Telegram's Durov Caves to Authorities and Documentation of Facebook's Covid Censorship goes Public (Issue 40, 2024)
Microsoft is also training AI on uncompensated scholarly content and Visa is likely monopolizing the debit market.
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In this edition:
Microsoft Pays Millions for AI Access to Uncompensated Educational Content
Facebook Enabled Government Censorship of Covid ‘Misinformation’ During Pandemic
Durov Caves as Telegram now Provides Personal Info to Law Enforcement
Meta’s Fine for Password Breach Tops $100 Million
Visa Sued by DOJ for Monopolising Debit Market
Federal Report States Tech Self-Governance has Failed Consumers
Former Google CEO’s Startup is Building AI Suicide Drones
Mozilla’s New Feature May Violate Users’ Privacy
Microsoft Pays Millions for AI Access to Uncompensated Educational Content
Multi-national company Informa, whose subsidiary Taylor & Francis publishes a variety of academic and technical books and journals, will earn £8M, or almost $11M USD, for allowing Microsoft access to data that will “help improve relevance and performance of AI systems”. While it is not known exactly what Microsoft’s intentions are, it is likely Informa-controlled academic articles and books will be ingested as training data for generative AI models.
The use of training data that infringes on copyright law is an ongoing issue for many generative AI companies, making this deal between Microsoft and Informa likely to be closely scrutinised. Additionally, writing journal and conference papers is usually required for academics aspiring to or holding full-time, tenured positions, which means a majority of academics receive no payment or compensation from their scholarly publishing.
Dr. Ruth Alison Clemens, a modern English literature lecturer whose published work will be included in the Microsoft and Informa partnership, was shocked that Taylor & Francis “had not publicised this [deal] more widely to their authors, as the use of AI and Large Language Models is a prominent concern for academic researchers today.” She added, “There is no clarity from Taylor & Francis about whether an opt-out policy is in place or on the cards.”
Facebook Enabled Government Censorship of Covid ‘Misinformation’ During Pandemic
America First Legal has been suing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for their handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly online censorship occurring at the height of the lock-downs. Recently, America First Legal released documents obtained from this litigation detailing the process used by Facebook to train CDC employees on reporting ‘Covid & Vaccine Misinformation’ for subsequent censorship on their social media platform.
The documents revealed that Facebook hosted a ‘government portal’ for approved government and law enforcement personnel that generated a ticket number allowing the government to track Facebook’s compliance with requested censoring. The portal also moved communication away from email chains, creating a loophole in government record keeping requirements that prevented requests under the ‘Freedom of Information Act’ (FOIA) from disclosing the details of these censorship actions to the public.
The executive director for America First Legal, Gene Hamilton, commented on the release of the latest documents, saying, “These documents show–definitively–the architecture behind the systems that political appointees and governmental bureaucrats used to unconstitutionally censor the free speech of Americans online.”
Durov Caves as Telegram now Provides Personal Info to Law Enforcement
Telegram is a messaging app with a global user base in the hundreds of millions. Recently, the owner of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was detained in France for "Complicity in the administration of an online platform to allow an illicit transaction, in an organised gang." Following Durov’s release on bail, Telegram has changed policies from sparsely providing user information to authorities only in cases of terrorism, to now more broadly giving up users’ IP addresses and phone numbers for any legitimate court order.
The original policy version, which was in effect up until last month read: “If Telegram receives a court order that confirms you're a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities. So far, this has never happened.”
The new policy, which is effective immediately, now states that they will supply the user’s IP address and phone number to law enforcement, “If Telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial authorities that confirms you're a suspect in a case involving criminal activities that violate the Telegram Terms of Service.” It should be noted that German-speaking publication Spiegel has claimed Telegram gave German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) user information related to investigations involving child abuse material and terrorism as far back as 2018.
Meta’s Fine for Password Breach Tops $100 Million
Following a multi-year investigation that began in 2019, social media company Meta was recently fined €91 million (about $101.5 USD) for a password breach affecting hundreds of millions of users. The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) began their inquiry after learning that Meta had not encrypted passwords, instead storing them in easily readable plaintext.
The specific violations perpetrated by Meta all fell under the EU’s GDPR legislation which requires passwords to be encrypted. Additionally the tech giant failed to notify regulators in a timely manner and to properly document the breach, adding to the total penalty.
DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle commented on the ruling, saying, “It is widely accepted that user passwords should not be stored in plaintext, considering the risks of abuse that arise from persons accessing such data.” To date Meta has received a majority of the largest fines handed out to tech companies operating in the EU and this latest case will only further solidify their ‘lead’.
Visa Sued by DOJ for Monopolising Debit Market
Financial services company Visa is being sued by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for monopolising debit networks. Citing a ‘web of exclusionary agreements’ the suit claims Visa controls over 60% of debit network transactions in the United States, has attempted to ‘smother’ competitors like Paypal and Square and entered into paid agreements with competitors resulting in an ‘enormous moat’ around Visa’s business.
Attorney General Merrick Garland stated, “We allege that Visa has unlawfully amassed the power to extract fees that far exceed what it could charge in a competitive market,” and added, “Visa’s unlawful conduct affects not just the price of one thing — but the price of nearly everything.”
The current lawsuit follows a 2020 DOJ antitrust court action that stopped Visa’s $5.3B acquisition of fintech company Plaid. Visa’s general counsel Julie Rottenberg replied that the current DOJ lawsuit “ignores the reality that Visa is just one of many competitors in a debit space that is growing, with entrants who are thriving”.
Federal Report States Tech Self-Governance has Failed Consumers
A four year investigation into the likes of Facebook, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter) by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has confirmed what many suspected, that tech giants are widely harvesting and sharing your personal information to generate revenue for their online behavioural advertising businesses.
The report outlines the various methods and types of data that companies collect, including the websites you visit, your location data, your demographic information, and personal interests like “divorce support” and “beer and spirits.” The FTC concludes that the amount and type of data obtained often far exceeds user expectations.
The FTC report also reveals a shocking lack of transparency for consumers when it comes to how these companies handle their data. Rampant sharing with third parties and behind the scenes tracking makes it difficult for users to know just how much privacy they’re giving up on various platforms. The FTC report emphatically states that these privacy violations are not just occasional mis-steps, but inherent to the business model of online behavioural advertising and that, “companies’ internal data privacy policies are inconsistent and inadequate, allowing them to prioritise profits over privacy.”
The FTC ends with a call to action of sorts, encouraging some form of legislative accountability, stating that “The report leaves no doubt that without significant action, the commercial surveillance ecosystem will only get worse.”
Former Google CEO’s Startup is Building AI Suicide Drones
Eric Schmidt, who helmed Google for over a decade starting in 2001, has created a new military defense company called White Stork. Schmidt recently stated that he is now a ‘licensed arms dealer’ due to his company’s intention to aid Ukraine in their fight against Russia using cheap drones, and even went so far as to write an op-ed piece for the Wall St. Journal in July touting the benefits of ‘kamikaze drones’.
As a former chairman for the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, Schmidt has been openly critical of the US military’s hesitancy in adopting new technology. He believes AI will revolutionise warfare, recently stating, “Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt in the 1930s saying that there is this new technology — nuclear weapons — that could change war, which it clearly did. I would argue that [AI-powered] autonomy and decentralized, distributed systems are that powerful."
His startup aims to mass produce cheap drones that use AI to identify targets. According to Schmidt, by lowering the costs for robotic weapons of war the need for traditional military equipment like tanks and artillery would be greatly reduced, possibly ending ground based warfare involving human participation. It is unclear at this time if he has seen the ‘Terminator’ series of movies.
Mozilla’s New Feature May Violate Users’ Privacy
The ever-vigilant privacy rights group none of your business (noyb) has recently filed a complaint against non-profit Mozilla, developer of the Firefox web browser. Noyb has taken issue with a new feature deployed on Firefox, claiming the web browser has been turned “into a tracking tool for websites”.
The new update to Firefox included a service called Privacy Preserving Attribution (PPA) and noyb has taken issue with PPA due to it moving the tracking of web users from individual website’s cookies into the browser itself. While it is likely less invasive than unlimited cookie-based tracking, Mozilla has turned the feature on by default, prompting noyb to claim that Firefox now “interferes with user rights under the EU’s GDPR”.
Responding to the complaint, Mozilla stated that PPA is an effort to improve, “invasive advertising practices by providing technical alternatives” and that PPA uses, “cryptographic techniques to enable aggregated attribution that preserves privacy”. If the Austrian data protection authority overseeing the complaint agrees with noyb, Mozilla will likely have to change the new feature or face stiff penalties.
That concludes this edition of Your Worldwide INTERNET REPORT!
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