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Texas AG Wins $1.4B Settlement From Facebook-Parent Meta Over Facial-Capture Charges
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has won a $1.4 billion settlement from Facebook-parent Meta over charges that it captured users’ facial and biometric data without properly informing them it was doing so.
Paxton said that starting in 2011, Meta, then known as Facebook, rolled out a “tag” feature that involved software that learned how to recognize and sort faces in photos.
In doing so, it automatically turned on the feature without explaining how it worked, Paxton said — something that violated a 2009 state statute governing the use of biometric data, as well as running afoul of the state’s deceptive trade practices act.
“Unbeknownst to most Texans, for more than a decade Meta ran facial recognition software on virtually every face contained in the photographs uploaded to Facebook, capturing records of the facial geometry of the people depicted,” he said in a statement.
Senate Passes Landmark Bills to Protect Kids Online, Raising Pressure on House
The Senate overwhelmingly passed a pair of bills to expand online privacy and safety protections for children on Tuesday delivering a major win for parent and youth activists who have clamored for action against tech companies they say are endangering the well-being of kids.
The legislation, approved 91-3, would force digital platforms to take “reasonable” steps to prevent harms to children such as bullying, drug addiction and sexual exploitation, and it would broaden existing federal privacy protections to include kids and teens 16 years old and younger.
The bills — the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, referred to as COPPA 2.0. — represent the most significant restrictions on tech platforms to clear a chamber of Congress in decades.
Strict Mask, Vaccine Rules Could Have Saved as Many as 250K Lives, Says New Study
Stricter COVID-19 restrictions could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the states that refused to institute them, though efforts to close nursing homes and schools likely caused more harm than good, a new study has found.
Between 118,000 and 248,000 more Americans would have survived the pandemic if all states had followed some restrictions practiced in Northeastern states, according to findings published July 26 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
The most effective responses were mask mandates and vaccine requirements, the JAMA Health Forum study found.
Hackers Can Wirelessly Watch Your Screen via HDMI Radiation
Covertly intercepting video signals is a very old-fashioned way to go about electronic spying, but a new method discovered by researchers puts a frightening spin on it.
A research team out of Uruguay has found that it’s possible to intercept the wireless electromagnetic radiation coming from an HDMI cable and interpret the video by processing it with AI.
Three scientists from the University of the Republic in Montevideo published their findings on Cornell’s ArXiv service, spotted by Techspot.
According to the paper, it’s possible to train an AI model to interpret the tiny fluctuations in electromagnetic energy from the wired HDMI signal.
Even though it’s a wired standard and it’s usually encrypted digitally, there’s enough electromagnetic signal coming off of these cables to detect without direct access.
B.C. Launches New Vaccine Registry for Healthcare Workers
Healthcare workers in British Columbia must now report their vaccination status against a number of diseases as the provincial government starts a new vaccine registry.
All health-care workers in public health-care facilities must report their immunization for COVID-19 and influenza and their immune status for other critical vaccine-preventable diseases.
The requirement to report will be phased in, beginning with the immediate collection of immune-status records for all new hires and appointees.
The move is the provincial government’s response to the provincial health officer’s decision to end the COVID-19 public health emergency, which ends the COVID-19 vaccine mandate in health-care settings.
