Online counseling company BetterHelp has agreed to pay $7.8 million to settle charges from the Federal Trade Commission that it improperly shared customers' sensitive data with companies like Facebook and Snapchat, even after promising to keep it private. The Verge reports: The proposed order, announced by the FTC on Thursday, would ban the same behavior in the future and require BetterHelp to make some changes to how it handles customer data. According to the regulator, the sign-up process for the company's service "promised consumers that it would not use or disclose their personal health data except for limited purposes." However, the FTC alleges that the company instead "used and revealed consumers' email addresses, IP addresses, and health questionnaire information to Facebook, Snapchat, Criteo, and Pinterest for advertising purposes."

The FTC also says that the company gave customer service agents false scripts to try and reassure users that it wasn't sharing personally identifiable or personal health information after a February 2020 report from Jezebel exposed some of its practices. The commission's complaint (PDF) accuses the company of misleading customers by putting a HIPAA seal on its website, despite the fact that "no government agency or other third party reviewed [BetterHelp]'s information practices for compliance with HIPAA, let alone determined that the practices met the requirements of HIPAA."

If the FTC's order ends up going through, the $7.8 million would go to customers who signed up for the service between August 1st, 2017, and December 31st, 2020. Here are some of the other things BetterHelp would be required to do:

- Stop sharing individually identifiable information about consumer's mental health with any third parties
- Stop misrepresenting its data collection and use policies
- Alert customers who created accounts before January 1st, 2021, that their personal info may have been used for advertising
- Obtain "affirmative express consent" from a customer before sharing information with a third party
- Reach out to third parties that received customer information and ask that it be deleted
- Establish a "comprehensive privacy program" and have an independent third party carry out privacy assessments

China says a ban on the use of TikTok by official European Union institutions will harm business confidence in Europe. From a report: In the latest salvo in the battle over the Chinese-owned video sharing app, the European Parliament, the European Commission and the EU Council have banned TikTok from being installed on official devices. [...] China has been pushing back, though its ruling Communist Party has long blocked many foreign social media platforms and messaging apps, including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram -- and TikTok. A Chinese version of the app, Douyin, is permitted, but its content is not the same as that found on TikTok. "The EU claims to be the most open market in the world, but recently it has been taking restrictive measures and unreasonably suppressing other countries' companies on the grounds of national security," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a daily briefing Wednesday. "This will dampen the international community's confidence in the business environment in the EU. The EU should match its words with deeds, respect the market economy and fair competition, stop overstretching and abusing the concept of national security and provide an open, fair, transparent and non-discriminatory business environment for all companies," Mao said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge's Alex Heath: Meta plans to release its first pair of smart glasses with a display in 2025 alongside a neural interface smartwatch designed to control them, The Verge has learned. Meanwhile, its first pair of full-fledged AR glasses, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg has predicted will eventually be as widely used as mobile phones, is planned for 2027. The details were shared with thousands of employees in Meta's Reality Labs division on Tuesday during a roadmap presentation of its AR and VR efforts that was shared with The Verge. Altogether, they show how Meta is planning to keep investing in consumer hardware after a series of setbacks and broader cost cutting across the company.

With regards to the VR roadmap, employees were told that Meta's flagship Quest 3 headset coming later this year will be two times thinner, at least twice as powerful, and cost slightly more than the $400 Quest 2. Like the recently announced Quest Pro, it will prominently feature mixed reality experiences that don't fully immerse the wearer, thanks to front-facing cameras that pass through video of the real world. [...] There will be 41 new apps and games shipping for the Quest 3, including new mixed reality experiences to take advantage of the updated hardware, Rabkin said. In 2024, he said that Meta plans to ship a more "accessible" headset codenamed Ventura. "The goal for this headset is very simple: pack the biggest punch we can at the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market."

During Tuesday's roadmap presentation, Alex Himel, the company's vice president for AR, laid out the plan for a bevy of devices through 2027. The first launch will come this fall with the second generation of Meta's camera-equipped smart glasses it released in 2021 with Luxottica, the parent company of Ray-Ban. In 2025, Himel said the third generation of the smart glasses will ship with a display that he called a "viewfinder" for viewing incoming text messages, scanning QR codes, and translating text from another language in real time. The glasses will come with a "neural interface" band that allows the wearer to control the glasses through hand movements, such as swiping fingers on an imaginary D-pad. Eventually, he said the band will let the wearer use a virtual keyboard and type at the same words per minute as what mobile phones allow. While Meta halted development of its smartwatch with dual cameras,Himel said that the company is still working on another smartwatch to accompany its 2025 glasses. "We don't want people to have to choose between an input device on their wrist and smartwatch functionality that they've come to love," he said. "So we are building a neural interfaces watch. Number one, this device will do input: input to control your glasses, input to control the functionality on your wrist, and input to control the world around you."

The Verge's Alex Heath adds: "Meta's first true pair of AR glasses, which the company has been internally developing for 8 years under the codename Orion, are more technically advanced, expensive, and designed to project high-quality holograms of avatars onto the real world." These glasses will "won't be released to the public until 2027," but an "internal launch" for employees will begin in 2024.

As for advertising, Meta is planning to utilize its existing business model for these future devices. "We should be able to run a very good ads business," he said. "I think it's easy to imagine how ads would show up in space when you have AR glasses on. Our ability to track conversions, which is where there has been a lot of focus as a company, should also be close to 100 percent."

"If we're hitting anything near projections, it will be a tremendous business," he said. "A business unlike anything we've seen on mobile phones before."

A sheriff's office in Illinois said it was initially thwarted from tracking a stolen car with a 2-year-old boy inside when Volkswagen's Car-Net service refused to provide access to the tracking system because the car's subscription had expired. From a report: "While searching for the stolen vehicle and endangered child, sheriff's detectives immediately called Volkswagen Car-Net, in an attempt to track the vehicle," the Lake County sheriff's office said in a statement posted on Facebook about the incident on February 23. "Unfortunately, there was a delay, as Volkswagen Car-Net would not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen." Volkswagen Car-Net lets owners track and control their vehicles remotely. According to a Chicago Sun-Times article, "the Car-Net trial period had ended, and a representative wanted $150 to restart the service and locate the SUV."

In a Facebook post today, Mark Zuckerberg said the company plans to develop "AI personas" for Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. He also announced that the company is "creating a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI." Engadget reports: It's currently investigating helpers for multiple media formats. You could see advanced chat features in Messenger and WhatsApp, or unique Instagram filters and ads. Video and "multi-modal" content could also benefit, Zuckerberg says. In the near future, you'll see an emphasis on tools for creation and expression. The social media giant is also pooling its generative AI teams into a single group to help "turbocharge" efforts in the emerging field, the executive adds. He doesn't provide more details, and cautions that there's a "lot of foundational work to do" before the most advanced projects come to fruition.

The buzz in tech these last few weeks has been focused squarely on the language models developed and deployed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI. But Meta, Facebook's parent company, continues to do significant work in this field and is releasing a new AI language generator named LLaMA today. From a report: LLaMA isn't like ChatGPT or Bing; it's not a system that anyone can talk to. Rather, it's a research tool that Meta says it's sharing in the hope of "democratizing access in this important, fast-changing field." In other words: to help experts tease out the problems of AI language models, from bias and toxicity to their tendency to simply make up information.

To this end, Meta is releasing LLaMA (which is not actually a single system but a quartet of different-sized models) under "a noncommercial license focused on research use cases," with access granted to groups like universities, NGOs, and industry labs. "We believe that the entire AI community -- academic researchers, civil society, policymakers, and industry -- must work together to develop clear guidelines around responsible AI in general and responsible large language models in particular," the company wrote in its post. "We look forward to seeing what the community can learn -- and eventually build -- using LLaMA."

Cars aren't the only conveyances being transformed by electricity. Along with electric motorcycles and snowmobiles, personal watercraft are floating better ways to coexist with nature and neighbors. This new breed of machines brings requisite thrills to the Great Outdoors, but without fouling the atmosphere or disturbing the peace with an internal-combustion racket. From a report: The latest comes from Florida-based Pelagion, whose founder and chief executive, engineer Jamie Schlinkmann, was inspired by childhood adventures on a watersports icon: A 1973 Kawasaki Jet Ski. Schlinkmann's machine, just the 213th ever built, is still one of his prized possessions. His company's Pelagion HydroBlade is an ingenious mash-up of classic stand-up Jet Skis and modern surfboard-style "eFoils." Those electric-powered boards had a real breakthrough in 2020 when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was spotted sailing over Hawaiian waters on one model. The metaverse may spring to mind the first time you see an eFoil, with its rider seeming to fly above the waves on a magic carpet. Naturally, there's no magic, only hydrodynamics. Hydrofoils work like an airplane wing, only underwater: An aerodynamic wing creates high and low pressure areas as it slices through water, generating lift with precious little drag. Add an electric motor and propeller to create thrust and you've got a hydrofoil that doesn't require surf waves, a kite, or tow boat to generate power.

There's only one problem: Powered or not, a hydrofoil takes some practice and patience to learn to ride in a standing position, especially for people with no surfing or wakeboarding experience, or so-so balance skills. To solve that, Schlinkmann's invention adds a boom-mounted canard and rudder ahead of the rider to keep the craft airborne and steady without a rider having to constantly expend energy and adjust body position. Add a trusty set of handlebars, says Schlinkmann, and the HydroBlade handles more like a vehicle with which most of us are familiar: a bicycle. Making the experience somewhat like riding a bike, he says, helps ease the intimidation factor and boost appeal for people of all ages and abilities. [...] The design began to take shape around 2020. Schlinkmann pulled the engine and other ICE guts from his old Jet Ski and studied how he could make it electric. He realized a conventional electric Jet Ski might only have a 15- or 20-minute runtime on a single charge, which wasn't good enough. But after riding a few eFoils, the idea came together. For the HydroBlade, a pair of permanent-magnet radial-flux motors drive dual propellers at a peak 16 kilowatts (21 horsepower). They're fed by two battery packs, with a combined 600 cylindrical 2170 NCM cells and a total 11 kilowatt-hours of energy -- about eight to 10 times the capacity onboard a typical eFoil. A separate 1.6-kW charger can refill batteries in about 4 hours.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC: Google is blocking some Canadian users from viewing news content in what the company says is a test run of a potential response to the Liberal government's online news bill. Also known as Bill C-18, the Online News Act would require digital giants such as Google and Meta, which owns Facebook, to negotiate deals that would compensate Canadian media companies for republishing their content on their platforms. The company said Wednesday that it is temporarily limiting access to news content for under four per cent of its Canadian users as it assesses possible responses to the bill. The change applies to its ubiquitous search engine as well as the Discover feature on Android devices, which carries news and sports stories. All types of news content are being affected by the test, which will run for about five weeks, the company said. That includes content created by Canadian broadcasters and newspapers.

In a news release, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) said Google's tactics just reinforce why Bill C-18 is so "vital," adding that Google and other global digital giants are showing they do not intend to play fair. "These are bully tactics, and Google is trying to push the Senate to back down on Bill C-18. We hope senators will see these actions for what they are," said CAB president Kevin Desjardins. "Bill C-18 was introduced to set up fair negotiations between news organizations and these global digital giants on the value of their news content. Google has shown they're willing to block Canadians' vital access to legitimate news content to maintain their dominance in the advertising field." Meta threatened to stop the sharing of news links in Canada last year if C-18 passed as currently written.

The social media company temporarily shut down news feeds in Australia after a similar law was introduced. It took effect in March 2021 and has largely worked, according to a government report.

CBC notes: "More than 450 news outlets in Canada have closed since 2008, including 64 in the last two years."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned away an Ohio man's claim that his constitutional rights were violated when he was arrested and prosecuted for making satirical posts about his local police department on Facebook. The justices' rejection of Anthony Novak's appeal means his civil rights lawsuit against the Parma Police Department cannot move forward. With its decision, the court again declined to consider revisiting "qualified immunity," the contentious legal defense that lets police officers and other government officials off the hook in civil rights cases if constitutional violations have not been "clearly established" when they occur. At issue was whether a lower court correctly granted the police officers qualified immunity under the rationale that previous court precedent had not clearly established that Novak's actions constituted protected speech under the Constitution's First Amendment.

In March 2016, Novak set up a Facebook page that purported to be that of the Parma Police Department. He published six satirical posts in 12 hours, one of which claimed there was a job opening to which minorities were encouraged not to apply and another that warned people not to give food, money or shelter to homeless people. The police department, claiming the posts had disrupted its operations, launched an investigation and ultimately searched Novak's apartment, arrested him and jailed him for four days. Novak was charged under a state law that criminalizes disruption of police operations but acquitted at trial.

The police officers, Kevin Riley and Thomas Connor, say they had probable cause to arrest Novak because they genuinely believed his conduct was disrupting their operations. Novak sued the officers and the police department, saying they had violated his free speech rights, as well as his right to be free of unlawful searches and seizures under the Constitution's Fourth Amendment. After lengthy litigation, a federal judge dismissed Novak's claims. The Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in a ruling in April that "the officers reasonably believed they were acting within the law" even if his Facebook page was obviously a parody. That's because there was no court precedent saying it's a violation of the Constitution to be arrested in retaliation for satirical remarks when the officers have probable cause, the court said. Novak's appeal was backed by satirical news sites The Babylon Bee and The Onion, which filed a lighthearted brief saying its writers "have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists."

Regulators have told major Chinese tech companies not to offer ChatGPT services to the public amid growing alarm in Beijing over the AI-powered chatbot's uncensored replies to user queries. From a report: Tencent Holdings and Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, have been instructed not to offer access to ChatGPT services on their platforms, either directly or via third parties, people with direct knowledge of the matter told Nikkei Asia. Tech companies will also need to report to regulators before they launch their own ChatGPT-like services, the sources added.

ChatGPT, developed by Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI, is not officially available in China but some internet users have been able to access it using a virtual private network (VPN). There have also been dozens of "mini programs" released by third-party developers on Tencent's WeChat social media app that claim to offer services from ChatGPT. Under regulatory pressure, Tencent has suspended several such third-party services regardless of whether they were connected to ChatGPT or were in fact copycats, people familiar with the matter told Nikkei. This is not the first time that China has blocked foreign websites or applications. Beijing has banned dozens of prominent U.S. websites and apps. Between 2009 and 2010, it moved to block Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Between 2018 and 2019, it instituted bans on Reddit and Wikipedia.

Facebook parent company Meta is preparing for a fresh round of job cuts, deputizing human resources, lawyers, financial experts and top executives to draw up plans to deflate the company's hierarchy, in a reorganization and downsizing effort that could affect thousands of workers. From a report: Meta plans to push some leaders into lower-level roles without direct reports, flattening the layers of management between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the company's interns, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on about internal matters. Other managers may end up overseeing a higher number of employees as their teams grow bigger. Some inside Meta expect employees whose jobs have been converted to eventually quit, trimming the company's workforce by default. In addition to targeting managers, the company is also considering more traditional cuts, including slashing some projects and jobs, the person said. These efforts, which are targeted at divisions across the company and around the world, may not happen on a single day, but will likely roll out across the company in the coming months.

The European Union is (finally) coming to grips with the dysfunctionalities of its most famous tech law of all: the General Data Protection Regulation. From a report: The European Commission will propose a new law before the summer that's aimed at improving how EU countries' privacy regulators enforce the GDPR, a newly published page on its website showed. Adopted in 2016, the privacy rulebook was a watershed moment in global tech regulation, forcing companies to abide by new standards such as asking for consent to collect people's data online against threats of hefty fines of up to 4 percent of global annual turnover. The law effectively became European officials' poster child of powerful legislation coming out of Brussels. But five years after EU data protection authorities started their job, as GDPR entered into force, activists, experts and some national privacy watchdogs have become frustrated at what they see as an inefficient system to tackle major cases, especially from Big Tech companies.

Most notably, critics have lamented the powerful role that the Irish Data Protection Commission has under the so-called one-stop shop rule, which directs most major investigations to run through the Irish system because tech companies like Meta, Google, Apple and others have set up their European homes there. Under the GDPR, tech companies are overseen by the national regulator in the EU country where they are headquartered. Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Luxembourg, where Amazon's EU headquarters is based, have faced mounting criticism in recent years for lax enforcement, which they deny. The Irish data authority in recent months imposed some major multimillion-euro fines to sanction GDPR infringements from Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. Now, a new EU regulation that is expected in the second quarter of 2023 wants to set clear procedural rules for national data protection authorities dealing with cross-border investigations and infringements. The law "will harmonize some aspects of the administrative procedure" in cross-border cases and " support a smooth functioning of the GDPR cooperation and dispute resolution mechanisms," the Commission wrote.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Meta announced a new $11.99-a-month subscription service on Sunday (or $14.99-a-month for Android and iOS). For your money you mainly get the privilege of authenticating your own account with a government ID, so that it can then display the official "verified" badge. (Accounts must have a prior posting history, with account holders verified to be at least 18 years old.)

Meta promises they won't change already-verified Facebook and Instagram accounts — at least, not "as we test and learn." But they immediately follow that sentence by warning that in the longer-term they're "evolving the meaning" of verification, aiming to making everyone want to subscribe. Meta calls this "expanding access."

Paying subscribers will also get:

— Protection from account impersonation (at a higher level that's apparently not made available to non-paying members), including "proactive account monitoring".

— "Help when you need it with access to a real person for common account issues."

— Exclusive "stickers" for Facebook and Instagram Stories and Facebook Reels, plus 100 free Facebook "stars" each month "so you can show your support for other creators."


But most importantly, Meta is also promising to grant "increased visibility and reach" to paying members, promising "prominence" in parts of the service (including search, recommendations, and in comments). Although a footnote warns this may vary — depending on what you're trying to post about — and all content "will be treated according to our existing guidelines for recommendations on Instagram or Facebook and our Content Guidelines."

George Takei once calculated roughly 80% of your friends never see the things you post on Facebook. But now Facebook is deliberately evolving into a two-tiered system where some will always be relegated to less-likely-to-be-seen status, always outshined by wealthier friends with $144 a year to spend on upgrading their Facebook accounts.

The internet already has a two-tiered system for news, where the best news articles are only available to those with the funds to climb over multiple paywalls. But now even the lower tier of discourse — all that non-journalistic content floating around Facebook — will transform from a pool of burbling anger and misinformation into something worse. It's like Facebook's algorithm went from promoting just the most divisive content to promoting content from whoever most desires to foist their ideas onto other people. This may not end well.

Is it just me, or does this seem like a desperate grab for money?

— They're monetizing Meta's inability to stop account impersonators.

— Their announcement admits that "access to account support" remains a top request of their creators. Yet paying members are apparently more likely to get it than non-paying members. Maybe that can be their new marketing slogan. "Help when you need it — sold separately."

— This is happening. It becomes available for purchase this week on Instagram or Facebook in Australia and New Zealand.

America's Federal Trade Commission "has long been dwarfed by Silicon Valley titans like Google and Apple, each staffed with thousands of engineers and technologists," notes the Washington Post.

"But FTC leaders are hoping combining and expanding their forces into a dedicated tech unit will help them keep up with the rapid advancements across the industry — and to keep it in check." The creation of the office will increase the number of technologists on staff by roughly a dozen, up from the current 10 — more than doubling the agency's capacity, officials said. In an exclusive interview announcing the move, FTC Chief Technology Officer Stephanie Nguyen said the unit will work with teams across the agency's competition and consumer protection bureaus to investigate potential misconduct and bring cases against violators. "Actually being able to have staff internally to approach these matters and help with subject matter expertise is critical," said Nguyen, who will lead the office.

The announcement arrives at a critical juncture. Federal regulators are dialing up investigations into tech behemoths like Amazon and waging blockbuster legal battles against Microsoft and Facebook parent company Meta. While Nguyen declined to discuss specific probes or cases, she said the new technology office will work directly on both the agency's investigative and enforcement efforts to "strengthen and support our attorneys" as they look to tackle alleged abuses across the economy. "The areas ... we will focus on is to work on cases," she said.... Nguyen said, the new team of technologists could help the agency refine the subpoenas it issues companies to get at the heart of their business models, or to strike a settlement that gets closer to "the root cause of the harm" taking place.
Republican Commissioner Christine Wilson, who Tuesday announced plans to resign "soon," voted in favor of creating the office, joining with the other commissioners in a unanimous vote.

The office's core mission will have three key areas, reports FedScoop: "strengthening and supporting law enforcement investigations, advising commission staff on policy and research initiatives, and highlighting market trends."

"For more than a century, the FTC has worked to keep pace with new markets and ever-changing technologies by building internal expertise," FTC Chair Lina Khan said. "Our office of technology is a natural next step in ensuring we have the in-house skills needed to fully grasp evolving technologies and market trends as we continue to tackle unlawful business practices and protect Americans."

Read on for more details about the new office.

Facebook parent Meta gave thousands of employees subpar ratings in a recently concluded round of performance reviews, a signal that more job cuts may be on the way, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The company also cut a bonus metric, the people said, one of several steps senior executives are taking after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 would be a "year of efficiency." Meta's leadership expects the ratings to lead more employees to leave in the coming weeks, the people said. The company will consider another round of layoffs if not enough depart, the people said.

About 11,000 workers, or about 13% of employees at the company, were recently laid off. Meta managers gave approximately 10% of employees ratings indicating they are underperforming, the people said. That proportion wasn't unprecedented in the years before the pandemic. But Meta's employee count nearly doubled from 2019 to 2022, to 86,400, and about half its workers had never experienced a typical performance-review cycle at the company, several people familiar with the matter said. The recently wrapped performance reviews were seen as a return to form for Mr. Zuckerberg, who before the pandemic had developed a reputation for delivering direct feedback to workers, people familiar with the process said.

Coming to the campuses of Facebook parent Meta Platforms is a contraption that can block sound, shield workers from their peers and allow for heads-down, uninterrupted work. It's a cubicle. From a report: That is, a noise-canceling cubicle designed using some of the same principles found in soundproof, echo-free anechoic chambers. "The Cube," which the company is beginning to roll out to offices worldwide after months of development, absorbs sound from multiple directions, says John Tenanes, vice president of global real estate and facilities at Meta. "It's like a self-cocoon."

Meta's experiment comes as workplaces are in the midst of a shake-up. Like many other employers, Meta realized early in the pandemic that its open-plan arrangements would need to shift to accommodate a new hybrid era of work. In 2021, it asked 10 groups of architects, design firms and furniture manufacturers-- including MillerKnoll's Herman Miller, KI and others -- to build a new office set-up. They were given guiding principles to follow and eight weeks to do it. [...] The Cube began to take shape, in part, after one of Meta's furniture vendors brought in an early prototype of a movable screen. Engineers quickly gravitated to it, grabbing one or two at a time to essentially barricade themselves at their desks, Dr. Nagy says. Meta and its vendors refined the Cube, and its popularity became even more apparent during testing when workers began personalizing the spaces to effectively reserve them.

ChatGPT is big in China, even though it's not officially available there. From a report: China's obsession with ChatGPT runs deeper than curiosity. Search giant Baidu is preparing to launch its own competitor, Ernie Bot, in March. It'll embed the tool initially into its search services and smart speakers. Amid the fervor, Alibaba, NetEase and Tencent each promised similar initiatives in the span of a few days, stirring Chinese tech stocks from a years-long slump. The government in Beijing, where Baidu is based, has vowed to give more support to such efforts.

This is the first time in probably more than a decade that Chinese internet firms are all racing to adopt, localize and perhaps advance a Silicon Valley invention on the level of Google, Facebook or YouTube. Microsoft's Bing and Alphabet's Google -- which showed its own artificial-intelligence search assistant called Bard -- appear to have an early lead. But both products exhibit many flaws. Rolling the services out too soon could create problems for Bing and Google. Doing so in China could be disastrous. Appeasing the country's complex censorship machine is difficult enough for search and social media companies. Trying to keep a malleable AI bot in check is a new kind of challenge.

As Meta gears up for its "year of efficiency," the company announced today it's exiting the livestream shopping business on Instagram, following a similar shutdown on Facebook. From a report: Starting on March 16, 2023, Instagram users will no longer be able to tag products while livestreaming -- a capability that has been broadly available to U.S. businesses and creators since 2020. The changes highlight the difficulties the U.S. market has had in making livestream shopping successful. The activity is already hugely popular activity in Asian markets, including China where apps like WeChat, Taobao Live and Douyin (China's TikTok) have proven live shopping to be a popular and profitable endeavor. As the pandemic raged across the globe, many U.S. businesses looked to adopt live shopping as well, to help boost their own online retail revenues. Before too long, pundits were calling live shopping the "future of e-commerce," citing the early traction businesses like TalkShopLive, NTWRK, Brandlive, and others in the space had gained, alongside adoption from big tech companies like Meta, Amazon, and YouTube.

Facebook parent company Meta reportedly plans to further reduce its headcount in the coming weeks. From a report: According to the Financial Times, work at the tech giant has slowed to a crawl while it plots a new round of job cuts. Meta is likely to announce the restructuring after it has completed staff performance reviews sometime in March. In November, the company laid off 11,000 employees or about 13 percent of its global workforce. Those cuts were the largest in Meta's nearly 20-year history, affecting every organization within the company.

On Wednesday the Associated Press tested the new AI enhancements to Microsoft's search engine Bing, asking it "for the most important thing to happen in sports over the past 24 hours — with the expectation it might say something about basketball star LeBron James passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's career scoring record.

"Instead, it confidently spouted a false but detailed account of the upcoming Super Bowl — days before it's actually scheduled to happen." "It was a thrilling game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs, two of the best teams in the NFL this season," Bing said. "The Eagles, led by quarterback Jalen Hurts, won their second Lombardi Trophy in franchise history by defeating the Chiefs, led by quarterback Patrick Mahomes, with a score of 31-28." It kept going, describing the specific yard lengths of throws and field goals and naming three songs played in a "spectacular half time show" by Rihanna.

Unless Bing is clairvoyant — tune in Sunday to find out — it reflected a problem known as AI "hallucination" that's common with today's large language-learning models. It's one of the reasons why companies like Google and Facebook parent Meta had been reluctant to make these models publicly accessible.