Login
Sen. Ron Johnson Accuses CDC of ‘Censorship’ of Own COVID Vaccine Info
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of coordinating with social media companies to suppress certain information about COVID-19 vaccines.
Citing one of his own social media posts about vaccines that got labeled misleading, Johnson claimed the agency had abused its authority and demanded it fork over key documents about the efforts in a Monday letter to CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen.
“Based on recent information I have received … it is clear that CDC abused its authority by engaging in a censorship campaign to suppress and discredit certain viewpoints it labeled as ‘misinformation,’” Johnson wrote in the letter, obtained by The Post.
As an example, Johnson highlighted a Jan. 3, 2022, post he made on Twitter, now known as X, that highlighted information from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). In the post, Johnson claimed that VAERS data showed there had been over 1 million adverse effects from the COVID-19 jab. That post was labeled misleading on the platform with a note explaining that most public health officials had deemed the vaccines safe.
Johnson, the ranking member on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, is demanding records detailing interactions between all CDC employees and employees at X, Facebook, and YouTube regarding 10 individuals who expressed vaccine and lockdown-skeptical views beginning Dec. 1, 2019.
IBM Promised to Back Off Facial Recognition — Then It Signed a $69.8 Million Contract to Provide It
IBM has returned to the facial recognition market — just three years after announcing it was abandoning work on the technology due to concerns about racial profiling, mass surveillance, and other human rights violations.
In June 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests swept the U.S. after George Floyd’s murder, IBM chief executive Arvind Krishna wrote a letter to Congress announcing that the company would no longer offer “general purpose” facial recognition technology.
Later that year, the company redoubled its commitment, calling for U.S. export controls to address concerns that facial recognition could be used overseas “to suppress dissent, to infringe on the rights of minorities, or to erase basic expectations of privacy.”
Despite these announcements, last month, IBM signed a $69.8 million (£54.7 million) contract with the British government to develop a national biometrics platform that will offer a facial recognition function to immigration and law enforcement officials, according to documents reviewed by The Verge and Liberty Investigates, an investigative journalism unit in the U.K.
Moore: COVID Lockdown Leaders Won’t Admit They Were Wrong
COVID mania just won’t go away. The deadly strains of the virus have been gone for two years now, and yet the recent outbreak of a mild flu-like variant is again stoking panic on the Left.
Nearly 100 universities are requiring masks this fall. Lionsgate movie studios in Los Angeles and Atlanta-based Morris Brown College this week stated they are reinstating not just mask mandates but social distancing measures and contact tracing.
CNN, which led the panic in 2020 and 2021 — causing manic school, restaurant and business shutdowns and vaccine mandates — recently put out a headline on its website that encouraged its readers not to go outside without a mask on. Really? The latest evidence finds this is less dangerous than a normal flu virus and tracking data suggest that the wave has already peaked.
It is one thing for well-meaning medical experts to have disagreed about how to best combat a once-in-a-half-century deadly virus. We didn’t know exactly what we were dealing with. But now we know with concrete scientific evidence that most mandates and lockdowns had a small impact on the spread of the virus and on fatalities. It turns out there was almost no difference in death rates in states with strict lockdowns and no lockdowns at all. The same is true of cross-country evidence.
Finland Is First to Test Digital Passports: How This Could Change Travel
What if we told you that the next time you jet off for your holiday or business trip, your mobile could act as your passport? Finland is trying something new and if it works, there’s a big chance that digital passports will become a reality and people will soon be able to bid adieu to the physical form of a passport.
Here’s what we know about the world’s first digital passports and what benefits they serve. On August 28, the Finnish Border Guard announced that it would be the first country across the globe to test digital travel documents.
The experiment, which will continue until February next year, is being carried out in partnership with Finnair, the Finnish police and airport company Finavia. As it is a trial, for now, it is only valid for Finnish people flying on Finnair to or from London, Manchester and Edinburgh.
While Finland is already testing its new digital passport, Poland and South Korea are also working on similar projects in their respective countries.
The United States and the United Kingdom are also working on something similar. Interestingly, it was Ukraine in 2021 that became the first country in the world to give the same legal status to digital passports as physical ones. Ukrainians have been able to use their digital passports in a range of situations such as confirming their identity at the post office, confirming their age or opening a bank account for a few years. But last year they were also recognized when traveling into the country by plane or train.
X Wants Permission to Start Collecting Your Biometric Data and Employment History
X, the platform previously known as Twitter, is expanding the amount of data it collects on users. The social network has updated its privacy policy to include carveouts for “biometric information” and “employment history,” as spotted by Bloomberg.
“Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes,” the privacy policy reads. It doesn’t include any details on what kind of biometric information this includes — or how X plans to collect it — but it typically involves fingerprints, iris patterns, or facial features.
X Corp. was named in a proposed class action lawsuit in July over claims that its data collection violates the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The lawsuit alleges that X “has not adequately informed individuals” that it “collects and/or stores their biometric identifiers in every photograph containing a face” that’s uploaded to the platform.
One possibility for using biometric data is enabling passwordless sign-ins. According to findings from app developer Steve Moser, X plans on rolling out support for passkeys, which can use your device’s fingerprint, facial recognition, or PIN to log in to your account.
A New Facebook Setting Tells Meta Not to Use Your Data for AI
Meta, the maker of Facebook and Instagram, introduced a new privacy setting Thursday that lets you ask, pretty please, for the company not to use your data to train its AI models.
Buried in the nether regions of Facebook’s Help Center — a part of the website most people probably never visit — you’ll find an entry called Generative AI Data Subject Rights. “This form is where you can submit requests related to your third-party information being used for generative AI model training,” Facebook tells the weary travelers who’ve managed to stumble onto the page.
The leaders of the tech industry say that AI will soon destroy our world. But if you’re truly concerned about your data being swept up to train artificial intelligence, there are a lot of reasons to think this new Facebook form might be a waste of your time.
As Facebook explains, models like the ones Meta is building analyze pieces of data from a variety of sources. Some of that data comes from the things you type into Meta itself on Facebook, Instagram, and other apps. This form won’t help you with that. Did you think that was your data?
There are other ways to delete some of the data you’ve handed Meta, but there’s no way to object to the company using it for AI. Meta has built an untold number of algorithms and AI tools on your information, though the company says its LLaMA 2 language model wasn’t built on user data.
