Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, considered changing how the company studies social issues after internal research on Instagram's impact on teen girls' mental health was made public, according to The Verge. This news emerged as Senate Democrats introduced a bill to ban Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from using facial recognition technology, as reported by Ars Technica. Simultaneously, the face-recognition app Mobile Fortify, used by US immigration agents, was revealed by Wired to be unreliable in identifying individuals.
The Verge reported that Zuckerberg's concerns arose after The Wall Street Journal published a story about Meta's findings on Instagram. The CEO reportedly wondered if Meta should alter its research methods.
Meanwhile, a bill called the "ICE Out of Our Faces Act" was introduced by Senate Democrats. Ars Technica noted that the bill would prohibit immigration officers from using biometric surveillance systems, including facial recognition and other technologies like voice recognition. It would also mandate the deletion of any data collected from such systems in the past.
Wired reported that the Department of Homeland Security launched the Mobile Fortify app in the spring of 2025 to determine or verify the identities of individuals stopped or detained by DHS officers. The rollout was linked to an executive order signed by President Donald Trump. However, according to Wired, the app is not designed to reliably identify people in the streets and was deployed without proper scrutiny.
In other tech news, Ars Technica reported that AI companies are shifting from AI assistants to AI agents that manage teams of AI agents. This shift, which Anthropic and OpenAI are spearheading, aims for users to delegate tasks to a workforce of AI agents. Also, Ars Technica reported that the search engine Bing blocked approximately 1.5 million independent websites hosted on Neocities, a platform known for archiving websites in the style of GeoCities.
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