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Which Stores Are Scanning Your Face? No One Knows.
In early February, I spent $171.59 to see the Rangers play the Canucks at Madison Square Garden. I had no plans to watch the hockey game. I just wanted to find out whether my guest, Tia Garcia, a personal injury lawyer, could get into the building. We got in the security line and walked through the metal detector. Then, as Ms. Garcia turned to pick up her bag from the conveyor belt, a security guard asked her to step aside and show her driver’s license. “Am I in trouble?” she asked.
Five minutes later, the security manager arrived to officially kick Ms. Garcia out. Even though she had expected it to happen, Ms. Garcia found the deployment of facial recognition technology to punish corporate enemies alarming. So did local lawmakers. The City Council convened a hearing last month to discuss how Madison Square Garden and other local businesses were using the technology.
There were lots of questions to be asked: Who is using it? Who are the people they’re trying to keep out of their businesses? What do they do when the technology gets it wrong and flags a look-alike? Mayor Eric Adams had recently encouraged businesses to use facial recognition to fight shoplifting. Who answered his call? If you shoplift once, are you barred for life?
No one at the hearing knew which other businesses were using the technology. So I decided to find out. New York City has a quirky new law that makes it the only municipality in the country where a business scanning faces has to post a sign telling customers that it is doing so. After I left the meeting, I set off on a miles-long walk in search of those signs. They weren’t where I expected them to be.
The Pentagon Is Funding Experiments on Animals to Recreate ‘Havana Syndrome’
The Defense Department is funding experiments on animals to determine if radio frequency waves could be the source of the mysterious ailment referred to as “Havana Syndrome” that has afflicted hundreds of U.S. government personnel in recent years, according to public documents and three people familiar with the effort.
This news of the ongoing animal testing, which has not previously been reported, comes after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence determined last week that there is no credible evidence that a foreign adversary wielding a weapon caused the health incidents. Despite the assessment, the Pentagon is continuing to examine that possibility, as POLITICO reported.
The Army in September awarded Wayne State University in Michigan a $750,000 grant to study the effects of radio frequency waves on ferrets, which have brains similar to humans, according to information on the grant posted on USASpending.gov. The aim is to determine whether this exposure induces similar symptoms to those experienced by U.S. government personnel in Havana, Cuba, and China, the documents show. Symptoms have been described as severe headaches, temporary loss of hearing, vertigo and other problems similar to traumatic brain injury.
There is a “strong rationale” that the Havana Syndrome was caused by “occult exposure to radio frequency (RF) waves,” according to the abstract, which notes that the Russians have used radio waves to clandestinely eavesdrop on U.S. government personnel since the Cold War, when the practice was known as the “Moscow Signal.”
‘Weaponization’ Subcommittee Members Spar Over ‘Twitter Files’
House Democrats and Republicans sparred Thursday over how Twitter handles government requests for Twitter to review posts, in the second House committee showdown over reports known as the “Twitter Files” released by several journalists on the platform.
Republicans called in Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, two of the journalists who released threads of the files, as witnesses in a hearing for the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government. The hearing ramped up House GOP leaders’ accusations that tech companies are making content censorship decisions with an anti-conservative bias.
In the most heated moments, Democrats complained that another Taibbi “Twitter Files” thread was just posted shortly before the hearing started and not provided to them. They also pressed the journalists on how they obtained the files. Democrats on the panel during Thursday’s hearing pressed Taibbi and Shellenberger over the scope of the information they had access to, and the terms they agreed to when posting them.
But Taibbi would not say, despite being pressed by both Plaskett and Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), whether Musk was the person who gave him that information.
House Republicans Pass Bill to Ban Federal Officials From Pressuring Tech Platforms on Content
House Republicans passed a bill on Thursday that seeks to ban federal officials from promoting censorship, a measure Republicans brought to the floor in response to what they say are efforts by the Biden administration to persuade social media companies to suppress certain information.
The measure titled the Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act was passed in a party-line 219-206 vote. The legislation specifically calls for prohibiting “federal employees from advocating for censorship of viewpoints in their official capacity,” which includes recommending that a third party should “take any action to censor speech.”
Lawmakers approved a number of amendments to the bill, including one that would prohibit law enforcement officials from sharing information with social media companies unless it pertains to speech not protected by the First Amendment — such as obscenity, fraud or incitement to imminent lawless action.
Telehealth Startup Cerebral Shared Millions of Patients’ Data With Advertisers
Cerebral has revealed it shared the private health information, including mental health assessments, of more than 3.1 million patients in the United States with advertisers and social media giants like Facebook, Google and TikTok.
The telehealth startup, which exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic after rolling lockdowns and a surge in online-only virtual health services, disclosed the security lapse in a filing with the federal government that it shared patients’ personal and health information who used the app to search for therapy or other mental health care services.
Cerebral said that it collected and shared names, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, IP addresses and other demographics, as well as data collected from Cerebral’s online mental health self-assessment, which may have also included the services that the patient selected, assessment responses and other associated health information.
Cerebral was sharing patients’ data with tech giants in real-time by way of trackers and other data-collecting code that the startup embedded within its apps. Tech companies and advertisers, like Google, Facebook and TikTok, allow developers to include snippets of their custom-built code, which allows the developers to share information about their app users’ activity with the tech giants, often under the guise of analytics but also for advertising.
A Former TikTok Employee Tells Congress the App Is Lying About Chinese Spying
A former risk manager at TikTok has met with congressional investigators to share his concerns that the company’s plan for protecting U.S. user data is deeply flawed, pointing to evidence that could inflame lawmakers’ suspicion of the app at a moment when many are considering a nationwide ban.
In an exclusive interview with The Washington Post, the former employee, who worked for six months in the company’s Trust and Safety division ending in early 2022, said the issues could leave data from TikTok’s more than 100 million U.S. users exposed to China-based employees of its parent company ByteDance, even as the company races to implement new safety rules walling off domestic user information.
His allegations threaten to undermine this $1.5 billion restructuring plan, known as Project Texas, which TikTok has promoted widely in Washington as a way to neutralize the risk of data theft or misuse by the Chinese government.
They could also fuel speculation that the wildly popular short-video app remains vulnerable to having its video-recommendation algorithm and user data distorted for propaganda or espionage. U.S. authorities have not shared evidence that the Chinese government has accessed TikTok’s data or code.
The Importance of Free Speech in the Medical Profession, and the Dangers of Censorship
“More than ever, society needs all clinicians to step up and speak up. Furthermore, professional organizations and state medical boards must make more robust use of their powers to take appropriate disciplinary action against clinicians who violate professional standards by spreading health misinformation,” wrote Allison M. Whelan in an article published by the AMA Journal of Ethics on March 1, 2023.
These two sentences seem to me to be in contradiction to one another. In essence, they require physicians to voice their opinions but also to face disciplinary action if their opinions happen not to coincide with the received opinions of their time. This is a very odd way of going about stimulating medical debate, which is so necessary to progress, to say nothing of freedom itself.
What counts as misinformation isn’t straightforward, as the author of the paper I have quoted acknowledges, but she’s especially concerned that those doctors connected in some way with politics or government shouldn’t pass on misinformation, as they’re likely to be seen as being in authority. The examples of misinformation that she gives are unfortunate, however.
For example, she quotes Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist, who wrote in a tweet that masks didn’t work in protecting against or preventing the spread of COVID-19, this going against “guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”
But guidance from the CDC isn’t in itself evidence of the justification of that guidance, and a recent Cochrane review (the nearest to a disinterested and objective review of medical evidence as is to be found in this wicked world) came to the conclusion that evidence in favor of masks was lacking.
Meta Is Working on a Twitter Killer, but With a Twist
Twitter hasn’t been doing too well lately, and now the sharks are coming. Facebook‘s parent company Meta is working on a standalone, text-based social network app that will be both a rival to Twitter and its decentralized competitor, Mastodon, at the same time.
Moneycontrol broke the news, and Meta confirmed the news, though the company didn’t share too many details about what it’s working on.
“We’re exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates. We believe there’s an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests,” a Meta spokesperson told Moneycontrol.
While the app, codenamed P92, might still be in the early stages of development, we now know it’s going to be standalone, meaning it’s not just a feature tacked onto Instagram.
