Malevolent Technology
WASHINGTON, May 31 (Reuters) – Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and a subsidiary reached separate multi-million dollar settlements with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday related to privacy violations of children using its voice assistant Alexa and homeowners using its Ring doorbell camera.
Amazon agreed to pay $25 million to settle allegations it violated children’s privacy rights when it failed to delete Alexa recordings at the request of parents and kept them longer than necessary, according to a court filing in federal court in Seattle.
“While we disagree with the FTC’s claims regarding both Alexa and Ring, and deny violating the law, these settlements put these matters behind us,” Amazon.com said in a statement.
It also pledged to make some changes to its practices.
Ring will pay $5.8 million for mishandling customers’ videos, according to a separate filing in federal court in the District of Columbia.
In its complaint against Amazon.com filed in Washington state, the FTC said that it violated rules protecting children’s privacy and rules against deceiving consumers who used Alexa. For example, the FTC complaint says that Amazon told users it would delete voice transcripts and location information upon request, but then failed to do so.
The FTC also said Ring gave employees unrestricted access to customers’ sensitive video data said “as a result of this dangerously overbroad access and lax attitude toward privacy and security, employees and third-party contractors were able to view, download, and transfer customers’ sensitive video data for their own purposes.”
As part of the FTC agreement with Ring, which spans 20 years, Ring is required to disclose to customers how much access to their data the company and its contractors have.
In February 2019, Ring changed its policies so that most Ring employees or contractors could only access a customer’s private video with that person’s consent.
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Read MoreThe growing prevalence of conversational artificial intelligence (CAI), digital agents that talk and respond socially to users, has increased the likelihood of over-dependency on this new technology. Drawing on the interaction of person-affect-cognition-execution model, this study examined how social anxiety, loneliness, and rumination contribute to the problematic use of CAI (PUCAI). The study also investigated the moderating role of mind perception by analyzing how the human-like mental capacity of CAI influences PUCAI. The serial mediation and moderated mediation analyses of data collected from 516 CAI users (214 males and 302 females, Mage = 27.06) revealed that social anxiety was positively associated with PUCAI, and this connection was serially mediated by loneliness and rumination. Moreover, mind perception intensified the positive association between social anxiety and PUCAI, but it buffered the positive association between rumination and PUCAI.
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Read MoreAI chatbots aren’t much good at offering emotional support being—you know—not a human, and—it can’t be stated enough—not actually intelligent. That didn’t stop The National Eating Disorder Association from trying to foist a chatbot onto folks requesting aid in times of crisis. Things went about as well as you can expect, as an activist claims that instead of helping through emotional distress, the chatbot instead tried to needle her to lose weight and measure herself constantly.
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Read MoreThe malware gathered sensitive information from devices
It’s unclear yet if it’s part of an “espionage campaign”
The app has since been removed from the Play store
An Android application available on the Google Play store allegedly spied on its users, a recent study found.
The application, screen recording app iRecorder – Screen Recorder, was first uploaded to the Play store on Sept. 19, 2021, and was downloaded more than 50,000 times. The app had generally been functioning normally for months and had no detected harmful features.
However, in its August 2022 update, a code within the app was changed that allowed bad actors to make secret audio recordings and make unauthorized transfers of images, videos, saved web pages and other files from the device, according to research conducted by Lukas Stefanko, a malware researcher with cybersecurity firm ESET.
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Read MoreIn a public-private collaboration with a technology company, the U.S Department of Defense’s (DoD) Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) developed AI monitored wearable devices that were used to detect infections in military personnel during the Covid-19 pandemic. The project is known as the Rapid Assessment of Threat Exposure (RATE), which characterizes infections as a security and combat readiness threat.
RATE uses a predictive artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that leverages biometric data from commercial wearable devices like rings and watches to try to detect early onset of infectious disease in people. Philips, a private technology company, is involved in developing RATE’s AI algorithm. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classifies RATE as a general wellness device.
Consumer wearable devices that continuously measure physiological metrics such as dermal temperature, heart rate, and respiratory rate can establish users’ individual baseline patterns and allow detection of deviations from their baselines. Because these physiological variables can change in response to infection consumer wearables may hold promise as broadly available tools for early illness detection.”
DoD has received an additional $10 million from Congress to expand the RATE project that began in 2020.
Currently, the wearable devices used will include Garmin watches and Oura rings, but the project is aiming to add three additional popular wearable devices.
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Read MoreThe Center for AI Safety has released a statement signed by 350 industry leaders, including the CEOs of OpenAI and Google DeepMind
Preventing runaway artificial intelligence from causing the extinction of humanity should be a top-level global priority, the nonprofit Center for AI Safety said in a statement on Tuesday signed by 350 prominent individuals in AI and related fields.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the statement reads.
Signers included Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who recently told Congress he was worried the technology could go “quite wrong” and urged them to impose regulations on the industry. The three industry leaders met with US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris earlier this month to discuss potential regulations. Numerous executives from their companies also added their names to Tuesday’s statement.
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Read MoreThe FDA’s approval of Elon Musk’s Neuralink for human experimentation is momentous — a potentially catastrophic step toward transhumanism — the attempted physical control of the mind.1 I emphasize “attempted” because all such previous attempts have inflicted severe injury on the brains of the subjects without achieving any significant control over the individual’s behavior. Neuralink uses a robot to “sew” very thin electrodes into the brain for interfacing with computers.
The FDA doesn’t typically confirm approvals for human clinical trials but offered a statement Friday. “The FDA acknowledges and understands that Neuralink has announced that its investigational device exemption … for its implant/R1 robot was approved by the FDA and that it may now begin conducting human clinical trials for its device,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement Friday.
Will the FDA protect the public from Musk unleashing a plague of transhumanistic experimentation on humanity? Not a chance. It will promote it. Transhumanistic experimentation is a darling of the Deep State in general and especially the FDA Center for Devices.
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Read MoreImagine a computer chip, powered by a mini-lithium battery, implanted in your brain that helps you control your weight, enable web browsing and telepathy with your thoughts, and also soothes, if not eliminates, mental instabilities.
Science fiction? For now, yes, but it could be very real in the near future.
It’s called Neuralink, the brainchild of Elon Musk, and it has received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to proceed with the first-in-human clinical trials.
Musk is so confident in the system’s ability to cure a range of conditions including obesity, autism, depression, schizophrenia and other applications, he said last year he would be willing to implant them in his children.
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Read MoreScientists and legal scholars question the rationale for the use of insects to disperse infectious genetically engineered (GE) viruses engineered to edit the chromosomes in plants, warning that the technology could very easily be weaponized.
This Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program is the first to propose and fund the development of viral horizontal environmental genetic alteration agents with the capacity to perform genetic engineering in the environment.
The $27 million project, called “Insect Allies,” is trying to take advantage of insects’ natural ability to spread crop diseases, but instead of carrying disease, they would spread plant-protective traits.
The opinion paper “Agricultural Research, or a New Bioweapon System?” argues that if plant modification were really the ultimate goal, a far simpler and more targeted agricultural delivery system could be used.
There are also serious concerns about environmental ramifications, as the insects’ spread cannot be controlled. It would also be impossible to prevent the insects from genetically modifying organic crops.
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