The Need-to-Know About Consumer Rights And Fine Print

If you’ve ever clicked “Accept” on those seemingly endless pages of “Terms and Conditions” without reading the fine print, you’re definitely not alone. But any time you do that, you’re putting yourself at risk.

That’s because of what fine print actually is—text outlining a company’s policies or a given contract in detail. Once you click “Accept,” you’re agreeing to whatever those terms are, whether you’ve read them or not.

With an average word count of 10,835, it’s hard to imagine anyone could read through and analyze the fine print, especially if you’re in a rush. On top of that, a recent study by Secure Data Recovery suggests that many companies make their fine print long-winded and confusing on purpose, too complicated for the average consumer to skim, let alone understand.

But there are ways to protect yourself. Here’s what to look out for in the fine print before you click “Accept.”

1. Data Privacy

In an increasingly digital world, data privacy is at the forefront of consumer concerns. Companies are aware of this and sometimes bury important data privacy policies in their fine print. The terms you agree to might give them permission to use your data however they want, up to and including selling it to other companies.

Phrases like “our affiliates,” “our partners,” or “third party” usually refer to data-sharing, allowing the company to sell personal data it collects from you to any willing buyer. This could lead to you getting bombarded with emails, texts, and other solicitations from those other companies, since they’ve bought your contact information.

Giving up your data rights also affects how companies can market to you. For example, they might use information that you intended to keep private, scraped from personal communication or other data you generate by using their product or service.

Look for an “Opt out” option if you need to use the product or service but want to keep your data safe.

2. Financial Policies

Burying financial policies in the fine print gives companies an advantage in marketing. They can market using exaggerated claims, qualifying them by outlining the true terms in the fine print. While it’s technically not deceptive advertising, it means that what you see in ads isn’t always what you get.

One example is hidden fees. A company webpage or a product description might offer free returns, while the fine print says there’s a 20% restocking fee for any returned merchandise—so while “returns” are technically free, restocking isn’t. Other hidden fees include cancellation fees, automatic renewal, rebates, interest rate changes, and other charges or penalties.

Also, look out for introductory offers or similar promotions. For example, a credit card company might offer a very low promotional interest rate for a fixed period but put the exact terms of that rate in the fine print. If you don’t read the fine print, you might sign up for the card thinking you’ve locked in a certain rate—and get blindsided when taking cash out or having a late payment causes your rate to suddenly skyrocket.

This can also happen with deferred interest offers. When a company defers your interest, that means you don’t have to pay interest for a fixed period. But if you don’t pay off the principal by the end of it, you’re on the hook for all the interest you incurred in that time. It’s only “interest-free” if you can pay off the principal during the promotional period.

3. Liability

We’d all like to think that companies stand behind their products and services. But companies can limit their liability, legally and otherwise, in the fine print.

The fine print will usually state what makes the agreement or certain policies void, even if the company doesn’t explicitly tell you otherwise. For example, if you’re dealing with warranty coverage for a product, the fine print might list conditions that automatically void your warranty or specifics that it doesn’t cover.

The fine print might also outline your legal rights. In some cases, companies can limit your ability to take legal action against them if something goes wrong, like if they fail to provide quality service or you’re injured by their product. Terms like “class-action waiver” and “mandatory arbitration” mean you can’t exercise certain legal options—you can’t pursue a class-action lawsuit or sue, no matter what happens.

Key Terms to Keep in Mind

What to look out for in the fine print depends on the specific agreement, like if it’s for a product or service, a free service or paid, and so on. But some things are worth checking for in any agreement you come across.

Before you agree to the fine print, look for the following:

• If your information will be shared with third parties or affiliates: You can search for the terms “third parties” and “affiliates” specifically to find these sections.
• Opt-out options
• Arbitration
• Waivers or releases: These are important because they could give the company the ability to use your data, or prevent you from pursuing any claims against the company.
• Any sections written in all caps: These usually contain some of the most important conditions.

Final Thoughts

It’s hard to sift through pages and pages of fine print—especially when some companies purposely make it difficult to read. But contracts are contracts, and those “Terms and Conditions” are binding, no matter what they’re for.

The next time you get hit with a pop-up full of fine print, keep an eye out for the things in this post to help protect your rights.

Read next: Research Shows that Tech Knowledge is Going to be a Must in Every Field in the Upcoming 10 Years
by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

Popular AI Image Generator Stable Diffusion Fails To Represent Minorities While Promoting Harmful Stereotypes, New Research Claims

There’s nothing worse than making use of AI technology to promote harmful stereotypes but it appears that one of the most popular AI-based image generators is doing just that.

Stable Diffusion has been deemed to be many people’s number one solution when it comes to AI image creation but thanks to new research by authors at the University of Washington, it might come at a specific cost.

This has to do with a complete erasure of minority groups including those belonging to indigenous communities, the study added, while making sure harmful stereotypes were promoted simultaneously.

Whenever a prompt was added to the tool, for example, to create a picture of an individual arising from a certain location, you’d find it creating light-skinned people too often.

Seeing the tool be a complete failure in terms of equal representation of all members of society really had the authors of the study stunned and they plan to go more into depth by presenting their research at this year’s conference in Singapore that has to do with Empirical Methods in Natural Language.

The same had to do with sexualizing pictures belonging to women arising from some kind of Latin nations like Peru or even Columbia as well as those arising from the likes of India and Egypt too.

The authors also spoke about how serious of a concern this was as it’s important to call out such tools that are serving as a harm to this world. There seems to be a complete removal of certain identity groups including those linked to nonbinary communities and those arising from indigenous communities.

If there happens to be a Stable Diffusion user arising from a particular part of Australia that is indigenous, they’d be amazed to figure out that they’ll never be represented by the powerful AI image generator tool.

Instead, lighter-skinned faces would be displayed even though indigenous communities were the first to settle and most of the land belonged to them originally in Australia.

To better gauge how the image generator portrays individuals, the authors of the research asked it to produce 50 different images featuring a person’s frontal view. The prompts generated were of various kinds including terms about six different types of continents and nearly 26 nations. A similar trial was done with gender.

The authors took those pictures produced by the tool and carried out a computed analysis and every one of them got a score. When the figure was closer to 0, it suggested less similar occurrences while those near to 1 had greater similarity.

The authors confirmed such results through manual means and that’s when they realized that most of the images were of the male gender and featured those having lighter skin tones and hailing from parts of Europe and North America. Meanwhile, the least correspondence was seen against the non-binary community and those hailing from the African and Asian regions.

In the same way, another interesting finding noted by the authors had to do with women of color being sexualized and most of them were from Latin America. Clearly, there is a huge problem that has to do with equal distribution of people but the authors failed to provide a proper solution on how to fix the matter.

The reason why the research was carried out on Stable Diffusion had to do with the fact that it put out its training data and is also open-source. The former is a rare occurrence when you look at other leading LLM including those from Dell.

Read next: Research Shows that Tech Knowledge is Going to be a Must in Every Field in the Upcoming 10 Years
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Research Shows that Tech Knowledge is Going to be a Must in Every Field in the Upcoming 10 Years

Per Scholas, a national nonprofit tech organization did research with the help of OnePoll that shows by the end of year 2033, all the jobs will be tech based. The survey was done among 650 chief executives, 100 hiring managers and 1500 regular workers of different companies. The purpose of the research was to find the trend of technology based equipment among workers. The survey also found out for which type of jobs will technology play an essential role in the upcoming 10 years.

The survey concluded that 98% CEOs think that tech knowledge is going to be a must part of jobs in the coming years. 75% of the workers weren't sure about their answer as most of them said that they think that tech skills will be important but not essential for jobs in the next 10 years. Even though the survey shows the trends in work spaces in the next 10 years, the research also shows that 57% of the workers are already learning new technology so they don’t be left behind in the tech race and lose their jobs. In the survey, 95% of Gen-Z were said to be learning new technology while in Gen-X, the percentage was 65%. 55% millennials are also learning new forms of technology to excel in their work.

What type of technology are workers from different types of jobs trying to learn? The research shows that 43% of the workers say that they are learning more about different apps, softwares, data science and artificial intelligence. Damien Howard, Chief Enterprise Solutions Officer at Per Scholas says that the data this research brings shows that companies are not intimidated to learn new forms of technology because technology can bring innovative, skillful and sustainable environments to their work. Although, some companies are not ready for the change. The reason lies in the fact that they don’t have a proper infrastructure of capital to do so.

45% CEOs say that they prefer hiring individuals with a 4 years degree, before anything else. But 44% say they choose individuals with strong command over tech to be the preference over a 4 years degree program. Damien Howard says that the trends in the companies are changing with the rapid change in working mediums. The authorities of the company want individuals with skills as well as tech knowledge to bring innovation and freshness to their work. Millennials know how important tech is as they have grown when the world was evolving in terms of technology. So, this group of people(27 years to 42 years) knows how important people with tech skills can bring into the work.

There are some skills that are very much in demand. IT tops the list with 39% employers looking for individuals with this skill set. AI and Cybersecurity come next with 29% and 28% demand respectively. When interviewing individuals, 63% employers demand technical knowledge to be the must. 49% look for communication skills while project management comes at 43%. Another interesting thing to be mentioned here is that 65% recruiters hire people with new ideas and perspectives, 42% recruiters prefer hiring individuals from different races and ethnicities.

The institutions where work is rapidly being shifted to technology are Engineering (79%), Education (71%) and tech (71%). The institutions with least upskilling rates are hospitality (49%), Banking (54%), Medical (58%). After tech, workers are also training in project management (38%), customer service (37%), graphic designing (36%) and leadership (36%).

Tech talent and skills can bring economic and well equipped changes to companies. Companies with the latest modes of work, diversity and opportunities can excel the most in the next 10 years.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Researchers Call for ML Transparency, Spotlight Energy-Intensive AI Content Creation; Image Generation Leads, Text Classification Is Lowest

Teaming up with Carnegie Mellon University, the brainiacs over at AI startup Hugging Face have stumbled upon a real eye-opener about the eco-impact of artificial intelligence.

When it comes to whipping up images with AI, whether it's for your run-of-the-mill stock photos or those fancy ID snapshots, it's like a gentle nudge to your smartphone's battery. Surprisingly, though, the script flips when you dive into the text-generating realm—turns out it's way thriftier on the energy front, clocking in at just 16% of a full smartphone charge.

Nope, the study's not just about pixels and paragraphs. It's a whole shebang of 13 tasks, from summing up stuff to sorting text. The brainy bunch kept it real by throwing experiments at 88 different models and giving them a spin with 30 diverse datasets. Each task got a grand treatment of 1,000 prompts, all in the name of cracking the code on carbon and figuring out the energy and carbon output during these digital back-and-forths.

The gist of their findings zooms in on the heavy lifting when AI's asked to whip up fresh content—be it words, summaries, captioning pics, or just churning out images. Surprise, surprise! Image-making takes the cake for emissions, while text sorting is the low-energy superhero in this tech showdown.

The researchers aren't pulling punches. They're waving the transparency flag in the machine learning arena, urging the brainy squad and the tech wizards to spill the beans on their models. Why? Because understanding the ins and outs of the AI's environmental ripple effect is key. Sure, charging your phone for a single AI image doesn't seem like a big deal, but when you throw in the crazy usage of models like ChatGPT—10 million users a day and a whopping 100 million monthly users—it's clear that the green impact of AI is no small potatoes.

Read next: AI Will Reduce Work Week to 4 Days by 2033
by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

Meta Grapples with Escalating Child Exploitation Scrutiny amid EU Probe and Legal Challenges

Social media giant Meta grapples with a grave issue—its struggle to curb the use of its platforms for promoting child abuse content.

A recent Wall Street Journal report brings this unsettling reality to light, revealing instances of child exploitation flourishing on Facebook and Instagram. European Union regulators intensify the scrutiny on Meta's child safety protocols in the wake of this revelation.

Tests conducted with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection expose how Meta's algorithms inadvertently facilitate the promotion of child exploitation. Shockingly, the recommendations include Facebook Groups and Instagram hashtags used as conduits for sharing such reprehensible material. Meta's delayed response to reports on this content allows the nefarious network to persist. The report unveils a disturbing scenario where Instagram accounts with millions of followers brazenly live-stream videos of child abuse, continuing despite prior reports.

One glaring example of Meta's inertia emerged when it initially dismissed a user report about a Facebook Group named "Incest." Only persistent pressure forced Meta to take down this group and others of a similar nature. European Union regulators, seizing this moment, employ a new law to scrutinize Meta's handling of child abuse material, imposing a stringent deadline of December 22 for data submission.

Meta, in response, asserts its commitment to fortifying defenses against predators, acknowledging the relentless determination of these criminals. The company claims improvements to internal systems and an expanded lexicon of child safety terms. Technology is deployed to identify and sideline potentially suspicious adults within Facebook Groups, disrupting their connections and content.

As the storm brews, Meta finds itself entangled in legal challenges, facing lawsuits from states accusing it of harming young users' mental well-being. Mark Zuckerberg prepares for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on child safety online. Simultaneously, regulators across the Atlantic invoke a new law to scrutinize Meta's handling of child abuse content.

The narrative unfolds against a backdrop of growing discontent, demanding accountability from Meta, once perched atop the digital pinnacle, now facing real-world consequences of its platform's inadequacies.

Photo: Dima Solomin / Unsplash

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by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

AI Will Reduce Work Week to 4 Days by 2033

AI can be seen positively or negatively based on who you might be asking at any given point in time, but in spite of the fact that this is the case, it appears that there is a high level of likelihood that it may reduce the work week. According to a study conducted by the think tank, Autonomy, it appears that AI will enable workers to work only 4 days out of the week instead of 5 and earn the same income.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that this change will mostly impact workers in the US and the UK, and we can extrapolate that these advantages would extend to other developed nations as well. The findings presented in this study seem to suggest that as many as 35 million workers in the US and 8 million in the UK will get the chance to work 4 days a week if the trend holds true for the next decade.

This would mean that a fairly significant proportion of the population would be working considerably less than might have been the case otherwise, and the wider economic impact of this change is likely also going to come into play. What's more is that 71% of workers based in the US could see their work hours reduced by 10%, and 88% of UK based workers will be able to avail the same benefits with all things having been considered and taken into account.

Reducing the work week could be significant because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up giving workers more free time. There have been many indications that human beings are extremely overworked in the modern age, and AI might make it possible to reverse this trend once and for all.

However, it bears mentioning that workers living in poorer parts of these countries would be less likely to enjoy a shorter work week. For example, the town of Boston in Lincolnshire, England will only see 15% of its work force get the chance to work four days a week. It will be interesting to see where things go from here on out, since there are a lot of different outcomes that could occur.

Photo: DIW - AIgen

Read next: It’s About Time Brands Start to Think About What Consumers Want When It Comes to Use of AI
by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World

TikTok is Set to Invest 12 Billion Euros to Start Working on European Data Centers

TikTok recently announced that it is going to invest a whopping 12 billion euros to win over European regulators. TikTok claims that it has established its own Norwegian data center and all of the TikTok data of Europeans is being regulated there. TikTok is the world’s top social media application that is being used and liked by millions of people. The app was launched by ByteDance in China in 2016. In the last few years, critics have been saying that TikTok shares its users’ data with the Chinese company but TikTok tried many times to convince law makers that the app isn’t completely bound to ByteDance. These reassurances didn’t work because a news broke that the Chinese employees of TikTok have access to data of USA and European users.

But TikTok is looking out for the concerns of its users. So, it has decided to launch Project Clover, which will open many data centers all over the Norwegian region to regulate and protect users' data. This project is partnered by Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) that will help TikTok control the data transmission in Europe. The 10 billion euro investment is for the next 10 years and TikTok will make 3 data centers from the investment money. A third-party security company called NCC Group will also help TikTok as the company will give audits on data and its transmission.

TikTok was kind of slow in shifting its data centers in Europe. When the first TikTok data center was built in Ireland in September, TikTok started to shift Europeans there as it was the most convenient at that time. Now, the European data in Ireland data center isn’t entirely shifted but the process is said to be complete in 2024. Second data center in Ireland has also been announced, followed by a third one in Norway (Hamar Region). The data center in Norway will operate on renewable energy sources entirely.

TikTok says that it has held over these 3 buildings entirely and the data transferring work of the European data center will get completed sometime in 2024. The European users will have their data transferred to their own European data centers. That will take away any doubt they have of their data getting to Chinese through TikTok headquarters.

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World