Unity Lays Off 25% Of It’s Work Force, Is Having A Bad Time

Failures

from the yikes dept

The bad times for Unity continue, it seems. Or, at the very least, for the ostensibly hardworking men and women that called the company home. The bad times really began late last summer when Unity decided to drastically change its pricing scheme both for future projects that used the game engine, and, somehow, retroactively as well, all without any transparency or much notice. This led to massive fallout among game developers, with a ton of them swearing off the engine entirely, while associated dev groups around the internet just simply shut down. Then Unity CEO John Riccitiello resigned, the company walked back some portion of its new pricing plan, and an interim CEO was named in James Whitehurst, formerly of Red Hat.

All of that takes you up to October of 2023. And that’s when the layoffs began. In November of 2023, Unity laid off over 250 workers, or something like 4% of its workforce. That was part of a plan to shut down a division it spent over a billion dollars acquiring several years ago. And now, two months later, the company has announced that it is laying off another 1,800 workers, or a full quarter of its remaining employees.

“This decision was not taken lightly, and we extend our deepest gratitude to those affected for their dedication and contributions,” Unity Director of PR Kelly Ekins said in a statement to The Verge. Ekins added that the layoffs will be spread across “all teams,” and a company spokesperson told Reuters that this round of layoffs will be complete by March, with additional internal changes coming thereafter.

The massive staffing cuts come after over 1,300 layoffs already implemented across the company in multiple waves since June 2022 (including those November Weta Digital cuts). Despite that, Unity’s statement to the SEC says these further cuts are necessary “to position [the company] for long-term and profitable growth.”

We’ll see about that growth, but it’s going to be hard to come by given the massive hit in goodwill and interest the company has taken for its core business in providing the Unity game engine. This doesn’t smell like some kind of positioning for growth at all, in fact. Instead, it sounds like classic shareholder value generation by massively trimming obligations such that stock prices rise in preparation for a sale. And, when you couple all the layoffs with reports of the state of Unity’s financial books, well, it drives the point home even further.

The company’s recent financial statements show why such a drastic change is even being considered. Despite annual revenues measured in the billions, Unity has struggled to show a profit in recent years, reporting net losses of $859 million for the 12 months ending in September 2023.

Notably, while the stock price jumped after the layoffs were announced, its price is still way, way down from just three years or so ago. Still, it’s trending back up significantly overall since Whitehurst came on board and started really driving the cost-trimming. Again, all the hallmarks of a play to make the company as attractive to buyers as possible.

And it seems as though the company is still banking on the fallout over the new pricing scheme to subside and for developers to jump back on board.

Even with the massively reduced headcount and new focus on the engine business, Unity isn’t expecting its corporate fortunes to turn around any time soon. In his November investor letter, Whitehurst said, “We expect the impact of this [runtime fee] business model change to have minimal benefit in 2024 and ramp from there as customers adopt our new releases.”

If the company really is trying to make a new go of it after all of this reputational self-immolation, all I can say is: good luck, you’re going to need it.

Filed Under: layoffs, video games
Companies: unity

California Cops Now Have To Lead With The Pretext When Making Pretextual Stops

Legal Issues

from the do-YOU-know-why-you-pulled-me-over? dept

A law passed last year has now taken effect in California. This attempt to limit pretextual stops and biased policing means California law enforcement officers will no longer be able to start every traffic stop with an impromptu Q&A session. They’ll have to get right to the point.

Here’s what the law says:

(a) A peace officer making a traffic or pedestrian stop, before engaging in questioning related to a criminal investigation or traffic violation, shall state the reason for the stop. The officer shall document the reason for the stop on any citation or police report resulting from the stop.

And this is what it would look like in practice, as stated late last year by a California law enforcement official:

“This is instead of the officer asking a driver, ‘Do you know why I pulled you over?’” LAPD Captain Steven Ramos told the commission. “Now, the onus is on the officer to tell the individual why they pulled them over.”

Which is the way it should always be everywhere. That question has always been stupid. You pulled me over. You tell me. It’s not a serious question.

If the LAPD official seems receptive to this change, it’s probably because the LAPD has already made steps to limit pretextual stops by requiring something more than “let’s go on a fishing expedition!”

Under a policy approved in March, officers must have a reason to suspect a more serious crime is afoot before initiating a pretext stop, and they are required to record their reasoning on body camera before the stop.

[…]

The change appears to be having the intended effect. A Times analysis of LAPD records has found that in the months since the new policy went into effect, officers are stopping far fewer people for the minor violations that can mark the start of pretext stops and are conducting fewer searches during those stops.

Go figure. Requiring cops to actually suspect something before engaging in a stop results in fewer stops, fewer searches and… more contraband. According to the data, LAPD officers have seen a slight uptick in discovered contraband since the policy change, which suggests the quality of stops may be increasing despite the number of stops over small violations dropping from 21% to 12% of all stops.

The LAPD’s policy requires officers to tell people why they’ve pulled them over and document that on their body-worn cameras. This new law basically codifies that policy and expands it statewide.

Of course, there’s an exception.

Subdivision (a) does not apply when the officer reasonably believes that withholding the reason for the stop is necessary to protect life or property from imminent threat, including, but not limited to, cases of terrorism or kidnapping.

That loophole will need to be monitored closely. It can’t possibly be closed, given the reality of law enforcement. Suggestions abound — some tied to other traffic/pedestrian stop reporting mandated by the same law. But the way forward is still unclear.

It’s not clear who would decide whether an officer’s refusal to disclose the basis for a stop was reasonable; a state board has been considering regulations to require officers to tell their superiors, and the state, why they believed full disclosure would endanger them.

They’d better come up with some good excuses. It’s no longer a matter of breaking policy. This sort of thing is now literally breaking the law.

And, of course, law enforcement unions are against this, even if they can’t seem to muster coherent counterarguments.

In opposition, the California State Sheriffs’ Association argued that “traffic stops can be among the most dangerous types of interactions that peace officers encounter” and they should remain free to take immediate action without first explaining their reasons.

So… the union thinks cops can’t state the reason for the stop into their recording devices during the time it takes to exit the car and walk up to the stopped car? There’s absolutely no logic to this statement. If it’s a guns-out stop, it isn’t pretextual. This law is intended to limit pretextual stops and that’s what it will do. The CSSA’s argument is one of pure desperation — the kind made by people who firmly believe law enforcement should be treated as a law unto itself, answerable to no one.

This is a good thing and should be copied by more states. It will increase the quality of stops, deter exploratory stops and searches, and force officers to focus on serious crime, rather than poorly lit plates or dangling air fresheners. If traffic stops are truly “among the most dangerous types of interactions,” anything that reduces the number of stops is bound to increase officer safety, right? I mean, that’s what the union rep said. Better stops, more production, and a whole lot less hassle is going to work out better for everyone.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, biased policing, california, fishing expeditions, lapd, police, pretextual stops

New York’s Watered Down ‘Right To Repair’ Bill Goes Live

Legal Issues

from the fix-your-own-shit dept

In late 2022, the state of New York finally passed new right to repair legislation after years of activist pressure. The bill, which went live this week, gives New York consumers the right to fix their electronic devices themselves or have them more easily repaired by an independent repair shop, instead of being forced to only obtain repairs through costly manufacturer repair programs.

In short, the bill requires that some manufacturers of some products provide consumers and indie repair shops access to the tools, parts, and manuals needed to repair some consumer tech products. Estimates by consumer groups are that it should save NY consumers somewhere in the ballpark of around $300 per year:

“For many years [repair shops have] been trying to cobble together all of those elements, but big manufacturers have clamped down on access to tools and parts,” Chuck Bell, a program director at Consumer Reports, said on WNYC’s “Morning Edition.” “They’ve made it really hard for consumers to do even simple repairs such as replacing a cracked screen, a battery or a hard drive.”

Here’s the catch: relentless lobbying by numerous tech companies and manufacturers resulted in New York Governor Kathy Hochul aggressively watering down the law before it finally passed. As a result, it doesn’t actually cover many of the sectors where annoying repair monopolization efforts are the worst, including cars, medical devices, agricultural hardware, E-bikes, home alarm systems, or power tools.

The law also only covers any tech product sold in New York on or after July 1, 2023. Additional restrictions, added by industry and Hochul at the last second, force consumers to buy entire “repair assemblages” instead of individual parts. Hochul didn’t really bother to give a useful explanation as to why she lobotomized the law in such a fashion, but the action generally speaks for itself.

Still, any progress is notable for a movement that continues to see widespread, bipartisan public support. All told, Massachusetts, Colorado, New York, Minnesota, Maine and California have all passed some flavor of right to repair legislation, and the momentum shows no sign of slowing down, even if industry has had some notable success ensuring these laws aren’t quite living up to their full potential.

Filed Under: consumer rights, independent repair shops, kathy hochul, new york, new york state, right to repair

ExTwitter Users Getting Fed Up With The Crypto Spam And AI Bots Elon Promised To Clean Up

Failures

from the turns-out-content-moderation-is-difficult dept

Among the various promises that Elon made regarding his takeover of ExTwitter, was that he was there to clean up the spam and bot problem. He seemed to think that the previous regime had fallen down on the job, and that somehow he would have the magical answer to dealing with such things.

About that.

Originally, Elon seemed to think that changing Twitter’s verification system into a subscription service would get rid of the bots. That did not work. More recently, he’s shifted into making anyone who wants to post anything to Twitter to have to pay a nominal amount as his solution.

All of this assumes, incorrectly, that it’s not worth it for scammers and spammers to pay tiny bits to flood Elon’s playground with shit.

And flood it, they are.

A report from Bleeping Computer notes that ExTwitter has become completely overwhelmed with crypto scam ads, and most of them are coming from accounts paying Elon his cut. And even Elon’s biggest supporters are getting sick of it.

And it seems clear that it’s worth it to scammers to pay $8/month for access to the absolute gullible fucks on ExTwitter. As Bleeping Computer highlighted last month, one of these crypto drainer scams that has been regularly advertising on ExTwitter was able to steal $59 million from suckers on ExTwitter via purchased ads:

On X, better known as Twitter, advertisements for MS Drainer are so abundant that ScamSniffer reports they account for six out of nine phishing ads on their feed.

Notably, many of the scam ads on X are posted from legitimate “verified” accounts that carried the blue tick badge when the ad was shown.

The account MalwareHunterTeam is out there finding more and more such scam ads on ExTwitter. Here are just a few:

And more and more and more.

Meanwhile, Elon’s other big “innovation” to try to stop the bots was to change the way the API worked so that it charged ridiculous fees to use. Of course, all that’s done is driven away the useful bots, but left the scam bots free to be.

Which brings us to the other story demonstrating Elon’s absolute failure to deal with bots on the platform. Boingboing details how Parker Malloy has found that there appear to be a shitload of fake bot accounts that are clearly running off of ChatGPT. And you can tell that by simply searching for the phrase “goes against OpenAI’s use case policy.” You find tons and tons of tweets using that phrasing, as it is clearly coming from a bot powered by ChatGPT, but where whoever set it up didn’t think that OpenAI would reject their query.

Post by @parkermolloy

View on Threads

And, look. Fighting spam and bots is a big challenge. And if Elon had approached this with even the slightest humility, you might feel bad for him. But instead, he insisted, without knowledge, that Twitter’s previous management was failing to take the problem seriously, was lying about how much spam was on the platform (even though that was only because he couldn’t understand how Twitter was reporting things), and that somehow he would have the singular solution to solve it.

Instead, he fired basically anyone who knew anything about fighting spam, put in place braindead stupid solutions that anyone with any experience in the field would tell you wouldn’t work… and then made the problem way, way, way worse.

No wonder Elon is now moving on to trying to blame “DEI” for anything bad that happens in the world (someone should tell him that his own companies, Tesla and SpaceX, both advertise their DEI efforts, but alas…)

Filed Under: ai, bots, chatgpt, crypto spam, elon musk, scams, spam, verification
Companies: twitter, x

Daily Deal: TexTalky AI Text-to-Speech

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Turn any text or script into a lifelike natural human voice in easy 3 steps using TexTalky, an AI text-to-speech synthesizer. No robotic voices! TexTalky uses the latest cloud-based AI technology powered by Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon. It covers more than 1140 international languages and accents, and over 900 kinds of lifelike human voices that meet most of your needs. Unlimited use cases. From YouTube narration and marketing content to documentaries and more, you can choose your synthesized audio to turn out exactly how you need them. It’s on sale for $37.99.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

EFF Asks Pennsylvania’s Top Court To Stop Cops From Googling For Suspects

Privacy

from the can't-just-make-everyone-a-suspect dept

Law enforcement officers learned long ago that if all they have is a crime scene and no likely suspects, there was no reason to wear out shoe leather beating the streets for alleged criminals. They don’t even need to leave the office. All they have to do is produce a subpoena for certain third-party records and/or convince a judge that the only “probable cause” they need to demonstrate is the probability Google houses the data they seek.

In some cases, investigators used Google to identify devices carried by people in or around crime scenes in hopes of finding probable suspects. This option — the geofence warrant — has proven extremely popular in recent years. The constitutionality of these warrants — which require Google (and it’s almost always Google) to search its entire repository of location data — is still up in the air.

So is the constitutionality of another Google-centric law enforcement option which also requires Google to search all of its data to find the stuff cops are looking for. These are keyword warrants and they work in reverse: instead of showing probable cause to search people’s Google search histories, investigators simply present Google with a warrant demanding information on anyone who used certain search terms.

The law is still unsettled here. The EFF is hoping the law will be a bit more settled, but on the side of the Constitution, in a case currently being considered by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Everyone deserves to search online without police looking over their shoulder, yet millions of innocent Americans’ privacy rights are at risk in Commonwealth v. Kurtz—only the second case of its kind to reach a state’s highest court. The brief filed by EFF, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), and the Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (PACDL) challenges the constitutionality of a keyword search warrant issued by the police to Google. The case involves a massive invasion of Google users’ privacy, and unless the lower court’s ruling is overturned, it could be applied to any user using any search engine. 

It’s an important case. As the EFF notes, this is only the second case of its kind to reach the highest level of a state court system. It has filed a brief [PDF] that not only points out how these warrants far exceed the bounds of the “general warrants” that prompted the creation of the Fourth Amendment, but how dangerous it would be to allow government entities to, in essence, initiate searches of every Google user’s search terms using nothing more than a single warrant.

As the EFF points out, people are far more willing to share intimate thoughts and desires (as expressed in the form of search queries) with Google than with their fellow human beings. Google makes no judgments. It simply goes looking for what it’s being asked to look for.

Unfortunately, the government generally doesn’t even know what it’s looking for when it demands Google perform searches of hundreds of millions of users’ search terms on its behalf.

Keyword search warrants are unlike typical warrants for electronic information in a crucial way: they are not targeted to specific individuals or accounts. Instead, they require a provider to search its entire reserve of user data and identify any and all users or devices who searched for words or phrases specified by police. As in this case, the police generally have no identified suspects when they seek a keyword search warrant. Instead, the sole basis for the warrant is the officer’s hunch that the perpetrator might have searched for something related to the crime.

On top of this hunch that someone may have searched for something, investigators add several more guesses. Not only do they not know who they’re searching for, they don’t know what search terms were used. This creates a dragnet — one cast by Google in an effort to comply with the warrant’s demands.

Several known keyword warrants have, as in this case, sought to identify everyone who searched for a specific address or variations of the victim’s name. However, in other cases police have investigated other search queries, such as the name of someone else related to the case. In at least two known cases, the search queries have been far broader. In response to a series of bombings in Austin, Texas, police sought everyone who searched for words like “low explosives” and “pipe bomb.“ And in Brazil, Google challenged a warrant for everyone who searched for the name of a popular politician who was assassinated and the busy street in Rio de Janeiro where she was killed.

These warrants are problematic and they have little to do with the ideals represented by the Fourth Amendment, like probable cause, specificity, and minimizing intrusions on citizens’ personal lives. And, like any dragnet, they’re capable of implicating innocent people.

Because keyword warrants require Google to search its entire data repository, they have the potential to implicate innocent people who happen to search for something an officer believes is incriminating. Here, Google identified responsive queries from fourteen different IP addresses within the eight days covered by the warrant. Keyword warrants could also allow officers to target people based on political speech and by their association with others. Police used multiple geofence warrants to identify people at political protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Minneapolis after police killings in those cities. Similarly, with keyword warrants, officers could seek to identify everyone who searched for the location or the organizers of a protest.

On top of the Fourth Amendment problem, keyword warrants create a First Amendment problem. Users could start censoring their own searches in hopes of avoiding being swept up in law enforcement dragnets. And because even investigators don’t know who or what they’re searching for, some users may decide to avoid searching for anything that might be considered indicative of criminal activity.

The lower court saw no problem with the warrant, reasoning the data sought by the warrant was covered by the Third Party Doctrine, rather than the Fourth Amendment or the state’s own constitution. As for the “willingly shared with third parties” aspect of the Third Party Doctrine, the lower court said Google users were well aware their search terms could be shared with law enforcement. After all, they’d all agreed to Google’s terms of service, which stated data would be stored by Google and handed over to the government if properly requested.

The EFF points out this broad interpretation of the Third Party Doctrine would, if adopted by the state Supreme Court, allow the government to collect all sorts of content and data from any service provider using nothing more than a non-specific warrant or (in some cases) subpoena.

Because all service providers impose TOS similar to Google’s, the lower court’s analysis, if correct, would apply to digital data maintained with any service provider, not just Google. Further, because providers’ terms apply to all content they store, not just search queries, this analysis would apply to any and all emails, files, photos, attachments, and other electronic “papers and effects” stored with any of those providers. Not only would that conclusion vitiate Fourth Amendment protections for the hundreds of millions of people who use these services, it would mean that a private company’s TOS trump Fourth Amendment protections for all content maintained with the provider. This is inconsistent with public expectations, well-recognized Fourth Amendment case law, and the stated positions of every member of the Supreme Court in Carpenter. If adopted by this Court, it would undermine fundamental privacy protections in communications media used by nearly all Americans.

The warrant at issue here is particularly bad, which should hopefully nudge the state Supreme Court to find it unconstitutional or, at the very least, establish ground rules for similar warrants.

[T]he warrant in this case was based on nothing more than an officer’s speculation that the perpetrator may have used a search engine sometime within the eight days prior to the crime to look for the victim’s house. The only stated connection to Google for this hunch was that its search engine is dominant, suggesting that if the perpetrator had conducted such a query, Google might have a record of it. The affidavit includes no facts to support these speculations. As the affidavit notes, the affiant “believed” that the perpetrator “was very familiar with the victim” and that both the victim and her residence were “not randomly targeted.” Given these beliefs, it is just as likely, if not more so, that the perpetrator knew the victim and would not need to use a search engine to identify her or her house.

Whichever way the state Supreme Court chooses to view this, it will set precedent. It is only the second case involving these warrants to make it this far in state courts and its decision will be used to craft challenges (or defend against them) all across the nation. Until a federal court with significant reach rules on this issue, what’s said in Pennsylvania will set the tone for the nation’s law enforcement agencies. It’s an important case. All we can do is hope this court recognizes this new form of “general warrant” for what it is.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, geofence warrant, location data, privacy
Companies: google

HP Hit With Yet Another Lawsuit Over Bricking Printers That Use Third-Party Ink Cartridges

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the this-is-for-your-own-good dept

Hewlett Packard (HP) has been socked with yet another lawsuit for crippling the printers of consumers who use cheaper third-party ink cartridges. The lawsuit, filed by eleven plaintiffs in US District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, states that HP misleadingly used its “Dynamic Security” firmware updates to “create a monopoly” over replacement printer ink cartridges.

The lawsuit seeks monetary damages of $5 million, demands that HP immediately cease crippling its printers in such a fashion, and is seeking a trial by jury. From the lawsuit:

“In 2022 and 2023, HP distributed updates to many of its registered customers that
featured the functionality of “Dynamic Security” previously discontinued: it disabled the printer if the customer replaced the existing cartridge with a non-HP cartridge. There was no notification of any kind at the time of this firmware update that might inform customers that the update would reduce the printer’s functionality. Even if a customer were able to discern that the update would impede the printer’s functionality with other cartridges, there was no means of opting out of the update.”

Despite years of criticism, HP has only doubled down. As Ars Technica notes, CFO Marie Myers has even lauded the obnoxious, predatory behavior as “relationship building”:

“We absolutely see when you move a customer from that pure transactional model … whether it’s [to] Instant Ink, plus adding on that paper, we sort of see a 20 percent uplift on the value of that customer because you’re locking that person, committing to a longer-term relationship.”

When it comes to obnoxious DRM and bizarre, greedy restrictions, nobody does it better than printer manufacturers. The industry has long waged a not-so-subtle war on its own customers, routinely rolling out firmware updates or DRM preventing them from using more affordable, competitor printer cartridges. Usually under the flimsy pretense of consumer safety and security.

A few years ago, printer manufacturers took this tactic one step further, and began preventing users from being able to use a multifunction printer’s scanner if they didn’t have company sanctioned ink installed. Canon was hit with a $5 million lawsuit in 2021 for the practice, but was able to quietly settle it privately without facing much accountability, or having to change much of its behavior.

In 2022 HP was also hit with a lawsuit (pdf) for preventing scanners from working without sanctioned ink cartridges installed, and not being transparent about this with customers. HP has spent a few years trying to wiggle out of the suit, but hasn’t had much luck. Last August, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman ruled that that case could also proceed.

It’s not clear how many lawsuits and regulatory actions are required before HP gets the message that this kind of behavior is violently unpopular bullshit that harms the company’s overall brand at the cost of a slight goose in quarterly earnings.

Filed Under: consumer rights, drm, hardware, ink cartridges, ink jet, laserjet, printers, right to repair
Companies: hp

WotC Denies Using AI Generative Art In Promo Materials, Later Admits, Yeah, It Did

Overhype

from the whoopsie dept

D&D and Magic: The Gathering publisher, Wizards of the Coast (WotC), has certainly been pissing folks off as of late. Between its attempt to change its OGL license for D&D both in the future and retroactively last year combined with sending the literal Pinkerton Agency after someone who received some unreleased Magic cards in error, the company appears to have taken a draconian turn in recent years. Then, over the summer, there was a bunch of backlash when WotC was found to have included art from one of its artists that had been partially generated using AI generative art in one of its books. After that whole fiasco, WotC publicly swore off using any art in its products that was not 100% human created.

And it’s important to note that this is a huge thing in the D&D and Magic worlds. The books, cards, and associated items that players and fans buy from these games have always been revered in part for the fantastic art that has come along with them. And the artists contributing to them have been equally celebrated.

So, when sharp-eyed observers of recent promotional art that came out for Magic pointed out it sure looked like the images around the cards showed signs of having been generated by AI, well, WotC came out with a very strong denial.

“We understand confusion by fans given the style being different than card art, but we stand by our previous statement,” the company tweeted. “This art was created by humans and not AI.”

And even as many sleuths on social media and elsewhere kept up the pushback insisting with example after example within the images themselves that, no, this had all the telltale signs of being AI generated, even that PC Gamer article was referring to all of this as an unfortunate “false positive” resulting from a hyper-sensitivity to the intrusion of AI in art and image generation.

But, no, it turns out that the images around the cards was in fact generated in part using AI, as admitted later on by WotC itself.

After sharp-eyed Magic: The Gathering fans cried foul over a recent promotional image’s seeming use of generative AI, Wizards of the Coast initially asserted that it was fully human-made. However, just two days on Wizards has deleted the offending marketing post and acknowledged that generative tools were used in the image.

On Twitter, Wizards of the Coast stated that the image background was sourced from a third-party vendor, and claimed that “It looks like some AI components that are now popping up in industry standard tools like Photoshop crept into our marketing creative, even if a human did the work to create the overall image.”

You can go read the company’s additional full statement on its website as well. And, as statements about such things go, it’s a fairly good one. It points out that this wasn’t done intentionally or with knowledge by the company, that the company would be working with its 3rd party vendors to make it clear that human-made art is a requirement, and it promised transparency moving forward when it came to this sort of thing.

But the real lesson here is that companies have to be very careful with this sort of thing. The internet has enough well-trained Sherlocks out there who are holding companies to their word, looking for anywhere where AI generated content is being snuck in to replace human-made content that, as the technology stands today, there’s a good chance any such uses will be found out. They might as well save themselves the trouble and just make sure the humans are doing the work.

Filed Under: ai, marketing, promos
Companies: wizards of the coast, wotc

California Appeals Court Says Police Drone Footage Not Automatically Exempt From Public Records Law

Legal Issues

from the seeing-more-from-the-all-seeing-eyes dept

Public records requesters in California recently scored a small victory in one of the state’s appeals courts. The EFF, which filed an amicus brief in this case, summarizes the decision at its website.

Video footage captured by police drones sent in response to 911 calls cannot be kept entirely secret from the public, a California appellate court ruled last week.

The decision by the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth District came after a journalist sought access to videos created by Chula Vista Police Department’s “Drones as First Responders” (DFR) program. The police department is the first law enforcement agency in the country to use drones to respond to emergency calls, and several other agencies across the U.S. have since adopted similar models.

This case began when journalist Arturo Castañares filed a public records request with the Chula Vista PD seeking drone use records, as well as any footage recorded between March 1 and March 31, 2021. The PD dragged their feet a bit before handing him some of the records he’d requested. But it refused to hand over any of the recordings, claiming the footage was exempt from the California Public Records Act (CPRA) because every single recording was an “investigative record.”

If this excuse sounds familiar, it’s because the Los Angeles Police Department made the same claim about its automatic license plate reader (ALPR) data. According to the LAPD, every single record collected by its plate readers (at a rate of nearly 2 million plate captures a week) was exempt from disclosure because they were (all several million of them!) part of ongoing investigations.

This ridiculous claim resulted in a public records lawsuit and a subsequent smackdown from the state’s top court, which ruled the LAPD could not categorically deny requesters these records because it was insane to state (and more insane to expect people to believe) that every single driver in the state was the subject of a criminal investigation.

A bit more credibly, the Chula Vista PD claimed it would be “unreasonably burdensome” to redact footage and/or sort through its recordings to determine which were actually linked to criminal investigations.

Neither of these arguments manage to secure much sympathy from the court. While it’s not actually willing to rule that all drone footage is subject to the CPRA, it’s just as unlikely that all of it is exempt. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

We agree with Castañares that the superior court erred in determining, as a matter of law, all video footage from the drone program is exempt under section 7923.600, subdivision (a) as records of investigations. However, it might be the case, after further inquiry, consistent with this opinion, that the majority of the video footage is exempt. That said, we cannot make that determination on the record before us.

The decision [PDF] notes the case of “everyone’s under investigation” ALPR data, which mildly instructive, is a bit different than what’s going on here. While the claim that every bit of footage is subject to this public records law exemption is a bit much, it’s not quite as egregious as the argument raised by the LAPD in its ALPR records lawsuit.

Although Castañares claims the instant matter is analogous to ACLU Foundation, we observe a key difference between the two cases in considering whether the requested drone video footage falls under the records of investigations exemption of the CPRA. In ACLU Foundation, the ALPR scans were random and not aimed at any particular person or in response to any call to service from the public. In contrast, here, the drone video footage is recorded only after an officer determines a drone should be dispatched in response to a 911 call. Thus, unlike the ALPR scans in ACLU Foundation, the drone video footage in the instant matter required an act of discretion by the City’s police. This is a critical difference between the two programs and underscores why we are not persuaded that ACLU Foundation is instructive regarding the application of the records of investigations exemption here.

Since it’s somewhere in the middle, the appeals court says more information is needed to determine what can and can’t be released. Any arguments over what’s been withheld can be taken up with the lower court.

Instead of adopting such an all-encompassing rule, we conclude a more nuanced approach to the drone video footage is apt. The drone video footage should not be treated as a monolith, but rather, it can be divided into separate parts corresponding to each specific call. Then each distinct video can be evaluated under the CPRA in relation to the call triggering the drone dispatch. Further, as an initial determination, the City is well equipped to categorize the drone video footage in this manner. However, we do not propose to instruct the City regarding what process it must use to evaluate the drone video footage or suggest that a City designee must watch the footage to make the necessary determinations. Indeed, it could be more efficient for the City to simply review call logs, AARs, and other related information to ascertain what drone video footage falls into the three categories. After the City categorizes the drone video footage, Castañares then should be permitted the opportunity to challenge or otherwise question any of the determinations the City made. To the extent the parties disagree on the categorization of the drone video footage, we trust the trial court to resolve those issues of disputed fact…

This ruling will immediately affect the Chula Vista PD, which must start reviewing footage and turning it over to the records requester. But, as the EFF points out in its post, it won’t be the only law enforcement agency affected. Chula Vista may have taken the lead with drone deployments in response to 911 calls, but at least three other law enforcement agencies in California have since done the same thing.

This victory sends a message to other agencies in California adopting copycat programs, such as the Beverly Hills Police Department, Irvine Police Department, and Fremont Police Department, that they can’t abuse public records laws to shield every second of drone footage from public scrutiny.

The state public records law instructs agencies to err on the side of disclosure. But government agencies, more often than not, abuse blanket exemptions when not using other methods to limit responses or deter requests. This ruling, while limited, at least alters these contours a bit, which means there’s a bit more transparency in California going forward.

Filed Under: california, chula vista pd, cpra, investigative record, police, police drones, public records

Substack Realizes Maybe It Doesn’t Want To Help Literal Nazis Make Money After All (But Only Literal Nazis)

Content Moderation

from the you-don't-have-to-hand-it-to-the-nazis dept

Last year, soon after Elon completed his purchase of (then) Twitter, I wrote up a 20 level “speed run” of the content moderation learning curve. It seems like maybe some of the folks at Substack should be reading it these days?

As you’ll recall, last April, Substack CEO Chris Best basically made it clear that his site would not moderate Nazis. As I noted at the time, any site (in the US) is free to make that decision, but those making it shouldn’t pretend that it’s based on any principles, because the end result is likely to be that you have a site full of Nazis and… that tends not to be good for business because other people you might want to do business with might not want to be on the site welcoming Nazis.

Thus, it should not have been shocking when, by the end of the year, Substack had a site with a bunch of literal Nazis. And, no, we’re not just talking about people with strong political viewpoints that lead people who oppose them to call them Nazis. We’re talking about people who are literally embracing Naziism and Nazi symbols.

And Substack was helping them make money.

Even worse, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie put out a ridiculous self-serving statement pretending that their decision to help monetize Nazis was about civil liberties, even as the site regularly deplatformed anything about sex. At that point, you’re admitting that you moderate, and then it’s just a question over which values you moderate for. McKenzie was claiming, directly, that they were cool with Nazis, but sex was bad.

The point of the content moderation learning curve is not to say that there’s a right way or a wrong way to handle moderation. It’s just noting that if you run a platform that allows users to speak, you have to make certain calls on what speech you’re going to allow and what you’re not going to allow — and you should understand that some of those choices have consequences.

In the case of Substack, some of those consequences were that some large Substack sites decided to jump ship. Rusty Foster’s always excellent “Today in Tabs” switched over to Beehiiv. And then, last week, Platformer News, Casey Newton’s widely respected newsletter with over 170,000 subscribers, announced that if Substack refused to remove the Nazi sites, it would leave.

Content moderation often involves difficult trade-offs, but this is not one of those cases. Rolling out a welcome mat for Nazis is, to put it mildly, inconsistent with our values here at Platformer. We have shared this in private discussions with Substack and are scheduled to meet with the company later this week to advocate for change.

Meanwhile, we’re now building a database of extremist Substacks. Katz kindly agreed to share with us a full list of the extremist publications he reviewed prior to publishing his article, most of which were not named in the piece. We’re currently reviewing them to get a sense of how many accounts are active, monetized, display Nazi imagery, or use genocidal rhetoric. 

We plan to share our findings both with Substack and, if necessary, its payments processor, Stripe. Stripe’s terms prohibit its service from being used by “any business or organization that a. engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence or physical harm to persons or property, or b. engages in, encourages, promotes or celebrates unlawful violence toward any group based on race, religion, disability, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, or any other immutable characteristic.”

It is our hope that Substack will reverse course and remove all pro-Nazi material under its existing anti-hate policies. If it chooses not to, we will plan to leave the platform.

As a result of those meetings, Substack has now admitted that some of the outright Nazis actually do violate “existing” rules, and will be removed.

Substack is removing some publications that express support for Nazis, the company said today. The company said this did not represent a reversal of its previous stance, but rather the result of reconsidering how it interprets its existing policies.

As part of the move, the company is also terminating the accounts of several publications that endorse Nazi ideology and that Platformer flagged to the company for review last week.

The company will not change the text of its content policy, it says, and its new policy interpretation will not include proactively removing content related to neo-Nazis and far-right extremism. But Substack will continue to remove any material that includes “credible threats of physical harm,” it said.

As law professor James Grimmelann writes in response: “As content moderation strategies go, “We didn’t realize until now that the Nazis on our platform were inciting violence” perhaps raises more questions than it answers.”

Molly White, who remains one of the best critics of tech-boosterism, also noted that Substack’s decisions seemed likely to piss off the most people possible, by first coddling the Nazis (pissing off most people who hate Nazis), and then pissing off the people who cheered on the “we don’t moderate Nazis.”

In the end, Substack is apparently removing five Nazi newsletters. As White notes, this will piss off the most people possible. The people who want Substack to do more won’t be satisfied and will be annoyed it took pointing out the literal support for genocide for Substack to realize that maybe they don’t want literal Nazis. And the people who supported Substack will be annoyed that Substack was “pressured” into removing these accounts.

Again, there are important points in all of this, and it’s why I started this post off by pointing to the speed run post at the beginning. You can create a site and say you’ll host whatever kinds of content you want. You can create a site and say that you won’t do any moderation at all. Those are valid decisions to make.

But they’re not decisions that are in support of “free speech.” Because a site that caters to Nazis is not a site that caters to free speech. Because (as we’ve seen time and time again), such sites drive away people who don’t like being on a site associated with Nazis. And, so you’re left in a situation where you’re really just supporting Nazis and not much else.

Furthermore, for all of McKenzie’s pretend high-minded talk about “civil liberties” and “freedom,” it’s now come out that he had no problem at all trying to put his fingers on the scale to put together a list of (mostly) nonsense peddlers to sign a letter in support of his own views. McKenzie literally organized the “we support Substack supporting Nazis” letter signing campaign. Which, again, he’s totally allowed to do, but it calls into question his claimed neutrality in all of this. He’s not setting up a “neutral” site to host speech. He’s created a site that hosts some speech and doesn’t host other speech. It promotes some speech, and doesn’t promote other speech.

Those are all choices, and they have nothing to do with supporting free speech.

Running a private website is all about tradeoffs. You have to make lots of choices, and those choices are difficult and are guaranteed to piss off many, many people (no matter what you do). For what it’s worth, this is still why I think a protocol-based solution should beat a centralized solution every time, because with protocols you can setup a variety of approaches and let people figure out what works best, rather than relying on one centralized system.

Substack is apparently realizing that there were some tradeoffs to openly supporting Naziism, and will finally take some action on that. It won’t satisfy most people, and now it’s likely to piss off the people who were excited about Nazis on Substack. But, hey, it’s one more level up on the content moderation speed run.

Filed Under: content moderation, nazi bar, nazis
Companies: platformer, substack