Login
Google to Pay California $93 Million Over Location-Tracking Claims
Google has agreed to pay $93 million to the state of California to settle claims it tracked the location of users without their knowledge. Under the terms of the proposed agreement, Google must also provide more information about the location data it collects on users.
The settlement follows a “multi-year” investigation by California’s Department of Justice, which found that Google deceived users into thinking they weren’t getting tracked when they actually were. According to the complaint, Google continued to collect and store location data on users even when they disabled the “Location History” setting within its apps and services, allowing the company to use this information for targeted advertising.
California is one of the many states that sued Google over its location tracking feature. After doling out $85 million to settle Arizona’s location-tracking lawsuit last year, it paid another $392 million to settle similar lawsuits from 40 states, including Oregon, New York, and Florida.
TikTok Fined $368 Million in Europe for Failing to Protect Children
A major European tech regulator has ordered TikTok to pay a €345 million ($368 million) fine after ruling that the app failed to do enough to protect children.
The Irish Data Protection Commission, which oversees TikTok’s activities in the European Union, said Friday that the company had violated the bloc’s signature privacy law.
An investigation by the DPC found that in the latter half of 2020, TikTok’s default settings didn’t do enough to protect children’s accounts. For example, it said, that newly-created children’s profiles were set to public by default, meaning anybody on the internet could view them.
TikTok didn’t sufficiently disclose these privacy risks to kids and also used so-called “dark patterns” to guide users toward giving up more of their personal information, the regulator noted.
Courts Strike a Blow Against White House’s Social Media Censorship
A federal appeals court delivered a win for free speech last week, rebuking the White House and several agencies by maintaining a freeze on their policing of our speech.
Most importantly, the court validated the argument that the U.S. government has been illegally censoring Americans by proxy via social media companies, in a breathtaking and massive violation of the First Amendment.
Critical aspects of the three-judge panel’s opinion, however — namely the government actors it absolved of culpability, and its minimizing of the size and scope of the freeze — made for only a qualified victory for our first freedom.
DHS Awards $20 Million to Program That Flags Americans as Potential ‘Extremists’ for Their Online Speech
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded 34 grants to as many organizations, worth a total of $20 million, whose role will be to undergo training in order to flag potential online “extremist” speech of Americans.
The money will be spent from the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) grant program for the fiscal year 2023, while the recipients include police, mental health providers, universities, churches and school districts.
The DHS announcement came on the anniversary of 9/11, but it showed that the focus is now on Americans rather than some foreign terrorist threat (or even foreign terrorist gangs in the habit of “invading” U.S. soil).
And the way the terrorist threat is defined here looks more like a drive to suppress dissent to dominant narratives pushed by the government and large traditional and social media who work in concert with the federal authorities.
Ban on COVID Vaccine Mandate Passes Arkansas Legislature
Arkansas lawmakers have passed a bill on Thursday that prohibits the state from mandating someone to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
The special session called by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders was said to be spotlighting tax cuts and redefining state FOIA laws. While the controversial FOIA bill has run into some roadblocks, the ban on vaccine mandates for COVID-19 was filed and subsequently sailed through the Senate and House.
The bill bans the State of Arkansas, a state agency or entity, a political subdivision of the state, or a state or local official from mandating or requiring someone to receive any type of COVID-19 vaccine. It goes on to specify that getting the vaccine can’t be a condition of “education, employment, entry, or services from the state or a state agency or entity” for obtaining a licensure, certificate, or permit from a state agency.
The Department of Health is also to make the “potential risks and harms associated” with the COVID-19 vaccine publicly available.
China to Manage Monkeypox as Disease on Par With COVID
China plans to manage monkeypox in the same way it handles infectious diseases such as COVID-19 starting from Sept. 20, health authorities said on Friday, after detecting around 500 cases of the viral infection last month.
Monkeypox will be managed under Category B protocols, the National Health Commission (NHC) said in a statement. Under this category, China could take emergency measures such as restricting gatherings, suspending work and school or sealing off areas when there is an outbreak of a disease.
Category B infectious diseases currently include COVID-19, AIDS and SARS. China puts infectious diseases into three classes, with the top level Category A giving authorities the power to quarantine patients and their close contacts.
China downgraded the management of COVID-19 to Category B from Category A at the end of 2022 after almost three years of strict restrictions that included locking down entire cities.
Big Tech Wields AI Might to Accelerate Cancer Research
Major tech companies are throwing their weight behind artificial intelligence in cancer care, lending their technological prowess to legacy institutions and startups trying to navigate a fast-evolving area of medicine. Why it matters: The explosion in AI has the potential to transform how the medical system researches and treats cancer, but only if the underlying tech is there to support it.
Driving the news: Microsoft’s research subsidiary last week announced it’s pairing its supercomputing power with the capabilities of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s health tech spinout Paige to build one of the world’s largest image-based AI models for digital pathology and oncology.
The big picture: Tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon have been battling for their expanding corners of the healthcare universe for years. Cancer is one of the major areas where those companies have set their sights.
Be smart: It’s not just the tech giants that are leaning into AI for cancer care. Pharmaceutical brands such as Moderna are bullish on its potential for cancer drug development.
The Online Safety Bill Is Just the Tip of the U.K. Surveillance State Iceberg
It all starts in 2019. The Online Harms whitepaper marked the first step into the government’s mission of making the U.K. “the safest place to be online,” building the premises for the debut of the Online Safety Bill two years later.
Now, after surviving three prime ministers, two government crises, and doubling up its pages on the way, the Bill is in its final stages in Parliament and likely to become law very soon. Yet, internet experts and privacy advocates are still concerned the new provisions will jeopardize citizens’ security instead.
To make things worse, U.K. lawmakers are also pushing for an update to another controversial bill: the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, also known as the “Snooper Chart” for its wide-ranging surveillance powers.
That’s why many commentators, including digital rights groups, cryptographers, academics, VPN services, and encrypted messaging app providers are now calling for new assurances the two proposals won’t be used together for greater control over public communications.
