Hillicon Valley: Amazon workers fired after criticizing company | Apple sharing mobility data to track virus | Tax pros targeted by hackers
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FIRED BY AMAZON: Amazon has fired two employees known for publicly criticizing the company’s environmental policies and who had expressed support for workers protesting warehouse conditions.
A spokesperson for the online retail giant confirmed to The Hill that user experience designers Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa had been fired for “repeatedly violating internal policies.” The company did not immediately respond to questions about what policies were violated.
“We support every employee’s right to criticize their employer’s working conditions, but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies,” the spokesperson added.
Cunningham, a member of the group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, had offered to match donations up to $500 for warehouse workers, who she said are at risk because of a “lack of safe and sanitary working conditions.”
Costa also offered to match donations on Twitter, saying the help was needed while the workers “struggle to get consistent, sufficient protections and procedures from our employer.”
Cunningham and Costa are not the first employees fired by Amazon after speaking out about working conditions amid the coronavirus pandemic.
FIRST AMAZON WORKER DIES: An Amazon warehouse worker in California has died of the novel coronavirus, a spokesperson for the online retail giant told The Hill on Tuesday.
The worker, an operations manager at Amazon’s Hawthorne facility, died of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, on March 31.
“We are saddened by the passing of a member of our management team in Hawthorne, California,” said Kristen Kish, the Amazon spokesperson. “His family and loved ones are in our thoughts, and we are supporting his fellow colleagues.”
It is unknown where the worker contracted COVID-19. He was last onsite on March 6 and was not exhibiting symptoms at the time, according to Amazon.
He went on vacation March 7-20, but began to feel unwell when he returned to the U.S. and did not return to the Amazon warehouse where he worked.
The Amazon spokesperson told The Hill that the company updated all site employees on March 31 when it became aware of his death.
EVERY STEP YOU TAKE, EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE: Apple is sharing its mobility data from Apple Maps to assist public health authorities in analyzing how people are moving in communities amid the pandemic, the company announced Tuesday.
The data trends tool uses information from Apple Maps to calculate the volume of people driving, walking or taking public transit in major cities and 63 countries or regions. Apple said in a release that it aims to allow governments and health officials to use the data to implement new policies to adjust the traffic in their respective areas during the coronavirus crisis.
The company said the data comes from the number of requests made to Apple Maps for directions and therefore is not associated with a user’s Apple ID and does not keep a history of where a user has been.
Data from recent weeks, with many countries under lockdowns or stay-at-home orders, can be compared to data from earlier this year.
“While protecting your privacy, we are sharing aggregated mobility data from Apple Maps to help public health authorities learn how people travel in their communities and to provide valuable insights to stop the spread of COVID-19,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a tweet.
TAX PROFESSIONALS TARGETED: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is warning that hackers are looking to take advantage of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to target tax professionals in a bid to steal financial information.
The IRS and its partners in the “Security Summit” program, including state tax agencies and private-sector tax groups, jointly noted that they had seen an uptick in efforts to steal data from tax professionals, as tax season continues in the midst of the pandemic.
“Identity thieves view the pandemic as a chance to exploit tax professionals as well as taxpayers,” IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig said in a statement on Tuesday. “They are using every trick of their criminal trade to con people as well as steal valuable personal and financial information to help enable tax-related identity theft.”
Rettig emphasized that “in many ways, tax pros are one of the first lines of defense. We urge the entire tax community to take additional steps and protect their sensitive data.”
The IRS strongly urged tax professionals to take steps to secure themselves, such as using multi-factor authentication, or two steps, to log-in to secure systems.
Cyber criminals are also increasingly using malicious phishing emails posing as potential clients to tempt tax professionals to click on links or attachments to either input sensitive information, or that contain computer viruses, an issue the IRS warned individuals to be on guard against.
The hackers may also use unsecured networks to access and steal financial information or even complete and file client tax returns while changing the bank account information for refunds.
NEW REDDIT RULES: Reddit on Monday announced an updated political advertising policy, requiring campaigns to work with the platform’s sales team on ads and requiring political advertisers to open comments the first day an ad is posted.
The platform also launched a new subreddit that will list all political ad campaigns that have run on Reddit since the beginning of 2019.
“In this community, you will find information on the individual advertiser, their targeting, impressions, and spend on a per-campaign basis,” Reddit said in a post announcing the subreddit, r/RedditPoliticalAds. “We plan to consistently update this subreddit as new political ads run on Reddit, so we can provide transparency into our political advertisers and the conversation their ad(s) inspires.”
The ad database reveals that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was the top political spender on Reddit among 2020 candidates before dropping out of the race.
MICROSOFT STEPS UP: Microsoft on Tuesday announced it would offer free cybersecurity protection tools to health care, humanitarian and human rights groups around the world following a spike in attempted hacking attempts due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The company will offer groups around the world free access to its AccountGuard threat notification program, which alerts users to malicious emails that may be attempts at stealing personal information or hack into systems. The program will be available for use by health care and human rights groups until the coronavirus pandemic subsides.
The AccountGuard program was previously offered for free by Microsoft to all candidates and their campaigns running for federal, state or local offices in the United States.
The announcement was made following weeks of reports that health care organizations, including hospitals and leading agencies, were under increasing attack by hackers.
LIFE-SAVING FABRICS: U.S. auto giant Ford announced this week that it is partnering with air bag supplier Joyson Safety Systems to produce 1.3 million medical gowns for the country’s medical professionals on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic by July 4.
The company said that the production of the gowns using air bag materials will ramp up to a weekly rate of 75,000 by Sunday, eventually increasing to a rate of 100,000 gowns per week.
Ford noted that the gowns can be washed and reused up to 50 times and were designed with the help of Beaumont Health, Michigan’s largest health care system.
Additionally, the auto manufacturer said that it was beginning production of powered air-purifying respirators at its Vreeland facility in Flat Rock, Mich., and has consulted with fellow manufacturing giant 3M to produce the design.
Ford also said that it has the ability to make more than 100,000 respirators. The machines will be made by 90 paid United Auto Workers union volunteers, according to Ford.
Lighter click: Didn’t catch that, did you say you work in tech?
An op-ed to chew on: COVID-19 will accelerate AI’s replacement of humans as factor of production
NOTABLE LINKS FROM AROUND THE WEB:
Unemployment checks are being held up by a coding language almost nobody knows (Verge / Makena Kelly)
Even Google and Facebook May Face an Ad Slump (New York Times / Daisuke Wakabayashi, Tiffany Hsu and Mike Isaac)
How Google Plans to Push Its Coronavirus Tracing Feature to Android Phones (Motherboard / Joseph Cox)
A cough recognition app could help track the spread of the coronavirus (Slate / Jane C. Hu)
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