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Your Face for Sale: Anyone Can Legally Gather and Market Your Facial Data Without Explicit Consent
Your facial information is a unique form of personal sensitive information. It can identify you. Intense profiling and mass government surveillance receive much attention. But businesses and individuals are also using tools that collect, store and modify facial information, and we’re facing an unexpected wave of photos and videos generated with artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
The development of legal regulation for these uses is lagging. At what levels and in what ways should our facial information be protected?
Our facial information has become so valuable, data companies such as Clearview AI and PimEye are mercilessly hunting it down on the internet without our consent.
Even if you deleted all your facial data from the internet, you could easily be captured in public and appear in some database anyway. Being in someone’s TikTok video without your consent is a prime example — in Australia this is legal.
Ohio Senator Demands Google ‘Breakup’ Amid Gemini Debacle: ‘One of the Most Dangerous Companies in the World’
Lawmakers have started reacting to Google’s admitted racial and historical bias and one Republican senator wants to see the “breakup” of one of the most well-known and profitable tech companies.
“This is one of the most dangerous companies in the world. It actively solicits and forces left-wing bias down the throats of the American nation,” Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, told FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo in a “Sunday Morning Futures” exclusive interview.
The Alphabet-owned tech giant is scrambling to right the ship after pulling the plug on Gemini’s image generation features, with CEO Sundar Pichai telling employees last Tuesday the company is working “around the clock” to fix the tool’s bias, calling the images generated by the model “completely unacceptable.”
Addressing the likelihood that legislative action may be taken against Google, the senator claimed there are “growing calls” across the political spectrum for a shakedown on the tech giant, noting it’s gotten “too big, too powerful.”
Pennsylvania Collaborates With DHS and CISA to Monitor Online Election-Related Speech
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor, Josh Shapiro, announced last week that, in an effort to address perceived “threats” to electoral procedures, the state is launching an initiative in partnership with various state and federal agencies.
These partners include the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and, notably, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), an organization long accused of aiding online censorship to impede freewheeling online speech.
This program, named the Pennsylvania Election Threats Task Force, is expected to bring forth measures for the protection of the electoral system, safeguard voters from any form of intimidation, and provide accessible and trustworthy information about the election.
Accusations have been levied against CISA for serving as the epicenter of the federal government’s efforts to censor speech, which is seen as an assault on civil liberties and First Amendment rights.
DeSantis Rejects Bill to Restrict Social Media Access for Teens
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vetoed a bill that would have barred social media companies, including Meta Platforms Inc. and TikTok Inc., from serving users under the age of 16, a move that would have made Florida the first state to enact such a ban.
The proposed legislation aimed to require social networks to block underage users from creating accounts and to deactivate existing accounts held by minors below the age threshold.
DeSantis vetoed the bill on Friday after the state legislature passed the legislation last week. Instead, state lawmakers are now pursuing softer restrictions. On Friday, they revised HB3, a bill initially targeting age verification for pornographic websites, to include provisions to forbid social media accounts for children under age 14 and stipulate parental consent for account registration by 14- and 15-year-olds.
DeSantis, in a letter to House Speaker Paul Renner, said he rejected the bill because the legislature was working through another proposal that would better protect children from “harms associated with social media” and support parents’ rights.
Court Weighs Whose Freedom of Speech Is at Risk in Content Moderation Fight
The long-running fight over perceived anti-conservative bias on social media platforms reached the U.S. Supreme Court when the justices heard oral arguments in two related cases challenging state laws in Texas and Florida limiting how internet companies police their platforms. The states say they’re combating abusive corporate behavior, the tech industry says the laws violate the First Amendment, and dozens of outside groups have weighed in with briefs tackling the debate from various angles.
Essentially, this is a disagreement about whether tech platforms are threatening their users’ freedom of speech, or are having their own freedom of speech threatened by the government. The conservative justices were split on the issue.
Justice Samuel Alito argued that the entire concept of content moderation was a euphemism for censorship carried out by private businesses, rather than the government, and suggested that “some may want to resist the Orwellian temptation to re-categorize offensive conduct in seemingly bland terms.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh threw Orwell right back at Alito, arguing that the government shouldn’t interfere in the decisions that private entities make about, say, what they allow to be posted on their websites. “When I think of Orwellian, I think of the state, not the private sector, not private individuals,” said Kavanaugh.
Before they decide on this case, the justices are planning to consider social media from a different angle. Later this month, they’ll hear arguments in a case that challenges the practice known as jawboning, in which governments suggest to social media companies what content they should consider removing. That case further complicates questions about content moderation, censorship and how the government interacts with tech companies — and it’s safe to assume it won’t be the last one to reach the court. Any final word on these issues still seems pretty far away.
Bill Banning Kids on Social Media May Throw Wrench in Senate Safety Push
A surging campaign to pass federal protections for kids online is facing new headwinds in the Senate, where an effort to bundle social media bills is stoking fears it could threaten the negotiations.
Earlier this month, a group of senators announced they secured more than 60 co-sponsors for the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a sprawling measure requiring tech companies to take steps to prevent harms to children on their sites and beef up their privacy and safety settings.
The milestone signaled that backers had clinched enough support to clear it out of the Senate, a step that would make it the most significant piece of internet regulation to do so in decades.
But now a group of lawmakers is pushing to couple the proposal with a separate bill banning kids under 13 from social media altogether, which could muddle the talks.
Elon Musk Sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, Claiming Betrayal of Its Goal to Benefit Humanity
Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman over what he says is a betrayal of the ChatGPT maker’s founding aims of benefiting humanity rather than pursuing profits.
In a lawsuit filed at San Francisco Superior Court, billionaire Musk said that when he bankrolled OpenAI’s creation, he secured an agreement with Altman and Greg Brockman, the president, to keep the AI company as a nonprofit that would develop technology for the benefit of the public.
Under its founding agreement, OpenAI would also make its code open to the public instead of walling it off for any private company’s gains, the lawsuit says.
However, by embracing a close relationship with Microsoft, OpenAI and its top executives have set that pact “aflame” and are “perverting” the company’s mission, Musk alleges in the lawsuit.
European Regulators Crack Down on Big Tech
European regulators have launched a series of probes against Big Tech. In the latest one, Apple (AAPL.O) received a $2 billion EU antitrust fine for preventing Spotify (SPOT.N) and other music streaming services from informing users of payment options outside its App Store.
Alphabet (GOOGL.O) unit Google‘s 2.42-billion-euro ($2.7 billion) EU antitrust fine should be upheld by Europe’s top court, an adviser to the court said on Jan. 11. The European Commission fined the company in 2017 for using its own price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals.
EU antitrust regulators said in January Microsoft‘s investment of over $10 billion in ChatGPT maker OpenAI may be subject to EU merger rules, following a similar warning from the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in December.
