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Meta Sued for Violating Patient Privacy With Data Tracking Tool

The Verge reported:

Facebook’s parent company Meta and major U.S. hospitals violated medical privacy laws with a tracking tool that sends health information to Facebook, two proposed class-action lawsuits allege.

The lawsuits, filed in the Northern District of California in June and July, focus on the Meta Pixel tracking tool. The tool can be installed on websites to provide analytics on Facebook and Instagram ads. It also collects information about how people click around and input information into those websites.

An investigation by The Markup in early June found that 33 of the top 100 hospitals in the United States use the Meta Pixel on their websites. At seven hospitals, it was installed on password-protected patient portals. The investigation found that the tool was sending information about patient health conditions, doctor appointments, and medication allergies to Facebook.

In one of the lawsuits, a patient says that her medical information was sent to Facebook by the Meta Pixel tool on the University of California San Francisco and Dignity Health patient portals (those hospitals are also defendants in the suit). The patient then was served advertisements targeted to her heart and knee conditions, the lawsuit says.

Elon Musk Files Countersuit Under Seal vs Twitter Over $44 Billion Deal

Reuters reported:

Elon Musk countersued Twitter on Friday, escalating his legal fight against the social media company over his bid to walk away from the $44 billion purchase, although the lawsuit was filed confidentially.

While the 164-page document was not publicly available, under court rules a redacted version could soon be made public.

Musk’s lawsuit was filed hours after Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery ordered a five-day trial beginning Oct. 17 to determine if Musk can walk away from the deal.

Amazon’s Climate Pollution Is Getting Way Worse

The Verge reported:

Amazon’s greenhouse gas emissions ballooned big time last year despite the company’s efforts to sell itself as a leader in climate action.

Its carbon dioxide emissions grew an eye-popping 18 percent in 2021 compared to 2020, according to its latest sustainability report.

Amazon generated 71.54 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent last year, about as much pollution as 180 gas-fired power plants might pump out annually.

This is the second year in a row that Amazon’s climate pollution has grown by double digits since it made a splashy climate pledge and started reporting its emissions publicly in 2019. Comparing that year to 2021, the company’s CO2 pollution has actually grown a whopping 40 percent.

Data Brokers Resist Pressure to Stop Collecting Info on Pregnant People

Politico reported:

Democratic lawmakers are piling pressure on data brokers to stop collecting information on pregnant people in order to protect those seeking abortions. They’re not having much luck.

For years, brokers have sold datasets on millions of expectant parents from their trimester status to their preferred birth methods. Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, that same data is becoming a political issue, with abortion-rights groups warning that states with abortion bans are likely to weaponize it.

In the three months since POLITICO reported the draft opinion against Roe, numerous congressional Democrats have sent letters to data brokers urging them to stop the practice, promised to interrogate the companies about their collections and introduced bills to restrict reproductive health data from being collected and sold.

But in the absence of federal data privacy legislation or any likely chance of it getting the support needed to pass, many brokers aren’t taking heed.

Corbett: Technocracy Is Insane, Anti-Human and It WILL Fail

Technocracy News reported:

It’s almost impossible to browse the news anymore without giving up all hope for the future of humanity. We’re all going to be fed into the maw of the technocratic system and have our fingers broken by our new chess-playing robot overlords and there’s nothing we can do about it.

After all, when you ask an AI image generation bot to predict what the last selfie a human ever takes will look like you get this. I guess we better just abandon all hope now, right? Not so fast.

Here’s a great big white pill for you: the technocratic system of tyranny is going to fail. This is not wishful thinking; it’s a cold statement of fact. Technocracy, in all its facets — from the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda to the brain chips and AI godheads of the transhumanists to the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) social credit surveillance state — is anti-human. It goes against nature itself. It cannot work in the long run, and it is destined to fail.

Now, this doesn’t mean that it’s a cake walk from here on out.

But it does mean that we can and will make it through these trying times. And the quicker that we wake up and realize the power to change the world for the better is in our hands — not in the hands of the would-be world controllers — the sooner this nightmare will end.

Twitter Is Dragging Elon Musk’s Billionaire Friends Into Its $44 Billion Legal Battle With a Flurry of Subpoenas

Business Insider reported:

Twitter has issued a slew of subpoenas to some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names amid its legal battle with Elon Musk, The Washington Post first reported.

Twitter sent legal requests to billionaire investors Chamath Palihapitiya and Marc Andreessen on Monday, according to documents that were obtained by The Post.

The publication said Twitter also subpoenaed one of the entrepreneurs that helped Musk found PayPal, David Sacks, SpaceX and Tesla board member Stephen Jurvetson, as well as investors Jason Calacanis, Keith Rabois, and Joe Lonsdale.

The legal requests could require the men to testify in court when the five-day trial starts in October.

The New Way Police Could Use Your Google Searches Against You

Slate reported: 

For millennia, we’ve been told that asking questions was the path to enlightenment. But in the surveillance age, it might land you in jail. That’s the danger of a new search tactic that police are increasingly turning to in their constant campaign to transform our phones and devices into evidence against us: keyword warrants.

One Denver court may soon rule on whether they can continue as a policing tactic — and in the post-Roe era, the wrong decision could put abortion seekers in unprecedented danger.

Police have used web browser history and search engine data in their investigations for about as long as the data has existed, but keyword warrants are different — a digital dragnet to find every user who searches for a specific person, place or thing.

We don’t know how often they are used, but we the number of publicly known examples is only growing. And soon a Denver judge will provide one of the first decisions on their constitutionality.

Taking ‘Little Miss’ Quizzes Going Around TikTok? Be Warned, They’re Collecting Your Data

Mashable reported:

Personality quizzes called “Which Little Miss Do I Think You Are?” by user vickova and “what little miss character are you?” by imm6y have made the rounds on TikTok, both hosted by online quiz platform uQuiz.

People have been sharing their results, often using the hashtag #littlemissquiz. Users have also been tweeting screenshots of the quizzes.

Questionable results aside, these quizzes should be flagged for a more pressing reason: uQuiz is collecting a lot of the data provided.

Under the platform’s privacy policy, the site states that “personally-identifiable information” is collected, “[depending] on the function(s) that are being performed.”

If you take a quiz on the site, including the Little Miss quizzes, any information provided is collected and stored on behalf of the quiz creator.

Most Important Problems Facing U.S. Today — per Poll

Newsweek reported:

Inflation, the economy, and abortion issues are among the most important problems facing the U.S., according to a new Gallup poll.

The poll found eight percent of Americans named abortion as the country’s top concern — the most since Gallup began tracking the issue in 1984.

Abortion still ranks behind three other issues, according to the poll, which surveyed 1,103 adults between July 5 and 26.

Inflation (17 percent) and dysfunctional government or bad leadership (17 percent) topped the list, with another 12 percent of Americans citing the economy in general.