Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Johnathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and a love of all things tech except for tech news. Today's a tech news day for Thursday, October one. And y'all, the tech news can just really it's just like reading the news in general. He can really beat you down after a while. We're really going to focus on Amazon and Facebook in this news episode because a lot of stuff has come out about both companies and it's not great for the most part. So let's start with Amazon. Reuter's reports that Amazon has been found to game the system in a really big way, leaning heavily on the company's ability to gather and analyze data at a huge scale. Now, in this particular case, we're talking about Amazon's operations in India. Broiters came into possession of various internal documents and emails that show Amazon employees were analyzing customer behaviors on the platform. Okay, no problem so far. I mean, you would expect Amazon to analyze customer behaviors because the company wants to streamline the experience, make it as useful as possible so that people keep coming back to Amazon. So some analysis makes sense. Amazon was also looking at which products were particularly popular. Still no problem. I mean, if you identify which products are popular, you can feature those and thus sell more units. So not necessarily a bad thing here either. However, company employees designated these as reference products and then set about to make Amazon knockoff versions of those things. Now they wouldn't go so far as to actually counterfeit something, but they did make products that were virtually identical to existing ones on the market. So this wasn't about Amazon saying, hey, you know, recharging cables are really popular, Let's make our own recharging cable. This was Amazon saying, hey, this very specific recharging cable is really popular. Let's make a version that is indistinguishable from this, sell it at a lower cost, and then promote it and thus make, you know, essentially undercut this existing vendor who is dependent upon Amazon as an online shop front. So on top of all this, Amazon used its algorithm to place the Amazon made versions of these products higher in search. So now someone searching for a specific product, you know, it could be a piece of clothing, it could be an electronics gadget, it could be a household item, They're more likely to come across the Amazon branded version of that before whichever one Amazon employees were using as a reference product. So you can find something that is almost identical to a very popular product that's branded by Amazon. And because the algorithm, you're seeing the Amazon one first, and their Amazon is essentially undercutting these other merchants. Now, I'm pretty sure you would be hard pressed to come up with a way to defend Amazon against a charge of being anti competitive in this case. Uh the internal documents showed that company employees wanted to displace existing products on the market. According to Reuters, the documents also showed that employees even sought out partnerships with the companies that were making the reference products because some of those products had final touches or unique processes that meant that those products were set apart and then it was harder to to make a you know, a reasonable copy of that thing. So employees needed to be able to find out what these unique processes were in order to replicate those products. For Amazon. That's pretty much industrial espionage when you get down to it again. This is all according to Reuters, and this also contradicts claims that Jeff Bezos made when he appeared before the United States Congress in twenty twenty. During that testimony, Bezos argued that Amazon doesn't use the data it collects to give its own branded products a leg up on other sellers that would be anti competitive, nor that the company uses its algorithm to boost Amazon brands in search results at the expense of other brands. But hey, maybe maybe he just meant, oh except in India. Maybe that's what he just forgot to say that part. Even if all of that is the case, the Reuters report is already stirring up activity in US politics again. Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a tweet saying, quote, these documents show what we feared about Amazon's monopoly power. That the company is willing and able to rig its platform to benefit its bottom line while stifling small businesses and entrepreneurs. This is one of the many reasons we need to break it up. End quote. Similarly, the American Economic Liberties Project criticized Amazon, pointing out that there have been reports from various sellers that alleged the company has copied product designs, indicating that Amazon had likely used its powerful data collection and analysis tools to identify products that could be big sellers, and then followed a similar path as we saw in India and the that that organization UH cited a an article from the Wall Street Journal that was published in twenty twenty that alleged Amazon employees had done pretty much the same thing that was going on in India over here, Oudweight, we are not done reporting on Amazon just yet. See. Amazon also recently scrapped plans to build a distribution center in San Diego County in San Diego, California. Now, the company has not cited a specific reason for backing out of this plan, like this was something that was not a done deal, but it was heading towards that direction. Critics, however, point to how San Diego recently passed legislation called the Working Families Ordinance. Now, that law would require companies that operate within San Diego County to pay the prevailing wage, and the prevailing wage takes union wages as the benchmark, and also any company that employs people within San Diego County. Any company that operates within San Diego County has to provide a baseline level of benefits and worker safety guarantees. So in other words, if you don't meet these basic criteria, you cannot operate within San Diego County. So these critics conclude, it looks like Amazon said, huh, if we have to if we build something here, if we build our distribution center in San Diego County, we would have to pay people more money, and we would have to spend more money to make sure that employees are safe, and we'd have to give them a minimum of fifty six hours of annual sick leaf. No thanks now again, Amazon, I should stress, has not referenced the law when addressing the fact that the company is no longer building a distribution center in San Diego County. But based on other recent activities that we've seen in which Amazon has taken a pretty tough stance against efforts of worker organization and unionization, I feel like maybe the critics who are pointing at this they might be onto something here. The company behind the development of the warehouse, essentially the real estate company, Chestnut Properties, sent a message out that also gets me a bit angry. That message says, quote, just the threat mention of this ordinance has already cost over four hundred great jobs for the weld property that I have been working on for over five years end quote. Now that seems to argue that the ordinance is actively harming the community because it's discouraging businesses from moving in and creating jobs, and that this therefore is a bad thing. Now, keep in mind, the ordinance demands a baseline level of compensation and benefits to employees, and without that legislation, companies like Amazon could be paying out much lower wages with fewer benefits and fewer guarantees of workers safety. I would argue that that kind of job does not qualify as a unquote great job, you know, as Chestnut Properties has argued. I mean, it's a job, so it is a job. But if it's a job that keeps workers living below the poverty line and workers are on the hook even if they get sick or injured, that's not a great job. That's that's like indentured servitude. It might have been great for the developer. It might have been great for Chestnut Properties because they saw to make a lot of money for you know, essentially selling off this this space for a distribution center. But that filter, so no, it's not great for them. I mean I get that, but I've said it a few times in this podcast, I since that there is a general labor movement that's growing in the United States, and it's something that has been overdue because there have been a lot of big companies that have grown exponentially at the expense of the folks who work for those companies. One of the frequent things you'll hear is, you know, it's hard to look at a company that pays its employees at such a low level that the employees can't afford whatever it is the company makes. That's not necessarily the case with Amazon. Amazon makes a lot of stuff, and it makes a lot of stuff that's super cheap. But you get the idea, right, Like, you know, the the argument about paying out, say fifteen dollars an hour, Well that's pretty much the minimum wage in California, and California is a state that has a very high cost of living. So while that might sound great if you're in a place that has a very low cost of living in California by comparison, it does not mean you're making a ton of money. And if you're in an environment that could potentially lead to you getting sick or hurt and you have no real benefits to recover from that. That's not great. So a trio of Amazon stories that are pretty rough. When we come act, we're gonna do the same thing all over again, except this time we'll talk about Facebook. Okay. So yeah, Facebook, like I said on Tuesday's episode, had a bad week last week. Well, that bad week has stretched into a couple of bad weeks. You probably know that the company has been dealing with consequences after some employees have leaked internal documents to reporters, law enforcement agencies, and political bodies like the United States Congress, and next week it will be regulatory body bodies in the European Union. Well, when that happens to a company, there are a few things that a company can do. There are a few different um, you know, the courses of action that you can pursue. One thing a company could try to do is it can try to address systemic problems within the organization. They can try to operate in a more ethical, transparent, and responsible way. It can try to improve in other words, or we can do what Facebook has done and try to just clamp down on leaks by instituting policies that limit access to certain internal group assets on the company's internal communications platform. Facebook uses Workplace. I've also used Workplace. It's a platform for all sorts of internal company uh processes. I'm actually amazed that folks have time to access the darned thing to, you know, have conversations. UM. I find navigating it somewhat tedious, but that's my own experience. And in Facebook, it is a way for employees to be able to access and share information internally within the company. None the past, employees were pretty much able to communicate across different topics within workplace without issue. They could jump into a front channels essentially that are dedicated to specific issues or concerns or corporate areas of interest. But now certain groups that focus on specific topics, ones that Facebook has labeled as being sensitive, have institute a kind of members only kind of approach. In other words, it's a need to know basis sort of thing. If you are part of that department, you have access, Otherwise you do not. Um and multiple outlets, including The New York Times, have reported on this, showing that the effort to stop leaks was then immediately leaked to the media. So what does that mean for Facebook? Well, I would say it probably means that for one thing, some employees at the company might not be so thrilled about what Facebook has been up to, and their discontent is enough to be an ongoing issue, and that perhaps if Facebook wants to fix this, they need to look at the root causes as opposed to the leaks. The Verge has another Facebook story that is interesting. The company has been working on various AI projects that ultimately would relate to Facebook's augmented reality initiatives. So the idea is to create a system that has a type of almost like a memory connected to it. Like the system itself would be able to go back over data over time and glean important things from that. You may have seen videos of Google kind of showing off a similar approach to how like the Assistant program, the virtual assistant in Google can continue to answer questions about a subject. So you ask one question, then after you get the answer, you follow up with another question, and without you know, specifically referencing that you're still talking about the same topic, assistant can then draw the conclusion that the second question is about the same subject as the first. Let me give you an example. Uh, using this version of assistant, I could say something like, what's the weather like at Disneyland tomorrow, and I get the answer, and then I might follow that up with what time does it open? Well, I didn't say Disneyland, I said what time does it open? Using this kind of approach to AI, the assistant might be able to glean the fact that when I say it, I'm referring to the subject from my previous question, that is Disneyland, and thus give me the correct answer. Now this is trivial for human beings, right, but it's actually a big deal for artificial intelligence. AI does not natively have the ability to understand context. So Facebook is working on several similar prop projects, some of which are really ambitious. Now, the downside of this is that it could lead to some pretty nasty privacy and security issues. So, for example, imagine that someone is wearing a pair of those a R ray band glasses, except these are a more advanced version. They're one that are have you know, more augmented reality type of features built into them. They're not just like a camera built into glasses. And let's say this person wearing the glasses goes by a secure facility of some sort, maybe it's a bank, right, and they look into the bank and the camera and the glasses captures images of a person who's accessing a secure part of that facility. So someone who's actually authorized to go into some area that otherwise you would not have access to. Okay, if you have this capability and you pair it with something like facial recognition, you could compromise that person's security. It could say, all right, this person so and so has access to this secure part of the bank. Here's some more information about so and so that we're able to pull from the Internet. Because of online mind social networking platforms and Twitter profiles and all that kind of stuff, you could easily see where this can quickly become a threat to privacy and security. Now, that is a pretty dramatic example, right, That's something that's obviously not going to apply to everyone. But the reality is that this technology, unless it's implemented very carefully, could become a huge threat to privacy for people in general. You know, it could even be like who did I see yesterday? Well, a question like that might be answered with, oh, you saw your buddy Jim, and you also saw these other five people you don't know, but I know them because I have facial recognition technology and I was able to cross reference it with the profiles that are available on Facebook. So now you know all the people you encountered, whether they wanted you to know them or not. They were just going about their daily lives, So that is a potential threat. Now Facebook is looking into some pretty incredible AI applications such as hand and object manipulation shtion, And in that case, you might be trying to learn a specific skill and you could use an augmented reality system to kind of teach you the steps you need to do in order to build your skills. But you could also use it potentially to analyze your own performance and then and you know, give you tips on how you can do that skill better and get you know, improve upon it, which is really cool. So this sort of hyper focused AI is really you know, compelling, but you also start to see where the need for things like privacy protection has to step in. This, by the way, is all part of an initiative that Facebook calls Ego four D. The Verge has a great piece that goes into much further detail if you want to learn more about this. It is titled Facebook is researching AI systems that see here and remember everything you do. It's by James Vincent. Highly recommend you check it out more than for The organizations have banded together to launch a campaign called how to Stop Facebook. So yeah, that hard week does just keep extending. The group advocates for regulations that would restrict how Facebook collects and uses data, citing the concerns that we've seen pop up due to Facebook's reliance on engagement driving algorithms, and those algorithms frequently favor content that can be harmful in various ways because it drives engagement, and as the campaign strategies director of Media Justice Masha Hayes has said, quote Facebook's surveillance capitalist business model is fundamentally incompatible with basic human rights end quote. That's a heck of a statement. Hard for me to find fault in it. Um, especially the way Facebook pursues its you know, business model. Uh, it appears that it is at least indifferent to basic human rights. The group is calling upon leaders, like political leaders to intervene and essentially force Facebook to fundamentally change how it operates. Um. And there are a lot of different groups that are all part of this, and a lot of them are are human rights groups and things along those lines that are very much concerned that Facebook's performance in the last you know a few years has shown it to be an organization that has the capacity to do a disproportionate amount of harm to vulnerable populations. Finally, the cherry on top for bad Facebook news comes out of Washington State. The Attorney General of Washington has filed a lawsuit against Facebook, saying that the company representatives have provided false testimony during a previous case about whether or not the platform violated Washington's campaign finance laws. So at the heart of the matter is how Facebook sold political ads in the state of Washington. Washington state law requires that any platform that sells ads space to political campaigns has to provide information about the ads who bought them, uh that their address. It has to also have who were the ads meant to target, how many views did those ads get. All of that information is required by state law to be publicly available upon request. Facebook is not complied with the full extent of that law. You can request information about Facebook ads, but it doesn't include all the points of data that Washington State law calls for. The Company's lawyers facebooks lawyers argue that Washington's law is unconstitutional, but the heart of this matter is that the Attorney General says in that case, Facebook representatives specifically gave false statements to questions asked of them, and that therefore they are guilty of perjury. So this is another part layer on top of everything else. So this legal battle is ongoing. We will have to check back in the future. Okay, there were other news stories today, but honestly, all the Amazon and face Book stuff kind of took all the wind out of my sales just because it was just so much rough reporting on different things. So we're gonna wrap it up here. Plus I can here that the lawn maintenance folks are outside of my house now, so it's gonna get progressively louder. My dog's gonna join into it's just gonna be a free for all. So um, while the noise level continually goes up in this episode, if you have suggestions for topics I should cover in the future, maybe like how weed whackers work, for example. Don't know why that jumped to mind, let me know. Send me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff h s W and I'll garden again. I'm sorry, I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an i heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Johnathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and a love of all things tech except for tech news. Today's a tech news day for Thursday, October one. And y'all, the tech news can just really it's just like reading the news in general. He can really beat you down after a while. We're really going to focus on Amazon and Facebook in this news episode because a lot of stuff has come out about both companies and it's not great for the most part. So let's start with Amazon. Reuter's reports that Amazon has been found to game the system in a really big way, leaning heavily on the company's ability to gather and analyze data at a huge scale. Now, in this particular case, we're talking about Amazon's operations in India. Broiters came into possession of various internal documents and emails that show Amazon employees were analyzing customer behaviors on the platform. Okay, no problem so far. I mean, you would expect Amazon to analyze customer behaviors because the company wants to streamline the experience, make it as useful as possible so that people keep coming back to Amazon. So some analysis makes sense. Amazon was also looking at which products were particularly popular. Still no problem. I mean, if you identify which products are popular, you can feature those and thus sell more units. So not necessarily a bad thing here either. However, company employees designated these as reference products and then set about to make Amazon knockoff versions of those things. Now they wouldn't go so far as to actually counterfeit something, but they did make products that were virtually identical to existing ones on the market. So this wasn't about Amazon saying, hey, you know, recharging cables are really popular, Let's make our own recharging cable. This was Amazon saying, hey, this very specific recharging cable is really popular. Let's make a version that is indistinguishable from this, sell it at a lower cost, and then promote it and thus make, you know, essentially undercut this existing vendor who is dependent upon Amazon as an online shop front. So on top of all this, Amazon used its algorithm to place the Amazon made versions of these products higher in search. So now someone searching for a specific product, you know, it could be a piece of clothing, it could be an electronics gadget, it could be a household item, They're more likely to come across the Amazon branded version of that before whichever one Amazon employees were using as a reference product. So you can find something that is almost identical to a very popular product that's branded by Amazon. And because the algorithm, you're seeing the Amazon one first, and their Amazon is essentially undercutting these other merchants. Now, I'm pretty sure you would be hard pressed to come up with a way to defend Amazon against a charge of being anti competitive in this case. Uh the internal documents showed that company employees wanted to displace existing products on the market. According to Reuters, the documents also showed that employees even sought out partnerships with the companies that were making the reference products because some of those products had final touches or unique processes that meant that those products were set apart and then it was harder to to make a you know, a reasonable copy of that thing. So employees needed to be able to find out what these unique processes were in order to replicate those products. For Amazon. That's pretty much industrial espionage when you get down to it again. This is all according to Reuters, and this also contradicts claims that Jeff Bezos made when he appeared before the United States Congress in twenty twenty. During that testimony, Bezos argued that Amazon doesn't use the data it collects to give its own branded products a leg up on other sellers that would be anti competitive, nor that the company uses its algorithm to boost Amazon brands in search results at the expense of other brands. But hey, maybe maybe he just meant, oh except in India. Maybe that's what he just forgot to say that part. Even if all of that is the case, the Reuters report is already stirring up activity in US politics again. Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a tweet saying, quote, these documents show what we feared about Amazon's monopoly power. That the company is willing and able to rig its platform to benefit its bottom line while stifling small businesses and entrepreneurs. This is one of the many reasons we need to break it up. End quote. Similarly, the American Economic Liberties Project criticized Amazon, pointing out that there have been reports from various sellers that alleged the company has copied product designs, indicating that Amazon had likely used its powerful data collection and analysis tools to identify products that could be big sellers, and then followed a similar path as we saw in India and the that that organization UH cited a an article from the Wall Street Journal that was published in twenty twenty that alleged Amazon employees had done pretty much the same thing that was going on in India over here, Oudweight, we are not done reporting on Amazon just yet. See. Amazon also recently scrapped plans to build a distribution center in San Diego County in San Diego, California. Now, the company has not cited a specific reason for backing out of this plan, like this was something that was not a done deal, but it was heading towards that direction. Critics, however, point to how San Diego recently passed legislation called the Working Families Ordinance. Now, that law would require companies that operate within San Diego County to pay the prevailing wage, and the prevailing wage takes union wages as the benchmark, and also any company that employs people within San Diego County. Any company that operates within San Diego County has to provide a baseline level of benefits and worker safety guarantees. So in other words, if you don't meet these basic criteria, you cannot operate within San Diego County. So these critics conclude, it looks like Amazon said, huh, if we have to if we build something here, if we build our distribution center in San Diego County, we would have to pay people more money, and we would have to spend more money to make sure that employees are safe, and we'd have to give them a minimum of fifty six hours of annual sick leaf. No thanks now again, Amazon, I should stress, has not referenced the law when addressing the fact that the company is no longer building a distribution center in San Diego County. But based on other recent activities that we've seen in which Amazon has taken a pretty tough stance against efforts of worker organization and unionization, I feel like maybe the critics who are pointing at this they might be onto something here. The company behind the development of the warehouse, essentially the real estate company, Chestnut Properties, sent a message out that also gets me a bit angry. That message says, quote, just the threat mention of this ordinance has already cost over four hundred great jobs for the weld property that I have been working on for over five years end quote. Now that seems to argue that the ordinance is actively harming the community because it's discouraging businesses from moving in and creating jobs, and that this therefore is a bad thing. Now, keep in mind, the ordinance demands a baseline level of compensation and benefits to employees, and without that legislation, companies like Amazon could be paying out much lower wages with fewer benefits and fewer guarantees of workers safety. I would argue that that kind of job does not qualify as a unquote great job, you know, as Chestnut Properties has argued. I mean, it's a job, so it is a job. But if it's a job that keeps workers living below the poverty line and workers are on the hook even if they get sick or injured, that's not a great job. That's that's like indentured servitude. It might have been great for the developer. It might have been great for Chestnut Properties because they saw to make a lot of money for you know, essentially selling off this this space for a distribution center. But that filter, so no, it's not great for them. I mean I get that, but I've said it a few times in this podcast, I since that there is a general labor movement that's growing in the United States, and it's something that has been overdue because there have been a lot of big companies that have grown exponentially at the expense of the folks who work for those companies. One of the frequent things you'll hear is, you know, it's hard to look at a company that pays its employees at such a low level that the employees can't afford whatever it is the company makes. That's not necessarily the case with Amazon. Amazon makes a lot of stuff, and it makes a lot of stuff that's super cheap. But you get the idea, right, Like, you know, the the argument about paying out, say fifteen dollars an hour, Well that's pretty much the minimum wage in California, and California is a state that has a very high cost of living. So while that might sound great if you're in a place that has a very low cost of living in California by comparison, it does not mean you're making a ton of money. And if you're in an environment that could potentially lead to you getting sick or hurt and you have no real benefits to recover from that. That's not great. So a trio of Amazon stories that are pretty rough. When we come act, we're gonna do the same thing all over again, except this time we'll talk about Facebook. Okay. So yeah, Facebook, like I said on Tuesday's episode, had a bad week last week. Well, that bad week has stretched into a couple of bad weeks. You probably know that the company has been dealing with consequences after some employees have leaked internal documents to reporters, law enforcement agencies, and political bodies like the United States Congress, and next week it will be regulatory body bodies in the European Union. Well, when that happens to a company, there are a few things that a company can do. There are a few different um, you know, the courses of action that you can pursue. One thing a company could try to do is it can try to address systemic problems within the organization. They can try to operate in a more ethical, transparent, and responsible way. It can try to improve in other words, or we can do what Facebook has done and try to just clamp down on leaks by instituting policies that limit access to certain internal group assets on the company's internal communications platform. Facebook uses Workplace. I've also used Workplace. It's a platform for all sorts of internal company uh processes. I'm actually amazed that folks have time to access the darned thing to, you know, have conversations. UM. I find navigating it somewhat tedious, but that's my own experience. And in Facebook, it is a way for employees to be able to access and share information internally within the company. None the past, employees were pretty much able to communicate across different topics within workplace without issue. They could jump into a front channels essentially that are dedicated to specific issues or concerns or corporate areas of interest. But now certain groups that focus on specific topics, ones that Facebook has labeled as being sensitive, have institute a kind of members only kind of approach. In other words, it's a need to know basis sort of thing. If you are part of that department, you have access, Otherwise you do not. Um and multiple outlets, including The New York Times, have reported on this, showing that the effort to stop leaks was then immediately leaked to the media. So what does that mean for Facebook? Well, I would say it probably means that for one thing, some employees at the company might not be so thrilled about what Facebook has been up to, and their discontent is enough to be an ongoing issue, and that perhaps if Facebook wants to fix this, they need to look at the root causes as opposed to the leaks. The Verge has another Facebook story that is interesting. The company has been working on various AI projects that ultimately would relate to Facebook's augmented reality initiatives. So the idea is to create a system that has a type of almost like a memory connected to it. Like the system itself would be able to go back over data over time and glean important things from that. You may have seen videos of Google kind of showing off a similar approach to how like the Assistant program, the virtual assistant in Google can continue to answer questions about a subject. So you ask one question, then after you get the answer, you follow up with another question, and without you know, specifically referencing that you're still talking about the same topic, assistant can then draw the conclusion that the second question is about the same subject as the first. Let me give you an example. Uh, using this version of assistant, I could say something like, what's the weather like at Disneyland tomorrow, and I get the answer, and then I might follow that up with what time does it open? Well, I didn't say Disneyland, I said what time does it open? Using this kind of approach to AI, the assistant might be able to glean the fact that when I say it, I'm referring to the subject from my previous question, that is Disneyland, and thus give me the correct answer. Now this is trivial for human beings, right, but it's actually a big deal for artificial intelligence. AI does not natively have the ability to understand context. So Facebook is working on several similar prop projects, some of which are really ambitious. Now, the downside of this is that it could lead to some pretty nasty privacy and security issues. So, for example, imagine that someone is wearing a pair of those a R ray band glasses, except these are a more advanced version. They're one that are have you know, more augmented reality type of features built into them. They're not just like a camera built into glasses. And let's say this person wearing the glasses goes by a secure facility of some sort, maybe it's a bank, right, and they look into the bank and the camera and the glasses captures images of a person who's accessing a secure part of that facility. So someone who's actually authorized to go into some area that otherwise you would not have access to. Okay, if you have this capability and you pair it with something like facial recognition, you could compromise that person's security. It could say, all right, this person so and so has access to this secure part of the bank. Here's some more information about so and so that we're able to pull from the Internet. Because of online mind social networking platforms and Twitter profiles and all that kind of stuff, you could easily see where this can quickly become a threat to privacy and security. Now, that is a pretty dramatic example, right, That's something that's obviously not going to apply to everyone. But the reality is that this technology, unless it's implemented very carefully, could become a huge threat to privacy for people in general. You know, it could even be like who did I see yesterday? Well, a question like that might be answered with, oh, you saw your buddy Jim, and you also saw these other five people you don't know, but I know them because I have facial recognition technology and I was able to cross reference it with the profiles that are available on Facebook. So now you know all the people you encountered, whether they wanted you to know them or not. They were just going about their daily lives, So that is a potential threat. Now Facebook is looking into some pretty incredible AI applications such as hand and object manipulation shtion, And in that case, you might be trying to learn a specific skill and you could use an augmented reality system to kind of teach you the steps you need to do in order to build your skills. But you could also use it potentially to analyze your own performance and then and you know, give you tips on how you can do that skill better and get you know, improve upon it, which is really cool. So this sort of hyper focused AI is really you know, compelling, but you also start to see where the need for things like privacy protection has to step in. This, by the way, is all part of an initiative that Facebook calls Ego four D. The Verge has a great piece that goes into much further detail if you want to learn more about this. It is titled Facebook is researching AI systems that see here and remember everything you do. It's by James Vincent. Highly recommend you check it out more than for The organizations have banded together to launch a campaign called how to Stop Facebook. So yeah, that hard week does just keep extending. The group advocates for regulations that would restrict how Facebook collects and uses data, citing the concerns that we've seen pop up due to Facebook's reliance on engagement driving algorithms, and those algorithms frequently favor content that can be harmful in various ways because it drives engagement, and as the campaign strategies director of Media Justice Masha Hayes has said, quote Facebook's surveillance capitalist business model is fundamentally incompatible with basic human rights end quote. That's a heck of a statement. Hard for me to find fault in it. Um, especially the way Facebook pursues its you know, business model. Uh, it appears that it is at least indifferent to basic human rights. The group is calling upon leaders, like political leaders to intervene and essentially force Facebook to fundamentally change how it operates. Um. And there are a lot of different groups that are all part of this, and a lot of them are are human rights groups and things along those lines that are very much concerned that Facebook's performance in the last you know a few years has shown it to be an organization that has the capacity to do a disproportionate amount of harm to vulnerable populations. Finally, the cherry on top for bad Facebook news comes out of Washington State. The Attorney General of Washington has filed a lawsuit against Facebook, saying that the company representatives have provided false testimony during a previous case about whether or not the platform violated Washington's campaign finance laws. So at the heart of the matter is how Facebook sold political ads in the state of Washington. Washington state law requires that any platform that sells ads space to political campaigns has to provide information about the ads who bought them, uh that their address. It has to also have who were the ads meant to target, how many views did those ads get. All of that information is required by state law to be publicly available upon request. Facebook is not complied with the full extent of that law. You can request information about Facebook ads, but it doesn't include all the points of data that Washington State law calls for. The Company's lawyers facebooks lawyers argue that Washington's law is unconstitutional, but the heart of this matter is that the Attorney General says in that case, Facebook representatives specifically gave false statements to questions asked of them, and that therefore they are guilty of perjury. So this is another part layer on top of everything else. So this legal battle is ongoing. We will have to check back in the future. Okay, there were other news stories today, but honestly, all the Amazon and face Book stuff kind of took all the wind out of my sales just because it was just so much rough reporting on different things. So we're gonna wrap it up here. Plus I can here that the lawn maintenance folks are outside of my house now, so it's gonna get progressively louder. My dog's gonna join into it's just gonna be a free for all. So um, while the noise level continually goes up in this episode, if you have suggestions for topics I should cover in the future, maybe like how weed whackers work, for example. Don't know why that jumped to mind, let me know. Send me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff h s W and I'll garden again. I'm sorry, I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an i heart Radio production. 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