EU investigates Meta over addiction concerns, shares in Reddit jump after ChatGPT deal

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The European Commission has opened an investigation into the owner of Facebook and Instagram over concerns that the platforms are creating addictive behaviour among children and damaging mental health. The EU executive said Meta may have breached the Digital Services Act (DSA), a landmark law passed by the bloc last summer that makes digital companies large and small liable for disinformation, shopping scams, child abuse and other online harms. “Today we open formal proceedings against Meta,” the EU commissioner for the internal market, Thierry Breton, said in a statement. Guardian

Pornhub’s parent company Aylo has announced it has backed new standards of good practice for pornography sites on combating child abuse, drawn up by UK charity the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). The IWF is a key part of the UK’s fight against online child sexual abuse material (CSAM), enabling people and organisations to report suspected online child abuse content. It hopes the announcement will lead other porn websites to support the voluntary standards developed in partnership with Aylo over a period of 18 months. BBC 

Apple released iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 earlier this week, and unfortunately there seems to be a problem with it – aside from the OLED iPad Pros experiencing a color reproduction bug. We’re talking about old, deleted photos resurfacing. In some cases, these photos were deleted years ago, but they’re reappearing in users’ libraries. Suffice it to say, this is a huge privacy problem, if photos that should have ceased to exist are somehow still around on Apple’s servers. One user over on Reddit reports seeing old photos deleted back in 2021 suddenly resurfacing and showing up as “recently uploaded” to iCloud. GSMArena

Shares in Reddit have jumped more than 10% after the firm said it had struck a partnership deal with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up OpenAI. Under the agreement, the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot will get access to Reddit content, while it will also bring AI-powered features to the social media platform. The announcement highlights Reddit’s efforts to broaden its income sources away from advertising. The deal also comes as a growing number of copyright owners mount legal challenges over the use of their material by AI firms. Reddit


Apple just announced a bunch of new accessibility features coming to iOS 18 later this year. And Apple CarPlay is getting some welcome upgrades as part of this push.  According to Apple’s press release, three new new features are coming to Apple’s in-car software, likely alongside iOS 18: Voice control, Color Filters and Sound Recognition. These are billed as accessibility features, but I have a feeling that they could prove useful to drivers of all kinds. There’s also a new feature for passengers, not related to CarPlay, which should help reduce the effects of motion sickness. TomsGuide

Samsung heard that Apple managed to upset a lot of people with the “Crush” ad revealed last week that smushed instruments, arcade games, and sculptures into a shiny new OLED-screened iPad Pro, and apparently just had to get into the conversation. Apple eventually apologized, with an exec saying it “missed the mark.” In response, the Samsung Mobile account on X posted this video with the hashtag “UnCrush,” which Ad Age reports was created by BBH USA and directed by Zen Pace.

 

 

Chris Price
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