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New York Bans Facial Recognition in Schools After Report Finds Risks Outweigh Potential Benefits
New York State banned the use of facial recognition technology in schools Wednesday, following a report that concluded the risks to student privacy and civil rights outweigh potential security benefits. Education Commissioner Betty Rosa’s order leaves decisions on digital fingerprinting and other biometric technology up to local districts.
The state has had a moratorium on facial recognition since parents filed a court challenge to its adoption by an upstate district.
The ban was praised by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which sued the state Education Department on behalf of two Lockport parents in 2020.
“Schools should be safe places to learn and grow, not spaces where they are constantly scanned and monitored, with their most sensitive information at risk,” said Stefanie Coyle, deputy director of the NYCLU’s Education Policy Center.
A Key U.S. Government Surveillance Tool Should Face New Limits, a Divided Privacy Oversight Board Says
The FBI and other government agencies should be required to get court approval before reviewing the communications of U.S. citizens collected through a secretive foreign surveillance program, a sharply divided privacy oversight board recommended on Thursday.
The recommendation came in a report from a three-member Democratic majority of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board, an independent agency within the executive branch, and was made despite the opposition of Biden administration officials who warn that such a requirement could snarl fast-moving terrorism and espionage investigations and weaken national security as a result.
The report comes as a White House push to secure the reauthorization of the program known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is encountering major bipartisan opposition in Congress and during a spate of revelations that FBI employees have periodically mishandled access to a repository of intelligence gathered under the law, violations that have spurred outrage from civil liberties advocates.
In a recommendation Thursday that critics say would impose a significant hurdle and mark a dramatic break from the status quo, three members of the board said executive branch agencies, with limited exceptions, should have to get permission from the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to read the results of their database queries on U.S. citizens.
DNA Drives Help Identify Missing People. It’s a Privacy Nightmare
Earlier this month, state police in Connecticut held a “DNA drive” in an effort to help identify human remains found in the state. Family members of missing people were invited to submit DNA samples to a government repository used to solve these types of cases, a commercial genetic database, or both if they chose to.
Public agencies in other states have held similar donation drives, billed as a way to solve missing persons cases and get answers for families. But the drives also raise concerns about how donors’ genetic information could be used.
Privacy and civil liberties experts warn that commercial DNA databases are used for purposes beyond identifying missing people and that family members may not realize the risks of contributing to them. In fact, one drive planned in Massachusetts this summer was postponed because of concerns raised by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Google Is Opening Up Its Generative AI Search Experience to Teenagers
Google is opening up its generative AI search experience to teenagers, the company announced on Thursday. The company is also introducing a new feature to add context to the content that users see, along with an update to help train the search experience’s AI model to better detect false or offensive queries.
The AI-powered search experience, also known as SGE (Search Generative Experience), introduces a conversational mode to Google Search where you can ask Google questions about a topic in a conversational manner.
Starting this week, teens ages 13-17 in the United States who are signed into a Google Account will be able to sign up for Search Labs to access the AI search experience through the Google app or Chrome desktop.
Here Are the Last 79 Colleges Still Mandating COVID Vaccines
No College Mandates, an advocacy group that argues against the COVID-19 vaccine for higher education, counts 79 colleges and universities that require their students to be vaccinated this fall semester.
“There are 79 colleges in the U.S. still mandating COVID vaccines when there should be zero just like the rest of the world. Do Not Comply!” No College Mandates posted on X.
The advocacy group said “COVID injections for one of the lowest risk populations” is “insanity.” They added higher education has “zero efficacy and safety data for the newly approved COVID injections. It is incomprehensible that this remains a reality.”
Will Amazon and Walmart Replace Our Hospitals?
The U.S. remains a bastion for healthcare innovation. We grow organs in labs, surgeons use augmented reality, and the Biden administration launched the Cancer Moonshot to reduce the death rate by 50%. So why are Americans getting sicker?
Today, the expected life span is the shortest it’s been in almost two decades. While our fractured health system was under the spotlight during the pandemic, we saw high rates of heart disease, obesity, and diabetes lead to more deaths than other industrialized nations.
An inscrutable maze, healthcare in America welds together the private and public, payors and policymakers, and a morass of regulation. But as consumers, we don’t need to understand the substrate of our system to know it’s broken. We feel the strain when trying to simply book a doctor’s appointment. And if we find a doctor, the average wait is 26 days. That’s unacceptable.
As healthcare reels, technology giants enter. Amazon has been shouldering its way into healthcare for years. The retail giant acquired primary-care practice One Medical for $3.9 billion, and recently, unveiled its virtual clinics, offering around-the-clock access to providers. Amazon‘s chief medical officer touted that “by creating a healthcare experience that is transparent and simple, we hope to make healthcare more accessible for all.”
Propelled during the lockdowns, virtual care became the modern-day “house call.”
Musk Ousts X Team Curbing Election Disinformation
Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter) said overnight that a global team working on curbing disinformation during elections had been dismissed — a mere two days after being singled out by the EU’s digital chief as the online platform with the most falsehoods.
Responding to reports about cuts, the tech mogul said on X, “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”
Vice President Vera Jourová this week warned that EU-supported research showed that X had become the platform with the largest ratio of posts containing misinformation or disinformation. The company under Musk left the European Commission’s anti-disinformation charter in late May after failing its first test.
X must comply with the EU’s content rules, the Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires large tech platforms with over 45 million EU users to mitigate the risks of disinformation campaigns. Failure to follow the rulebook could lead to sweeping fines of up to 6 percent of companies’ global annual revenue.
Norway Seeks to Extend Ban on Meta’s Consentless Tracking Ads Across the EU
Norway’s data protection authority has asked a European Union regulator to take a binding decision on whether its emergency sanction on Facebook and Instagram tracking and profiling users for ad targeting without their consent should be made permanent and applied across the EU single market, not just locally.
The move could lead to a blanket ban on Meta running tracking ads without consent across the EU single market if the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) agrees the action is merited. Meta may also switch to asking users for their permission to run “personalized ads” before any Board action, as it has claimed it intends to.
