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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and Chris discuss Apple’s new iPhones, Watches, and Air Pods, Ai voice translation for Instagram Reels, a TransUnion data breach, Samsung’s upcoming devices, and more.
“News Pick of the Week” with Ralph Bond
We’ve all heard about the huge challenge of creating habitats with air, water, and food sources to someday sustain humans on Mars. But what if you could transform the atmosphere of Mars to make it an Earth-like planet. Our science and technology reporter, Bond, Ralph Bond, is here with news about a group of scientists who have a very ambitious plan to do just that!
Read more here.
James in North Carolina asked: “With so many smart devices collecting data in our homes, what steps can regular people take to protect their privacy?”
James, North Carolina has not passed any privacy law that protects your personal data or prevents its sale to third parties.
Unless a law like that is passed, there really isnt an awful lot you can do to stay safe from this kind of data collection.
A lot of these devices will have some privacy settings, and its worth checking them and trying to minimize what the device collects and shares, but what you will be able to block from there will be limited.
Unscrupulous companies like Facebooks Meta have also been caught doing malicious things to collect your data. For example, years ago Meta bought a VPN company called Onavo Protect and offered a free private VPN service that was actually funneling all of their users browsing data straight to Meta. That cost Meta $20M back in 2023, which to them was likely a slap on the wrist.
And we know it was a slap on the wrist because in 2024 researchers discovered that all Meta apps on Android phones (the exploit was not possible on iPhones) were running servers that shared a unique identifier with Meta that allowed them to deanonymize users and track browsing data to a specific person. Yandex did the same thing.
In 2024 Roku TVs displayed a message saying that if you continued to use the TV you agreed with their new privacy policy and allowed them to collect your data and bound users to an arbitration agreement.
You could opt out by writing a letter and mailing it to them and waiting for them to process it. For the time between the message being displayed and the physical letter being processed your TV would effectively be bricked and you couldnt even use the HDMI ports.
Modern cars share your driving habits not just with insurers but also with advertisers that may be interested to hear that you park at a certain location every weekday at 8:50am for a coffee.
The only real solution you have to curb the data collection if you dont live in a State with privacy laws is to use as few of these services as you can, but in the real world that is a hard option when at a minimum a smartphone is almost inescapable.
Frank in Westbury, New York asked: “Mark Zuckerberg just committed 600 billion dollars to AI development in the United States. Just wondering if you knew what that money is gonna be going towards.”
Frank, the only thing we really know about is that Zuckerberg intends to build city-sized Ai data centers and that they want to focus on what they call personal superintelligence, which more or less means more personalized Ai tailored to each user (think of it as the algorithm on their newsfeed that only shows you what youll engage with, but for Ai).
It may be a good idea to take the $600 billion dollar number with a grain of salt and just take it to mean were planning to invest because not only was Zuckerberg himself caught on an open mic immediately after making that statement saying that he didnt know what number you wanted to use but Metas own finance department also said that they hadnt started working on their 2026 budget at that point.
Meta has also announced a hiring freeze on their Ai team and changed the leadership above those teams as well, so its likely that they may want to allow those new leaders some leeway in determining what the next steps are going to be rather than saddle them with hugely expensive plan that has not yet been put into motion.
That is to say that they probably have plans but nothing set in stone yet, but they did just have a very good financial year so it may be best to ignore the $600 billion figure and just assume it means were planning to sink a lot of money into Ai and see where it goes.
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