Tag: social media

Telegram Will Now Share Users’ IP Addresses and Phone Numbers With Governments in Response to Legal Requests

Telegram, the messaging app that once positioned itself as the rebel’s answer to Big Tech surveillance, has made a sharp U-turn on the “we protect your data at all costs” highway. On Monday, the company quietly updated its privacy policy to allow for the disclosure of user information—like those precious IP addresses and phone numbers—to law enforcement, but only, of course, if they present a valid legal request.

As we all know, no one has ever stretched the definition of “valid” to fit their agenda, right?

This revelation comes hot on the heels of a little incident back in August, when Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov found himself in handcuffs, detained by French authorities. What was the crime? Well, it appears Telegram was accused of playing hardball with French law enforcement, refusing to hand over data, leading to Durov’s arrest. It seems law enforcement didn’t take kindly to that level of noncompliance, especially after making 2,460 unanswered requests for information.

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Social Media Giants Collecting Massive Amounts of Data From Kids, Teens

Child welfare advocates renewed calls for U.S. lawmakers to pass a pair of controversial bills aimed at protecting youth from Big Tech’s “dangerous and unacceptable business practices” after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a report on Sept. 19 detailing how social media and streaming companies endanger children and teens who use their platforms.

The FTC staff report — entitled “A Look Behind the Screens: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services” — “shows how the tech industry’s monetization of personal data has created a market for commercial surveillance, especially via social media and video streaming services, with inadequate guardrails to protect consumers.”

The agency staff examined the practices of Meta platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; YouTube; X, formerly known as Twitter; Snapchat; Reddit; Discord; Amazon, which owns the gaming site Twitch; and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok.

“The report finds that these companies engaged in mass data collection of their users and — in some cases — nonusers,” Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine said in the paper.

“It reveals that many companies failed to implement adequate safeguards against privacy risks. It sheds light on how companies used our personal data, from serving hypergranular targeted advertisements to powering algorithms that shape the content we see, often with the goal of keeping us hooked on using the service.”

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LinkedIn is training its AI using your posts and articles without your permission

LinkedIn has been using user-generated content, including posts and articles, to train its generative AI models without obtaining consent from users.

The platform updated its privacy policy and FAQ section to reflect this practice, indicating that data collection for AI training had already begun before the announcement.

Users can opt out of having their data used for AI training by toggling a setting called “Data for Generative AI Improvement” under “Data Privacy” in their settings.

LinkedIn has quietly implemented a new setting that automatically opts users into contributing their personal data, including posts, towards the training of generative AI models. This means that users’ posts are being harvested for AI training without their explicit consent.

LinkedIn’s generative AI models are used for features like writing assistants, and the scraped data will be used to train these models. The company claims to employ privacy-enhancing technologies to anonymise or redact personal data from its AI training sets.  However, considering what Larry Ellison,  co-founder of Oracle and Chairman of the Board and Chief Technology Officer, said last week about data captured by surveillance cameras we shouldn’t take LinkedIn’s word for it.

During an investor Q&A session at the ‘Oracle Financial Analyst Meeting 2024’ event, Ellison said: “The police … body cameras … our [Oracle’s] body cameras are simply two lenses attached to a vest [and] attached to the smartphone that you’re wearing … the camera is always on, you don’t turn it on and off, you can’t turn it off to go to the bathroom – ‘Oracle, I need two minutes to take a bathroom break,” then we’ll turn it off.  The truth is, we don’t really turn it off.  What we do is, we record it so no one can see it [so] that no one can get into that recording without a court order.” (see timestamp 1:08:27 HERE.)

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TYRANNY: Biden-Harris Regime to Sanction Elon Musk in Their Baseless ‘Investigation’ Over His Lawful Purchase of X/Twitter

As Jim Hoft previously reported, Biden-Harris’s Securities and Exchange Commission has been baselessly investigating Elon Musk’s lawful purchase of X/Twitter since 2022 and is suing him. Now, the Biden-Harris regime intends to levy the full force of the ‘law’ in an effort to punish one of their most formidable enemies.

Reuters reported Friday that the SEC said they would sanction Elon Musk after he refused to appear in court for testimony regarding his acquisition of X/Twitter. To make matters worse, they are making this decision even though his testimony had already been rescheduled for early October, demonstrating the Regime was looking for an excuse to harm the world’s richest man.

From Reuters:

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on Friday it intends to seek sanctions against Elon Musk after he failed to appear for court-ordered testimony for the regulator’s probe into his $44 billion takeover of X/Twitter.

In a court filing, the SEC said the sanctions motion would seek an order to show cause for why Musk should not be held in civil contempt for waiting until just three hours before the scheduled Sept. 10 testimony to advise he would not appear.

Lawyers for Musk called sanctions “drastic” and unnecessary, saying his testimony has already been rescheduled for Oct. 3.

A spokesman for the SEC declined to comment.

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Senators Push Big Tech to Increase Content Moderation, Share More Info With Government Ahead of 2024 Election

During a US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing titled “Foreign Threats to Elections in 2024 – Roles and Responsibilities of U.S. Tech Providers,” several senators urged Big Tech executives to increase their censorship of foreign “disinformation” and share more information with the federal government.

While the senators pushing these measures insisted that such efforts would be focused on foreign adversaries who are creating inauthentic content, previous incidents, most notably the censorship of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop story, have shown that measures claiming to combat foreign disinformation often result in the speech of Americans being censored.

In his opening statement, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) told the witnesses, Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) President and Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker, that he hoped the hearing would result in greater information between Big Tech and government.

“Our committee’s bipartisan efforts also…resulted in a set of recommendations for government, for the private sector, and for political…campaigns,” Warner said. “Recommendations for which I hope today’s hearing will serve as a status check. These recommendations included greater information sharing between the US government and the private sector…about foreign malicious activity. Not domestic, foreign malicious activity.”

He continued by claiming that there’s already been “a pretty successful effort to share threat information about foreign influence activity with the private sector” and complained that X (which has reduced censorship on its platform since entrepreneur Elon Musk took over) didn’t send a representative to the hearing.

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Social Media Claims That Ukraine-Tied Trump Assassin Will Get ‘Epsteined’

Critics on social media speculated that Ryan Wesley Routh, the accused-attempted assassin behind the second threat to Donald Trump’s life, could face a fatal outcome in jail. Some even suggested on Monday he might end up being “Epsteined.”

The term refers to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender whose controversial death left many questions unanswered, including the roles of powerful figures who visited his estates or may have assisted in his crimes.

These comments suggested that Routh might face a similar fate, possibly being silenced about mounting questions surrounding his finances and connections to others involved in the foiled assassination attempt on Trump.

“He’s in federal custody, unfortunately. Chances of being Epsteined just went up tremendously,” wrote independent journalist Nick Sortor to his 527,000 followers on X.

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Meta Scrubs Trump Would-Be Assassin Ryan Routh’s Facebook Page, X Suspends His Account – Both Pages Littered with Pro-Ukraine Propaganda

Meta scrubbed Trump would-be assassin Ryan Routh’s Facebook page and X suspended his account.

The Gateway Pundit has verified that both of Routh’s social media accounts have been taken down.

Shots were fired at Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach on Sunday afternoon at 1:30 pm as the former president was playing a round of golf with real estate investor Steve Witkoff.

Ryan Wesley Routh pushed the muzzle of his rifle through the fence line at Trump’s golf course before Secret Service agents fired at him.

Law enforcement said the gunman was about 300 to 500 yards away from Trump. He was hiding in the shrubbery when he pointed his rifle with a scope through the fence.

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French EU Official Thierry Breton, Who Threatened Elon Musk With Arrest, Resigns

The French EU official Thierry Breton, who is responsible for the ‘digital environment, and who took on Elon Musk and threatened him for allowing free speech on Twitter, has resigned.

This whole incident smells like a ‘test run’ for us, as we decipher the globalist tea leaves. The EU was pushing to see how far they could push humanity in its drive for censorship of the masses.

The European Union’s top digital enforcer tried to take on Elon Musk. Within hours, he faced accusations of meddling in American politics and his own staff were back-pedaling hard, wrote Politico a months ago.

Thierry Breton, who oversees the bloc’s enforcement of new social media rules, sent Musk a letter posted on X that warned the tech mogul about spreading “harmful content,” ahead of Musk’s livestreamed interview with Donald Trump.

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Kamala Says Quiet Part Out Loud: Government ‘Oversight’ Needed to Police the Internet and Rein in Thought Crimes

The global crackdown on free speech continues unabated, and if you think it’s relegated to countries like China, Cuba, and North Korea, think again.

A Brazilian Supreme Court panel on Monday upheld a decision to suspend Elon Musk’s social media platform X in the country.

Last Friday, Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered the platform blocked.

Since the decision, Musk and his supporters have tried to paint de Moraes as a renegade and an authoritarian censor of political speech. But Brazil is no outlier. The European Union is also cracking down on free speech with its Online Service Act, and we have our own free-speech haters here in the United States.

In fact, one of them is a candidate for president.

Kamala Harris came out in 2019 and admitted in the wide open that she wants to see the same type of state-sponsored censorship implemented in the United States as what we now see taking shape in Brazil.

The government, Harris believes, should have ultimate control over what you and I are allowed to post on the internet, as well as more control over what we are allowed to see and hear. She doesn’t trust us to decide for ourselves as to the truth or accuracy of what we see or read online.

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“It Aint Just Cats, They Also Eat Dogs” – Numerous Haitian Americans Confirm Cat Eating in TikTok Comment Sections

Disturbing reports have surfaced online from the Haitian immigrant community, where several members openly discuss hunting and eating cats.

TikTok user Ayoitsdamenace posted a video discussing his Haitian heritage and family members back home who eat cats as part of their culture. He acknowledges this practice but also criticizes Democrat leaders, claiming they aren’t being honest about these cultural differences.

He goes on to say that he doesn’t support immigrants who refuse to assimilate or those who engage in criminal behavior. Meanwhile, as Americans express outrage over their missing pets, liberal voices on social media mock those raising alarms, dismissing these concerns as exaggerated or rooted in bigotry.

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