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""Even if the data is old, it's never really old because it will always be useful for data brokers," he said. "It helps them correlate related information that is new and dump them into these profiles, which they sell online for as little as 99 cents.""

"In total, the group reported more than 500 suspect groups and Facebook pages operating across France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Poland and Spain. Most were either spreading fake news or using false pages and profiles to artificially boost the content of parties or sites they supported, in violation of Facebook's rules."

"The submission outlines Big Blue's belief that facial recognition is fine in a "1 to 1" context such as unlocking a phone. But IBM is opposed to "1 to many" facial recognition that refers to a database to identify a face in a crowd and could therefore be used for "mass surveillance systems, racial profiling or other human rights violations.""

"The questions of the day are "How do we save the planet from the climate crisis?" and "What do we do about misogyny, racial profiling and police violence, and homophobic laws?" and "How do we check mass surveillance and the widening power of the state?" and "How do we bring down autocratic, human-rights-abusing regimes without leaving behind chaos and tragedy?" Those are the questions. But the internet is the answer. If you propose to fix any of these things without using the internet, you're not being serious. And if you want to free the internet to use in all those fights, there's a quarter century's worth of Internet Utopians who've got your back."

"In one case, a government campaign aimed at helping young people off benefits was targeted at Facebook users with interests including "afro-textured hair" and the "West Indies cricket team". Other campaigns have targeted LGBTQ+ content at people interested in "genderqueer" issues and the TV show RuPaul's Drag Race; council support services at people interested in "hijabs" and "Islamic dietary requirements"; and an appeal for witnesses to a murder in Manchester aimed at people interested in "hip-hop", "rapping", Kim Kardashian and Usain Bolt. The "microtargeting" is revealed in analysis of more than 12,000 ads which ran on Facebook and Instagram between late 2020 and 2023. Supplied to UK academics by Facebook's parent company Meta, and shared with the Observer, the data gives an insight into the use of targeted advertising by the state based on profiling by the world's biggest social media company. In 2021, Facebook announced a ban on targeting based on race, religion and sexual orientation amid concerns about discrimination, which led to the removal of several interest categories that had been used by advertisers to reach and exclude minority groups."

"This all presents big questions for which we don't yet have answers. "At what point should kids know better?" asked David Dockterman, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "When should a person's 'permanent digital record' start recording, if ever? To what extent should social media be a space for trial-and-error exploration around identity and social behavior?" "These are fantastically difficult moral dilemmas for teenagers who act impulsively, using tools that are not fully under their control, leading to consequences that perhaps none of us can anticipate," said Sonia Livingstone, professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "This is the first time we've had a society in which almost by default, everything is recorded and shared and aggregated in ways that create a lifelong profile. Children should have the right to make mistakes.""

"Something that a lot of mourners find disconcerting is when they receive automated prompts from social networking platforms telling them to friend somebody who has died, or connect with their dead spouse. Some platforms such as Twitter [now known as X] and TikTok lack a mechanism to treat a profile as being that of a dead person. Or, as in the case of LinkedIn, a mechanism exists but most people are not aware of it or don't use it. And while most platforms do offer an ability to download your archive, which you can then bequeath, it is far from straightforward. These products emanate from people who haven't had to think too much about the messiness of human existence Platforms can also delete dormant accounts, which can have repercussions. And there are also no guarantees how long any of the platforms we participate in will survive. That death hasn't been baked into tech platforms to begin with is a sign of a particular kind of privilege: these products emanate from people who haven't had to think too much about the messiness of human existence."

"ussian, North Korean, or Iranian state backed-hackers, for example, might now be able to execute much more convincing social engineering and election interference schemes in the US using this tool. ChatGPT can also generate multiple versions of these campaigns and many fake online profiles to promote them, to allow the success of such attacks through sheer volume or variation in content."

"Have you been looking forward to somniferous alkaloid compounds customized to your personal metabolic dependency profile? Good news! 23andMe is selling everyone's DNA to the pharmaceutical industry. GSK Plc will pay 23andMe Holding Co. $20 million for access to the genetic-testing company's vast trove of consumer DNA data, extending a five-year collaboration that's allowed the drugmaker to mine genetic data as it researches new medications."

"Deepfakes have arrived to US elections, with a faked audio call purporting to be Joe Biden reaching voters in New Hampshire earlier this year. Artificial intelligence tools allow people to create spoofed audio easily and cheaply - so easily and cheaply that a journalist can do it! We created some fake audio clips of both Biden and Donald Trump using Parrot AI, an app with audio renditions of public figures that users can input words into. You can make audio of what sounds like Biden, Trump or a host of other high-profile speaking, and it sounds real-ish."

""The face jumped out at me as being fake," said DiResta, a veteran researcher who has studied Russian disinformation campaigns and anti-vaccine conspiracies. To her trained eye, these anomalies were red flags that Ramsey's photo had likely been created by artificial intelligence."