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Venmo Teen Accounts Are Coming Next Month
Venmo is introducing a new service that allows parents to open a Venmo account for children between the ages of 13-17 to send and receive money via the app. Venmo Teen accounts also come with a debit card and controls for parents to monitor transactions and manage their child’s privacy settings — important because Venmo has been routinely criticized for its lack of privacy protections in the past.
Venmo says its new Teen account will begin rolling out to select customers from June 2023 and will be “widely available in the coming weeks.”
Kids require safe digital access to money as stores increasingly phase out physical cash, but Venmo has given plenty for parents to be concerned about. The mobile payment service has been widely criticized over privacy concerns, with one 2022 study from the University of Southern California reporting that two in five Venmo users have exposed their own personal information on the platform.
U.S. Intelligence Building System to Track Mass Movement of People Around the World
The Pentagon’s intelligence branch is developing new tech to help it track the mass movement of people around the globe and flag “anomalies.”
The project is called the Hidden Activity Signal and Trajectory Anomaly Characterization (HAYSTAC) program and it “aims to establish ‘normal’ movement models across times, locations, and populations and determine what makes an activity atypical,” according to a press release from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI).
HAYSTAC will be run by the DNI’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). It’s kind of like DARPA, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research department, but with a focus on intelligence projects. According to the agency, the project will analyze data from internet-connected devices and “smart city” sensors using AI.
Jack Cooper, HAYSTAC’s program manager, also mentioned privacy, or rather a lack of it, as a motivation for thinking about human movement. “Today you might think that privacy means going to live off the grid in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “That’s just not realistic in today’s environment. Sensors are cheap. Everybody’s got one. There’s no such thing as living off the grid.”
Medical AI’s Weaponization
Machine learning can bring us cancer diagnoses with greater speed and precision than any individual doctor — but it could also bring us another pandemic at the hands of a relatively low-skilled programmer.
Why it matters: The health field is generating some of the most exciting artificial intelligence innovation, but AI can also weaponize modern medicine against the same people it sets out to cure.
Driving the news: The World Health Organization is warning about the risks of bias, misinformation and privacy breaches in the deployment of large language models in healthcare. The big picture: As this technology races ahead, everyone — companies, government and consumers — has to be clear-eyed that it can both save lives and cost lives.
Escaped viruses are a top worry. Around 350 companies in 40 countries are working in synthetic biology. With more artificial organisms being created, there are more chances for accidental release of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, and possibly another global pandemic.
Amazon’s Palm-Scanning Payment Tech Will Now Be Able to Verify Ages, Too
Amazon One, the retailer’s palm-scanning payment technology, is now gaining new functionality with the addition of age verification services. The company announced today that customers using Amazon One devices will be able to buy adult beverages — like beers at a sports event — just by hovering their palm over the Amazon One device. The first venue to support this feature will be Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies MLB team. The technology will roll out to additional venues in the months ahead, Amazon says.
To use the system, customers hold their hand over a reader on the device that identifies multiple aspects of their palm, like lines, ridges and vein patterns, to make the identification. Amazon has argued that palm reading is a more private form of biometrics because you can’t determine someone’s identity just by looking at their palm images. However, the company isn’t just storing palm images — it’s creating a customer database that matches palm images with other information.
The technology has been the subject of privacy concerns since its debut, which already led one early adopter to abandon their plans to use the readers, after receiving pressure from consumer privacy and advocacy groups. Denver Arts and Venues had been planning to leverage Amazon One for ticketless entry at Red Rocks Amphitheater — a big win for Amazon — but it cut ties with the retailer after the publication of an open letter that suggested Amazon could share palmprint data with government agencies and that it could be stolen from the cloud by hackers.
A group of U.S. senators also pressed Amazon for more information about its plans with customer biometrics shortly after the technology’s launch. Plus, Amazon is facing a class action lawsuit over failure to provide proper notice under an NYC biometric surveillance law, related to the use of its Amazon One readers at Amazon Go stores.
That ChatGPT iPhone App Has Serious Privacy Issues You Need to Know About
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently brought its artificial intelligence bot to phones with the ChatGPT iPhone app. The mobile version of the chatbot has already climbed the ranks and become one of the most popular free apps on the App Store right now. However, before you jump headfirst into the app, beware of getting too personal with the bot and putting your privacy at risk.
OpenAI’s privacy policy says that when you “use our services, we may collect personal information that is included in the input, file uploads, or feedback you provide”. This basically means that if you ask ChatGPT questions that contain any personal information (read: facts about you which you’d rather not share with a living soul) it’ll be sent to OpenAI and could be read by a human reviewer. And that’s a big deal.
So, you have no idea whether OpenAI is actually reading your conversations, and you have no option to opt out. There is no possible way for the company to read every conversation from every user, but it is something you should keep in mind as you continue to use the app.
The Government Can’t Seize Your Data — but It Can Buy It
When the Biden administration proposed new protections earlier this month to prevent law enforcement from demanding reproductive healthcare data from companies, they took a critical first step in protecting our personal data. But there remains a different, serious gap in data privacy that Congress needs to address.
While the Constitution prevents the government from compelling companies to turn over your sensitive data without due process, there are no laws or regulations stopping them from just buying it. And the U.S. government has been buying private data for years.
Congress needs to ban the government from buying up sensitive geolocation data entirely — not just preventing its seizure. So long as agencies and law enforcement can legally purchase this sensitive information from data brokers, constitutional limits on the government’s ability to seize this data mean next to nothing.
Meta Slapped With $1.3 Billion Fine for Sending EU User Data to the U.S.
Facebook‘s parent company Meta has been fined 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) for breaching the European Union’s data protection rules.
The issue revolves around the way Facebook handled European user data. According to Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), which announced the results of its inquiry into Meta Ireland on Monday, Facebook’s transferring of user data from Europe to the U.S. was in breach of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules.
In a nutshell, when Facebook takes personal data from its customers in the EU and transfers it over to the U.S., the data can potentially be shared with U.S. intelligence services. A deal called the Privacy Shield used to allow the free transfer of EU user data to companies in the U.S. until 2020 when the EU’s Court of Justice determined it didn’t really protect EU users’ data from U.S. surveillance. But Facebook continued to transfer EU users’ personal data even after the Privacy Shield was invalidated, thus triggering the inquiry by the EU’s regulators.
With this fine, Facebook will be the unwilling record-holder for the biggest ever fine handed by the EU, surpassing Amazon which was slapped with an $886 million fine over (surprise) a GDPR breach in 2021. According to Euronews, Meta plans to appeal the decision.
