Consent

Meta intends to ask users in the European Union for their consent before allowing businesses to target advertising based on what they view on its services such as Facebook and Instagram, the social media giant said on Tuesday. Meta said the change is to address a number of evolving regulatory requirements in the region and stems from an order in January by Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner, Meta's lead EU regulator, to reassess the legal basis on how it targets ads. Facebook and Instagram users had effectively agreed…

Are issues surrounding sexual consent (the relentless murk, mystery and misunderstandings) doomed to remain roughly the same, generation to generation? Every so often, a “parent-/adult-frightening”, youth-oriented film (Kids, Thirteen) comes along that rewires the conversation. One such film, How to Have Sex, by writer-director Molly Manning Walker, won the Un Certain Regard award at Cannes this year. To be clear: your daughters and sons (all young people) need to see this film, and so do you.At times filmed in the style…

Mia McKenna-Bruce had watched How to Have Sex just once before it screened at this year’s Cannes film festival. The first viewing had been in London: an intimate, cast-and-crew-only affair. Between marvelling at the visuals, score, edit, and cheering on the rest of the performances, she had little time to take in what was actually unfolding on screen.“And maybe,” McKenna-Bruce now says, “I was also too in shock to really digest anything. It was only at Cannes in May that I really sat back and took in what happened to…

Here’s a cause for celebration for fans of British cinema: a feature debut that launches not one but two of the most promising talents to arrive in movie theatres for a long while. Writer and director Molly Manning Walker is the complete package: a storyteller with an acute ear for youth vernacular; a film-maker with a gift for capturing images that sear themselves into your eyes, while also filling each frame with a sensory overload of energy and movement; and a director who can tease remarkably intimate and revealing…

Authors including Margaret Atwood, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Philip Pullman have signed a petition calling for artificial intelligence companies to stop using writers’ work without consent or credit.The open letter, which has been set up by the Authors Guild, America’s largest professional organisation for writers, is addressed to the CEOs of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, Stability AI, and IBM. It presents these generative AI leaders with three demands, asking that these companies: “Obtain permission for use of our copyrighted…

Jonah Hill, known for his roles in movies, including The Wolf of Wall Street and 21 Jump Street, amid numerous allegations of sexual harassment and abuse, has been accused of kissing The Walking Dead actor Alexa Nikolas without her consent when she was 16. Hill is already facing charges of emotional abuse by his ex-girlfriend Sarah Brady, who had also called him a “misogynist narcissist”. According to reports, Nikolas tweeted on how Hill allegedly approached her and offered her a cigarette: “Jonah Hill…

Bank of America must pay more than $100 million to customers for doubling up on some fees, withholding reward bonuses and opening accounts without customer consent. Bank of America will pay $90 million in penalties to its organization and $60 million in penalties to the OCC, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Tuesday. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency found the bank’s double-dipping on fees was illegal. Bank of America, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, serves 68 million people and small…

After Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law that requires teens and kids to get parental consent before signing up for social media, that law is now in the crosshairs of a tech trade group called NetChoice, which filed a lawsuit against it.How To Remove Followers From TwitterAccording to a press release from NetChoice, the group filed the lawsuit yesterday,while the law was signed by Sanders in April and does not go into effect until September 1, 2023. NetChoice is a self-described nonprofit group of tech…

Texas passed a sweeping new social media law Wednesday banning users under the age of 18 from accessing social media sites or creating accounts without first obtaining parental content. The law, which targets social networks but is written in a way that could include a large swath of online services, is the latest in a string of state bills attempting to legally age-gate the internet. 988—The New National Suicide Prevention HotlineThe law, dubbed the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment, (HB18) will…

Consent is too low a standard for promoting ethical sex — even if it may be the best available legal standard. Credit: Shutterstock In early May, a New York jury found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll in 1996. The jury did not find him liable for allegedly raping her. In the wake of this…