A good place to start
This podcast episode has a great speech written by Cory Doctorow, and explains how the current system in the US was set up for making monopolies, and Big Tech has tacked full advantage of that, and how and why they do what they do, and a bit about what to do about it. If you’d like to hear more from Cory, you can check out his podcast using this link.
Apple pays out over claims it deliberately slowed down iPhones
Apple has begun making payments in a long-running class action lawsuit over claims it deliberately slowed down certain iPhones in the US. Complainants will receive a cut of a $500m (£394m) settlement which works out to around $92 (£72) per claim.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67911517
Apple services privacy policy overview
This is an audit of Apple’s privacy policy showing how they gather a lot of things that they really don’t need.
https://tosdr.org/en/service/158
Google class action lawsuits tracker users when tracking was turned off
Google unlawfully accessed devices and data, including app activity data on mobile devices, even though the Google activity controls called Web & App Activity and/or a sub-setting concerning “Chrome history and activity from sites, apps, and devices that use Google services were turned off or “paused.
https://googlewebappactivitylawsuit.com/
Google privacy policy overview
This is an audit of Google’s privacy policy showing how they gather a lot of things that they really don’t need.
https://tosdr.org/en/service/217
Apple listening to you and selling that information to data brokers
Apple sold recording from Siri to third party brokers for advertising. The proposed class action settlement, which awaits preliminary court approval, would resolve allegations that users of Siri-enabled devices—including iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, MacBooks, iMacs, HomePods, iPod Touches and Apple TVs—have had their private conversations recorded by Apple and shared with third parties without consent, particularly at times when Siri was activated accidentally.
Apple has agreed to pay $95m (£77m) to settle a court case alleging some of its devices were listening to people without their permission.
https://www.classaction.org/news/95m-apple-siri-settlement-seeks-preliminary-approval-from-court
Facebook torrents 81.7 TB of data illegally,
They have documented discussions of choosing not to pay publishes for books, and to just torrent then instead, there are also messages from employer saying they felt weird torrenting from work laptops
They also did everything they could to not seed the torrents as well, (when you torrent a file it also shares that file with other users who also are trying to download that same file, basically they tried not to share the files only download them for themselves, which is a big no no in the torrenting community).
Facebook Illegally Downloaded ALOT of Books…
In this video I discuss how Meta/Facebook has been illegally downloading dozens of terabytes of books from Z-library, Libgen, and other sources to train their AI models and what this might mean for the fictional book writing industry.
