🥇If There’s One Story To Read Today
Tomayto Tomahto
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By choosing cash-on-delivery rather than paying online, you don’t really avoid paying for that product, it’s just that you pay later. Google’s changes to Play Store work similarly: Allowing developers to use third-party billing systems alongside Google’s billing system is not the win for developers that it appears to be. The company is still going to levy the dreaded “Google tax.” Although Google will reduce the commission by a teeny weeny bit, what developers save with one hand will most likely get spent by the other as they have to shell out that money to the third-party provider they choose.
What’s more, the competition watchdog CCI may not be willing to wade into the pricing issue either. Its orders to Google were about giving ‘other choices’ to developers, and not really about how much commission Google ‘should’ charge. Then, what really is in the changes for developers, users, smartphone manufacturers? Tune in to our MediaNama Briefing today at 3 pm, where we discuss this and more. [Read, 2 minutes]
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🗓 Your Tech Policy Agenda
- A fellowship for media freedom: Yale Law School’s Information Society Project is offering a clinical fellowship at the Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic (MFIA), a law student clinic focussed on government accountability, protecting media freedoms, and policy interventions. The fellowship starts July 1, 2023. Check out details here
- Mapping Brazil’s AI journey: Georgetown Law School will host two ranking members of Brazil’s committee to deliberate on the country’s upcoming Artificial Intelligence (AI) regulation. Panellists and interviewers will explore questions of transparency, copyright, discrimination, and individual rights. Register for the webinar on Feb 3, 2023 at 11:00 AM (ET), here
- IAMAI summit in Delhi: The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) is hosting its 17th ‘India Digital Summit’ which brings industry players and stakeholders together to discuss the present and future outlook of the digital economy and digitalization that is underway in India. The summit will be held at The Lalit, New Delhi from 20-21 February, 2023. Find details here
🚨Today’s Top Stories
TELECOM AND ACCESS
TRAI seeks feedback on digital convergence: It seems like India’s telecom watchdog has come out with a consultation paper on regulating converged digital technologies and services. It may be timely as convergence means bringing unrelated technologies together in a single device like smartphones. The paper deals with issues enabling convergence of carriage of broadcasting services and telecommunication services. [Read 🔒, 2 minutes]
PRIVACY, SURVEILLANCE
Andhra workers tire of facial recognition attendance: First the teachers, then doctors and now sanitation workers in Andhra Pradesh are tired of facial recognition-based attendance. Many have told the government that they would rather have higher payment or health insurance than such AI-based technologies. But are their pleas falling on deaf ears? [Read 🔒, 2 minutes]
DIGITIZATION OF HEALTH
Practo partners with government: Around 12 integrators, including Practo have partnered with the government to help develop India’s health stack, informed Kiran Gopal, director at the National Health Authority (NHA). Steps like these will lead to exchange of sensitive health information between multiple entities, which may open up new business opportunities, and at the same time, increase the risk of this sensitive health data being breached. [Read 🔒,3 minutes]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
ChatGPT goes Uncle Ben on us: We prompted the wildly popular AI tool ChatGPT to write a poem on facial recognition in India, and it included Uncle Ben’s famous words to Peter Parker: “With great power, comes great responsibility” in its verses. Cute much? The government better be listening! [Read, 🔒 1 minute]
🌏 Tech Policy from Around the World
4chan users embrace AI voice clone tool to generate celebrity hatespeech [Read] (James Vincent/ The Verge)
The ‘OK Computer’ [Read] (Adi Robertson/ The Verge)
A New Tracker Promises to Collect a Lot More of Your Data. Its Maker Says That’s Better For Your Privacy. [Read] (Thomas Germain/ Gizmodo)
TikTok’s CEO is headed to Congress to testify about user privacy and safety [Read] (Matt Binder/ Mashable)
ChatGPT Is Making Universities Rethink Plagiarism [Read] (Sofia Barnett/ Wired)
Google Fi says hackers accessed customers’ information [Read] (Carly Page/ Tech Crunch)
Elon Musk pushes forward with Twitter payments vision [Read] (Hannah Murphy/ Financial Times)
The generative AI revolution has begun—how did we get here? [Read] (Haomiao Huang/ Ars Technica)
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