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Parents in Pakistan Could Be Jailed for Polio Vaccine Refusal
Parents in Pakistan who refuse to get their children vaccinated against infectious diseases could be jailed or fined under a new law introduced in Sindh province.
The introduction of the legislation is an attempt to eradicate polio, which is endemic in Pakistan, but will cover vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough (pertussis), measles, mumps and rubella.
Parents who do not allow their children to be vaccinated could be sentenced to a month in prison and fined 50,000 Pakistani rupees (£130). The law, the first of its kind in the country, was signed last week and will come into force this month.
More than 62,000 parents, most of them in Sindh province, refused polio vaccinations for their children during the countrywide polio vaccination campaign in January this year.
Facebook Files: White House Peddled Obvious Foreign Lies About ‘Disinformation Dozen’
A U.K.-based, government-linked dark money nonprofit operated by a far-left British Labour Party operative fabricated statistics about the so-called ‘disinformation dozen’ — people with large social media footprints that expressed vaccine or lockdown skepticism, according to the latest Facebook Files released on Tuesday by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) run by a man named Imran Ahmed claimed that Robert Kennedy Jr. and 11 other people were responsible for 65% of “anti-vaccine content circulating on social media.”
That claim itself was disinformation, according to Jordan — who notes that Facebook employees were highly skeptical of the CCDH’s claims, which they said were just Americans expressing “vaccine hesitancy,” which is often “not misinfo” even under Facebook’s policies.
What’s more, the Biden White House repeatedly peddled the 65% lie as Facebook employees were preparing to draft a memo to CEO Mark Zuckerberg to complain about “pressure from … the White House” to remove the so-called Disinfo Dozen, even though they did “not believe we currently have a clear path for removal.”
According to the internal emails, Facebook continued to monitor the so-called disinformation dozen to justify censorship, only to find that the “majority” of them weren’t spreading misinformation.
The Supreme Court’s Next Target: Government Coercion on Social Media
The Supreme Court Justices will hear argument this fall in two cases that ask whether public officials violate the First Amendment when they block people on social media using accounts that issue communications on job-related matters. (The Second Circuit had previously ruled against President Donald Trump‘s blocking people on Twitter, but the Supreme Court vacated the decision and mooted the case when Trump left office.)
And the Court will almost certainly grant petitions arising from a split in the lower courts over Florida and Texas laws that treat tech companies as common carriers, preventing them from engaging in viewpoint discrimination. But this summer, a new social media issue emerged that may well swamp these in public importance: jawboning.
Two examples gripped the news cycle recently: the censorship of posts relating to COVID policy, election integrity, and Hunter Biden‘s laptop as detailed in Missouri v. Biden, where a federal judge enjoined officials from meeting and coordinating with social media companies; and revelations that have come out of the House Subcommittee on Government Weaponization.
Connected Cars Are a ‘Privacy Nightmare,’ Mozilla Foundation Says
Today, the Mozilla Foundation published its analysis of how well automakers handle the privacy of data collected by their connected cars, and the results will be unlikely to surprise any regular reader of Ars Technica. The researchers were horrified by their findings, stating that “cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy.”
Mozilla looked at 25 car brands and found that all of them collected too much personal data, and from multiple sources — monitoring not just which buttons you push or what you do in any of the infotainment system’s apps but also data from other sources like satellite radio or third-party maps. Or even when you connect your phone — remember that prompt asking you if you wanted to share all your contacts and notes with your car when you connected it via Bluetooth?
While some gathered data seems innocuous or even helpful — feedback to improve cabin ergonomics and UIs, for example — some data is decidedly not.
Mozilla found plenty more to worry about. Eighty-four percent of the brands they analyzed said they can share your data, and 76% said they can sell it. And more than half say they’ll share data with the government and law enforcement by request. Users have very little control over what those brands do with their data. Only two of the 25 brands (Renault and Dacia) tell users they have the right to have their data deleted, and neither sell cars in the United States.
Huntington Beach City Council Approves Banning Mask and Vaccine Mandates
CBS News Los Angeles reported:
The Huntington Beach City Council narrowly voted to approve a declaration to ban universal mask and COVID-19 vaccine mandates in the city. The declaration passed with a 4-3 vote. The meeting adjourned at 2:48 a.m. on Wednesday, September 6.
Mayor Pro Tem Gracey Van Der Mark introduced the motion at the Huntington Beach City Council meeting on Tuesday night. The approval of the declaration essentially makes Huntington Beach a no mask and no vaccine city.
In the declaration, Van Der Mark said in regard to mask mandates imposed at City Hall and other parts of the city in 2020 and 2021 “unnecessarily limited the freedoms of the citizens of Huntington Beach, even those who were not around anyone who tested positive for COVID-19 or at risk of any exposure.”
Republicans Declare War on Mask Mandates
Mask mandates might be a relic of the past. The federal government eliminated them at the close of the national health emergency declared around COVID-19, citing high levels of vaccinations that made the need to slow the spread of the virus even less prudent.
Many businesses followed suit, with voluntary masking requirements in most stores dissipating as more and more people received the vaccine.
But as some schools and medical facilities have begun reinstating them amid a surge of a new strain of COVID-19, Republican lawmakers want them to stay a thing of the past, launching bills aimed at restricting the federal government’s ability to impose similar mandates in the future.
Citing arguments that masks didn’t work to slow the spread of the virus during COVID — which most studies contest — Ohio Republican Senator JD Vance announced plans September 5 to introduce the Freedom to Breathe Act, which would permanently prevent the federal government from reimposing federal mask mandates in the United States.
Class Required to Wear Masks After COVID Outbreak in Montgomery Co. School
Students and staff in one class at a public school in Montgomery County, Maryland, are being told that they must wear masks for the next 10 days after three “or more” people tested positive for COVID-19.
In a letter sent home to parents on Tuesday, Rosemary Hills Elementary School principal Rebecca Irwin Kennedy wrote that KN95 masks would be distributed and students and staff in “identified classes or activities” will be required to mask up while in school for the next 10 days “except when eating or drinking.”
The letter states that after a 10-day period, “masks will become optional again.”
Norway Court Rules Against Facebook Owner Meta in Privacy Case
Meta Platforms (META.O) can be fined for breaching users’ privacy, a Norwegian court ruled on Wednesday, stopping an attempt by the owner of Facebook and Instagram to halt a fine imposed by the country’s data regulator.
Meta has been fined one million crowns ($93,200) per day since Aug. 14 for harvesting user data and using it to target advertising at them. So-called behavioural advertising is a business model common to Big Tech.
The owner of Facebook and Instagram had sought a temporary injunction against the order from the Norwegian data regulator, Datatilsynet, which imposed a daily fine for three months.
“This is a big victory for privacy,” Datatilsynet said in a statement.
Britain Admits Defeat in Controversial Fight to Break Encryption
Tech companies and privacy, activists are claiming victory after an eleventh-hour concession by the British government in a long-running battle over end-to-end encryption.
The so-called “spy clause” in the U.K.’s Online Safety Bill, which experts argued would have made end-to-end encryption all but impossible in the country, will no longer be enforced after the government admitted the technology to securely scan encrypted messages for signs of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, without compromising users’ privacy, doesn’t yet exist. Secure messaging services, including WhatsApp and Signal, had threatened to pull out of the U.K. if the bill was passed.
Opponents of the bill say that putting backdoors into people’s devices to search for CSAM images would almost certainly pave the way for wider surveillance by governments.
“You make mass surveillance become almost an inevitability by putting [these tools] in their hands,” Alan Woodward, a visiting professor in cybersecurity at the University of Surrey, says. “There will always be some ‘exceptional circumstances’ that [security forces] think of that warrants them searching for something else.”
