Imagining an internet without TikTok
The bill to require TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent company or face a nationwide ban made it to President Joe Biden’s desk on Wednesday as part of a huge foreign aid package that passed through Congress this week. And Biden, as he previously promised, signed the bill into law. ByteDance now has nine months to sell TikTok, a deadline that Biden can opt to extend once by 90 days. And while TikTok could avoid a ban with a successful sale or court challenge, the new law means Americans might want to start imagining an online world without TikTok. The push to either ban TikTok or excise the platform…
Your brain’s privacy is at risk. The US just took its first big step toward protecting it.
If you take it for granted that nobody can listen in on your innermost thoughts, I regret to inform you that your brain may not be private much longer. You may have heard that Elon Musk’s company Neuralink surgically implanted a brain chip in its first human. Dubbed “Telepathy,” the chip uses neurotechnology in a medical context: It aims to read signals from a paralyzed patient’s brain and transmit them to a computer, enabling the patient to control it with just their thoughts. In a medical context, neurotech is subject to federal regulations. But researchers are also creating noninvasive neurotech. Already, there are AI-powered brain decoders that can translate into…
