Login
Texas Sues Google Over Use of Facial Images
The Wall Street Journal reported:
The Texas attorney general sued Alphabet Inc.’s Google on Thursday, alleging the search giant violated state laws by collecting biometric data on face and voice features without seeking the full consent of users.
Texas alleged Google’s data-collection practices stretched back to 2015 and affected millions of the state’s residents, according to a complaint filed in state district court in Midland County, Texas.
“Google’s indiscriminate collection of the personal information of Texans, including very sensitive information like biometric identifiers, will not be tolerated,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said. “I will continue to fight Big Tech to ensure the privacy and security of all Texans.”
The case follows a similar suit Texas brought against Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. in February. Meta, which discontinued its use of facial-recognition technology last year, said the claims were without merit.
‘Voice Biomarker’ Tech Analyzes Your Voice for Signs of Depression
Software that analyzes snippets of your speech to identify mental health problems is rapidly making its way into call centers, medical clinics and telehealth platforms. The idea is to detect illnesses that might otherwise go untreated.
Why it matters: Proponents of “voice biomarker” technology say the underlying artificial intelligence is good enough to recognize depression, anxiety and a host of other maladies.
But its growing ubiquity raises privacy concerns similar to those brought about by facial recognition.
Driving the news: Hospitals and insurance companies are installing voice biomarker software for inbound and outbound calls, so that — with patients’ explicit permission — they can identify in real-time if someone they’re chatting with may be anxious or depressed, and refer them for help.
Lockdowns: The Penal Pandemic Solution
COVID-19 represents the first time in the history of pandemics that we confined healthy populations. While the ancients did not understand the mechanisms of infectious disease — they knew nothing of viruses and bacteria — they nevertheless figured out many ways to mitigate the spread of contagion during epidemics. These time-tested measures ranged from quarantining symptomatic patients to enlisting those with natural immunity, who had recovered from the illness, to care for the sick.
From the lepers in the Old Testament to the plague of Justinian in Ancient Rome to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, lockdowns were never part of conventional public health measures. The concept of lockdowns arose in part from a public health apparatus that had become militarized over the previous two decades. We now routinely hear of “countermeasures”; but doctors and nurses never use that word, which is a term of spy craft and soldiering.
In 1968, while an estimated one to four million people died in the H3N2 influenza pandemic, businesses and schools stayed open and large events were never canceled. Until 2020 we had not previously locked down entire populations, because that strategy does not work. In 2020 we had zero empirical evidence that lockdowns would save lives, only flawed mathematical models whose predictions were not just slightly off, but wildly exaggerated by orders of magnitude.
When Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, leading the president’s coronavirus task force, decided in February 2020 that lockdowns were the way to go, The New York Times was tasked with explaining this approach to Americans.
Disney to Charge Unvaccinated Customers Extra at Tokyo Theme Park
Even though the general narrative around the COVID “threat” has fallen apart and the majority of western nations have mostly abandoned their attempts to institute mandates and restrictions, in many parts of Asia the fear-mongering continues. Disney appears to be taking full advantage of the lingering hype in Japan and is using it to impose its own politically motivated mandates.
Tokyo Disney theme park will now be offering 20% cheaper rates for customers with proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test taken within 3 days of admission. Unvaccinated customers get the old rates.
The move is a remnant of policy initiatives designed by government and corporate partnerships in 2020 — a collusion of big government and big business as a means to encourage or force the public to comply with vaccination demands (or any other demands). The carrot-and-stick approach is outlined in documents published by globalists at the Imperial College of London at the very beginning of the pandemic in 2020.
Nike Lifts COVID Vaccine Requirement
Nike lifted its COVID-19 vaccine requirement for most employees in the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, citing public health guidance that finds the disease can spread even among vaccinated people.
“At this stage in the pandemic, the CDC and other public health authorities have acknowledged that community spread is possible even when people are fully vaccinated,” Joe Marsico, Nike’s chief security officer, wrote in an email to employees Wednesday.
Nike will continue giving people time off for vaccinations and boosters and offers sick leave to employees with COVID-19. The vaccine requirement remains in place at Nike workplaces in New York City, which has a citywide vaccine mandate in place until Nov. 1.
Coast Guard Cadet Kicked out for Refusing Vaccine Mandate Speaks out
For failing to comply with the military’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate, the Coast Guard Academy in August disenrolled seven cadets. Sophia Galdamez, a 22-year-old who had been in the academy for three years, was one of those cadets. She described her experience to The Epoch Times.
After finding out the vaccines used aborted fetal stem cell lines in their testing and development, as well as having concern about the drug’s potential side effects, Galdamez decided against getting vaccinated. This was before the Coast Guard’s adoption of the vaccine mandate in August 2021.
Although the mandate was not in effect over the summer of 2021, Galdamez noted that the “rules at the academy began to change.” Because she was unvaccinated, the cadet was required to always wear a mask, even while participating in physical fitness tests, which included push-ups, sit-ups and a 1.5-mile run.
Because Galdamez sought religious accommodation, she said, she began to be treated differently for opposing the vaccine.
Australia’s COVID Lockdown Rules Found to Have Lacked Fairness and Compassion
Australia’s COVID-19 response failed the nation’s most vulnerable people and in many cases amounted to overreach, according to a new report.
But the Victorian and Queensland premiers pushed back at the report’s findings, which Daniel Andrews dismissed as “academic views.”
The report, Fault lines: an independent review into Australia’s response to COVID-19, led by former public servant Peter Shergold and released on Thursday, found some lockdowns and border closures were not necessary and schools should have remained open.
Under Xi Jinping, Zero-COVID Is Accelerating China’s Surveillance State
As a new, deadly virus overtook the central city of Wuhan and spread throughout China in early 2020, the country’s ruling Communist Party and its leader Xi Jinping were faced with a crisis on a scale not seen in decades.
In Wuhan, there was chaos. The city shut itself off from the outside world, while hospitals were overrun with the sick and dying — but it was too late to stop the virus’ advance. Huge swaths of China, too, locked down, grinding the country to a halt. Online, public outrage over apparent delays in the official release of information — and the silencing of whistleblowers — lit up social media faster than the censors could repress it.
In the months following that initial outbreak, Xi oversaw the assembly of a toolbox of brute-force lockdowns, enforced quarantines and digital tracking. All that was used to bring the virus to heel and largely keep it outside China’s shuttered borders — an approach that initially appeared to earn broad public support as China lived largely virus-free and the pandemic raged overseas.
But, now, as Xi steps into an expected new era of his rule, that system — known today as the “dynamic zero-COVID” policy — is facing both social and economic pushback.
FTC Eyes a Crackdown on Influencers and Advertisers Who Target Kids
The Federal Trade Commission held an event Wednesday focused on the problem of “stealth” advertising in content geared towards children, where it’s difficult to differentiate between marketing and regular content. In the opening hours of the day-long event, the commission provided a glimpse into its thinking on the issue and indicated that new regulatory efforts may be on the horizon.
“When kids interact with digital media, they’re exposed to an array of marketing practices that blur the line between advertising and entertainment. That’s an especially serious issue when we’re talking about young people,” FTC chairperson Lina Khan said at the event.
“Developing brains are more susceptible to deceptive or harmful practices, and the immediate, and long-term effects can be significant.”
Khan said the FTC is exploring an update to the rules for implementing the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The commission is already in the process of updating its rules about commercial surveillance more broadly.
U.K. Watchdog Gives First Report Into How Video-Sharing Sites Are Tackling Online Harms
The U.K.’s media watchdog, Ofcom, has published a debut report on its first year regulating a selection of video-sharing platforms (VSPs) — including TikTok, Snapchat, Twitch, Vimeo and OnlyFans — following the introduction of content-handling rules aimed at protecting minors and others from viewing harmful user-generated video content online.
It’s a taster of a broader (and more controversial) online content regulation that’s been years in the making — aka the Online Safety Bill — which remains in limbo after the new U.K. prime minister, and her freshly appointed minister heading up digital issues, paused the draft legislation last month saying they wanted to tweak the approach in response to freedom of expression concerns.
What I Learned From Diving Headfirst Into the Metaverse
Until a couple of months ago, I would have described myself as a Luddite when it came to the metaverse. But working on the Decoded show for CNN International I had the opportunity to dive headfirst into these virtual worlds and meet some of the key players in this space.
At its most basic definition, the metaverse is the internet gone three-dimensional. The word itself it much older than you might think; it was first created in 1992 by sci-fi author Neal Stephenson, who, with alarming foresight, wrote about a dystopian future where people escaped into a virtual world, accessed with goggles.
As one of the founders of Second Life, Philip Rosesdale’s biggest concern is how future metaverse platforms make money. “It has to be a business model that doesn’t include surveillance, targeting and advertisement,” he says.
It’s a shared concern for many, and a rational one given the biggest social media company in the world is staking its future on the metaverse; it’s even changed its name to Meta.
