Hyundai is facing a $200 million bill due to a TikTok ‘car theft’ challenge that has gone viral. The challenge involves people slipping paper with an engraved identification number into the doors of cars, leading to them being stolen. With people becoming aware of the challenge and its implications, Hyundai is facing the repercussions of this social media trend, leading to the exorbitant fine.
In the tech world, Google Play and Apple’s App Store have been quietly filling up with scam apps that sucker people into paying for weekly or monthly subscriptions. OpenAI has recently responded to this issue by releasing ChatGPT, an app that is available for free and will soon have an Android version. Despite being free, it has its own drawbacks such as collecting heaps of data from the user and a built-in camera that can track movement. A company called TellyTV is also offering 55-inch televisions for free to the first 500,000 people who join its list. This deceptive marketing scheme also involves collecting data from users and bombarding them with ads.
Montana recently became the first US state to ban TikTok, citing First Amendment rights violations. Even so, getting around the ban is easy due to Virtual Private Networks (VPN). In a different case of tech-related news, families of four people who died in a racism-fueled mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, are suing a slew of companies, including Alphabet, Amazon, and 4chan. The 4chan company had been purchased by a Japanese toy company in 2015 and the plaintiffs believe they bear some responsibility for the tragedy.
In regards to privacy, the US Postal Service has been using ‘mail covers’ which do not require court orders to gather the information on the outside of envelopes and packages. This tactic is now being targeted by a bipartisan group of US Senators who want to curb the use of this technology due to the violation of privacy and First Amendment rights it causes. The UK government, on the other hand, is working towards expanding a mass surveillance program which collects web history and other records from millions of people. The Investigatory Powers Act of 2016 has been heavily criticized as a ‘Snooper’s Charter’ by advocates and critics alike, and now records show that it may be implemented on a national level.
To wrap up, researchers from Kaspersky have uncovered a hacker group known as Red Stinger that has operated in Ukraine for more than 15 years. They have targeted both pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian figures with the goal of espionage. This group is an example of the unseen side of technology, which can have dire implications if not managed correctly.
