Shit is about the get real for TikTok in the USA, with Reuters reporting that the "chair and top Democrat on a U.S. House of Representatives committee on China told the CEOs of Google-parent Alphabet and Apple on Friday they must be ready to remove TikTok from their U.S. app stores on Jan. 19". Meanwhile, TikTok is begging the Supreme Court to delay enforcing the law while they battle it out in court, with TikTok still pushing the freedom of speech angle, along with saying that a sale to a US-entity is "not legally, technologically or financially feasible — in part because a sale would most likely be blocked by Beijing". Reckon TikTok could get the same treatment here? Cook up a national security issue, force Bytedance to flog it to Nine or News Corp or whatever now that there's precedence for it over in the US?
The OAIC made Meta cough up $50m for Aussies that had their data caught up in that whole Cambridge Analytica mess. From the press release: "the Commissioner alleged that the personal information of some Australian Facebook users was disclosed to the This is Your Digital Life app in breach of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). The information was exposed to the risk of disclosure to Cambridge Analytica and other third parties, and risked being used for political profiling purposes". If you meet the criteria laid out in the press release (had a Facebook account, present in Australia for more than 30 days, had the This is Your Digital Life app installed or a friend who did) you could get a bit of that $50m pot of cash.
Ed Zitron's had an extremely ranty 2024 while he investigates what the fuck happened to the tech industry. This latest post - Never Forgive Them - kinda sums up what he's been crapping on about. If your digital devices don't bring you the joy they used to, if you struggle to use the latest stuff when you didn't previously, it's not just you feeling that way and it's not your fault. It's the fault of the top end of this industry making things crap on purpose to milk every last cent out of us. Rot economy, enshittification, line must go up - it's all here.
Telecom Australia Annual Report 1985 (National Library of Australia)
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