Drugmakers Are Set to Pay 23andMe Millions to Access Consumer DNA (Bloomberg)
BY Kristen V. Brown
GSK will pay the DNA testing company $20 million for non-exclusive access to genetic data.
23andMe is best known for its DNA-testing kits that give customers ancestry and health information. But the DNA it collects is also valuable, including for scientific research. With information from more than 14 million customers, the only data sets that rival the size of the 23andMe library belong to Ancestry.com and the Chinese government.
NYC Mayor Casually Announces He’s Deepfaking Himself, Experts Horrified (VICE)
BY Roshan Abraham
Eric Adams is using AI to make New Yorkers think he speaks their language, which experts called “Orwellian.”
In a statement sent after the press conference Monday, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) condemned the robocalls, calling them deceptive. “This is deeply unethical, especially on the taxpayer’s dime,” executive director Albert Fox Cahn said in a statement. “Using AI to convince New Yorkers that he speaks languages that he doesn’t is deeply Orwellian. Yes, we need announcements in all of New Yorkers’ native languages, but the deep fakes are just a creepy vanity project.”
Fake Nudes of Real Students Cause an Uproar at a New Jersey High School (The Wall Street Journal)
BY JULIA JARGON
After boys shared faked pornographic images made of female classmates, both the school and the local police began investigating.
When girls at Westfield High School in New Jersey found out boys were sharing nude photos of them in group chats, they were shocked, and not only because it was an invasion of privacy. The images weren’t real.
Students said one or more classmates used an online tool powered by artificial intelligence to make the images, then shared them with others. The discovery has sparked uproar in Westfield, an affluent town outside New York City.
Pfizer hikes price of COVID antiviral Paxlovid from $530 to nearly $1,400 (Ars Technica)
BY BETH MOLE
The price hike is expected to exacerbate already poor uptake of the drug.
Pfizer on Wednesday revealed that it raised the list price of a course of Paxlovid—its lifesaving antiviral drug used to reduce the risk of severe COVID-19 in those most vulnerable—to nearly $1,400, more than double the roughly $530 the US government has paid for the treatment in the emergency phase of the pandemic.
Want to Attend an Indian Wedding? Now You Can Pay To. (NYT)
BY ANNA KODÉ
Join My Wedding allows tourists to purchase tickets to Indian weddings. Some say it’s resulted in meaningful cultural exchange. Others believe selling the experience can be cultural fetishism.
“The fetishization of Indian weddings and wedding tourism is a two-way street: the ‘seller’ gets money (and social status), and the buyer gets the product, namely, the experience of an Indian wedding without investing years of emotions in a friendship,” Parul Bhandari, a sociologist at the University of Cambridge and the author of “Matchmaking in Middle Class India,” wrote in an email.
Dr. Bhandari added that wedding tourism is part of the larger trend of selling experiences, comparing it to travelers attending tea ceremonies when visiting Japan.
Kids Deserve Privacy Online. They’re Not Getting It. (The Atlantic)
By S. Matthew Liao and Claudia Passos Ferreira
Today’s children face a world of constant surveillance. Their very sense of self is at stake.
All in all, by the time a child reaches the age of 13, online advertising firms have collected an average of 72 million data points about them. That’s not even considering the degree to which children’s data are shared and their privacy potentially compromised by the people closest to them—sometimes in the form of a grainy sonogram posted to social media before they are even born. As of 2016, the average child in Britain had about 1,500 images of them posted online by the time they hit their fifth birthday.
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