Are your neighbours allowed to use surveillance cameras? The Hype Behind Harvey

Are your neighbours allowed to use surveillance cameras?

Nearly half of American EV owners want to switch back to gas-powered vehicle, McKinsey data shows Fox

MARK JUDGE: Good News: No One is Talking to Journalists Anymore.

In September of 2018, a friend of mine, a bartender named Rick, came home to a shocking sight. His 85-year-old mother was being interrogated by a reporter from the New York Times. The reporter, Kate Kelly, was interrogating an elderly woman about what parties I went to in the 1980s. Kelly had fast-talked her way into Rick’s house, and Rick’s poor mother had no idea what Kelly was talking about.

    Kate Kelly was trying to find dirt on me. My high school classmate, Brett Kavanaugh, was up for a seat on the Supreme Court. Allegations about sexual misconduct had been launched, the opposition researcher and political left had tried to implicate me with Kavanaugh, and the rabid press corp was completely out of control. Thus, they came for me. When I wouldn’t talk, they came for my friends. When my fiends wouldn’t talk, they came for their elderly mothers.

Kate Kelly is one of the reasons nobody is talking to journalists anymore.

Back in 1992, the late Ginny Carroll, of the then-Washington Post-owned Newsweek, admitted on C-SPAN that at the 1992 Republican Convention, she wore a button that said, “Yeah, I’m in the Media — Screw You.”

Nobody should be surprised that their customers feel the same way, and thanks to the Internet, finally have a way to express that opinion themselves.

The Hype Behind Harvey

Law.com: Part 1 – The Hype Behind Harvey: How the Stealthy Startup Is Raising Industry Eyebrows. “Harvey, the OpenAI-backed legal tech startup, has nabbed high-profile clients and tons of cash, along with an air of suspicion around its AI capabilities.”

Law.com: Part 2 – The Hype Behind Harvey: How Firms Are Using the Gen AI Startup. “Harvey, the OpenAI-backed legal and professional services software provider, has quickly accumulated a list of high-profile law firm and corporate clients. 

At the same time, it’s also raised some skepticism from an industry that has largely been kept out of product demos and pricing details about Harvey’s technology. The first part of this series, which you can read here, digs further into Harvey’s stealth approach, and its impact. While not all law firms that use Harvey have gone on the record, below is a picture of how some of them are currently using the generative AI technology. Harvey offers a suite of generative AI-powered products geared toward law firms and legal professionals. 

These products currently fall into three buckets: workflow automation; legal research; and an AI assistant (chatbot). Most of the firms listed are piloting and licensing several generative AI tools, one of which is Harvey…

John Naughton, in an Observer article called “Closing the Stanford Internet Observatory will edge the US towards the end of democracy”, writes 

 “To make things worse, we also invented a technology that enables every Tom, Dick and mad Harry to publish whatever they like on opaque global platforms, which are incentivised to propagate the wildest nonsense. 

And to this we have now added powerful tools (called AI) that automate the manufacture of misinformation on an epic scale. If you were a malign superpower that wanted to screw up the democratic world, you’d be hard put to do better than this.” 

 Worse? It is strange how the writer of an article saying how the ability of everyone to publish whatever they like makes things worse claims to be so concerned for democracy. 

If he would deny mad Harry the right to publish what he likes and read what he likes, why would he grant Harry the right to vote?

 Naughton continues, At the root of all this are two neuroses. One is the Republicans’ obsessive conviction that academic studies, like those of DiResta and her colleagues, of how “bad actors – spammers, scammers, hostile foreign governments, networks of terrible people targeting children, and, yes hyper-partisans actively seeking to manipulate the public” use digital platforms to achieve their aims is, somehow, anti-conservative. 

 The other neurosis is, if anything, more worrying: it’s a crazily expansive idea of “censorship” that includes labelling social media posts as potentially misleading, factchecking, down-ranking false theories by reducing their distribution in people’s social media feeds while allowing them to remain on a site and even flagging content for platforms’ review. 

 Down-ranking theories deemed to be false by secretly stopping them from being communicated freely is not a crazily expansive idea of censorship, it is censorship. 

The censors’ kindness in allowing the censored material to remain on site so long as nobody sees it is akin to the kindness of the 1960s London gangster Charlie Richardson, who, having had a man beaten bloody in front of him, would make a gift to his victim of a nice clean shirt to go home in.

Antoinette Lattouf’s unfair dismissal case against the ABC to head to trial ABC Australia. 

Cars & Consumer Data: On Unlawful Collection & Use

FTC : “Some say the car a person drives can say a lot about them. As cars get “connected,” this turns out to be truer than many people might have realized. While connectivity can let drivers do things like play their favorite internet radio stations or unlock their car with an app, connected cars can also collect a lot of data about people. This data could be sensitive—such as biometric information or location—and its collection, use, and disclosure can threaten consumers’ privacy and financial welfare. Connected cars have been on the FTC’s radar for years. 

The FTC highlighted concerns related to connected cars as part of an “Internet of Things” workshop held in 2013, followed by a 2015 report. In 2018, the FTC hosted a connected cars workshop highlighting issues ranging from unexpected secondary uses of data to security risks. The agency has also published guidance to consumers reminding them to wipe the data on their cars before selling them—much as anyone would when trying to resell a computer or smart phone. 

Over the years, privacy advocates have raised concerns about the vast amount of data that could be collected from cars, such as biometric, telematic, geolocation, video, and other personal information. News reports have also suggested that data from connected cars could be used to stalk people or affect their insurance rates. 

Many have noted that when any company collects a large amount of sensitive data, it can pose national security issues if that data is shared with foreign actors. Car manufacturers—and all businesses—should take note that the FTC will take action to protect consumers against the illegal collection, use, and disclosure of their personal data. Recent enforcement actions illustrate this point…”