Facebook owner Meta was hit by a record $1.3 billion European Union privacy fine and given a deadline to stop shipping users' data to the US after regulators said it failed to protect personal information from the prying eyes of American security services. Bloomberg News: The social network giant's continued data transfers to the US didn't address "the risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms" of people whose data was being transfered across the Atlantic, according to a decision by the Irish Data Protection Commission announced on Monday. On top of the fine, which eclipses a $806 million EU privacy penalty previously doled out to Amazon, Meta was given five months to "suspend any future transfer of personal data to the US" and six months to stop "the unlawful processing, including storage, in the US" of transferred personal EU data. A data-transfers ban for Meta was widely expected and once prompted the US firm to threaten a total withdrawal from the EU. But its impact has now been muted by the transition phase given in the decision and the prospect of a new EU-US data flows agreement that could already be operational by the middle of this year.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge: Meta is building its first custom chip specifically for running AI models, the company announced on Thursday. As Meta increases its AI efforts — CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said the company sees "an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful" — the chip and other infrastructure plans revealed Thursday could be critical tools for Meta to compete with other tech giants also investing significant resources into AI.

Meta's new MTIA chip, which stands for Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, is its "in-house, custom accelerator chip family targeting inference workloads," Meta VP and head of infrastructure Santosh Janardhan wrote in a blog post... But the MTIA chip is seemingly a long ways away: it's not set to come out until 2025, TechCrunch reports.
Meta has been working on "a massive project to upgrade its AI infrastructure in the past year," Reuters reports, "after executives realized it lacked the hardware and software to support demand from product teams building AI-powered features."

As a result, the company scrapped plans for a large-scale rollout of an in-house inference chip and started work on a more ambitious chip capable of performing training and inference, Reuters reported...

Meta said it has an AI-powered system to help its engineers create computer code, similar to tools offered by Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet.
TechCrunch calls these announcements "an attempt at a projection of strength from Meta, which historically has been slow to adopt AI-friendly hardware systems — hobbling its ability to keep pace with rivals such as Google and Microsoft."

Meta's VP of Infrastructure told TechCrunch "This level of vertical integration is needed to push the boundaries of AI research at scale." Over the past decade or so, Meta has spent billions of dollars recruiting top data scientists and building new kinds of AI, including AI that now powers the discovery engines, moderation filters and ad recommenders found throughout its apps and services. But the company has struggled to turn many of its more ambitious AI research innovations into products, particularly on the generative AI front. Until 2022, Meta largely ran its AI workloads using a combination of CPUs — which tend to be less efficient for those sorts of tasks than GPUs — and a custom chip designed for accelerating AI algorithms...

The MTIA is an ASIC, a kind of chip that combines different circuits on one board, allowing it to be programmed to carry out one or many tasks in parallel... Custom AI chips are increasingly the name of the game among the Big Tech players. Google created a processor, the TPU (short for "tensor processing unit"), to train large generative AI systems like PaLM-2 and Imagen. Amazon offers proprietary chips to AWS customers both for training (Trainium) and inferencing (Inferentia). And Microsoft, reportedly, is working with AMD to develop an in-house AI chip called Athena.

Meta says that it created the first generation of the MTIA — MTIA v1 — in 2020, built on a 7-nanometer process. It can scale beyond its internal 128 MB of memory to up to 128 GB, and in a Meta-designed benchmark test — which, of course, has to be taken with a grain of salt — Meta claims that the MTIA handled "low-complexity" and "medium-complexity" AI models more efficiently than a GPU. Work remains to be done in the memory and networking areas of the chip, Meta says, which present bottlenecks as the size of AI models grow, requiring workloads to be split up across several chips. (Not coincidentally, Meta recently acquired an Oslo-based team building AI networking tech at British chip unicorn Graphcore.) And for now, the MTIA's focus is strictly on inference — not training — for "recommendation workloads" across Meta's app family...

If there's a common thread in today's hardware announcements, it's that Meta's attempting desperately to pick up the pace where it concerns AI, specifically generative AI... In part, Meta's feeling increasing pressure from investors concerned that the company's not moving fast enough to capture the (potentially large) market for generative AI. It has no answer — yet — to chatbots like Bard, Bing Chat or ChatGPT. Nor has it made much progress on image generation, another key segment that's seen explosive growth.

If the predictions are right, the total addressable market for generative AI software could be $150 billion. Goldman Sachs predicts that it'll raise GDP by 7%. Even a small slice of that could erase the billions Meta's lost in investments in "metaverse" technologies like augmented reality headsets, meetings software and VR playgrounds like Horizon Worlds.

The Supreme Court on Thursday sidestepped a case against Google that might have allowed more lawsuits against social media companies. From a report: The justices' decision returns to a lower court the case of a family of an American college student who was killed in an Islamic State terrorist attack in Paris. The family wants to sue Google for YouTube videos they said helped attract IS recruits and radicalize them. Google claims immunity from the lawsuit under a 1996 law that generally shields social media company for content posted by others. Lower courts agreed with Google. The justices had agreed to consider whether the legal shield is too broad. But in arguments in February, several sounded reluctant to weigh in now. In an unsigned opinion Thursday, the court wrote that it was declining to address the law at issue.

Big tech companies accounting for more than 5% of a telecoms provider's peak average internet traffic should help fund the rollout of 5G and broadband across Europe, according to a draft proposal by the telecoms industry. From a report: The proposal is part of feedback to the European Commission which launched a consultation into the issue in February. The deadline for responses is Friday. Alphabet's Google, Apple, Facebook-owner Meta, Amazon, Netflix and TikTok would most likely be hit with fees, according to industry estimates. Google, Apple, Meta, Netflix, Amazon and Microsoft together account for more than half of data internet traffic.

The document, which was reviewed by Reuters and has not been published, was compiled by telecoms lobbying groups GSMA and ETNO. They represent 160 operators in Europe, including Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica and Telecom Italia. Telecom operators have lobbied for years for leading technology companies to help foot the bill for 5G and broadband roll-out, saying that they create a huge part of the region's internet traffic. This is the first time they have tried to define a threshold for who should pay.

Vice Media has filed for bankruptcy, "punctuating a yearslong descent from a new-media darling to a cautionary tale of the problems facing the digital publishing industry," writes Lauren Hirsch and Benjamin Mullin via the New York Times. The media company was once valued at $5.7 billion back in 2017. From the report: The bankruptcy will not interrupt daily operations for Vice's businesses, which in addition to its flagship website include the ad agency Virtue, the Pulse Films division and Refinery29, a women-focused site acquired by Vice in 2019. A group of Vice's lenders, including Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management, is in the leading position to acquire the company out of bankruptcy. The group has submitted a bid of $225 million, which would be covered by its existing loans to the company. It would also take over "significant liabilities" from Vice after any deal closes. A sale process follows next. The lenders have secured a $20 million loan to continue operating Vice and then, if a better bid does not emerge, the group that includes Fortress and Soros will acquire Vice.

Investments from media titans like Disney and shrewd financial investors like TPG, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars, will be rendered worthless by the bankruptcy, cementing Vice's status among the most notable bad bets in the media industry. Like some of its peers in the digital-media industry, including BuzzFeed and Vox Media, Vice and its investors bet big on the rising power of social media networks like Facebook and Instagram, anticipating they would deliver a tide of young, upwardly mobile readers that advertisers craved. Though readers came by the millions, new media companies had trouble wringing profits from them, and the bulk of digital ad dollars went to the major tech platforms.

Trend Micro researchers at Black Hat Asia are warning that millions of Android devices worldwide come pre-infected with malicious firmware before the devices leave their factories. "This hardware is mainly cheapo Android mobile devices, though smartwatches, TVs, and other things are caught up in it," reports The Register. From the report: This insertion of malware began as the price of mobile phone firmware dropped, we're told. Competition between firmware distributors became so furious that eventually the providers could not charge money for their product. "But of course there's no free stuff," said [Trend Micro researcher Fyodor Yarochkin], who explained that, as a result of this cut-throat situation, firmware started to come with an undesirable feature -- silent plugins. The team analyzed dozens of firmware images looking for malicious software. They found over 80 different plugins, although many of those were not widely distributed. The plugins that were the most impactful were those that had a business model built around them, were sold on the underground, and marketed in the open on places like Facebook, blogs, and YouTube.

The objective of the malware is to steal info or make money from information collected or delivered. The malware turns the devices into proxies which are used to steal and sell SMS messages, take over social media and online messaging accounts, and used as monetization opportunities via adverts and click fraud. One type of plugin, proxy plugins, allow the criminal to rent out devices for up to around five minutes at a time. For example, those renting the control of the device could acquire data on keystrokes, geographical location, IP address and more. "The user of the proxy will be able to use someone else's phone for a period of 1200 seconds as an exit node," said Yarochkin. He also said the team found a Facebook cookie plugin that was used to harvest activity from the Facebook app.

Through telemetry data, the researchers estimated that at least millions of infected devices exist globally, but are centralized in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. A statistic self-reported by the criminals themselves, said the researchers, was around 8.9 million. As for where the threats are coming from, the duo wouldn't say specifically, although the word "China" showed up multiple times in the presentation, including in an origin story related to the development of the dodgy firmware. Yarochkin said the audience should consider where most of the world's OEMs are located and make their own deductions.

The team confirmed the malware was found in the phones of at least 10 vendors, but that there was possibly around 40 more affected. For those seeking to avoid infected mobile phones, they could go some way of protecting themselves by going high end. That is to say, you'll find this sort of bad firmware in the cheaper end of the Android ecosystem, and sticking to bigger brands is a good idea though not necessarily a guarantee of safety. "Big brands like Samsung, like Google took care of their supply chain security relatively well, but for threat actors, this is still a very lucrative market," said Yarochkin.

A study commissioned by Meta has found that the metaverse could contribute around 2.4% to U.S. annual GDP by 2035, equating to as much as $760 billion. Reuters reports: The concept of the metaverse includes augmented and virtual reality technologies that allow users to immerse themselves in a virtual world or overlay information digitally on images of the real world, according to the report by consulting firm Deloitte. Economic gains may come from the use of the technologies in the defense, medical and manufacturing sectors, plus entertainment use cases such as video games and communication, the report said.

Social media giant Meta, which pivoted its focus on building metaverse technologies in 2021, has forecast the tech would eventually replace mobile as the main computing platform. In a separate report, Meta said the European Union may see an increased economic opportunity of up to 489 billion euros ($538.29 billion) in annual GDP by 2035 or about 1.3%-2.4% of its total GDP. The metaverse could contribute between C$45.3 billion ($33.88 billion) and C$85.5 billion to Canada's annual GDP by 2035, Deloitte said. Last year, a Meta-funded report estimated that metaverse adoption would contribute $3.01 trillion by 2031.

LinkedIn, the networking platform used by millions of employees and companies, said on Monday it will pare down its operations in China, capping a multiyear pullback that exemplified the challenges of running a foreign business in China. From a report: The company, owned by Microsoft, said it will lay off 716 employees worldwide, including teams dedicated to engineering and marketing in China, because of slumping demand. It did not say how many of those layoffs will be in China. LinkedIn will also shut its China job posting app, a bare-bones version of its international service, by August. Users of the app, called InCareer, could only search for jobs and not post or share articles the way they can on LinkedIn.

When LinkedIn started a Chinese-language version of its website in 2014, it charted a path that its peers, including Facebook and Google, had shied away from. It partnered with local firms and began censoring the content of millions of Chinese customers in accordance with Beijing's strict laws. Several U.S. journalists and activists said their profiles had been blocked because of "prohibited content." The company said at the time that while it opposed government censorship, its absence in the country could deprive Chinese professionals of the chance to make professional connections.

Meta has announced a new open-source AI model that links together multiple streams of data, including text, audio, visual data, temperature, and movement readings. From a report: The model is only a research project at this point, with no immediate consumer or practical applications, but it points to a future of generative AI systems that can create immersive, multisensory experiences and shows that Meta continues to share AI research at a time when rivals like OpenAI and Google have become increasingly secretive. The core concept of the research is linking together multiple types of data into a single multidimensional index (or "embedding space," to use AI parlance). This idea may seem a little abstract, but it's this same concept that underpins the recent boom in generative AI.

Facebook says it is not dead. Facebook also wants you to know that it is not just for "old people," as young people have been saying for years. From a report: Now, with the biggest thorn in its side -- TikTok -- facing heightened government scrutiny amid growing tensions between the U.S. and China, Facebook could, perhaps, position itself as a viable, domestic-bred alternative. There's just one problem: young adults like Devin Walsh (anecdote in the story) have moved on. [...] Today, 3 billion people check it each month. That's more than a third of the world's population. And 2 billion log in every day. Yet it still finds itself in a battle for relevancy, and its future, after two decades of existence. For younger generations -- those who signed up in middle school, or those who are now in middle school, it's decidedly not the place to be. Without this trend-setting demographic, Facebook, still the main source of revenue for parent company Meta, risks fading into the background -- utilitarian but boring, like email.

An anonymous reader shared this report from NBC News: Alexej Savreux, a 34-year-old in Kansas City, says he's done all kinds of work over the years. He's made fast-food sandwiches. He's been a custodian and a junk-hauler. And he's done technical sound work for live theater.

These days, though, his work is less hands-on: He's an artificial intelligence trainer.

Savreux is part of a hidden army of contract workers who have been doing the behind-the-scenes labor of teaching AI systems how to analyze data so they can generate the kinds of text and images that have wowed the people using newly popular products like ChatGPT. To improve the accuracy of AI, he has labeled photos and made predictions about what text the apps should generate next.

The pay: $15 an hour and up, with no benefits... He credits the AI gig work — along with a previous job at the sandwich chain Jimmy John's — with helping to pull him out of homelessness.
"Their feedback fills an urgent and endless need for the company and its AI competitors: providing streams of sentences, labels and other information that serve as training data," the article explains: "A lot of the discourse around AI is very congratulatory," said Sonam Jindal, the program lead for AI, labor and the economy at the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit based in San Francisco that promotes research and education around artificial intelligence. "But we're missing a big part of the story: that this is still hugely reliant on a large human workforce," she said...

A spike in demand has arrived, and some AI contract workers are asking for more. In Nairobi, Kenya, more than 150 people who've worked on AI for Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT voted Monday to form a union, citing low pay and the mental toll of the work, Time magazine reported... Time magazine reported in January that OpenAI relied on low-wage Kenyan laborers to label text that included hate speech or sexually abusive language so that its apps could do better at recognizing toxic content on their own. OpenAI has hired about 1,000 remote contractors in places such as Eastern Europe and Latin America to label data or train company software on computer engineering tasks, the online news outlet Semafor reported in January...

A spokesperson for OpenAI said no one was available to answer questions about its use of AI contractors.

The FTC is proposing to prevent Meta from monetizing children's data due to alleged violations of a 2020 privacy order. CNBC reports: According to the FTC, an independent assessor found "several gaps and weaknesses in Facebook's privacy program" that posed "substantial risks to the public." The company had agreed to independent assessments of its updated privacy program as part of the 2020 settlement, under which Facebook paid a $5 billion civil penalty following an FTC investigation around the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. The FTC alleges Facebook also violated an earlier 2012 order by continuing to allow app developers access to private user information. Facebook allowed third-party apps to access user data until mid-2020 in some cases, the FTC alleges. The FTC is also accusing Meta of violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule by misrepresenting parental controls on its Messenger Kids app. The COPPA Rule requires parental consent for websites to collect personal information from kids under 13. The FTC alleged that while the company marketed that the app would only allow kids to talk with contacts their parents approved, children were able to communicate with additional contacts in group chats or group video calls in some circumstances.

As a result, the FTC is proposing to strengthen the terms of the 2020 agreement to put additional restrictions on the company, which would apply to all of Meta's services including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus. The proposed terms include a blanket ban on monetizing data from users under 18. That means any data collected from these users could only be used for security reasons and any data collected while users are under age could not be later monetized once they turn 18. The FTC also seeks to impose a pause on the company's ability to launch new or modified products or services until the independent assessor confirms in writing that Meta's privacy program is in full compliance with the terms of the agreement. Compliance with the 2020 order would also extend to any companies Meta acquires or merges with. The proposal would also require Meta to get affirmative consent from users for future use of facial recognition technology. Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone called the FTC's move a "political stunt." He said in a statement: "Despite three years of continual engagement with the FTC around our agreement, they provided no opportunity to discuss this new, totally unprecedented theory. We have spent vast resources building and implementing an industry-leading privacy program under the terms of our FTC agreement. We will vigorously fight this action and expect to prevail."

Facebook owner Meta said on Wednesday it had uncovered malware purveyors leveraging public interest in ChatGPT to lure users into downloading malicious apps and browser extensions, likening the phenomenon to cryptocurrency scams. From a report: Since March, the social media giant has found around 10 malware families and more than 1,000 malicious links that were promoted as tools featuring the popular artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, it said in a report. In some cases, the malware delivered working ChatGPT functionality alongside abusive files, the company said. Speaking at a press briefing on the report, Meta Chief Information Security Officer Guy Rosen said that for bad actors, "ChatGPT is the new crypto."

The co-founders of Google DeepMind and LinkedIn have launched an AI chatbot called Pi (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), which aims to provide relaxed and supportive conversations rather than information or specific tasks, distinguishing itself by encouraging dialogue and inquiry from users. The Financial Times reports: The first product from the year-old AI start-up behind Pi, Inflection AI, comes as the growing hype around generative AI drives a surge of investor and consumer interest. Users of Pi can have personal conversations with the chatbot, either directly via an app, or through text, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook. Inflection AI chief executive Mustafa Suleyman described the chatbot as having the persona of a sympathetic sounding board, rather than trying to provide information. The product, which has been beta-tested by users for several months, has a narrow use case, which makes it safer and easier to control, Suleyman said.

"There's lots of things Pi cannot do. It doesn't do lists, or coding, it doesn't do travel plans, it won't write your marketing strategy, or your essay for school," Suleyman said in an interview with the Financial Times. "It's purely designed for relaxed, supportive, informative conversation." Eventually, the personal AI tool would also provide assistance such as helping users perform online tasks, but was currently more for "mundane, trivial and banal" conversations, according to Suleyman.

In a live demo of the chatbot, Pi appeared distinct from others such as ChatGPT or Bard in that it often ended its responses with a question for the user, encouraging dialogue. "That's what Pi does really well, it helps facilitate your own line of inquiry," Suleyman said. However, it does not provide citations or references, although Suleyman said that will change. It also sometimes fabricates facts, as is the case with all large language models -- the technology underlying the new generation of chatbots, he added.

Thanks to a crowdfunding campaign dating back to 2014, soldiers in Ukraine are now using Steam Decks to remotely operate a high-caliber machine gun turret. The weapon is called the "Sabre" and is unique to Ukraine. Motherboard reports: Ukrainian news outlet TPO Media recently reported on the deployment of a new model of the Sabre on its Facebook page. Photos and videos of the system show soldiers operating a Steam Deck connected to a large machine gun via a heavy piece of cable. According to the TPO Media post, the Sabre system allows soldiers to fight the enemy from a great distance and can handle a range of calibers, from light machine guns firing anti-tank rounds to an AK-47.

In the TPO footage, the Sabre is firing what appears to be a PKT belt-fed machine gun. The PKT is a heavy barrelled machine that doesn't have a stock and is typically mounted on vehicles like armored personnel carriers. It uses a solenoid trigger so it can be fired remotely, which is the cable running out of the back of the gun and into the complex of metal and wires on the side of the turret.

The Sabre system wasn't always controlled with a Steam Deck [...]. The first instances of the weapon appeared in 2014. The U.S. and the rest of NATO is giving Ukraine a lot of money for defense now, but that wasn't the case when Russia first invaded in 2014. To fill its funding gaps, Ukrainians ran a variety of crowdfunding campaigns. Over the years, Ukraine has used crowdfunding to pay for everything from drones to hospitals. One of the most popular websites is The People's Project, and it's there that the Sabre was born. The People's Project launched the crowdfunding campaign for Sabre in 2015 and collected more than $12,000 for the project over the next two years. It's initial goal was to deploy 10 of these systems.

Last weekend around 2 a.m. Sunday, "Facebook's advertising system went haywire," reports Gizmodo, "overcharging customers and wasting money on ads that didn't work." Reports suggest Meta, the social network's parent company, charged some advertisers more than double what they agreed to pay, ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meta briefly stopped showing ads on part of its network with practically zero communication to its millions of customers.

The company confirmed the bug happened and promised to follow its "normal refund process," but shared very little about what went wrong.
A Meta spokesperson described it as "a technical issue that has now been resolved" (adding that the glitch also appeared to a lesser extent on Instagram).

But Alex Golick, the CEO of marketing agency Intensify told CNBC it was the worst Facebook glitch he'd seen in the decade he's worked in digital advertising — with one client burning through 90% of its ad budget by 9 a.m. And his entire customer base had similar problems: Golick said that all those advertisers had essentially just wasted most of their money for the day, spending roughly triple the amount they normally would to acquire a customer. "The results were horrendous," Golick told CNBC...

For brands that are already lowering ad costs to manage through a sluggish economy and a mobile ad market that no longer allows for targeting based on user data, Facebook's miscue is more than just an unfortunate blip. In low-margin industries, where every dollar counts, it can turn a profitable weekend into a big loser, while also raising further questions about the reliability of Facebook's ad systems...

Data analytics and marketing firm Varos provided data showing that, of the more than 3,000 ecommerce and direct-to-consumer companies that use its technology, the software bug caused a majority of them to experience a rise in cost per thousand impressions, or what those in the industry call CPMs. About 36% of companies were "very significantly impacted" by the bug, meaning their CPMs at least doubled, Varos said...

Varos CEO Yarden Shaked the glitch resulted in a "bidding war for nothing." Data about the glitch provided by the advertising technology firm Proxima on 108 companies also revealed that these firms spent their "entire day's budget in the first few hours of the day," the company said...

Meta sees "an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful," CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors Wednesday. From a report: While he was vague about how exactly Meta will add generative AI to its apps, Zuckerberg gave the most detailed preview yet during the company's earnings call for the first quarter of this year, when it reported $28.6 billion in revenue and a record 2 billion daily users of the Facebook app, beating Wall Street's estimates. Meta's profit for the quarter was $5.7 billion, a 24 percent decrease from the same time last year. "We're exploring chat experiences in WhatsApp and Messenger, visual creation tools for posts in Facebook and Instagram and ads, and over time video and multi-modal experiences as well," Zuckerberg said on the earnings call. "I expect that these tools will be valuable for everyone from regular people to creators to businesses. For example, I expect that a lot of interest in AI agents for business messaging and customer support will come once we nail that experience. Over time, this will extend to our work on the metaverse, too, where people will much more easily be able to create avatars, objects, worlds, and code to tie all of them together."

In its first-quarter earnings report today, Meta said its virtual reality and augmented reality unit, Reality Labs, recorded a $3.99 billion operating loss. The unit generated just $339 million in revenue. CNBC reports: The numbers show a slowdown from last quarter, when Reality Labs lost $4.28 billion on $727 million of revenue. For all of last year, Reality Labs recorded an operating loss of $13.72 billion on $2.16 billion in sales, underscoring how VR and AR technologies have yet to reach the mainstream. Despite Reality Labs' operating loss, Meta posted first-quarter net earnings of $5.71 billion, or $2.20 a share, with revenue up less than 3% to $28.65 billion from $27.91 billion a year ago. This sent its stock soaring more than 10% in extended trading Wednesday.

"Facebook had 2.04 billion daily active users, up 5% from a year ago, and the 'family' of Meta apps -- which includes Instagram -- reported daily active users of 3.02 billion, up 4%," adds MarketWatch.

Meta's head of global affairs, Nick Clegg, called into question the values of TikTok by invoking the anti-China rhetoric that's become a trademark of lawmakers that want to expel his company's rival from the US. From a report: "TikTok, a hugely successful, highly dynamic and innovative Chinese company, is able to operate in the United States, but companies like Meta are not able to operate our social media services in China," Clegg said in an interview Tuesday with Bloomberg TV. "So there is this issue of a kind of lack of a level playing field. And in the end, there's always an underlying issue of values: What values are the underpinning of new technologies?" TikTok, owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, has said it's not a Chinese company and is walling off sensitive US operations to house all data and employees in America. The app also isn't available in China. Still, it hasn't been able to shake concerns about its ownership and whether that opens up the app for influence or data collection by the Chinese government.

Clegg's comments echo the hawkish sentiments that have swirled around China and TikTok's connection to the country. In the US, where the social media platform has amassed 150 million users every month, the company is facing a national security review and legislation that could limit its availability in the country. There are "pretty profound differences in values" in how China views technology and individual privacy, Clegg said, including the country's willingness to seal off most of its internet from access by foreign companies. This has also expanded to discussions about new artificial intelligence technologies where, he said, "Chinese authorities are already rushing to insert their values and the way in which those AI systems are developed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Joshua Bergen is a very productive person. His secret is the workspace app Notion. Bergen, a product manager living in Vancouver, uses it to plan trips abroad in meticulous detail, with notes and timelines. He uses it to curate lists of the movies and TV shows he's watched, and records what he thought of them. It's also a handy way to keep tabs on his 3D-printing projects, map snowboarding runs, and quickly update his cute list of the funny things his kid has said. It might sound strange, but Bergen is one of a growing number of people using Notion, software intended for work, to organize their personal lives. They're using it in a myriad of different ways, from tracking their meditation habits and weekly schedules to logging their water intake and sharing grocery lists.

So why has a platform built to accommodate "better, faster work" struck such a chord when there are countless other planning apps out there? Part of the reason Notion has such a devoted fan base is its flexibility. At its heart, Notion is designed to combine the various programs a business might use for functions like HR, sales, and product planning in a single hub. It uses simple templates that let users add or remove features, and remote workers can easily collaborate on notes, databases, calendars, and project boards. This high level of customizability sets Notion apart from other work apps. It's also what's made it so popular among people looking to map out their free time. It started to gain traction around 2018 in YouTube's thriving productivity subculture, where videos of fans swapping time management tips and guides to organizing their lives regularly rack up millions of views.

Since then, its following has snowballed. More than 275,000 people have joined a dedicated subreddit, tens of thousands of users share free page templates in private Facebook groups, and TikTok videos advising viewers on how to make their Notion pages look pretty have been watched hundreds of millions of times. "You don't have to change your habits to how rigid software is. The software will change how your mind works," says Akshay Kothari, Notion's cofounder and chief operating officer. "I think that's actually been a big reason why you see so much love in the community: because people feel like the things they build are theirs." While platforms like Notion are great for people who enjoy feeling organized, spending too much time optimizing and organizing our lives can be counterproductive when we prioritize creating to-do lists over completing the actual tasks on them, says Gabriele Oettingen, a psychology professor at New York University. It's a phenomenon known as the planning fallacy.

Using Notion to track whether you're drinking enough water or going jogging, or using it to plan assignments, doesn't necessarily mean you're actually getting those things done. "In a way, Notion might help me to get structure, but it might not work to get me going," she says.