News StoriesExcerpts of Key News Stories in Major Media
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On an October morning, a small army arrived to evict Rudy Ortega from his home in the Crash Zone, an encampment located near the end of the airport runway in San Jose, California. The camp, one of the largest in California, was cleared between 2021 and 2023 in part by a private company named Tucker Construction. Public spending on private sweep contractors is soaring across California. In total, private firms have been paid at least $100m to clear homeless camps, an investigation by the Guardian and Type Investigations has found. Pete White, the founder of the Los Angeles Community Action Network ... says he's observed a steady increase in the privatization of sweeps in recent years. "The growth of a private industry geared towards removing and dismantling informal settlements and houseless encampments has grown steadily in Los Angeles and across the country," said White. "Not only are we seeing a growth in the loss of property, but also the loss of rights." Firms vying for contracts to sweep encampments in California include mid-size construction companies that also do home renovations, as well as large environmental services firms that specialize in cleaning up hazardous waste and responding to public emergencies. A study of the health impacts of sweeps where the Crash Zone is located found that unhoused residents often lost medicines and other "health necessities" and that sweeps "drove unhoused people into hazardous, isolated, less visible spaces". As well as the loss of their homes, they allege the destruction of belongings that rules are meant to protect.
Note: Read more about the unprecedented rise in food costs that are leaving millions of Americans facing higher prices and growing food insecurity. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.
Consider the Norwegians, who experienced extreme polarization at the same time as the Germans did. The Norwegian economic elite organized against striking laborers and produced a polarized country that included both Nazi Brown Shirts goose-stepping in the streets and Norwegian Communists agitating to overthrow capitalism. The politician Vidkun Quisling, an admirer of Hitler, organized in 1933 a Nazi party, and its uniformed paramilitary wing sought to provoke violent clashes with leftist students. Quisling reportedly held discussions with military officers about a possible coup d'etat.The stage was set for a fascist "solution." Instead, Norway broke through to a social democracy. Progressive movements of farmers and workers, joined by middle-class allies, launched nonviolent direct action campaigns that made the country increasingly ungovernable by the economic elite. The majority forced the economic elite to take a back seat and invented a new economy with arguably the most equality, individual freedom, and shared abundance the developed world has known. The key to avoiding fascism? An organized left with a strong vision and broad support. Grassroots movements built a large infrastructure of co-ops that showed their competency and positivity when the government and political conservatives lacked both. Additionally, activists reached beyond the choir, inviting participation from people who initially feared making large changes. Norwegians also ... chose nonviolent direct action campaigns consisting of strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, and occupations. Norway therefore lacked the dangerous chaos that in Germany led the middle classes to accept the elite's choice of Hitler to bring "law and order."
Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing social division and reimagining the economy.
In Sudan ... civilians have endured 16 months of a violent civil war. Last week, talks to end the war began in Switzerland, but only one of the two warring factions showed up. By the weekend, however, each side had taken a critical step. The armed group attending the talks agreed to enable the delivery of emergency aid to parts of the East African country where hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of starvation. About the same time, and seemingly independently, the other faction opened a vital border crossing for the same purpose. The mutual acknowledgment of the need to protect innocent life may have opened a door to solving one of the world's gravest crises. "These constructive decisions by both parties will enable the entry of aid needed to stop the famine, address food insecurity and respond to immense humanitarian needs," international mediators in Geneva said in a joint statement. Recent trends in conflict resolution, the International Committee of the Red Cross noted, have shown that protecting innocent civilians from harm "can have an impact on the success of peace negotiations and agreements, as well as on the chances for post-conflict reconciliation." Humanitarian gestures, the ICRC observed, helped the Colombian government build trust with guerrilla factions and strengthen compliance with a 2016 peace accord. More recently, two armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo signed a mutual pledge in March to respect and protect civilians caught in the vast African country's fragmented wars.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing the war machine.
Dr. Amit Goswami [is the] founder of the Center for Quantum Activism and former professor at the University of Oregon. the quantum revolution, which started at the beginning of the last century, has put us in the position of an unfinished revolution, otherwise known as a kind of suspended paradigm shift where the world is shifting from a situation of materialist reductionism, as it's called, where everything is regarded as based on material particles, to a world where everything is based on energy cannot be understood apart from consciousness. And that's important for us because nonviolence does not operate materially. Nonviolence operates spiritually in the domain of consciousness. "Matter is just a possibility in consciousness," [said Gaswami]. "So, consciousness chooses out of the matter waves the actual events that we experience. In the process, consciousness identifies with our brain, the observer's brain. We can talk about nonviolence in a very scientific way. If we are all originating from the same source, if we are ultimately the same consciousness that works through us, then it is complete ignorance to be violent to each other. So, the issue of nonviolence is basically a challenge of transformation. How do we transform using creativity, using the archetype of goodness, bring that into the equation of power, and learn to be nonviolent with each other?" There's a lot of mental violence going on. But the point is that the way we approach it as violence begets more violence. So, it never stops. The answer, of course, is that nonviolence has to grow from inside of us. It has to be an intuition that often happens not just once or twice during the day, but becomes a conviction, a faith that I cannot be violent to my fellow human.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing social division.
The internet can be misused. It is understandable that those in the Senate might seek a government solution to protect children. The Kids Online Safety Act, known as KOSA, would impose an unprecedented duty of care on internet platforms to mitigate certain harms associated with mental health. As currently written, the bill is far too vague, and many of its key provisions are completely undefined. The bill empowers the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to regulate content that might affect mental health, yet KOSA does not explicitly define the term "mental health disorder." Instead, it references the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders…or "the most current successor edition." Even more concerning, the definition could change without any input from Congress. The sponsors of this bill will tell you that they have no desire to regulate content. In truth, this bill opens the door to nearly limitless content regulation, as people can and will argue that almost any piece of content could contribute to some form of mental health disorder. Anxiety and eating disorders are two of the undefined harms that this bill expects internet platforms to prevent and mitigate. Should we silence discussions about gun rights because it might cause some people anxiety? Could pro-life discussions cause anxiety in teenage mothers considering abortion? What about violent images from war? They are going to censor themselves, and users, rather than risk liability. This bill does not merely regulate the internet; it threatens to silence important and diverse discussions that are essential to a free society. [This] task is entrusted to a newly established speech police. The ACLU brought more than 300 high school students to Capitol Hill to urge Congress to vote no on KOSA.
Note: This article was written by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and mental health from reliable major media sources.
Columbus landlords are now turning to artificial intelligence to evict tenants from their homes. [Attorney Jyoshu] Tsushima works for the Legal Aid Society of Southeast and Central Ohio and focuses on evictions. In June, nearly 2,000 evictions were filed within Franklin County Municipal Court. Tsushima said the county is on track to surpass 24,000 evictions for the year. In eviction court, he said both property management staffers and his clients describe software used that automatically evicts tenants. He said human employees don't determine who will be kicked out but they're the ones who place the eviction notices up on doors. Hope Matfield contacted ABC6 ... after she received an eviction notice on her door at Eden of Caleb's Crossing in Reynoldsburg in May. "They're profiting off people living in hell, basically," Matfield [said]. "I had no choice. I had to make that sacrifice, do a quick move and not know where my family was going to go right away." In February, Matfield started an escrow case against her property management group which is 5812 Investment Group. When Matfield missed a payment, the courts closed her case and gave the escrow funds to 5812 Investment Group. Matfield received her eviction notice that same day. The website for 5812 Investment Group indicates it uses software from RealPage. RealPage is subject to a series of lawsuits across the country due to algorithms multiple attorneys general claim cause price-fixing on rents.
Note: Read more about how tech companies are increasingly marketing smart tools to landlords for a troubling purpose: surveilling tenants to justify evictions or raise their rent. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.
Surveillance technologies have evolved at a rapid clip over the last two decades – as has the government's willingness to use them in ways that are genuinely incompatible with a free society. The intelligence failures that allowed for the attacks on September 11 poured the concrete of the surveillance state foundation. The gradual but dramatic construction of this surveillance state is something that Republicans and Democrats alike are responsible for. Our country cannot build and expand a surveillance superstructure and expect that it will not be turned against the people it is meant to protect. The data that's being collected reflect intimate details about our closely held beliefs, our biology and health, daily activities, physical location, movement patterns, and more. Facial recognition, DNA collection, and location tracking represent three of the most pressing areas of concern and are ripe for exploitation. Data brokers can use tens of thousands of data points to develop a detailed dossier on you that they can sell to the government (and others). Essentially, the data broker loophole allows a law enforcement agency or other government agency such as the NSA or Department of Defense to give a third party data broker money to hand over the data from your phone – rather than get a warrant. When pressed by the intelligence community and administration, policymakers on both sides of the aisle failed to draw upon the lessons of history.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.
Data breaches are a seemingly endless scourge with no simple answer, but the breach in recent months of the background-check service National Public Data illustrates just how dangerous and intractable they have become. In April, a hacker known for selling stolen information, known as USDoD, began hawking a trove of data on cybercriminal forums for $3.5 million that they said included 2.9 billion records and impacted "the entire population of USA, CA and UK." As the weeks went on, samples of the data started cropping up as other actors and legitimate researchers worked to understand its source and validate the information. By early June, it was clear that at least some of the data was legitimate and contained information like names, emails, and physical addresses in various combinations. When information is stolen from a single source, like Target customer data being stolen from Target, it's relatively straightforward to establish that source. But when information is stolen from a data broker and the company doesn't come forward about the incident, it's much more complicated to determine whether the information is legitimate and where it came from. Typically, people whose data is compromised in a breach–the true victims–aren't even aware that National Public Data held their information in the first place. Every trove of information that attackers can get their hands on ultimately fuels scamming, cybercrime, and espionage.
Note: Clearview AI scraped billions of faces off of social media without consent. At least 600 law enforcement agencies were tapping into its database of 3 billion facial images. During this time, Clearview was hacked and its entire client list – which included the Department of Justice, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Interpol, retailers and hundreds of police departments – was leaked to hackers.
Luis Elizondo made headlines in 2017 when he resigned as a senior intelligence official running a shadowy Pentagon program investigating U.F.O.s and publicly denounced the excessive secrecy, lack of resources and internal opposition that he said were thwarting the effort. Now Elizondo, 52, has gone further in a new memoir. In the book he asserted that a decades-long U.F.O. crash retrieval program has been operating as a supersecret umbrella group made up of government officials working with defense and aerospace contractors. Over the years, he wrote, technology and biological remains of nonhuman origin have been retrieved from these crashes. "Humanity is, in fact, not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species," Elizondo wrote. The book, "Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for U.F.O.s," is being published ... after a yearlong security review by the Pentagon. In a foreword to the book, Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, wrote that, without Elizondo, "the U.S. government would still be denying the existence of U.A.P. and failing to investigate a phenomenon that may well be the greatest discovery in human history." The program led by Elizondo investigated sightings, near-misses and other encounters between U.A.P. and Navy jets. It also collected data from incidents involving military and intelligence operations, including images of extraordinary craft maneuvers.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our UFO Information Center.
Ryan Graves was in the Navy for more than 10 years. He's since left the service. This summer, he testified before the House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs. And he told the representatives that as a pilot and a formally trained engineer, he'd witnessed many phenomena that he could not explain. "During a training mission in Warning Area Whiskey 72, 10 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach, two F-18 Super Hornets were split by a UAP," [said Graves]. "The object, described as a dark gray or black cube inside of a clear sphere, came within 50 feet of the lead aircraft and was estimated to be 5 to 15 feet in diameter. The mission commander terminated the flight immediately and returned to base. Our squadron submitted a safety report, but there was no official acknowledgement of the incident and no further mechanism to report the sightings. Soon, these encounters became so frequent that aircrew would discuss the risk of UAP as part of their regular preflight briefs." Graves now runs an organization called Americans for Safe Aerospace. It's a non-profit dedicated to understanding unidentified anomalous phenomena as a national security threat. He says he still doesn't know what he saw in the skies. Part of the reason for that is that any unidentified aerial phenomenon, as the government now calls them, is automatically highly classified. But he says, whatever they are, they must be taken seriously.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on UFOs from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our UFO Information Center.
As the 23rd anniversary of 9/11 approaches, Americans still don't have a full accounting of the role of a supposed U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia, in the terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. The voids in our knowledge owe both to the Saudi government's opacity and denials ... as well as to our government's lid on information gleaned through federal investigations, a congressional inquiry and blue-ribbon commission. President Biden in 2021 finally ordered many documents declassified, fulfilling a promise to the 9/11 victims' families, but the releases were heavily redacted. "What we've uncovered, with no help from our FBI and no help from our own government, is that [the terrorists] had a significant amount of help, and that help came in the form of the Saudi government," Brett Eagleson, president of the families group 9/11 Justice, told reporters after a court hearing. The lawsuit turns on whether assistance from Saudi individuals and groups to two hijackers who had lived in San Diego was part of the Al Qaeda plot. Of the 19 attackers, 15 were Saudis, including the two in California who would commandeer the jetliner that they crashed into the Pentagon. Osama bin Laden belonged to one of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest clans. In a 1999 video first aired by CBS' "60 Minutes"in late June, Saudi citizen Omar Al Bayoumi – an informant to Saudi intelligence, the FBI confirmed, despite Saudi denials – surveills the U.S. Capitol ... presumably for his Al Qaeda handlers.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on 9/11 from reliable major media sources.
Nearly 25 years ago, a group of suicide bombers attacked the U.S.S. Cole off Aden, Yemen, with the loss of 17 U.S. sailors. A Saudi, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, believed to be the mastermind of the attack, was captured in 2002, and was officially charged in 2011 with leading the attack. He has become the longest-running capital murder case at Guantanamo. Al-Nashiri, like so many captives at Guantanamo, was subjected to secret imprisonment by the CIA as well as waterboarding, rectal abuse, and prolonged sleep deprivation. A previous judge at Guantanamo excluded the confessions of al-Nashiri and others because of CIA's torture and abuse. The al-Nashiri case was particularly egregious because his interrogators found him to be compliant, but a senior CIA official ordered the reinstatement of torture and abuse to include waterboarding. The CIA has always maintained that secret memoranda of George W. Bush's Department of Justice permitted the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" to include waterboarding in order to break the will of the captives. The CIA also had the support of psychologists and the American Psychological Association (APA) in conducting the coercive interrogation of terror suspects in Guantanamo and its secret prisons in East Europe and Southeast Asia. Two former military psychologists developed the CIA's sadistic techniques, which were based on Chinese efforts to obtain false confessions from American prisoners in the 1950s.
Note: Read more about how the American Psychological Association supported CIA torture operations. Learn more about US torture programs in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.
Body camera footage from a police officer who responded to the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump last month in Pennsylvania shows the intra-cop quarrels in the immediate aftermath of the attack. Video footage from body cameras on Butler Township Police Department officers, obtained by The Intercept, shed light on the chaos among law enforcement officials responding to the assassination attempt. The videos confirm previous reporting that a lack of communication and coordination between federal, state, and local police led to confusion at the rally and reflected insufficient preparation. Additional body camera footage shows one officer telling his colleagues minutes after the shooting that he warned the Secret Service well ahead of the rally to post agents at the building used by the shooter. One Butler Township police officer started to help other law enforcement teams climb onto a plastic shed to access the roof. As police teams scattered around the building debriefed on what happened, two Butler officers and the Secret Service agent stood looking at the storage shed. "Is that how he got up?" one police officer asked. "I have no idea," the other said. "I fucking told them they need to post the guys fucking over here," the first officer said to his colleague. "I told them that – the Secret Service – I told them that fucking Tuesday. I told them to post fucking guys over here." "I thought you guys were on the roof?" the other cop responded.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on assassinations and government corruption from reliable major media sources.
A US federal appeals court ruled last week that so-called geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Geofence warrants allow police to demand that companies such as Google turn over a list of every device that appeared at a certain location at a certain time. The US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on August 9 that geofence warrants are "categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment" because "they never include a specific user to be identified, only a temporal and geographic location where any given user may turn up post-search." In other words, they're the unconstitutional fishing expedition that privacy and civil liberties advocates have long asserted they are. Google ... is the most frequent target of geofence warrants, vowed late last year that it was changing how it stores location data in such a way that geofence warrants may no longer return the data they once did. Legally, however, the issue is far from settled: The Fifth Circuit decision applies only to law enforcement activity in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Plus, because of weak US privacy laws, police can simply purchase the data and skip the pesky warrant process altogether. As for the appellants in the case heard by the Fifth Circuit, well, they're no better off: The court found that the police used the geofence warrant in "good faith" when it was issued in 2018, so they can still use the evidence they obtained.
Note: Read more about the rise of geofence warrants and its threat to privacy rights. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.
A wave of local democracy is sweeping across Europe. On the streets of Hull ... democracy is coming to life through people's assemblies. Assemblies are public meetings where local people get together to discuss and decide on a specific issue, without political interference or hidden agendas. These assemblies can help us fundamentally rethink how we make decisions in our society, and create strong, active communities in the process. To survive ecological breakdown and the collapse of our failing economy, we need both, urgently. The culture war has gained a lot of ground. Overcoming these divisions is one of our biggest, most pressing challenges. Through assemblies, it's possible to form self-organising communities where we lift each other out of the conditions that these ideologies prey on. Where we are forced to work alongside people we disagree with or even dislike, and organise positive initiatives that feed us, lower our energy bills, give us purpose and contribute to a stronger community spirit. Our assembly ground rules ask us to look for what we have in common, and there is a wealth of agreement to be found if you care to look for it. Cooperation Hull is holding Neighbourhood Assemblies across the city, and in each one we are learning what happens when a room full of strangers upend social norms to break bread, hold hands (an ice-breaker) and voice their honest opinions on the most important questions of our time. Soon we will launch the first citywide assembly: hundreds of people weighing in on a big issue, then attempting to make practical changes with the help of local organisations – and there are groups like us popping up from Cornwall to Glasgow, and Italy and Germany, too. The potential of assemblies is nothing short of revolutionary. It is the potential to change everything.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing social division.
Mr. Chen Si, known as the Angel of Nanjing, has volunteered to patrol the Yangtze Bridge every day, and over a 21-year career, he has saved 469 people from committing suicide. One of the most famous bridges in the country, it is also the world's most popular location to commit suicide. Almost daily there are people lingering alone or wandering aimlessly along its sidewalk, and Chen engages them in conversation to test whether or not they are prospective jumpers. It started for Chen back in 2000, when he saw a desperate-looking girl wandering on the bridge. He was worried something might happen to her so he brought lunch for them to share and started to chat with her. He eventually paid for a bus ticket for her to go home, but realized that this was something that must happen all the time. For the past 21 years, he's crossed the bridge 10 times a day on his electric scooter wearing his red jacket with the words "cherish all life" written across the back, he's charismatic, he's determined, he can be almost rude, in a certain Chinese way, in his efforts saving people's life, and he's become an expert. "People with an extreme internal struggle don't have relaxed body movements, their bodies look heavy," Chen [said]. He's caught suicidal people who've been cheated on by their spouses, those who can't afford school, and many other reasons. He has spare rooms in his house to keep those he pulls off the bridge in a safe environment.
Note: Watch the trailer for a 2015 documentary about Chen. Explore more positive human interest stories focused on solutions and bridging divides.
Ms. Gatto is Green-Wood [Cemetery's] resident death educator. She coordinates programs that include financial end-of-life planning seminars and the Mortality & Me book club. For much of human history, the issues of death and dying have been predominantly handled though religion and rites of organized faith. But as the United States became more secular, the loss of customs left a void. "Many people are raised with different ideas about fear connected to death. People end up carrying this stuff with them throughout their whole lives ... It's creating these more positive outlets for processing these kinds of feelings with community. I get to see what people are yearning for, and then create events and programs around it – and make it, dare I say, a little fun, right?" [Gatto] says. The goal of today's death education, says Anita Hannig, an anthropologist and author who studies death, is to find ways to address mortality without taking on the baggage that often accompanies it. "We're trying to create a safe container for us to have those conversations and not be labeled as morbid, suicidal, or weird and obsessed with death," she says. Some people's first encounter might be a death cafe. The unstructuredness of death cafes means participants can steer the conversation to larger topics, like questions of an afterlife, legacy, or a bucket list. But they can also find it helpful to dig into more functional topics, like funeral planning, wills, and burial methods. These gatherings numbering in the thousands have taken place across 90 countries. The rules of death cafes are simple: They are respectful and confidential. They shouldn't have any particular agenda. They shouldn't be held with the intention of leading participants to any particular conclusion. And they should, ideally, involve cake.
Note: Explore more positive stories like this about healing social division.
Kamala Harris' campaign team's decision to doctor headlines on Google that tout the Democratic presidential candidate has sparked "significant ethical concern" over possibly "misleading" the public. The vice president's team launched the sponsored posts on the search giant that linked to real news stories from various unsuspecting publishers such as CNN, USA Today, The Guardian and the Associated Press – but featured headlines and descriptions that were edited by her team. Google called the practice "common" and said the ads did not violate its policies because they were clearly labeled as "sponsored." However, Rich Hanley, Quinnipiac University associate professor of journalism emeritus, called the marketing move "troubling" and "exploitative." Hanley, who teaches a class in disinformation, said the Harris campaign is "exploiting a vulnerability in the information ecosystem" which is dangerous in this "climate of disinformation and misinformation." "What they are actually doing is manipulating someone else's content by changing headlines," he said. "There should be a clear and bright line when it comes to news organizations." The altered headlines ... were changed without the news outlets' knowledge. For instance, one sponsored ad that links to NPR's website features the headline "Harris will Lower Health Costs" while another that links to the Associated Press reads "VP Harris's Economic Vision – Lower Costs and Higher Wages."
Note: Both parties engage in sophisticated media manipulation to influence voter behavior, as with the Hilary Clinton campaign and DNC conspiracy to keep Bernie Sanders from getting the party nomination in 2016 and Cambridge Analytica's role in targeting voters with personalized ads in the UK on behalf of the political right. For more along these lines, explore summaries of revealing news articles on elections corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.
If you appeared in a photo on Facebook any time between 2011 and 2021, it is likely your biometric information was fed into DeepFace – the company's controversial deep-learning facial recognition system that tracked the face scan data of at least a billion users. That's where Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton comes in. His office secured a $1.4 billion settlement from Meta over its alleged violation of a Texas law that bars the capture of biometric data without consent. Meta is on the hook to pay $275 million within the next 30 days and the rest over the next four years. Why did Paxton wait until 2022 – a year after Meta announced it would suspend its facial recognition technology and delete its database – to go up against the tech giant? If our AG truly prioritized privacy, he'd focus on the lesser-known companies that law enforcement agencies here in Texas are paying to scour and store our biometric data. In 2017, [Clearview AI] launched a facial recognition app that ... could identify strangers from a photo by searching a database of faces scraped without consent from social media. In 2020, news broke that at least 600 law enforcement agencies were tapping into a database of 3 billion facial images. Clearview was hit with lawsuit after lawsuit. That same year, the company was hacked and its entire client list – which included the Department of Justice, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Interpol, retailers and hundreds of police departments – was leaked.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and Big Tech from reliable major media sources.
Automated fast food restaurant CaliExpress by Flippy, in Pasadena, Calif., opened in January to considerable hype due to its robot burger makers, but the restaurant launched with another, less heralded innovation: the ability to pay for your meal with your face. CaliExpress uses a payment system from facial ID tech company PopID. It's not the only fast-food chain to employ the technology. Biometric payment options are becoming more common. Amazon introduced pay-by-palm technology in 2020, and while its cashier-less store experiment has faltered, it installed the tech in 500 of its Whole Foods stores last year. Mastercard, which is working with PopID, launched a pilot for face-based payments in Brazil back in 2022, and it was deemed a success – 76% of pilot participants said they would recommend the technology to a friend. As stores implement biometric technology for a variety of purposes, from payments to broader anti-theft systems, consumer blowback, and lawsuits, are rising. In March, an Illinois woman sued retailer Target for allegedly illegally collecting and storing her and other customers' biometric data via facial recognition technology without their consent. Amazon and T-Mobile are also facing legal actions related to biometric technology. In other countries ... biometric payment systems are comparatively mature. Visitors to McDonald's in China ... use facial recognition technology to pay for their orders.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and Big Tech from reliable major media sources.
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.