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Google employees protest Israeli military contract

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A growing number of Googlers are speaking out against the company’s work with the Israel Defense Forces

Google employees protesting the company’s Project Nimbus contract with Amazon Web Services and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have gone public with a week of protest actions set to culminate in a multi-city demonstration headlined No Tech for Apartheid.

A multiethnic, multireligious group of Googlers calling themselves Jewish Diaspora in Tech hopes to pressure the corporate giant into dropping the mammoth $1.2 billion contract on moral grounds, arguing that by allowing Israel access to its most sophisticated machine learning and AI technology, Google is enabling crimes against the occupied Palestinian population.

Google marketing manager and leading anti-Nimbus advocate Ariel Koren announced her resignation on Tuesday after what she described as a pattern of hostility and retaliation from management. After seven years with the company, Koren said she was presented with an ultimatum – move from San Francisco to Google’s Brazil office or quit – over her efforts lobbying against the project.

“Google is aggressively pursuing military contracts and stripping away the voices of its employees through a pattern of silencing and retaliation towards me and many others,” Koren wrote in her resignation letter published on Medium. The secretive effort to provide an “all-encompassing cloud solution” powered by the company’s most advanced technology has seen Google abandon its prized transparency so much that employees have no idea what the tech they’re selling the IDF will really be used for, she claimed.

Koren and her colleagues are seeking basic transparency regarding what their labor will be used to do, she told Peacock TV, explaining that under the current regime, “we don’t understand the extent to which [our work] is going to be used to perpetrate systemic human rights violations by an agency and by a military that we know violates human rights in an extremely egregious and atrocious way every single day.” Worse, the Nimbus contract explicitly bars Google or Amazon from exerting control over how their services are used by the IDF.

Since the launch of Project Nimbus, Google has become an aggressively anti-Palestinian place to work, according to 15 employees whose recorded testimonials were released to coincide with Koren’s resignation. Google employees can no longer even “express any opinion of disagreement of the war waged on Palestinians without being called into an HR meeting with the threat of retaliation,” one Palestinian Googler said, while another was told using the phrase “support Palestine” was offensive.

“I feel like I’m making a living off the oppression of my family back home,” a third anonymous employee lamented.

They also charge that Project Nimbus violates Google’s vaunted AI code of ethics, which prohibits the company from using AI to cause harm, develop weapons, or conduct surveillance in violation of international norms. The code was devised after employee activism scuttled Project Maven, a Pentagon initiative that would have used Google’s AI to analyze drone surveillance footage for the purpose of improving targeting.

While Google declined to comment regarding specifics of Project Nimbus, a spokeswoman dismissed Koren’s claims regarding retaliation by management, explaining they had been “thoroughly investigated” and found baseless.

TECHNOLOGY

How much YouTube pays for 1 million views, according to creators

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  • YouTube creators earn money from Google-placed ads on their videos.
  • A number of factors determine how much money they make, including video views.
  • Creators said how much YouTube pays for 1 million views ranged from $3,400 to $30,000.

While many factors — content niche and country, among them — determine how much money a YouTuber earns on any particular video, the number of views it gets is perhaps the most significant.

When a YouTube video hits 1 million views, there’s almost a guaranteed big payday for its creator. In some cases, creators can make five-figures from a single video if it accrues that many views.

Three creators explained how much money YouTube had paid them. YouTube pays $3,400 to $30,000 for 1 million views, these creators said.

When tech creator Shelby Church spoke with Insider, she had earned $30,000 from a video about Amazon FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon). At the time, the video had accrued 1.8 million views.

Her RPM rate — or earnings per 1,000 views — are relatively high, she said, because of her content niche. Business, personal finance, and technology channels tend to earn more per view.

“YouTubers don’t always make a ton of money, and it really depends on what kind of videos you’re making,” she said.

Influencers can earn 55% of a video’s ad revenue if they are part of YouTube’s Partner Program, or YPP. To qualify for the program, they must have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time on their long-form videos.

They can also make money from shorts, YouTube’s short-form video offering. In order to qualify, creators need to reach 10 million views in 90 days and have 1,000 subscribers. YouTube pools ad revenue from shorts and pays an undisclosed amount to record labels for music licensing. Creators receive 45% of the remaining money based on their percentage of the total shorts views on the platform.

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Tesla employees shared sensitive images recorded by cars – Reuters

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Some pictures were turned into memes and distributed through internal chats, former workers told the agency

Tesla workers shared “highly invasive” images and videos recorded by customers’ electric cars, making fun of them on internal chat groups, several former employees of Elon Musk’s company have told Reuters.

The electric-car manufacturer obtains consent from its clients to collect data from vehicles in order to improve its self-driving technology. However, the company assures owners that the whole system is “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy,” the agency pointed out in its report on Thursday.

According to nine former workers who talked to the agency, groups of employees shared private footage of customers in Tesla’s internal one-on-one chats between 2019 and 2022.

One of the clips in question captured a man approaching his electric car while he was completely naked, one of the sources said.

Tesla recalls over 360,000 cars over self-driving threat

Others featured crashes and road-rage incidents. One particular video of a Tesla hitting a child on a bike in a residential area spread around the company’s office in San Mateo, California “like wildfire,” an ex-employee claimed.

“I’m bothered by it because the people who buy the car, I don’t think they know that their privacy is, like, not respected… We could see them doing laundry and really intimate things. We could see their kids,” another former worker told the agency.

Seven former employees also told Reuters that the software they used at work allowed them to see the location where the photo or video was made, despite Tesla assuring its customers that “camera recordings remain anonymous and are not linked to you or your vehicle.”

The agency noted that it could not obtain any of the pictures or clips described by its sources, who said they were all deleted. Some former employees also told the journalists that they had only seen private data being shared for legitimate purposes, such as seeking assistance for colleagues. Tesla did not respond when approached for comment on the issue by Reuters.

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Nordic nation’s military bans use of TikTok – media

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Sweden’s Defense Ministry has reportedly barred employees from using the Chinese-owned app on their work phones

Sweden’s military has reportedly cracked down on TikTok, decreeing that staff members are no longer allowed to use the Chinese-owned video-sharing application on their devices at work because of security concerns.

The Swedish Defense Ministry on Monday issued its decision, which was viewed by Agence-France Presse, banning the use of TikTok. Security concerns were raised based on “the reporting that has emerged through open sources regarding how the app handles user information and the actions of the owner company, ByteDance,” the ministry said.

The move follows similar restrictions imposed by other EU countries in recent weeks. For example, France banned government employees from downloading “recreational applications,” including TikTok, on their work phones. Norway barred use of the app on devices that can access its parliament’s computer network, while the UK and Belgium banned it on all government phones. Denmark’s Defense Ministry and Latvia’s Foreign Ministry imposed their TikTok bans earlier this month.

China responds to TikTok allegations

“Using mobile phones and tablets can in itself be a security risk, so therefore we don’t want TikTok on our work equipment,” Swedish Defense Ministry press secretary Guna Graufeldt told AFP.

The US, Canada and New Zealand previously banned their federal employees from using TikTok on government-issued devices, citing fears of ByteDance’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Members of Congress may try to ban the app from the US market altogether after testimony at a congressional hearing last week by TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew failed to ease their security concerns. “They’ve actually united Republicans and Democrats out of the concern of allowing the CCP to control the most dominant media platform in America,” US Representative Mike Gallagher said on Sunday in an ABC News interview.

Chinese officials have denied claims that TikTok is used to collect the personal data of its American users. “The Chinese government has never asked and will never ask any company or individual to collect or provide data, information or intelligence located abroad against local laws,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters last week. She added that Washington has attacked TikTok without providing any evidence that it threatens US security.

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