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Major egg corporations may be using avian flu as a ruse to hike up prices, generating record profits while hurting American consumers, new research suggests. The cost of a dozen large eggs hit almost $5 in January – a record high in the US and more than two and a half times the average price three years ago before the avian flu outbreak. This signifies a 157% inflation rate for eggs. "Bird flu does not fully explain the sticker shock consumers experience in the egg aisle ... corporate consolidation is a key culprit behind egg price spikes," said Amanda Starbuck, lead author of the FWW report The Economic Cost of Food Monopolies: The Rotten Egg Oligarchy. "Powerful corporations that control every step of the supply chain – from breeding hens to hatching eggs to processing and distributing eggs – are making windfall profits off this crisis, raising their prices above and beyond what is necessary to cover any rising costs." The analysis found that in some regions, prices were going up even before the new strain of the deadly H5N1 virus had affected poultry flocks and reduced egg production. The south-east, for instance, remained free of bird flu in its table egg flocks until January 2025. In fact, egg production rose in 2022 and 2023 compared with 2021 levels. Yet retail egg prices in the region increased alongside national spikes. Even as egg production recovered in 2023, prices did not come down.
Note: Read how skyrocketing food prices are caused by corporate greed. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on food system corruption.
Antidepressants are frequently prescribed to people with dementia for symptoms like anxiety, depression, aggressiveness and sleeplessness. But a specific class of antidepressant medications - selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) - actually might speed up brain decline among some dementia patients, a new Swedish study suggests. Heavier doses of certain SSRIs are tied to a higher risk for severe dementia, researchers reported in a new study ... in the journal BMC Medicine. The SSRI drug escitalopram was associated with the fastest cognitive decline, followed by citalopram and sertraline. For the study, researchers tracked the brain health of more than 18,700 patients enlisted in the Swedish Registry for Cognitive/Dementia Disorders between May 2007 and Oct. 2018. The patients' average age was 78. During an average follow-up of more than four years, about 23% of patients received a new prescription for an antidepressant, researchers said. SSRIs were the most commonly prescribed antidepressant, amounting to 65% of all those prescriptions, the study says. "Higher dispensed doses of SSRIs were associated with higher risk for severe dementia, fractures, and all-cause mortality," the researchers concluded. "These findings highlight the significance of careful and regular monitoring to assess the risks and benefits of different antidepressants use in patients with dementia."
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Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers–Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego–to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon's costliest new projects. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country's largest and most powerful defense contractors ... posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC. The very notion of a "military-industrial complex" linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address. In 2024, just five companies–Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion)–claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts. Now ... a new force–Silicon Valley startup culture–has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.
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The former head of the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) drug division is joining Pfizer as its chief medical officer. Patrizia Cavazzoni was formerly director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) from 2020 until January, when she resigned just ahead of President Trump's return to office. Cavazzoni previously worked at Pfizer prior to joining the FDA in 2018. The announcement spurred renewed criticisms about the common "revolving door" between the FDA and industry. Critics worry the close relationship leads to a quid pro quo and favoritism toward industry. Scott Gottlieb, FDA commissioner during Trump's first term, now serves on the board of Pfizer. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long accused the FDA of being corrupt and beholden to industry influence and has pledged to root out supposed conflicts of interest across the agency. Just ahead of the election, while Trump was considering him for HHS secretary, Kennedy posted on social media that FDA employees who are "part of this corrupt system" should "pack their bags." Watchdog group Public Citizen panned Cavazzoni's hiring. "Cavazonni's move demonstrates that the revolving door between the FDA and the industries it regulates is alive and well and continues to undermine the FDA's credibility as a public health agency," the organization's health research group director Robert Steinbrook said.
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Pesticide company efforts to push through laws that could block litigation against them is igniting battles in several US farm states. Laws have been introduced in at least eight states so far and drafts are circulating in more than 20 states, backed by a deluge of advertising supporting the measures. The fight is particularly fierce now in Iowa, where opponents call the pesticide-backed proposed law the "Cancer Gag Act", due to high levels of cancer in Iowa that many fear are linked to the state's large agricultural use of pesticides. Iowa has the second-highest rate of new cancer cases in the United States and the fastest growing rate. The bill would bar people from suing pesticide manufacturers for failing to warn them of health risks, as long as the product labels are approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Opponents say the legislation will rob farmers and others who use pesticides from holding companies accountable in court if their pesticide products cause disease or injury. "We're very worried. Our farmers feel that if they have injuries or illnesses due to their use of a pesticide they should have access to the courts," said [Iowa Farmers Union president] Aaron Lehman. The actions in the states come alongside a simultaneous push for changes in federal law that would in effect shield companies from lawsuits brought by people claiming they developed cancers or other diseases due to their use of pesticides.
Note: Thousands of farmers and everyday people have filed lawsuits against major corporations for failing to warn consumers about the health risks associated with these chemicals. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on toxic chemicals and food system corruption.
Palantir is profiting from a "revolving door" of executives and officials passing between the $264bn data intelligence company and high level positions in Washington and Westminster, creating an influence network who have guided its extraordinary growth. The US group, whose billionaire chair Peter Thiel has been a key backer of Donald Trump, has enjoyed an astonishing stock price rally on the back of strong rise of sales from government contracts and deals with the world's largest corporations. Palantir has hired extensively from government agencies critical to its sales. Palantir has won more than $2.7bn in US contracts since 2009, including over $1.3bn in Pentagon contracts, according to federal records. In the UK, Palantir has been awarded more than Ł376mn in contracts, according to Tussell, a data provider. Thiel threw a celebration party for Trump's inauguration at his DC home last month, attended by Vance as well as Silicon Valley leaders like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI's Sam Altman. After the US election in November, Trump began tapping Palantir executives for key government roles. At least six individuals have moved between Palantir and the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), an office that oversees the defence department's adoption of data, analytics and AI. Meanwhile, [Palantir co-founder] Joe Lonsdale ... has played a central role in setting up and staffing Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.
Note: Read about Palantir's growing influence in law enforcement and the war machine. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in the military and in the corporate world.
Instagram has released a long-promised "reset" button to U.S. users that clears the algorithms it uses to recommend you photos and videos. TikTok offers a reset button, too. And with a little bit more effort, you can also force YouTube to start fresh with how it recommends what videos to play next. It means you now have the power to say goodbye to endless recycled dance moves, polarizing Trump posts, extreme fitness challenges, dramatic pet voice-overs, fruit-cutting tutorials, face-altering filters or whatever other else has taken over your feed like a zombie. I know some people love what their apps show them. But the reality is, none of us are really in charge of our social media experience anymore. Instead of just friends, family and the people you choose to follow, nowadays your feed or For You Page is filled with recommended content you never asked for, selected by artificial-intelligence algorithms. Their goal is to keep you hooked, often by showing you things you find outrageous or titillating – not joyful or calming. And we know from Meta whistleblower Frances Haugen and others that outrage algorithms can take a particular toll on young people. That's one reason they're offering a reset now: because they're under pressure to give teens and families more control. So how does the algorithm go awry? It tries to get to know you by tracking every little thing you do. They're even analyzing your "dwell time," when you unconsciously scroll more slowly.
Note: Read about the developer who got permanently banned from Meta for developing a tool called "Unfollow Everything" that lets users, well, unfollow everything and restart their feeds fresh. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and media manipulation.
In the nineteen-fifties, the Leo Burnett advertising agency helped invent Tony the Tiger, a cartoon mascot who was created to promote Frosted Flakes to children. In 1973, a trailblazing nutritionist named Jean Mayer warned the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs that ... junk foods could be described as empty calories. He questioned why it was legal to apply the term "cereals" to products that were more than fifty-per-cent sugar. Children's-food advertisements, he claimed, were "nothing short of nutritional disasters." Mayer's warnings, however, did not lead to a string of state bans on junk food. Advertising continued to target children, and consumers of all ages were free to buy and consume any amount of Frosted Flakes. This health issue was ultimately seen as one that families should manage on their own. In recent years, experts have been warning that social media harms children. Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist who became a whistle-blower, told a Senate subcommittee that her ex-employer's "profit optimizing machine is generating self-harm and self-hate–especially for vulnerable groups, like teenage girls." "It is time to require a surgeon general's warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents," Vivek Murthy, whose second term as the U.S. Surgeon General ended on Monday, wrote in an opinion piece last year.
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and mental health.
The "Make America Healthy Again" agenda has catapulted nutrition issues to the forefront of conversations about Americans' health. The policy proposals range from getting junk foods out of schools to preventing the government from subsidizing candy through programs like SNAP. To advance these policies, we need a clear system of labeling unhealthy junk foods in the food supply. The Food and Drug Administration is considering implementing this type of labeling system, but the food industry is trying to interfere. Warning labels signaling when foods are high in salt, added sugar and saturated fat can help consumers easily identify which foods they should limit. Ten countries already require such labels, and the National Academy of Medicine first recommended them in the U.S. more than 14 years ago. Food companies criticize the science supporting front-of-package labeling, delay public consultation periods, push for their own confusing label designs and emphasize the possible harms of a mandatory labeling policy. Food companies have deployed these tactics to avoid effective labeling policies around the globe for decades. In the public discourse, food companies are making distracting arguments about the possible harms of a clear front-of-package labeling policy, arguing that such labels may hurt the economy, raise food prices, scare consumers or lead to shame when selecting certain foods. None of these arguments are supported by scientific evidence.
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Emails show Planned Parenthood negotiating terms regarding the donation of aborted fetuses for medical research. The emails discuss fetal tissue like any other commodity such as sugar or rice, nonchalantly negotiating for fetuses up to 23 weeks old from elective abortions. A heavily-redacted so-called "Research Plan" submitted to the University of California San Diego (UCSD) Institutional Review Board and approved in 2018 states scientists wanted 2,500 fetuses from up to almost the sixth month of gestation for experimentation. Although selling fetal tissue is illegal, donating it is not illegal. The contract between UCSD and Planned Parenthood appears to allow Planned Parenthood to retain "intellectual property rights relating to the" fetal tissue, although it also does not grant UCSD the independent right to "commercialize" the tissue. The emails were shared with The Post by [founder of Center for Medical Progress] David Daleiden. Daleiden ... accuses Planned Parenthood of racism. The English language consent forms contain 15 bullet points including language disclosing that the donated tissue may have "significant commercial value." However, that specific information is not included in the Spanish language consent forms which contain only 14 bullet points. "I don't understand why Planned Parenthood…. and UCSD felt that Spanish speaking mothers did not deserve to know that the body parts of their aborted children would be â€commercialized" while English speaking mothers did deserve to have this fact disclosed to them," Daleiden [said]. The transfer of any aborted human fetal tissue for "valuable consideration" across state lines is a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison or a fine of up to $500,000.
Note: Watch all the leaked footage of Planned Parenthood executives discussing the sale of aborted fetal tissue here. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on corruption in science.
The US spy tech company Palantir has been in talks with the Ministry of Justice about using its technology to calculate prisoners' "reoffending risks", it has emerged. The prisons minister, James Timpson, received a letter three weeks after the general election from a Palantir executive who said the firm was one of the world's leading software companies, and was working at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI). Palantir had been in talks with the MoJ and the Prison Service about how "secure information sharing and data analytics can alleviate prison challenges and enable a granular understanding of reoffending and associated risks", the executive added. The discussions ... are understood to have included proposals by Palantir to analyse prison capacity, and to use data held by the state to understand trends relating to reoffending. This would be based on aggregating data to identify and act on trends, factoring in drivers such as income or addiction problems. However, Amnesty International UK's business and human rights director, Peter Frankental, has expressed concern. "It's deeply worrying that Palantir is trying to seduce the new government into a so-called brave new world where public services may be run by unaccountable bots at the expense of our rights," he said. "Ministers need to push back against any use of artificial intelligence in the criminal justice, prison and welfare systems that could lead to people being discriminated against."
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New rules require drugmakers to be clearer and more direct when explaining their medications' risks and side effects. The [new] guidelines ... are designed to do away with industry practices that downplay or distract viewers from risk information. But while regulators were drafting them, a new trend emerged: Thousands of pharma influencers pushing drugs online with little oversight. A new bill in Congress would compel the FDA to more aggressively police such promotions on social media platforms. "Some people become very attached to social media influencers and ascribe to them credibility that, in some cases, they don't deserve," said Tony Cox ... at Indiana University. Still, TV remains the industry's primary advertising format, with over $4 billion spent in the past year. Even so, many companies are looking beyond TV and expanding into social media. They often partner with patient influencers who post about managing their conditions, new treatments or navigating the health system. Advertising executives say companies like the format because it's cheaper than TV and consumers generally feel influencers are more trustworthy than companies. "The power of social media and the deluge of misleading promotions has meant too many young people are receiving medical advice from influencers instead of their health care professional," Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois and Mike Braun of Indiana wrote the FDA in a February letter.
Note: Prescription drug advertising is only legal in the US and New Zealand. Read more about the influencers who are paid to promote pharmaceuticals on social media. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Pharma profiteering and media manipulation.
A former director at the tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PMI) was handed a role on an influential expert committee advising the UK government on cancer risks. Ruth Dempsey, the ex-director of scientific and regulatory affairs, spent 28 years at PMI before being appointed to the UK Committee on Carcinogenicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment (CoC). The committee's role is to provide ministers with independent advice. Yet since taking up the position in February 2020, Dempsey has continued to be paid by PMI for work including authoring a sponsored paper about regulatory strategies for heated tobacco products. She also owns shares in the tobacco giant ... and receives a PMI pension. But her appointment, unreported until now, raises questions about the potential for undue influence and possible access to inside information on policy and regulatory matters that may be valuable to the tobacco industry. PMI has a long history of lobbying and influence campaigns, including pushing against planned crackdowns on vaping. It has also invested heavily in promoting heated tobacco as an alternative to smoking and expects to ship around 140bn heated tobacco units in 2024, a 134% increase on its 59.7bn sales in 2019. Sophie Braznell, who monitors heated tobacco products as part of the University of Bath's Tobacco Control Research Group, said Dempsey's position on the committee risked undermining its work. "In permitting a former senior tobacco employee and consultant for the world's largest tobacco company to join this advisory committee, we jeopardise its objectivity and integrity."
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Once upon a time, you could have yourself a nice little Saturday of stocking up at Costco (using your sister's membership card, naturally), before hitting up a museum (free admission with your 15-year-old expired student ID) or settling into a reality TV binge sesh (streaming on your college roommate's ex-boyfriend's Netflix login). Thanks to the fine-tuning of the tech that Corporate America uses to police subscriptions, those freeloading days are over. Costco and Disney this month took a page from the Netflix playbook and announced they are cracking down on account sharers. Want to put on "Frozen" for the kids so you can have two hours to do literally anything else? You're going to need a Disney+ login associated with your household. The tech that tracks your IP address and can read your face has gotten more sophisticated. Retailers and streaming services are increasingly turning to status-verification tech that make it harder for folks to claim student discounts on services like Amazon Prime or Spotify beyond graduation. Cracking down on sharing was hugely successful for Netflix. For years, the streaming giant turned a blind eye to password sharing because doing so allowed more people to experience the product and, crucially, come to rely on it. Netflix kept growing and growing until 2022, when [it] cashed in on its brand loyalty, betting that it had made itself indispensable to enough viewers that they'd be willing to cough up $7-$15 a month to keep their access.
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On July 16, the S&P 500 index, one of the most widely cited benchmarks in American capitalism, reached its highest-ever market value: $47 trillion. 1.4 percent of those companies were worth more than $16 trillion, the greatest concentration of capital in the smallest number of companies in the history of the U.S. stock market. The names are familiar: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Alphabet, and Tesla. All of them, too, have made giant bets on artificial intelligence. For all their similarities, these trillion-dollar-plus companies have been grouped together under a single banner: the Magnificent Seven. In the past month, though, these giants of the U.S. economy have been faltering. A recent rout led to a collapse of $2.6 trillion in their market value. Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs issued a deeply skeptical report on the industry, calling it too expensive, too clunky, and just simply not as useful as it has been chalked up to be. "There's not a single thing that this is being used for that's cost-effective at this point," Jim Covello, an influential Goldman analyst, said on a company podcast. AI is not going away, and it will surely become more sophisticated. This explains why, even with the tempering of the AI-investment thesis, these companies are still absolutely massive. When you talk with Silicon Valley CEOs, they love to roll their eyes at their East Coast skeptics. Banks, especially, are too cautious, too concerned with short-term goals, too myopic to imagine another world.
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Real estate companies are making an explicit appeal to wartime patriotism, leading with the conflict as a selling point and a reason to invest. In late June, a company called My Israel Home hosted an expo at a Los Angeles synagogue catering to a specific clientele: Jewish Americans looking to buy a new home in Israel – or on illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Similar real estate fairs have popped up across North America this year ... and several have faced protests as the war on Gaza has brought the issue of Israeli settlements and Palestinian sovereignty to the fore. On websites largely tailored for Jewish American buyers looking to move to Israel, prospective homeowners can browse properties that include listings for homes in settlement communities, which offer the typical trappings of suburban life. Around a dozen real estate firms have participated in real estate fairs organized by My Israel Home across North America this year. Six of these firms are actively marketing at least two dozen separate properties for sale located within eight different West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements, according to their online listings. Other real estate firms commonly list dozens of West Bank properties on their sites. West Bank settlements have long drawn criticism from the international community, which regards the settlements as illegal, in violation of Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions. Criticism of settlements have only intensified in recent months amid a spike in settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied territory.
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The tobacco company Philip Morris International has been accused of "manipulating science for profit" through funding research and advocacy work with scientists. Campaigners say that leaked documents from PMI and its Japanese affiliate also reveal plans to target politicians, doctors and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as part of the multinational's marketing strategy to attract non-smokers to its heated tobacco product, IQOS. A paper from researchers at the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath said that Philip Morris Japan (PMJ), funded a Kyoto University study into smoking cessation via a third-party research organisation. The researchers said they could find no public record of PMJ's involvement, although a PMI spokesperson said its involvement had been attributed when the results were presented at a scientific conference in Greece in 2021. PMJ paid about Ł20,000 a month to FTI-Innovations, a life sciences consultancy run by a Tokyo University professor, for tasks such as promoting PMI's science and products at academic events. In one internal email, a PMJ employee claimed they had been told "to keep it a secret". Dr Sophie Braznell, one of [the paper's] authors, said: "The manipulation of science for profit harms us all, especially policymakers and consumers. It slows down and undermines public health policies, while encouraging the widespread use of harmful products."
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Research from the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) details the widespread burdens that plastic pollution places on US cities and states, and argues that plastic producers may be breaking public-nuisance, product-liability and consumer-protection laws. It comes as cities such as Baltimore have begun to file claims against plastic manufacturers, but the authors write that existing cases "are likely only the beginning, as more states and municipalities grapple with the challenges of accumulating plastic waste and microplastics contamination." Taxpayers foot the bill to clean plastic pollution from streets and waterways, and research shows people could ingest the equivalent of one credit card's worth of plastic per week. From 1950 to 2000, global plastic production soared from 2m tons to 234m tons annually. And over the next 20 years, production more than doubled to 460m tons in 2019. As the public grew concerned about plastic pollution, the industry responded with "sophisticated marketing campaigns" to shift blame from producers to consumers – for instance, by popularizing the term litterbug. Plastic has clogged sewer grates, leading to increased flooding. It has also exposed populations to microplastics. The report outlines different legal theories that could help governments pursue accountability. Nuisance could account for the harms themselves ... and consumer-protection law could be used to combat deceitful marketing practices.
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Facebook's inscrutable feed algorithm, which is supposed to calculate which content is most likely to appeal to me and then send it my way ... feels like an obstacle to how I'd like to connect with my friends. British software developer Louis Barclay developed a software ... known as an extension, which can be installed in a Chrome web browser. Christened Unfollow Everything, it would automate the process of unfollowing each of my 1,800 friends, a task that manually would take hours. The result is that I would be able to experience Facebook as it once was, when it contained profiles of my friends, but without the endless updates, photos, videos and the like that Facebook's algorithm generates. If tools like Unfollow Everything were allowed to flourish, and we could have better control over what we see on social media, these tools might create a more civic-minded internet. Unfortunately, Mr. Barclay was forced by Facebook to remove the software. Large social media platforms appear to be increasingly resistant to third-party tools that give users more command over their experiences. After talking with Mr. Barclay, I decided to develop a new version of Unfollow Everything. I – and the lawyers at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia – asked a federal court in California last week to rule on whether users should have a right to use tools like Unfollow Everything that give them increased power over how they use social networks, particularly over algorithms that have been engineered to keep users scrolling on their sites.
Note: The above was written by Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy and director of the UMass Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For more along these lines, explore concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech from reliable major media sources.
Emotion artificial intelligence uses biological signals such as vocal tone, facial expressions and data from wearable devices as well as text and how people use their computers, promising to detect and predict how someone is feeling. Over 50% of large employers in the U.S. use emotion AI aiming to infer employees' internal states, a practice that grew during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, call centers monitor what their operators say and their tone of voice. We wondered what workers think about these technologies. My collaborators Shanley Corvite, Kat Roemmich, Tillie Ilana Rosenberg and I conducted a survey. 51% of participants expressed concerns about privacy, 36% noted the potential for incorrect inferences employers would accept at face value, and 33% expressed concern that emotion AI-generated inferences could be used to make unjust employment decisions. Despite emotion AI's claimed goals to infer and improve workers' well-being in the workplace, its use can lead to the opposite effect: well-being diminished due to a loss of privacy. On concerns that emotional surveillance could jeopardize their job, a participant with a diagnosed mental health condition said: "They could decide that I am no longer a good fit at work and fire me. Decide I'm not capable enough and not give a raise, or think I'm not working enough." Participants ... said they were afraid of the dynamic they would have with employers if emotion AI were integrated into their workplace.
Note: The above article was written by Nazanin Andalibi at the University of Michigan. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corporate corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.
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