The FTC has send orders to Amazon, TikTok, Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Snapchat, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube, asking them for information about "how social media and video streaming services collect, use, track, estimate, or derive personal and demographic information; how they determine which ads and other content are shown to consumers; whether they apply algorithms or data analytics to personal information; how they measure, promote, and research user engagement; and how their practices affect children and teens". This is the secret sauce of some of these businesses, so it'll be fascinating to see how the sausage is made if their responses to the FTC are made public.
PornHub nuked millions of user-uploaded videos overnight. Not content with just preventing unverified users from uploading new content, they've gone and deleted all the stuff unverified users already uploaded. 9 million of the 13.5 million videos have been deleted. Horny teens are shedding a tear for all that lost porn, but it just got too risky for PornHub to keep hanging on to that toxic data. Even just a handful or dodgy vids exposes PornHub to criminal charges. Amazing how if you take away a company's ability to generate revenue (MC & Visa cutting PornHub loose) and jail time (no tolerance for kiddie porn from law enforcement & governments), shit gets done. Now let's do the same to Facebook.
The Victorian government's inquiry into the state's COVID-19 response has confirmed what everyone knew - "the committee received no evidence that the federal government’s COVIDSafe app was effective or contributed to supporting Victoria’s public health response". Just a few days earlier, the federal Select Senate Committee on COVID-19 called for an independent inquiry into the app, after it came out that COVIDSafe has cost the federal government over $10m. Oh and NZ has said they're going to use the Google and Apple framework for contact tracing, ditching their homegrown one as they realised it just can't work in the background anywhere near as well as the built-in framework.
Beacuse many readers of The Sizzle are huge Apple nerds, here's a big fat chunk of Apple related news you might care about:
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