The White House is cracking down on so-called “junk” fees from banks, airlines, cable companies, and other entities.
These are surprise costs added to consumer bills, and they’re some of the most frustrating for unsuspecting consumers. Charges range from bounced check and overdraft fees levied by banks, to hidden fees consumers are forced to pay for cable, internet, flights, hotel rooms, concert tickets, and more. President Joe Biden said the new initiatives will save consumers over $1 billion annually and provide “a little breathing room” for American families after months of steep inflation.
The changes were announced last week as part of a continued push by the Biden administration to highlight its efforts to lower the cost of living. “…
The tech industry is currently embroiled in a heated debate over the future of AI: should powerful systems be open-source and freely accessible, or closed and tightly monitored for dangers?
On Tuesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg fired a salvo into this ongoing battle, publishing not just a new series of powerful AI models, but also a manifesto forcefully advocating for the open-source approach. The document, which was widely praised by venture capitalists and tech leaders like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, serves as both a philosophical treatise and a rallying cry for proponents of open-source AI development. It arrives as intensifying global efforts to regulate AI have galvanized resistance from open-source advocates, who see some of those potential laws as threats to innovation and a…
Meta’s new text-based conversation platform Threads launched with a bang earlier this month, surpassing 100 million sign-ups less than a week after it became available to the public on July 5.
But soon after the app—seen as a direct threat to Twitter, which recently became X— was released, users on Twitter began posting screenshots of Threads’ privacy policy published on Apple’s App store. Some pointed out the app’s terms of service give Meta permission to collect a trove of data, including information on user’s health, financial information, location, search history.
Data privacy experts say that, though this level of data collection is not unique to Threads, users do risk handing over even more personal information to a company that already knows a lot…