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Oklahoma Manufacturer Sued for Firing Employees Over COVID Vaccine Exemptions
AG Equipment Company, a Broken Arrow, Oklahoma compressor packaging manufacturer, violated federal law when it fired 10 employees for failing to receive a COVID-19 vaccination because of their religious beliefs or medical restrictions, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charged in a lawsuit filed today.
According to the EEOC’s lawsuit, in the fall of 2021, AG Equipment mandated all employees receive a COVID-19 vaccination and told workers no exceptions would be permitted for any reason.
Nonetheless, 10 employees submitted written requests seeking exemptions based on their religious beliefs or medical conditions.
The company refused to discuss the employees’ requests or explore possible accommodations, and fired the 10 individuals on Oct. 15, 2021, along with 77 other unvaccinated workers.
Such alleged conduct violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans with Disabilities Act, which prohibit religious and disability-based discrimination.
Yes, It Sounds Like a Conspiracy Theory. But Maybe Our Phones Really Are Listening to Us
Big brands already know far too much about us. But Cox Media Group’s “Active Listening” software adds a whole new layer of creepiness.
Conspiracy theorists of the world, rip off that tinfoil hat and take a bow: you were (kinda) right.
Despite the fact pretty much everyone has a story involving chatting about something only to see an ad for that something pop up on a device, the idea that your phone actively listens to you has long been dismissed as silly.
After all, brands don’t need to eavesdrop like that — they already have access to millions of data points that build up a detailed picture of your habits and predicted purchases.
But just because brands don’t need to listen to your conversations, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t companies figuring out creepy new ways to mine your data.
404 Media, a tech-focused news site, recently got hold of a pitch deck from Cox Media Group (CMG), touting its “Active Listening” software, which targets adverts based on what people say near their device microphones.
The presentation doesn’t specify whether this voice data comes from smart TVs, smart speakers, or smartphones but the slide where it extols “the power of voice (and our devices’ microphones)” has a picture of people looking at their phones.
Drew Barrymore Says She’ll Be the Parent She Needed by Limiting Her Kids’ Access to Tech. Experts Say Her Approach Is a Good One.
Drew Barrymore says that she’s going to become the “parent I needed” as a child by implementing boundaries and protecting her two daughters, ages 10 and 12, from the “access and excess” of phones and social media.
In a lengthy Instagram post, Barrymore talked about her own difficult childhood, including a stay in a psychiatric hospital when she was 13. She attributed her troubles to being exposed to the adult world far too young and having no boundaries set for her.
“I wished many times when I was a kid that someone would tell me no,” she wrote. “I had no guardrails.”
Robert D. Friedberg, a clinical psychologist who studies anxious youth, says that boundary setting — including around technology, social media, and phone use — helps reduce anxiety for kids by setting expectations and strengthening the family structure.
“Limit setting or saying no to children is pivotal,” he said. Although children and teens might not like boundaries, those limits serve the child well in the long run, Friedberg added. “I remind parents that the root of the word discipline means to teach or instruct.”
Barrymore says she’s willing to take the burden of her children’s disappointment if it means protecting them.
Cops’ Favorite Face Image Search Engine Fined $33M for Privacy Violation
A controversial facial recognition tech company behind a vast face image search engine widely used by cops has been fined approximately $33 million in the Netherlands for serious data privacy violations.
According to the Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA), Clearview AI “built an illegal database with billions of photos of faces” by crawling the web and without gaining consent, including from people in the Netherlands.
Clearview AI’s technology — which has been banned in some U.S. cities over concerns that it gives law enforcement unlimited power to track people in their daily lives — works by pulling in more than 40 billion face images from the web without setting “any limitations in terms of geographical location or nationality,” the Dutch DPA found.
Perhaps most concerning, the Dutch DPA said, Clearview AI also provides “facial recognition software for identifying children,” therefore indiscriminately processing personal data of minors.
AI ‘Surveillance Pricing’ Could Use Data to Make People Pay More
The Federal Trade Commission is studying how companies use consumer data to charge different prices for the same product.
In 2006 mathematician Clive Humby called data “the new oil” — a raw commodity that, once refined, would fuel the digital economy.
Since then big tech companies have spent vast sums of money honing algorithms that gather their users’ data and scour it for patterns.
One result has been a boom in precision-targeted online advertisements. Another is a practice some experts call “algorithmic personalized pricing,” which uses artificial intelligence to tailor prices to individual consumers.
The Federal Trade Commission uses a more Orwellian term for this: “surveillance pricing.”
“What’s frightening is that a company could know something about me that I had no idea they could find out and I would have never authorized,” says Jean-Pierre Dubé, a professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
A Telltale Clue Reveals Shady Ads on Facebook and Instagram
Facebook and Instagram don’t allow ads for illicit drugs, stolen and counterfeit goods, or financial scams. But if you want to find ads for those things on Meta’s social networks, it isn’t hard: just look for the ones that link to the messaging app Telegram.
CEO Pavel Durov’s arrest in France, researchers Damon McCoy, Laura Edelson and Yaël Eisenstat of Cybersecurity for Democracy were prompted to search Meta’s publicly available Ad Library for ads that link to Telegram channels.
Given Telegram’s reputation as a haven for speech and activities that are prohibited elsewhere, they suspected they might find a few ads for shady products or services.
Out of the first 50 such active Facebook and Instagram ads they found on Aug. 28, more than half — 32 — appeared to violate Meta’s advertising policies, by the researchers’ reckoning.
They included nine ads for drugs, one for explicit adult content and a range of gambling and financial scams, including a document-forgery service and offers of guaranteed betting wins.
The finding shows how bad actors online use mainstream social networks such as Facebook and Instagram as a front door to lure users into shady or illegal schemes that transpire on Telegram — and how Meta, perhaps inadvertently, profits from the practice.
Mobile Phones Are Not Linked to Brain Cancer, According to a Major Review of 28 Years of Research
A systematic review into the potential health effects from radio wave exposure has shown mobile phones are not linked to brain cancer.
The review was commissioned by the World Health Organization and is published today in the journal Environment International.
Mobile phones are often held against the head during use. And they emit radio waves, a type of non-ionizing radiation. These two factors are largely why the idea mobile phones might cause brain cancer emerged in the first place.
The possibility that mobile phones might cause cancer has been a long-standing concern.
Mobile phones – and wireless tech more broadly — are a major part of our daily lives. So it’s been vital for science to address the safety of radio wave exposure from these devices.
Police Use of Facial Recognition in Britain Is Spreading
Britons spend large chunks of their lives on camera. The country has up to 6m closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras — one for every 11 people in the country, the third-highest penetration rate in the world after America and China.
To help identify rioters in the wake of violent protests that swept parts of the country in early August, police officers are collecting footage from mosques and shops that were vandalized.
Some are releasing CCTV footage to the public to identify suspects. Others are using another technology to get the job done — facial recognition.
Facial-recognition systems use artificial intelligence to match images to identities. Retrospective facial recognition of the sort being used to pursue rioters compares CCTV footage with suspects; in predictive policing, live images are compared with the faces of people who have been placed on watchlists.
The technology was used during King Charles’s coronation in 2023.
Last year the South Wales Police scanned the faces of more than 819,000 people. In Haringey in north London, around 133 facial scans are performed every minute.
Belgian Schools Launch Crackdown on Smartphones
Children start their day at the Bogaerts International School near Brussels by putting their smartphones in a locker.
“If we catch them with a phone, we confiscate it and we give it back at the end of the day,” said the school’s director, David Bogaerts.
Hundreds of schools across Brussels and Belgium’s southern region of Wallonia are set to follow the institution’s example. Over the summer, the Francophone community’s new government announced plans for a smartphone ban in primary schools and the first three years of secondary schools.
Many schools, however, aren’t waiting for the plan to be finalized before moving ahead with bans of their own.
The trend isn’t catching on only in Belgium: The Netherlands has a ban on the devices, and education ministers in France and Ireland said last week that they were also considering it.
Starlink Agrees to Comply With Brazil’s Orders to Block X
Elon Musk’s internet service, Starlink, has announced that it will comply with a Brazil Supreme Court order to shut down X while vowing to pursue “all legal avenues” to allow the recently banned Musk-owned social media platform to operate in Brazil.
The move, announced by Starlink in a statement on Sept. 3, marks an apparent reversal after the country’s telecommunications regulator previously said that the satellite-based internet provider stated that it wouldn’t agree to block the social media platform.
Starlink said it would abide by an order from Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes requiring internet service providers and app stores to block X from their platforms.
Arthur Coimbra, an Anatel board member, told The Associated Press that if Starlink refuses to abide by the order to block X, authorities could also eventually seize equipment from Starlink’s 23 ground stations in Brazil, where Starlink serves over a quarter million customers.
