News

Child access and privacy work are at the forefront of issues being addressed politically. On Wednesday, January 31, five CEOs from major tech companies, including Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew, testified at a Senate hearing about the protection of children from online sexual exploitation as congressional leaders explore how to tackle these issues.

Additionally, the California Attorney General Rob Bonta introduced two bills, one privacy and one on social media. “The privacy bill, deemed the proposed Children’s Data Privacy Act, aims to amend the California Consumer Privacy Act to tighten youth coverage. The proposed Protecting Youth from Social Media Addiction Act focuses on measures to moderate content and limit luring features or techniques on social media platforms.”

23 & Me’s stock price tumbled to the ground as they face a class action filed last week around a data breach specifically impacting Jewish and Chinese customers. 

Court began to scrutinize using AI chatbots on legal briefings as an attorney Jae Lee “reports that she relied on a generative artificial intelligence tool, ChatGPT, to identify precedent that might support her arguments, and did not read or otherwise confirm the validity of the (non-existent) decision she cited.”

TikTok continues to struggle in preventing the sharing of data with its Chinese parent company. TikTok is trying to show the U.S. lawmakers that its video sharing application is a safe form of social media through these limits in data sharing.

OpenAI removed their blanket prohibition on military use of ChatGPT by deleting the text from their usage policy. The blanket ban on “military and welfare” has been removed from the policy but continues the policy on using the tool for “to harm yourself or others” and “develop or use weapons”. 

Events

As an organization focused on the intersection of law and artificial intelligence, LunchGPT’s first lunch is planned for Friday February 16 at 12 PM. If you are interested, please reach out to Kevin Fraizer with questions.

Registration is now open for the 2024 ACM Symposium on Computer Science and Law, which will take place on March 12-13, 2024, at Boston University. The Symposium is a leading venue for cross-disciplinary scholarship at the intersection of computer science and law.

(Compiled by Student Fellow Molly Pushner)