News

Thirteen states and the District of Columbia sued TikTok on October 8th, accusing the company of violating their consumer protection laws by creating an intentionally addictive app that harmed children and teenagers. They said that the company had designed features to prompt heavy, compulsive use of TikTok and that many children were using the app late at night when they would otherwise have been asleep. TikTok said that it strongly disagreed with the claims in the lawsuits and that it provided “robust” safeguards for young users. The action is similar to a set of lawsuits that states brought against Meta in the last year.

In a similar manner, the Korea Communications Commission prepared to launch an investigation into possible violations of Korea’s personal data protection law by TikTok. The company is accused of not giving users the option to opt out from receiving various promotional materials and not allowing new users to review the full terms and conditions when they sign on.

The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday set out the changes it would like to see at Google after a federal district court judge ruled in August that the company was guilty of antitrust abuses in the search and search-advertising markets. The department’s suggested fixes would deprive Google of some of the data that it normally draws on when delivering AI-powered search results. The first suggestion involved allowing websites to opt out from having data compiled by Google’s web crawlers used in any of its AI products. The DOJ also proposed prohibiting Google from “using contracts or other practices to undermine rivals’ access to web content.”

Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency sent orders to service providers to unblock X, formerly Twitter, ending a five-week ban of the social media company. This follows the Brazilian Supreme Court allowing X to resume activities in the country after determining that it “met all the necessary requirements to return.” The company was banned due to failing to designate a new legal representative in the country.

An independent candidate running for Virginia’s 8th congressional district has challenged the Democratic incumbent to a debate, and prepared an AI chatbot to stand in for the incumbent in case he refuses. Bentley Hensel said he was frustrated by Don Beyer’s refusal to appear for additional debates, and has trained an AI called DonBot on Beyer’s official websites, press releases, and data from the Federal Election Commission. Hensel also plans to create an AI version of the Republican candidate, Jerry Torres as well, should he refuse to debate. Beyer’s spokeswoman did not address whether his campaign would try to prevent the debate from happening beyond saying he had no plans to participate.

John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton received the Nobel Prize in Physics on October 8th for work in the late 1970s and early 1980s on machine learning that uses artificial neural networks, providing the building blocks for developments in artificial intelligence. In a call during the Nobel announcement, Dr. Hinton expressed worries over machine learning and said it would have an extraordinary influence on society, extolling its improvements to productivity while considering potential bad consequences. In a news conference on the same day, Dr. Hopfield compared advances in A.I. with the splitting of the atom.

Lowry Pressly, a professor of political science at Stanford, has released a new book entitled “The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life,” in which he posits an “ideology of information.” According to Pressly, this is a fundamental “idea that information has a natural existence in human affairs, and that there are no aspects of human life which cannot be translated somehow into data.” This ideology, in Pressly’s view, informs the purpose of privacy, which is to prevent the creation of information. The book’s title is reflective of the dichotomy between privacy and information; to the author, “Oblivion” refers to an opaque realm which disappears once information is created. Pressly maintains that Oblivion provides a restorative refuge for the mind, and is essential for human dignity.

(Compiled by Student Fellow Jerome David)