By Nadia Zaifulizan
Facebook Struggles with Deepfake Decision-making
After the Deepfake video of political figure Nancy Pelosi went viral on social media, it took Facebook a while to fact-check it, flag it, before unexpectedly deciding to allow the video to stay online, unlike other platforms such as Youtube. Facebook defended its decision by stating that the video has been marked as a false report/fake news and that it will be flagged, attached with correct articles by fact-checkers, and will have limited distribution.
As a whole, Zuckerberg’s overall response in the matter also reflects some of his intent to meet the public’s desire of free expression, and to avoid providing entities the direct decision-making autonomy in controlling public contents, even when it involves incidence of false content with damaging consequences. Zuckerberg blamed the problem with Facebook’s response on execution, but not on the policy and decision. In recent years Facebook is seen as struggling with the complex process of moderating common contents consistently, thus allowing Deepfakes will most likely add to the task of moderation, fact-checking, flagging and distribution control.
Google and University of Chicago Medical Centre Sued Due to Patient Data Privacy Concerns
Google has been on a research spree for years in an effort to develop its medical health diagnosis AI, and are commonly partnering with hospitals to obtain patient data for research. Recently its partnership with the University of Chicago Medical Centre was under scrutiny due to a lawsuit by an ex-patient of the medical centre, alleging Google of unjust enrichment, and the medical centre with consumer fraud, based on allegedly disclosing medical records to Google without patient consent. The response has been varied so far, but this could either be the start of major data privacy scrutiny on AI related projects thus slowing it down, or the expansion of the current accepted standards for healthcare data privacy.
Whatsapp Shareable Status Updates: For Facebook
Whatsapp’s recent cross-platform status-sharing is now in beta test mode. It has just launched the testing of features that allow sharing of Whatsapp status across Facebook, Instagram, or Gmail, or Google Photos. The feature is optional, and is said to not directly link Facebook and Whatsapp status with each other but instead utilize the same iOS and Android data-sharing APIs as practiced by common apps. In this case data is transferred between the apps on-device, thus maintaining separate app services.
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