If protection once morest intrusive drones and the fight once morest cyberattacks is indeed one of the priorities of the organizers of the Paris Olympic Games, the National Assembly has just given its agreement to video surveillance which relies on artificial intelligence to protect the competition. While this technology is worrying, it is necessary to multiply safeguards and limit its deployment over time. Explanations.
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Eco / Tech
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From March 31, all devices with access to the New Zealand Parliamentary Network will be required to remove the TikTok app. Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States have already taken similar measures due to data security concerns.
New Zealand will ban the Chinese social network TikTok from the devices of members of parliament, officials told AFP on Friday, following in the footsteps of other Western countries that have taken similar measures.
The ban will affect all devices with access to the parliamentary network, said Rafael Gonzalez-Montero, a parliamentary official. It will take effect on March 31.
According to Rafael Gonzalez-Montero, the risks are “not acceptable in the current parliamentary environment in New Zealand”. “The decision was taken on the basis of the analyzes of our own experts, following a discussion with our colleagues in government and internationally,” he added.
American threats
New Zealand will therefore follow the path already taken by Canada, the UK and US federal agencies, which have already banned TikTok from government devices due to data security concerns. The European Commission has also ordered to ban the video-sharing application from the devices of its employees.
Global action once morest TikTok started in India in 2020. The social network was on a list of banned apps following deadly clashes on the border with China, with New Delhi claiming to defend its sovereignty. The same year, former President Donald Trump accused TikTok of being a tool of espionage on behalf of Beijing.
TikTok has admitted that employees of its parent company ByteDance in China have accessed Americans’ account information, but has always denied passing this data to authorities.
The current President of the United States, Joe Biden, for his part recently threatened to completely ban the application from the territory, if it did not separate from ByteDance.
With AFP
Some 11,000 layoffs in Novemberand soon 10,000 more: the company Meta – parent company of social networks Facebook and Instagram – will lay off thousands more people by the end of 2023, announced on Tuesday, March 14, its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
In addition, the giant of Menlo Park (California) will remove from its organization chart 5,000 positions currently unoccupied and for which there will be no recruitment, the manager said in a press release. The list of positions concerned will be unveiled at the end of April and the restructuring will be carried out by the end of the year.
At the end of these two waves, Meta will have cut its workforce by 24%, a brutal change of gear for a group that had never launched a social plan in nearly 20 years of existence.
For Mark Zuckerberg, the decision is justified by the need to “make (of Meta) a better technology company” and “to improve our financial performance in a difficult environment, so that we can carry out our long-term vision”.
The co-founder of Facebook, who alone embodies the social network, took up the term used during the presentation of the annual results, at the beginning of February, namely that 2023 must be “the year of efficiency” for Meta.
Slowdown in online
In addition to the job cuts, the company will slow the pace of its hiring, added Mark Zuckerberg, who also plans to “cancel non-priority projects”. The group had already announced a hiring freeze until the end of March 2023.
>> Layoffs at Meta: “The era of hypergrowth is behind them”
After posting insolent growth since its creation, Facebook – which became Meta at the end of 2021 – has suffered from the slowdown in online since 2022.
The movement is accentuated by the modification of the operating system of the iPhone (iOS), which no longer allows the platform to collect as much data as before on its users.
In addition, Facebook and Instagram are subject to increasingly strong competition, in particular from the video platform TikTok, which is cutting back on its market share.
Finally, Meta suffers like the entire technology industry from the rise in interest rates, which penalizes a very cash-intensive sector to finance its development.
In 2022, Meta’s revenue contracted 1% to $116.6 billion.
With AFP
In California, justice ratifies the law on the independent status of Uber drivers
written by Alexandra Hartman Editor-in-Chief
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Uber won a victory Monday in California, where an appeals court ruled that the “Proposition 22” law devoting paid work to the task, while granting drivers some social benefits, was in line with the local Constitution.
The law on the independent status of app drivers like Uber is not contrary to the California Constitution, an appeals court in this American state ruled on Monday March 13, a victory for the international company whose model economy depends on this status.
“Today’s decision is a victory for workers and the millions of Californians who voted for Proposition 22,” said Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer, referring to the law passed in a referendum in 2020, which devoted paid work to the task, while granting drivers some social benefits.
Uber, its competitor Lyft and other platforms refuse to consider drivers as full employees, which would mean granting them certain rights, such as unemployment benefits or possible collective bargaining.
Drivers’ associations and unions campaigning for employee status had won a first battle in August 2021, when a judge declared Proposition 22 “unconstitutional”, because it limited “the power of the assembly” to legislate to the future on this subject. Asked by AFP, one of these associations, RDU (Rideshare Drivers United), did not immediately react to the decision.
Uber embodies the “gig economy”, or the gig economy, widely adopted, but also widely criticized, in many major cities around the world. The group defends its economic model step by step, but it has had to let go of ballast in certain countries. In the United Kingdom, in 2021 it had to grant salaried worker status to its British drivers, with minimum wage and paid leave, a world first for the company.
Resistance in the United States
But in the United States, the platform continues to resist. With its competitor Lyft and delivery services, it had spent in 2020 more than 200 million dollars to promote the “yes” to Proposition 22. And three months before the vote, the two Californian companies had threatened to completely interrupt their service in the state, which would have put tens of thousands of people out of work.
Voters had voted 58.6% in favor of the law proposed by the companies. “Drivers across the state have said they are happy with Proposition 22, which allows them to enjoy new benefits while maintaining job flexibility through apps,” Tony West said Monday.
The vehicle-with-driver (VTC) reservation and meal delivery platform recorded a net loss of $9.1 billion in 2022, despite a net profit of nearly $600 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. Its title took nearly 5% during electronic trading following the close of trading on Monday.
With AFP