Turning Up the Heat
Plus: Surely we are going to get in trouble for this
Dear Citizens,
It’s hot out there kids, and the data centers aren’t helping. Is this putting heat on the AI industry? Not in this Virginia county. From 404 media, your dystopian headline of the week: County With 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to ‘Conserve Electricity’. 🥵
Here’s what else to read, listen to and know this week.
🎧 ONE LISTEN: Hyperscaling 🎧
Speaking of data centers, this is a great conversation from Tech Won’t Save Us about how rising opposition to data center construction is uniting people across party lines and prompting broader conversations around what infrastructure people want instead.
👉 Listen to the full conversation here.
👀 Bonus watch (or listen): Big Tech’s hostile takeover of democracy, a conversation with Carole Cadwalladr, Roger McNamee, Sophie in 't Veld and Reinier van Lanschot.
The Citizens
⛓️💥 ONE READ: Broken, Buried or Missing ⛓️💥
Those child safety features on social media apps? Many of them - and I know, you’re going to be shocked here - don’t work as intended, or sometimes don’t work at all. A new report from the Cybersafety Research Center and multiple research partners found that “in some cases, the safety tools appeared to be missing altogether, while in others they were broken, easily circumvented or difficult to find”.
Snapchat, for example, allowed adults to send message requests to children they didn’t know and suggested that teenagers befriend adult strangers. Instagram, too, prompted teen accounts to connect with unknown men. And TikTok, after promising to remove content that promoted eating disorders, recommended searches to teen accounts such as “how to pretend to eat your food.”
Yikes. You can read the full report, Broken, Buried, or Missing, here.
A related bonus read? Meta Paid Hundreds of Contractors to Pretend to Be Teenagers While Barraging Its Competitors’ AI With Disturbing Content. Yikes again, plus the quote of the year: “Everyone I knew who worked on this project was completely gobsmacked by some of the text they were asking us to test. Like, surely we are going to get in trouble for doing this?” Inshallah.
✊ ONE ACTION: Primed for a Win ✊
One for our friends in the UK, who are this close to dumping Palantir from the NHS. Presumptive Prime Minister Andy Burnham has indicated he’ll dumb Palantir from key UK contracts… but the tech evil giant won’t go down without a fight, with one former NHS official arguing that the plan is ‘unrealistic’ because there is no alternative.
Want to help get this over the finish line? Foxglove has a new petition (all signatories welcome!) calling on Burnham to hold strong and scrap Palantir’s contracts for good.
👉 Sign here.
📢 Bonus action: Concerned about the UK’s reliance on a handful of foreign tech companies? (cough Palantir cough) Us too.
Join Open Rights Group on 15 July (6–8pm BST) to discuss how we take back democratic control of our digital infrastructure. Let’s goooo.
👉 Register here.
That’s all for this week!
See you next time,
Team Citizens
*PS - Join our Signal Chat if you haven’t already! 350+ people share practical advice on protecting your data, organising against Big Tech and staying ahead of what you need to know.
