Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, a collection of the past week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.
RFK Jr.’s autism registry
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s been facing backlash over anti-scientific, offensive and belittling remarks he made about the basic abilities of autistic people, is launching a disease registry to track Americans with autism. The news raises a host of data security concerns, in addition to questions about how Kennedy might use the data to advance his conspiratorial and harmful health agenda.
Advocates for people with autism have decried Kennedy’s recent comments that autism is a “preventable” disease that “destroys families,” and Kennedy has hired a discredited vaccine researcher to investigate debunked claims that autism and vaccines are linked. So the idea that the health secretary wants to compile a database of Americans who have a condition he seems intent on spreading falsehoods about is more than a little suspect.
CBS News reports: “Between 10 and 20 outside groups of researchers will be given grant funding and access to the records to produce Kennedy’s autism studies.”
Read more at CBS News.
Trump Media asks the Trump admin for help
Trump Media and Technology Group, which is majority-owned by President Donald Trump and according to a regulatory filing has been placed in a trust controlled by his oldest son, is asking the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate a hedge firm that bet against it to the tune of more than $100 million. In other words, Trump’s media company is asking the Trump administration to probe someone who predicted its failure.
Read my report at MSNBC.
Google’s antitrust issues
Last week, Google lost its second antitrust lawsuit in less than a year, when a judge ruled that its advertising business ran afoul of monopoly rules. This follows a separate antitrust lawsuit Google lost last year, over its Chrome search engine. The federal government is asking a judge to require that Google sell Chrome, and a separate judge will decide the proper punishment on the advertising front.
Read more at The New York Times.
ICE reportedly quenches its thirst for data
404 Media reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is planning to create a centralized database with data from various federal agencies that can be used to help target people as part of Trump’s immigration crackdown. The tool reportedly is known as ATrac, or Alien Tracker, and will “provide near real-time tracking of both targets on a local level and the broader set of immigration enforcement targets around the country” by pulling data from several agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Labor.
Read more at 404 Media.
Zuckerberg’s power plays
Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg has embarked on a largely behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign with top government officials — including House Speaker Mike Johnson — to steer lawmakers away from passing rules on children’s online safety that could place the onus on Meta to verify users’ ages.
Read more at Politico.
FTC takes umbrage with Uber One
The Federal Trade Commission is suing ride-hailing app Uber over what it says are “deceptive” billing and cancellation practices involving the Uber One subscription service. An Uber spokesperson said the company is “disappointed” by the complaint, but confident that court rulings will be in its favor.
Read more at CNN.
Hegseth’s second Signal scandal
The White House is trying to beat back outcry over a report that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared sensitive military details about a military strike with his wife, brother and personal attorney. This, of course, would mark the second time in as many months that Hegseth was embroiled in such a scandal involving the Signal messaging app. And Sabrina Singh, a former deputy press secretary for the Defense Department, explained for MSNBC why this Hegseth scandal is worse than the first:
The first group chat that we learned about consisted of members of the national security team. He [Hegseth] still shared sensitive information in a commercial text app but these were with people who typically meet the “need to know” threshold. But do Hegseth’s wife, brother and personal attorney have a “need to know” regarding when a military operation is going to start, the takeoff times of F/A-18s, the launches of the Tomahawk missiles and when the bombs will drop? No.
Read Singh’s full piece at MSNBC.
Not the hill to die on
Semafor’s Max Tani reported that Trump’s social media company, Truth Social, has dropped political media outlet The Hill from a defamation lawsuit targeting more than a dozen news organizations. Tani’s report said that The Hill’s parent company, Nexstar, had reached a settlement over a story that overstated Truth Social’s financial losses.
Read more at Semafor.
MAGA-aligned prayer app
Over on Salon, writer Amanda Marcotte published a dispatch on her “unnerving descent” into the prayer app Hallow, which is popular among MAGA celebrities and garnered some of its early funding from Trump-aligned billionaire Peter Thiel and one of his associates, now-Vice President JD Vance.
Read more at Salon.
