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It’s Time for Laws Limiting the Power of Public Health Institutions
Over the past three years, the public has seen first-hand the tremendous power the public health establishment wields. Using emergency power that most people never realized an American government possessed, public health violated Americans’ most fundamental civil rights in the name of infection control.
We endured three years of useless and divisive policies, including lockdowns, church and business closures, zoom schools, mask mandates and vaccine mandates and discrimination.
Now that the WHO has declared the end of the COVID pandemic and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has announced her resignation, it is time for states to take action to limit the power of public health so that a repeat never happens again.
Contrary to what you hear these days from those making poor decisions throughout the pandemic, many of the errors were not honest mistakes. Public health embraced positions at odds with the scientific evidence throughout the pandemic, for instance, by pretending that immunity after COVID recovery does not exist, and by overstating the ability of the vaccine to stop COVID infection and transmission. Despite many getting vaccinated, COVID spread and people died anyway, with tremendous collateral harm — both economic and in terms of public health — deriving from the favored policies of our public health institutions.
Students Can’t Get Off Their Phones. Schools Have Had Enough.
When students returned to school during the pandemic, educators quickly saw a change in their cellphone habits. More than ever, they were glued to their devices during class — posting on social media, searching YouTube, texting friends.
So this year, schools in Ohio, Colorado, Maryland, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Virginia, California and others banned the devices in class to curb student obsession, learning disruption, disciplinary incidents and mental health worries.
The stakes are higher after the COVID years, with many districts behind academically up to a year or more and doing all they can to help students catch up. Some have come to see social media — accessed via students’ phones — as a major contributor to poor mental health. A string of school systems has filed suit against the platforms.
New Social Media Recommendations for Teens Focus on Preventing Harm
A new report from the American Psychological Association (APA) gives parents of adolescents information that is often hard to find: an up-to-date, thorough list of recommendations for social media use. Included in the APA’s 10 recommendations are commonsense tips, like reasonably monitoring social media use, limiting time spent so that it doesn’t interfere with sleep and exercise, and minimizing use for social comparison, particularly related to beauty- and appearance-related content.
The report also highlights the importance of regularly screening pre-teens and teens for “problematic” social media use as well as offering social media literacy training to help them develop skills like questioning the accuracy of the content they see and understanding tactics for spreading misinformation.
Written by a panel of experts who focus on adolescent mental health, the recommendations are meant to reach policymakers, educators, mental health clinicians, technology companies, and teens, in addition to parents and caregivers.
Though the authors mention the role that product design choices like notifications and algorithms play in amplifying certain types of content and engagement, they do not take a position on regulating social media companies, as some critics and politicians have done.
Subpoenaed Alphabet Documents Improperly Redacted, May Not Be Complete, Jordan Says
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Monday sent a letter to Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, urging full compliance with a subpoena requiring the production of unredacted documents pertaining to the company’s communications with the executive branch.
In the letter, Jordan said the company released insufficient information, producing only 4,049 pages of material with key details redacted “despite explicit instructions” not to do so.
Jordan said he expects Alphabet to submit all requested documents without redactions by May 22, including some that he believes are in the company’s possession but haven’t been released.
Alphabet is one of several tech companies — including Amazon, Apple and Meta — the committee subpoenaed in February for “reported collusion with the federal government … to suppress free speech.”
TechScape: AI is Feared to be Apocalyptic or Touted as World-Changing — Maybe It’s Neither
What if AI doesn’t fundamentally reshape civilization? This week, I spoke to Geoffrey Hinton, the English psychologist-turned-computer scientist whose work on neural networks in the 1980s set the stage for the explosion in AI capabilities over the last decade. Hinton wanted to speak to deliver a message to the world: he is afraid of the technology he helped create.
Hinton is not the first big figure in AI development to sound the alarm, and he won’t be the last. The undeniable — and accelerating — improvement in the underlying technology lends itself easily to visions of unending progress. The clear possibility of a flywheel effect, where progress itself begets further progress, adds to the potential. Researchers are already seeing good results, for instance, on using AI-generated data to train new AI models, while others are incorporating AI systems into everything from chip design to data-center operations.
But I’m more interested in the middle ground. Most technologies do not end the world. (In fact, so far, humanity has a 100% hit rate for not destroying itself, but past results may not be indicative of future performance.) Many technologies do change the world. How might that middle ground shake out for AI?
Melbourne Public Housing Tower Residents Offered $5M Payout Over COVID Lockdown
Thousands of residents forced into a sudden COVID-19 lockdown in public housing towers in Melbourne in 2020 are set to collectively reap $5m in compensation.
The Victorian government has settled a class action over measures intended to stop an outbreak of the virus in nine towers at the height of the second wave.
The plaintiffs claim people were wrongly detained for up to 14 days and threatened with physical harm if they tried to leave the towers, though the state of Victoria denied those claims.
The government has repeatedly refused to apologize to the residents despite the state’s complaints watchdog recommending one was in order for the harm and distress caused by the suddenness of the lockdown.
MWC Organizers Fined Over GDPR Biometric Security Concerns
The GSMA, the organizers behind Barcelona’s annual Mobile World Congress (MWC), have been fined €200 million for not carrying out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA).
Per TechCrunch, the decision delivered in Spanish by the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (AEPD) found that the GSMA fell short when failing to account for biometric data collected from attendees, partially as a result of BREEZZ — an optional, automated identity verification system permitting entry to the event.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires that a robust DPIA be carried out when data collection may pose a “high risk” to the right to privacy of those affected. Biometric facial recognition technology falls into this category in this case because said data was used to identify MWC attendees.
The AEPD also ruled that the GSMA collected passports and EU identity documentation from attendees, and required them to consent to biometric data collection as part of the upload process.
AI Cameras Are Being Set Up on Highways to Catch Drivers Who Throw Trash Out of Their Car Windows
AI cameras are being set up on some U.K. highways to stop drivers from throwing trash out of their car windows. The AI-powered cameras will be installed in British lay-bys in the coming weeks in an attempt to catch drivers who litter, The Metro reported. Offenders could be fined up to £100, or $126, according to the news outlet.
The cameras would be able to automatically send the images to enforcers, meaning officers would no longer have to look through hours of CCTV footage, the publication added.
AI cameras are already being used to monitor other aspects of driving. In February, an Amazon driver shared how the company’s AI camera system is used to monitor drivers during delivery shifts. The driver shared a TikTok explaining how the camera can be used to flag delivery drivers for doing anything from taking a sip of coffee to failing to buckle their seatbelts enough times.
