts surveyed more than 950 people with diverse disabilities. They identified four categories of individuals within the disability community with varying levels of impact, with the most affected group known as “heavily impacted.”

People with neuromuscular disabilities, blindness or low vision and/or cognitive or intellectual disabilities were more likely to be in this group. This heavily impacted group comprised about 39% of study participants, many of them veterans and women.

One Day, AI Will Seem as Human as Anyone. What Then?

Wired reported:

From here on out, the safe use of artificial intelligence requires demystifying the human condition. If we can’t recognize and understand how AI works — if even expert engineers can fool themselves into detecting agency in a “stochastic parrot” — then we have no means of protecting ourselves from negligent or malevolent products.

This is about finishing the Darwinian revolution, and more. Understanding what it means to be animals, and extending that cognitive revolution to understanding how algorithmic we are as well. All of us will have to get over the hurdle of thinking that some particular human skill —  creativity, dexterity, empathy, whatever — is going to differentiate us from AI. Helping us accept who we really are, how we work, without us losing engagement with our lives, is an enormous extended project for humanity, and of the humanities.

‘Watchdog Moms’ on TikTok Are Trying to Keep Minors Safe

CNN Business reported:

Seara Adair is part of an emerging community of so-called “watchdog moms” calling attention to potential issues for younger users on TikTok and other platforms, and building up an online following in the process. This small group of parents flags issues ranging from the sharing of exploitative videos to more routine concerns about the oversharing of photos and personal information about children online. Adair, along with these peers, works to get problematic content taken offline, which she said is often a “very long battle.”

Sarah Adams, who is part of this advocate cohort and known as mom.uncharted on TikTok, has attracted millions of views on the platform for exposing these types of dangers. She started by creating videos on TikTok about child safety and sharing practices and eventually began highlighting specific examples of the problematic content she’d find, including how seemingly harmless photos shared by parents online can be fetishized by sexual predators.

How to Scrub Yourself From the Internet, the Best That You Can

The Washington Post reported:

Data brokers collect detailed information about who we are based on things like our online activity, real-world purchases and public records. Together, it’s enough to figure out your political leanings and health status, even if you’re pregnant. Friday’s news that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, and abortion could become illegal in 13 states within a month, highlight concerns about ways these piles of information could be used.

You can’t fully scrub yourself from the internet. A little bit of you will always linger, whether it’s in data-broker databases, on old social media you forgot about or in the back of someone else’s vacation photos on Flickr.

That’s no reason to give up! You can absolutely take steps to protect your privacy by cleaning up things like your Google results. For the best results you’ll need time, money, patience and to live in a country or state with strong privacy laws.

Google is what most people think of when they worry about their data online. The search engine is the largest index of websites, but it’s often just the messenger. Know that anything you manage to remove from a search result will likely still live on the site hosting it unless you also get them to take it down. You’ll want to ask those sites to remove it as well.

U.S. Senators Ask FTC to Investigate Apple and Google Over Mobile Tracking

Engadget reported:

A group of Democratic senators is urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Apple and Google over their collection of mobile users’ information.

In a letter addressed to FTC Chair Lina Khan, the lawmakers — Senators Ron Wyden, Elizabeth Warren, Cory A. Booker and Sara Jacobs — accuse the tech giants of “engaging in unfair and deceptive practices by enabling the collection and sale of hundreds of millions of mobile phone users’ personal data.” They added that the companies “facilitated these harmful practices by building advertising-specific tracking IDs into their mobile operating systems.”

The senators specifically mentioned in their letter how individuals seeking abortions will become particularly vulnerable if their data, especially their location information, is collected and shared. They wrote the letter shortly before the Supreme Court officially overturned Roe v. Wade, making abortion immediately illegal in states with trigger laws.

They explained that data brokers are already selling location information of people visiting abortion providers. The senators also stressed how that information can now be used by private citizens incentivized by “bounty hunter” laws targeting individuals seeking an abortion.