Suing Meta

Meta has run into problems since it was introduced by Mark Zuckerberg. Now, in addition to its financial and public image trouble, it's being sued by forty-one states. 

This is a big deal. Their claim is that "that Meta knew its “addictive” features were harmful and intentionally misled the public about the safety of its platform." The Attorney General of the state of California says, "Meta has been harming our children and teens, cultivating addiction to boost corporate profits.” 

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According to the lawsuit, "Meta designed and deployed harmful and psychologically manipulative product features to induce young users’ compulsive and extended Platform use."

Meta is in the crosshairs of the attorneys general of 41 of America's 50 states. That's a lot of firepower.

from Yahoo

Loss for Meta

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, continues to lose value as revenue goes down and they keep investing in virtual reality. Meta stock in 2016, at its peak, was worth about $362/share. This week a share was going for about $100. 

Mark Zuckerberg owns 350 million shares. About 13 months ago his net worth was $142 billion, and then Meta began its precipitous decline. Don't feel too sorry for him because he's still worth $38 billion, which will get him through the winter all right.

Bloomberg wealth index listed him at one time as 3rd richest, right after Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Now he's pegged as #23.

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from Bloomberg

Meta settles

“Unbeknownst to most Texans, for more than a decade Meta ran facial recognition software on virtually every face contained in the photographs uploaded to Facebook, capturing records of the facial geometry of the people depicted,” according to the office of the attorney general of Texas. 

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It's against Texas law to capture biometric identifiers without the person's consent. The attorney general filed suit in February of 2022, and it's just been settled. 

Meta is going to pay $1.4 billion to the state over five years, a deal negotiated through the lawyers nearly two months ago. Attorney General Paxton calls it a "victory for Texan privacy rights."

Google's owner, Alphabet, is being sued by Texas as well for "illegally collecting biometric data from millions of Texans."

Meta

Facebook has rightfully lost steam because it's lost the trust of the public. So attention is being re-directed to Meta, its new parent company and Mark Zuckerberg's new vision. 

That vision is, ta-da, The Metaverse: a virtual reality where we will be able to live and do what we can't in our real world. If you saw the movie "Ready Player One," you've seen the concept.

When you want to escape your dystopia because you feel helpless to change things, fear not. You can escape to the Metaverse where everything is cool. 

Or not. In the movie, corrupted human beings still control the escape universe. Kinda like Facebook?

If we're all going to live VR lives, let's hope Meta is not the guardian of that universe.

from MSM

Meta loss

Last Thursday, the new Meta (formerly Facebook) company started the day with an enormous loss of market capitalization. 

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Why the huge fall of its stock price? Meta published its fourth quarter (last three months of 2021) earnings report the previous night: a shocking operating loss of $10 billion. Plus, Facebook had a loss of daily active users for the first time in its history.

It's on track to be the biggest one-day wipeout of a corporation's market value in America, ever.

from Business Insider

FB Deepface 2

So Facebook "will no longer deploy facial recognition technologies on its platform." Good to know, since people today are uneasy about what could happen to their private information in the hands of public entities.

But Meta (fb's parent company) is not making that promise. 

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They are going to keep and use Deepface, the algorithm that powered fb's photo-tagging feature by linking user photos with facial pattern templates. A spokesperson for Meta says they think they can continue to work with it for "positive" uses.

That's not all. Meta "aims to build a virtual, internet-based simulation where people can interact as avatars." So they need ways to identify individuals. They're exploring "biometrics" for that purpose, body measurements that can be used like facial recognition templates. Other examples that can be used in addition to the human face are fingerprints, DNA, iris or retina recognition, and more. Biometrics to control access and verify identity are already being used by countries listed here. 

What could go wrong? It's not as if someone would ever use our identities for some bad purpose.

Zuck regrets

Did you doubt it when you heard that social media censors speech? Or when you heard that the current American administration was pushing them to do it, because the government we have now wants to silence some of us?

If so, doubt no more. Mark Zuckerberg (photo), founder and CEO of Meta, confirms it in a letter he wrote to the chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary of the U.S. House of Representatives:

"In 2021, senior officials from the . . White House repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content . . and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree." There were other subjects, too, that the government wanted censored.

He says they would handle the situation differently today than they did then and expresses some regret. "[W]e're ready to push back if something like this happens again." 

Meta cooperated with the government to violate the First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing free speech. Zuckerberg seems to admit it, now that the House of Representatives is investigating.

AI & nuclear 1

Remember the "Metaverse," that virtual reality envisioned by Mark Zuckerberg? After billions of dollars of investment, there was enormous loss. The Metaverse virtual reality platforms still exist, but not as the company's primary focus. 

Instead, Meta has turned to artificial intelligence. Their new superintelligence research lab will be led by the founder of Scale AI (they paid $14.3 billion dollars for a 49% share in his company).

As MIT commented, building out AI will require "staggering" amounts of energy. So they're actively looking for nuclear developers with whom they can partner (read: invest $) to produce new power. That could include either big conventional plants, or the emerging SMR's (small modular reactors).

But of course fusion (instead of current fission) nuclear would be the breakthrough solution if the theory ever becomes practical. Meta has an agreement with Helion, as does Microsoft, for the delivery of fusion-produced nuclear power by 2028. 

Can Helion do it? It remains to be seen. We're hopeful. They've started on Microsoft's nuclear fusion plant:

FB & DeepFace

Is Facebook eliminating facial recognition? Yes. No. Both answers are true, and neither of them reveal the whole picture. Sometimes a media headline leaves out something significant.

First, the "yes" details. Jerome Presenti, VP of artificial intelligence at Meta (fb's parent company), says: 'Meta will shut down the Face Recognition system on Facebook . . people who have opted in to our Face Recognition setting will no longer be automatically recognized in photos and videos, and we will delete the facial recognition template used to identify them."

That will amount to "more than 1 billion people’s individual facial recognition templates." A billion is a lot of people, considering that U.S. population is 330 million, and the population of the whole world is 7.8 billion.

Did they all trust Facebook to create a digitally recognizable visual of their own face? That could identify them in any picture or video posted in the world forever? That's a lot of trust. 

But no worries, because now all that visual personal ID is going to be destroyed . . right?

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(cont'd tomorrow)

Metaverse ⬇️

"Sky-high expections" of "futuristic vistas" where we all would interact in virtual worlds, that's how the Metaverse was promoted. Glowing predictions of the internet of the future attracted investors to Mark Zuckerberg's vision. But it was just big hype.

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Zuckerberg told media hosts that a billion people would use it and spend hundreds of dollars there. But they didn't. Users never approached the expected numbers. Consulting firms predicted that the company would be worth $5-13 trillion within a few years. But it wasn't.

"Meta could not convince people to use the product it had staked its future on."

"Zuckerberg misled everyone, burned tens of billions of dollars, convinced an industry of followers to submit to his quixotic obsession, and then killed it . . . "

from Business Insider

Meta spying

Social media learns information about us as we use it. We see the results when an ad shows up which seems to address a need we've talked about. What else do they know about us?  

If you live and play in the Metaverse, you're handing over quite a bit more information about yourself, like your real physical attributes, your gender, your wealth. Ads will be more personalized: "A lot of people think metaverse ads mean billboards. Actually, it could be something far, far more immersive than that . . ."

And beyond making our data available to their customers who want to advertise to us, we're sure that they will sell our data to . . someone . . for some unknown purpose.

A study published last month demonstrates how easy it is to gather data from virtual reality (VR) users. They created a simple VR game and learned over 20 data points about those users in about five minutes:

from Forbes

Google loses one

Google is still fighting suits filed by states or the federal government a few years ago. One of them was decided and finished this summer. The state of Texas won it.

Attorney General Ken Paxton says, "In Texas, Big Tech is not above the law. For years, Google secretly tracked people’s movements, private searches, and even their voiceprints and facial geometry through their products and services . . .They will pay for abusing our trust."

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After aggressive litigation by the Attorney General, a settlement was negotiated in place of a judge's legal decision. Google will pay the state of Texas $1,375,000,000: far, far more than Google has had to pay as a result of other similar suits.

This is in addition to a similar suit and settlement with Meta just a year ago, where they settled to pay Texas $1.4 billion. I hope the technology sector has learned that we the people will not tolerate massive, secret theft of privacy.

from Texas state website

Tech layoffs

Massive layoffs at Twitter were predicted and actually happened (3700 jobs, 50%) after Elon Musk, under pressure from the company, completed purchasing it. 

No word on whether the other big tech layoffs were expected.

November 4 was the worst day for job cuts in 2022:

• Lyft - 700 jobs, 13% 
• Chime - 160 jobs,12%
• Stripe - 1000 jobs, 14%
• Opendoor - 550 jobs, 15%
• others

Meta is part of the wave too, announcing yesterday that they're cutting a whopping 11,000 jobs (13%) - probably related to its huge value crash.

from MindMatters

Vibe shift 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Business owners and managers don't need ill will from those who hold power. It's already challenging to produce some kind of product which people want and will pay for, while keeping expenses low.  

So big business will try to make peace with the powers that be. That includes tech companies that have leaned left politically. America has a new sheriff in town.

Google donated $1 million to the new president's inauguration in January. OpenAI donated a million. Meta donated a million. Microsoft donated a million. Apple's CEO donated a million.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledges the "vibe shift," and calls the new administration "a breath of fresh air." He says there is huge excitement in the U.S. tech industry: “Maybe we can go figure out how to get good at semiconductor fab again, get good at robotic factories, to make data centers again, get good at building new energy.” 

Their Super Bowl commercial for ChatGPT:

Nuclear now 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

And why is nuclear power a concern for AI builders? Because artificial intelligence is being developed fast, and it's going to require much more power very soon. 

Last February the U.S. president and OpenAI announced the "Stargate" initiative, a collaboration between private companies and the government to develop artificial intelligence and the data centers that will power it. 

Running AI is energy-intensive. MIT says, "The energy resources required to power this artificial intelligence revolution are staggering . . ."

What sort of plants will supply the power? It's less likely to be coal, windmills or solar. Even relatively clean natural gas, being a fossil fuel, is considered somewhat "dirty." Both "Meta and Microsoft are working to fire up new nuclear power plants." 

More nuclear looks to be a common, clean choice (image).

from Technology Review

Super rich 3

(cont'd from this post)

Sultan Bolkiah is far from the richest person on earth. In fact, according to the Forbes list of global billionaires, #10 on the list is three times richer. (But, of course, the sultan takes the prize for collecting luxury cars.)

The top four on the list made their fortunes in the American technology sector. After Elon Musk comes Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Larry Ellison (Oracle). The U.S. has the most billionaires, China is next, followed by India with its own ~200 billionaires.

A minority inherited the money, but about two thirds of them created their own fortunes. Factors like the value of their investments and businesses are considered when Forbes figures out their net worth, and one of the investigators explains it below.

from Forbes

Freer FB

"Destroyed trust." Head of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, says that his former policies of content moderation and fact-checker censors have destroyed the public's trust. Maybe he was actually sincere last September when he seemed to regret the censorship that Facebook has practiced.

It sounds like the message that Jeff Bezos delivered to Washington Post. It could be a trend, a good one. Many Americans have had enough of media efforts to force their own views down our throats. As they both said, we don't trust them anymore.

Zuckerberg says that Facebook is going to adopt something like X's community notes to function in place of fact-checkers.

Skeptical people think he's just kissing up to the new administration. Whether he is or not, Facebook will be a freer platform . . and that's a good thing.

Teen depression

Teenagers, the younger half of Generation Z, should be energetically learning and looking forward to thrilling years ahead. Many are, but way too many are depressed instead. They should be inspired and excited about their future. Why is depression unusually common? 

Youth Risk Behavior Survey (from Center for Disease Control) reported a couple of years ago that 57% of girls have "persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness" while the same was true of 29% of boys. Both statistics are significantly higher when compared to 2011.

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Lockdowns and the pandemic played a part, but the CDC also credits social media with this disturbing trend. As you know, 41 states are suing Meta for using "harmful and psychologically manipulative product features to induce young users’ compulsive and extended Platform use."

Americans try to protect our young people from drugs (yesterday's post) and social media. But church activity could improve mental health: "Gallup’s research confirms the “correlation between [an] individuals’ personal religiosity and various measures of wellbeing, happiness and mental (and, in some instances, physical) health.” 

Power holders in our culture are not inclined to promote that.

from Daily Signal

Censor 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Three U.S. senators are pushing social media to aggressively censor "misinformation" on their platforms. They worry that Twitter, Google, and Meta won't censor enough during the coming election campaign because all of them have cut staff.

But how will social media know which posts are misinformation and must be cancelled? Easy, the government will tell them. Any fact or opinion that challenges the government's narrative must be stomped on. Because--what if people believe their opponents and so they vote the wrong way?! 

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Do social media companies actually make a difference? Do they deliver votes to a specific party? 

Yes, they do: "Google is shifting votes on a massive scale."

(cont'd on Monday)