The News

Rival app stores allowed in Google Play Store after another court loss

Google will be forced to allow rival app stores in its Google Play Store, after the tech giant failed to get an early court decision overturned (Reuters). Epic Games, which has been a thorn in the side of both major phone OS makers, had successfully convinced a judge that Google’s exclusion of the Epic Games Store was an illegal monopoly that was stifling competition. This decision means that the 2023 court order forcing Google to open up to other app stores kicks in immediately and it won’t be overturned even if Google files a further appeal.

The Sizzle: Between this and Apple’s fights with Epic, we’re seeing some pretty significant rollbacks of restrictions that major platforms were able to enforce. Realistically, I don’t think 95% of people will install another app store — that is, and I mean this endearingly, nerd shit — but the possibility will force Apple and Google to have to compete on function and cost. That’s a good thing.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

It’s totally fine to give away millions of people’s medical scans as long as you make it hard to tell who they belong to

Australia’s privacy commissioner has cleared Australia’s largest radiology provider I-MED for giving over 30 million + medical scans from patients without their consent or knowledge to another company to train AI (Crikey, $). Commissioner Carly Kind took the unusual step of publishing the full preliminary inquiries (OAIC) which were kicked off when yours truly revealed this was happening last year (Crikey). The report found that I-MED adequately de-identified the scans so that they couldn’t be considered sensitive health data anymore, so, therefore, the scans weren’t protected under privacy law.

The Sizzle: I accept that I-MED didn’t break the law when handing over data in this specific way, but it beggars belief that a company should be able to take sensitive medical data without permission or knowledge and make truckloads of cash from it just because they scrub the name. I expect to have more on this in the future.

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It’s pretty easy to find public ChatGPT conversations that people probably should’ve kept private

Digital investigator Henk Van Ess published an investigation showing that hundreds of sensitive ChatGPT transcripts were publicly searchable thanks to search engine indexing (Digital Digging). Like my Meta AI story earlier this year (Crikey, $) users had to choose to share it, but, whether by accident or because of poor judgement, many had decided to make conversations with AI featuring trade secrets, illegal behaviour and personal confessions public. OpenAI has now disabled the feature (Search Engine Journal).

The Sizzle: On a meta level, it’s revealing to see what AI companies will decide is OK or not from their users. Letting its products pretend not to be a robot when navigating the web (Futurism), ok! Publicly embarrassing the company by revealing how people are seemingly choosing to show how they’re really using these products? Well, we better turn that off.

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Leftovers

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Oh, Also

There’s an AI-equivalent of pre-nuclear fallout metal

I keep coming across examples how AI slop is actually polluting web results with bullshit (Reddit), which, presumably will then be ingested and reinforced in the models so that they will become even more wrong. But as it turns out, there’s a resource for that: lowbackgroundsteel.ai is a trove of “uncontaminated content” created prior to the release of ChatGPT in 2022.

But what’s most interesting about it to me is the name: it’s a reference to steel produced before the first nuclear bombs were detonated in 1945. Wikipedia tells me that there are specific demands for steel that hasn’t been contaminated by nuclear fallout for things like Geiger counters, and that one of the common places to get that is shipwrecks. Cool!

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical and electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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