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Category Archives: E-Commerce

FTC Proposes Rule Provision – “Click to Cancel” Recurring Subscriptions and Memberships

“The Federal Trade Commission today proposed a “click to cancel” provision requiring sellers to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up. That is just one of several significant updates the Commission is proposing to its rules regarding subscriptions and recurring payments. The new click to cancel provision, along with other proposals, would go a long way to rescuing consumers from seemingly never-ending struggles to cancel unwanted subscription payment plans for everything from cosmetics to newspapers to gym memberships. “Some businesses too often trick consumers into paying for subscriptions they no longer want or didn’t sign up for in the first place,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “The proposed rule would require that companies make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for one. The proposal would save consumers time and money, and businesses that continued to use subscription tricks and traps would be subject to stiff penalties.” The notice of proposed rulemaking announced today is part of the FTC’s ongoing review of its 1973 Negative Option Rule, which the agency uses to combat unfair or deceptive practices related to subscriptions, memberships, and other recurring-payment programs…”

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OpenAI is massively expanding ChatGPT’s capabilities to let it browse the web and more

The Verge: “OpenAI is adding support for plug-ins to ChatGPT — an upgrade that massively expands the chatbot’s capabilities and gives it access for the first time to live data from the web. Up until now, ChatGPT has been limited by the fact it can only pull information from its training data, which ends in… Continue Reading

Create images with your words – Bing Image Creator comes to the new Bing

Microsoft Blogs: “Last month we introduced the new AI-powered Bing and Microsoft Edge, your copilot for the web – delivering better search, complete answers, a new chat experience and the ability to create content. Already, we have seen that chat is reinventing how people search with more than 100 million chats to date. We’ve seen… Continue Reading

AI isn’t yet going to take your job

Washington Post – “but you may have to work with it Artificial intelligence is increasingly making its way across industries, changing jobs from retail to medicine to marketing…Today, AI can power grocery store robots that change how stores get stocked, speed up vaccine production and generate creative ideas. But the latest advancements raise important questions… Continue Reading

Gen Zers are bookworms but say they’re shunning e-books because of eye strain, digital detoxing, and their love for libraries

Insider: “There’s no doubt that Gen Z loves to read.  This generation, defined as people born between 1997 and 2015, is often considered phone-obsessed and addicted to technology. But when it comes to reading, Gen Zers say they prefer to pick up a printed book over an e-book. Book sales in the US and the… Continue Reading

Amazon sued for not telling New York store customers about facial recognition

CNBC: “Amazon did not alert its New York City customers that they were being monitored by facial recognition technology, a lawsuit filed Thursday alleges. In a class-action suit, lawyers for Alfredo Perez said that the company failed to tell visitors to Amazon Go convenience stores that the technology was in use. Thanks to a 2021 law, New… Continue Reading

The stupidity of AI

The Guardian: “Artificial intelligence in its current form is based on the wholesale appropriation of existing culture, and the notion that it is actually intelligent could be actively dangerous.. The entirety of this kind of publicly available AI, whether it works with images or words, as well as the many data-driven applications like it, is… Continue Reading

GPT-4

GPT 4 – “We’ve created GPT-4, the latest milestone in OpenAI’s effort in scaling up deep learning. GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks.” Read paper View system card… Continue Reading

BookFinder.com

“BookFinder.com is a one-stop ecommerce search engine that searches over 150 million books for sale—new, used, rare, out-of-print, and textbooks. We save you time and money by searching every major catalog online, and letting you know which booksellers are offering the best prices and selection. When you find a book you like, you can buy… Continue Reading

Americans Can’t Consent to Companies Use of their Data

Americans Can’t Consent – Companies’ Use of Their Data – They Admit They Don’t Understand It, Say They’re Helpless to Control It, and Believe They’re Harmed When Firms Use Their Data —Making What Companies Do Illegitimate: A Report from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania – “Overview – Consent has always been a… Continue Reading

EPIC, Coalition Call for ICE to Cancel Contract with LexisNexis for Invasive Surveillance Databases

EPIC: “In a letter signed by more than 80 immigrant rights, racial justice, government accountability, human rights, and privacy organizations, EPIC and coalition members called upon ICE not to renew a $22 million contract for a suite of surveillance services. LexisNexis gives ICE agents access to the Accurint database compiled from thousands of sources and… Continue Reading