Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.
ICE gives Home Depot investors goosebumps
A group of Home Depot investors has raised concerns about the company’s work with a surveillance firm after a news report said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement used data acquired by the firm to aid Trump’s increasingly unpopular anti-immigrant crackdown.
Reuters reported last week that some investors, spearheaded by a group that advocates for sustainability, want a review of the company’s partnership with Flock Safety, which conducts anti-fraud and security measures for corporations, after 404 Media reported in May that local law enforcement agencies provided Flock’s license plate data to federal immigration officers. The investors want to understand Flock’s involvement with Home Depot for “assessment of privacy and civil rights risks, including discrimination or wrongful detention from misuse of customer data.” They say the practices “may expose the Company to financial and legal risks, including potential data breaches and enforcement of evolving state privacy laws.”
Home Depot, whose locations the Trump administration has targeted in its anti-immigrant crackdown, declined to comment on whether it would end its partnership with Flock Safety but told Reuters, “The company does not grant access to its license-plate readers to federal law enforcement.”
Read the Reuters report here.
Growing Grok backlash
Elon Musk’s social media artificial intelligence chatbot continues to face a backlash over a feature Musk and his team recently enabled that allowed X users to generate nonconsensual pornographic images, including images of children. Last week, California issued a cease and desist order to xAI, X’s parent company; Arizona opened a probe into the chatbot; and right-wing influencer Ashley St. Clair, who has a child with Musk, is suing xAI over sexual images of her generated by the tool.
Read Jessica Levinson’s MS NOW column about St. Clair’s suit here.
Big Tech’s anti-anti-homelessness movement
A conservative think tank’s nationwide push for laws that target homeless people and that roll back laws that offer them aid is the subject of a new report. The attack on so-called housing first policies is being driven by the Cicero Institute, an organization set up by Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale, who seems to have endorsed the idea of racist apartheid-driven societies as a model for the U.S. and backed public hangings to bring back what he called “masculine leadership.”
Read more at Truthout here.
YouTube monetizes controversial content
YouTube announced last week that it is monetizing some content that dramatizes or discusses sexual abuse and other forms of violence. The company announced in a video that it had determined “This content might reference topics that advertisers find controversial, but are ultimately comfortable running their ads against. For example, content may be in a fictional context or voiced from personal experiences in passing or in a nongraphic manner. So, as long as the content steers clear of very descriptive or graphic scenes or segments, creators can now earn more ad revenue.”
On YouTube and other social media platforms, some users who are hoping to earn revenue or avoid being shadow-banned have resorted to using alternate characters or phrases — known sometimes as “algospeak” — to discuss topics that have risked placing them in YouTube’s crosshairs.
Read more at TechCrunch here.
Senate crypto bill crashes
A bill in the Senate that would have placed some guardrails around the cryptocurrency industry was shelved last week after vocal opposition from the CEO of cryptocurrency firm Coinbase.
Read more at CNBC here.
Progressives seek Fetterman foe
Pennsylvania’s progressive Working Families Party has launched a website to recruit a primary challenger to Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania.
Read more at Common Dreams here.
Presidential fakery
A new ad for Fannie Mae, the federally backed mortgage company, features an AI-generated fake of Donald Trump’s voice — and the administration is apparently fine with that. What could go wrong? It’s not like we haven’t seen bad actors misuse purportedly presidential statements generated by AI in the past.
Read more at The Associated Press here.
The ICE man cometh (back)
An ICE official linked to a bigoted social media account has reportedly returned to his job prosecuting people swept up in the Trump administration’s racist anti-immigration crackdown.
Read my blog on James Rodden’s reported return to work here.
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