Category: Tech News Feed

LONDON (AP) — Britain’s antitrust watchdog has proposed labeling Google’s and Apple’s mobile ecosystems with “strategic market status,” which would mandate changes at the Big Tech companies to improve competition.

The Competition and Markets Authority’s announcement Wednesday follows separate investigations it opened at the start of the year into Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, using newly acquired digital market regulations designed to protect consumers and businesses from unfair practices by Big Tech companies.

The watchdog said Apple and Google hold an “effective duopoly,” with 90-100% of mobile devices in Britain running on either mobile platform. Its investigation found a range of concerns affecting businesses and consumers such as unpredictable app reviews, inconsistent app store search rankings and commissions on in-app purchases of as much as 30%.

The CMA also unveiled separate “roadmaps” for each company outlining possible measures to improve competition, including “fair and transparent” app reviews and app store rankings to give British app developers “certainty.”

The watchdog also recommends letting app developers “steer” users to channels outside of app stores where users can make purchases, mirroring similar efforts by the European Union.

Google called the watchdog’s decision “disappointing and unwarranted,” and said Android has saved app developers money because they didn’t have to adapt to different operating models for each smartphone.

It’s “crucial that any new regulation is evidence-based, proportionate and does not become a roadblock to growth in the U.K.,” the company’s senior director of competition, Oliver Bethell, said.

Apple said it was worried the CMA’s moves could pose increase risks for users and jeopardize the U.K.’s “developer economy.”

“We’re concerned the rules the U.K. is now considering would undermine the privacy and security protections that our users have come to expect, hamper our ability to innovate, and force us to give away our technology for free to foreign competitors,” Apple said in a statement. “We will continue to engage with the regulator to make sure they fully understand these risks.”

The regulator is seeking feedback on its proposal and has until Oct. 22 to make a final decision.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Wednesday unveiled a sweeping new plan for America’s “global dominance” in artificial intelligence, proposing to cut back environmental regulations to speed up the construction of AI supercomputers while promoting the sale of U.S.-made AI technologies at home and abroad.

The “AI Action Plan” embraces many of the ideas voiced by tech industry lobbyists and the Silicon Valley investors who backed Trump’s election campaign last year.

“America must once again be a country where innovators are rewarded with a green light, not strangled with red tape,” Trump said at an unveiling event that was co-hosted by the bipartisan Hill and Valley Forum and the “All-In” podcast, a business and technology show hosted by four tech investors and entrepreneurs, which includes Trump’s AI czar, David Sacks.

The plan includes some familiar tech lobby pitches. That includes accelerating the sale of AI technology abroad and making it easier to construct the energy-hungry data center buildings that are needed to form and run AI products. It also includes some AI culture war preoccupations of the circle of venture capitalists who endorsed Trump last year.

Trump signed three executive orders Wednesday to deliver on the plan. They seek to fast-track permitting of AI construction projects, expand U.S. tech exports and get rid of “woke” in AI.

Trump had given his tech advisers six months to come up with new AI policies after revoking President Joe Biden’s signature AI guardrails on his first day in office.

Trump’s AI plan: global dominance, cutting regulations

The plan prioritizes AI innovation and adoption, urging the removal of any barriers that could slow down adoption across industries and government. The nation’s policy, Trump said, will be to do “whatever it takes to lead the world in artificial intelligence.”

Yet it also seeks to guide the industry’s growth to address a longtime rallying point for the tech industry’s loudest Trump backers: countering the liberal bias they see in AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.

Trump’s plan aims to block the government from contracting with tech companies unless they “ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.” The plan says the nation’s leading AI models should protect free speech and be “founded on American values,” though it doesn’t define which values those should include.

Sacks, a former PayPal executive and now Trump’s top AI adviser, has been criticizing “woke AI” for more than a year, fueled by Google’s February 2024 rollout of an AI image generator. When asked to show an American Founding Father, it created pictures of Black, Asian, and Native American men.

Google quickly fixed its tool, but the “Black George Washington” moment remained a parable for the problem of AI’s perceived political bias, taken up by X owner Elon Musk, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Vice President JD Vance and Republican lawmakers.

Streamlining AI data center permits to speed up supercomputer construction

Chief among the plan’s goals is to speed up permitting and loosen environmental regulation to accelerate construction on new data centers and factories. It condemns “radical climate dogma” and recommends lifting environmental restrictions, including clean air and water laws.

Trump has previously paired AI’s need for huge amounts of electricity with his own push to tap into U.S. energy sources, including gas, coal and nuclear.

“We will be adding at least as much electric capacity as China,” Trump said at the Wednesday event. “Every company will be given the right to build their own power plant.”

Many tech giants are already well on their way toward building new data centers in the U.S. and around the world. OpenAI announced this week that it has switched on the first phase of a massive data center complex in Abilene, Texas, part of an Oracle-backed project known as Stargate that Trump promoted earlier this year. Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and xAI also have major projects underway.

The tech industry has pushed for easier permitting rules to get its computing facilities connected to power, but the AI building boom has also contributed to spiking demand for fossil fuel production, which contributes to global warming.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday called on the world’s major tech firms to power data centers completely with renewables by 2030.

The plan includes a strategy to disincentivize states from aggressively regulating AI technology, calling on federal agencies not to provide funding to states with burdensome regulations.

“We need one common sense federal standard that supersedes all states, supersedes everybody,” Trump said, “so you don’t end up in litigation with 43 states at one time.”

Who benefits from Trump’s AI action plan?

There are sharp debates on how to regulate AI, even among the influential venture capitalists who have been debating it on their favorite medium: the podcast.

While some Trump backers, particularly Andreessen, have advocated an “accelerationist” approach that aims to speed up AI advancement with minimal regulation, Sacks has described himself as taking a middle road of techno-realism.

“Technology is going to happen. Trying to stop it is like ordering the tides to stop. If we don’t do it, somebody else will,” Sacks said on the “All-In” podcast.

On Tuesday, more than 100 groups, including labor unions, parent groups, environmental justice organizations and privacy advocates, signed a resolution opposing Trump’s embrace of industry-driven AI policy and calling for a “People’s AI Action Plan” that would “deliver first and foremost for the American people.”

J.B. Branch, Big Tech accountability advocate at the watchdog group Public Citizen, which signed the resolution, called the plan a “sellout.”

“Under this plan, tech giants get sweetheart deals while everyday Americans will see their electricity bills rise to subsidize discounted power for massive AI data centers,” Branch said in a statement Wednesday. “Americans deserve an AI future rooted in safety, fairness, and accountability — not a handout to billionaires.”

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TUNBRIDGE, Vt. (AP) — An electrical engineer by trade, Patrick Schlott has spent countless hours tinkering with new and old technology. But it wasn’t until he found himself living in rural Vermont that he realized his penchant for repairing old pay phones could provide a public service.

“I realized, wow, there’s no cell service for 10 miles (16 kilometers) in either direction,” he said. “The community could really benefit from something like this.”

Schlott, a full-time engineer at electric airplane manufacturing company BETA Technologies, decided to approach the owners of his local general store with the idea to install old pay phones around town and make them free for public use. After he explained that there would be no cost to the host, North Tunbridge General Store owners Mike and Lois Gross let Schlott install his first phone outside the store.

“Everyone’s pretty surprised, and they’re like, ‘Is that a real pay phone? Does that really work?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but it doesn’t cost any money now,’ ” said store owner Mike Gross. “We’ve had people use it that broke down. It’s a great thing because service is so spotty in Vermont.”

The first free public phone installation was Schlott’s idea, but he says the two other locations, the Latham Library in Thetford and inside an informational booth in Randolph off Interstate 89, came from community members requesting the service.

“All the other phones so far have been people reaching out, which is pretty cool,” he said.

Schlott buys the old pay phones, which can range in cost from $100 to $500, at flea markets, from internet listings or at auction and fixes them up in his basement workshop. All that’s needed to install one of his phones is an internet connection — no coins necessary.

“Basically, there’s a small piece of equipment that converts an internet telephone line to an analog line that these phones can operate off of,” he said.

Along with covering the costs, which are about $2 to $3 a month for each phone line and less than $5 a month for calls, Schlott acts as the operator for each phone and can field or transfer calls, helping users when needed. If a user dials zero, the phone will ring Schlott’s personal cellphone, though he uses an app to keep his number private.

So far, the phone at the Latham Library location has seen the most use. According to Schlott, 370 calls have been made since the phone was installed five months ago, filling a need for students without cellphones to call their parents for after-school pickups.

Hannah McClain is a regular at the North Tunbridge General Store and says she finds comfort in knowing the phone is there whenever her 16-year-old daughters might need it.

“It does make me feel safer if the kids are out and about, that if they had an emergency up this way that they could stop and use this. I think these are a great service,” she said.

Schlott is seeing increased interest in the service, with another free phone install in the works at the Brownell Library in Essex. For now, he plans to continue covering the costs associated with each phone, but noted that may change as the project scales.

“It’s cool to see something retro that has that old-school appeal but also works. To actually hear it ring, to pick it up and have a dial tone, I think there’s real power in that,” he said. “And I don’t think they should end up in a landfill. They should be recycled and put to good use.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned the financial industry of a “significant impending fraud crisis” because of the ability of artificial intelligence tools to impersonate a person’s voice to bypass security checks and move money.

Altman spoke at a Federal Reserve conference Tuesday in Washington.

“A thing that terrifies me is apparently there are still some financial institutions that will accept the voiceprint as authentication,” Altman said. “That is a crazy thing to still be doing. AI has fully defeated that.”

Voiceprinting as an identification for wealthy bank clients grew popular more than a decade ago, with customers typically asked to utter a challenge phrase into the phone to access their accounts.

But now AI voice clones, and eventually video clones, can impersonate people in a way that Altman said is increasingly “indistinguishable from reality” and will require new methods for verification.

“That might be something we can think about partnering on,” said Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman, the central bank’s top financial regulator, who was hosting the discussion with Altman.

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian lawmakers on Tuesday approved a bill that punishes online searches for information that is deemed “extremist,” the latest move by government authorities in their relentless crackdown on dissent.

The bill passed by the lower house, the State Duma, moves to its all-but-certain endorsement in the upper house and then goes to President Vladimir Putin to be signed into law.

The legislation punishes what it describes as “deliberately searching for and accessing extremist materials” online. First-time offenders face a fine of up to the equivalent of $64.

The official definition of extremist activity is extremely broad and includes opposition groups like the Anti-Corruption Foundation, created by the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and the “international LGBT movement.”

It’s not clear how authorities will track down violators. Officials and lawmakers said ordinary internet users won’t be affected and only those who methodically seek outlawed content will be targeted. They didn’t explain how the authorities would differentiate between them.

Some observers have suggested the information would likely come from internet providers or social media platforms, and police also could randomly check the search history of cellphones or computers.

The new legislation also contained a ban on advertising of virtual private network services and fines for VPN resources that fail to comply with government regulations, but stopped short of banning their use. It did list the use of a VPN as an “aggravating circumstance” in case of other violations of the law.

Russians widely use VPN services for access to banned content, but authorities have sought to tighten restrictions, trying to close the loopholes. The state communications watchdog has increasingly used technology to analyze traffic and block specific VPN protocols.

The Russian authorities have ramped their multipronged crackdown on dissent after sending troops into Ukraine in February 2022.

Since then, online censorship and prosecutions for social media posts and comments have soared. Multiple independent news outlets and rights groups have been shut down, labeled as “foreign agents” or outlawed as “undesirable.” Hundreds of activists and critics of the Kremlin have faced criminal charges.

The new legislation has sparked broad public criticism. The Duma, which unanimously supports most government initiatives, was markedly divided in Tuesday’s vote, with 306 backing the measure, 67 voting against it and 22 abstaining. Among those who opposed the bill were some members of the Communist Party, Just Russia and the liberal New People party who usually follow the Kremlin’s wishes.

Liberal politician Boris Nadezhdin, who sought to challenge Putin in last year’s presidential election but was denied a spot on the ballot, told reporters outside the State Duma that he opposed the new legislation. “It creates real problems for tens of millions of people,” he said.

Nadezhdin’s aide, Dmitry Kisiev, who picketed the parliament building with a poster likening the legislation to the world of George Orwell’s dystopian “1984,” was quickly rounded up by police, who also detained several reporters covering the protest.

Even some pro-Kremlin figures have criticized the bill, arguing it would make it impossible for them to track down and deflect comments by Kremlin critics.

Margarita Simonyan, head of the state-funded RT channel, has spoken against the legislation, questioning how her media group could “investigate and bring to shame” anti-Kremlin outlets “if we are forbidden to even read them.”

And Yekaterina Mizulina, whose group Safe Internet League has frequently reported dissenters to authorities, also strongly condemned the new bill, arguing it would make it impossible for her group to monitor “extremist communities” on the web.

LONDON (AP) — Hewlett Packard is owed more than 700 million pounds ($943 million) from British tech tycoon Mike Lynch’s estate and his former finance director after they lost a fraud case involving Lynch’s software company, a U.K. High Court judge ruled on Tuesday.

The court’s decision comes nearly a year after Lynch was killed when his superyacht sank off Sicily, where he had gathered with friends and family to celebrate his acquittal months earlier in a separate U.S. criminal trial.

The U.S. tech company, now known as Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, had accused Lynch of fraud and conspiracy after it bought Lynch’s company, Autonomy Corp., for $11 billion.

HPE also took Lynch to court in the U.K., seeking up to $4 billion in damages in a civil case. The High Court had ruled mostly in HPE’s favor in 2022, but the judge had said that the amount awarded would be “substantially less” than the company was seeking.

Judge Robert Hildyard was originally due to issue a draft ruling in September but delayed it after Lynch’s yacht, the Bayesian, sank in the storm off Sicily on Aug. 19. Lynch and his daughter were among seven people who died while 15 others survived, including the captain and most of the crew.

In a written judgment, Hildyard expressed his “sympathy and deepest condolences” to Lynch’s wife and family.

Hildyard said HPE suffered a loss of 646 million pounds based on the difference between Autonomy’s purchase price and what it would have paid had Autonomy’s “true financial position been correctly presented.”

HPE is also owed 51.7 million pounds for “personal claims related to deceit and/or misrepresentation” against Lynch and Sushovan Hussain, the finance director, and $47.5 million for other losses.

Hussain was convicted in a 2018 U.S. trial of wire fraud and other crimes related to Autonomy’s sale, and sentenced to five years in prison.

“We are pleased that this decision brings us a step closer to the resolution of this dispute,” HPE said in a statement. “We look forward to the further hearing at which the final amount of HPE’s damages will be determined.”

A hearing to deal with interest, currency conversion and whether Lynch’s estate can appeal is set for November.

In a statement written before his death and issued posthumously, Lynch said the ruling shows that HP’s original claim “was not just a wild overstatement – misleading shareholders – but it was off the mark by 80%.”

“This result exposes HP’s failure and makes clear that the immense damage to Autonomy was down to HP’s own errors and actions,” he said.

TUNBRIDGE, Vt. (AP) — An electrical engineer by trade, Patrick Schlott has spent countless hours tinkering with new and old technology. But it wasn’t until he found himself living in rural Vermont that he realized his penchant for repairing old pay phones could provide a public service.

“I realized, wow, there’s no cell service for 10 miles (16 kilometers) in either direction,” he said. “The community could really benefit from something like this.”

Schlott, a full-time engineer at electric airplane manufacturing company BETA Technologies, decided to approach the owners of his local general store with the idea to install old pay phones around town and make them free for public use. After he explained that there would be no cost to the host, North Tunbridge General Store owners Mike and Lois Gross let Schlott install his first phone outside the store.

“Everyone’s pretty surprised, and they’re like, ‘Is that a real payphone? Does that really work?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but it doesn’t cost any money now,’” said store owner Mike Gross. “We’ve had people use it that broke down. It’s a great thing because service is so spotty in Vermont.”

The first free public phone installation was Schlott’s idea, but he says the two other locations, the Latham Library in Thetford and inside an informational booth in Randolph off Interstate 89, came from community members requesting the service.

“All the other phones so far have been people reaching out, which is pretty cool,” he said.

Schlott buys the old pay phones, which can range in cost from $100-$500, at flea markets, from internet listings or at auction and fixes them up in his basement workshop. All that’s needed to install one of his phones is an internet connection — no coins necessary.

“Basically, there’s a small piece of equipment that converts an internet telephone line to an analog line that these phones can operate off of,” he said.

Along with covering the costs, which are about $2-$3 a month for each phone line and less than $5 a month for calls, Schlott acts as the operator for each phone and can field or transfer calls, helping users when needed. If a user dials zero, the phone will ring Schlott’s personal cellphone, though he uses an app to keep his number private.

So far, the phone at the Latham Library location has seen the most use. According to Schlott, 370 calls have been made since the phone was installed five months ago, filling a need for students without cellphones to call their parents for after-school pickups.

Hannah McClain is a regular at the North Tunbridge General Store and says she finds comfort in knowing the phone is there whenever her 16-year-old daughters might need it.

“It does make me feel safer if the kids are out and about, that if they had an emergency up this way that they could stop and use this. I think these are a great service,” she said.

Schlott is seeing increased interest in the service, with another free phone install in the works at the Brownell Library in Essex. For now, he plans to continue covering the costs associated with each phone, but noted that may change as the project scales.

“It’s cool to see something retro that has that old-school appeal but also works. To actually hear it ring, to pick it up and have a dial tone, I think there’s real power in that,” he said. “And I don’t think they should end up in a landfill. They should be recycled and put to good use.”

NEW YORK (AP) — When the “KissCam” at a Coldplay concert landed on a couple who tried (but failed) to duck out of the spotlight, the internet immediately got to work.

In hours, the clip was just about everywhere. Endless memes, parody videos and photos of the pair’s shocked faces filled social media feeds. Online sleuths rushed to identify who was on camera. Artificial intelligence and software company Astronomer eventually confirmed that its CEO and chief people officer were in fact the couple in the video — and announced the CEO’s resignation over the weekend.

The incident’s fallout has, of course, generated conversations about business ethics, corporate accountability and the repercussions that conflicts of interest among leadership can cause. But there are also broader implications at play in our increasingly online world — about the state of potentially being visible everywhere you go or tracked through “social media surveillance.” Experts say it’s more and more common for moments that may have been intended to be private, or at least reserved to a single physical venue, to make their way online and even go global today.

So in the era of lightning-fast social sharing and when cameras are practically inescapable, does being in public hold any expectation of privacy anymore? Is every experience simply fodder for the world to see?

Cameras are everywhere

It’s no secret that cameras are filming much of our lives these days.

From CCTV security systems to Ring doorbells, businesses, schools and neighborhoods use ample video surveillance around the clock. Sporting and concert venues have also filmed fans for years, often projecting playful bits of audience participation to the rest of the crowd. In short, the on-scene viewer becomes part of the product — and the center of attention.

And of course, consumers can record just about anything if they have a smartphone in their pocket — and, if it’s enticing to other social media users, that footage can quickly spread through cyberspace.

Ellis Cashmore, author of the book “Celebrity Culture,” proposes that the rapid fame of last week’s KissCam moment probably answers a question many have been asking for years: “Is the private life still what it was? And the answer is, of course, there’s no such thing as the private life anymore,” he notes. “Certainly not in the traditional sense of the term.”

“I’m not sure that we can assume privacy at a concert with hundreds of other people,” adds Mary Angela Bock, an associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media. “We can’t assume privacy on the street anymore.”

Some version of the KissCam has long been a staple at big events — from timeouts during sports games to romantic songs played by artists at their concerts. It’s easy to miss, but most venues have signs to inform the audience that they could be filmed during the event. What’s been different in more recent years, experts note, is how quickly those moments can travel beyond the physical space where they actually unfold.

That isn’t only limited to what shows up on a jumbotron. Sometimes it only takes one person in the crowd to capture any interaction on their phone and post the video online — where it can zip around the world.

“It’s not just the camera,” Bock says. “It’s the distribution system that is wild and new.”

Once something’s viral, doxing often follows

Then there’s the second ring of exposure — what happens after the video or photos spread.

Experts point to growing instances of social media users rushing to publicly identify, or dox, the people captured on camera — much like how quickly the internet committed to finding those involved in the Coldplay moment, for example. The LinkedIn pages belonging both to Astronomer’s now-former CEO and chief people officer remained disabled on Monday, and The Associated Press could not reach either for comment.

But it isn’t limited to company executives. Beyond someone simply spotting a familiar face and spreading the word, technological advances — including AI — have made it easier and faster overall to find just about anyone in an online post. This can happen with videos and photos shared on social media each day, even if it doesn’t go viral, experts warn.

“It’s a little bit unsettling how easily we can be identified with biometrics, how our faces are online, how social media can track us — and how the internet has gone from being a place of interaction, to a gigantic surveillance system,” Bock says. “When you think about it, we are being surveilled by our social media. They’re tracking us in exchange for entertaining us.”

And of course, such moments can also impact people who were not actually on camera. As easy as it can be to be identified online today, the internet is notorious for cutting a broad swath or not always getting it right. That sometimes produces harassment of individuals not actually involved.

At last week’s Coldplay concert, for example, many social media users speculated that a third person seen near the two caught on camera was another Astronomer employee — leading to swarms of posts targeting her. But the company later confirmed that she was not at the event and said no other employees were in the video circulating online.

For the now-viral moment, “we can talk about what’s right and wrong, and whether they deserved it,” says Alison Taylor, a clinical associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Still, it’s a “very frightening thing to get a lot of abuse and harassment online,” Taylor notes. “There are real human beings behind this.”

It’s hard to think that that these kind of viral moments will ever go away — and there are few legal restrictions to stop users from sharing clips of interactions recorded from anything from a concert to the street widely online. But on an individual level, Bock says it can be helpful to “think before you share” and question whether something’s really accurate.

“Social media has changed so much,” Bock says. “But we really have not, as a society, caught up with the technology in terms of our ethics and our etiquette.”

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Associated Press journalists Hilary Fox and Kelvin Chan contributed to this report.

MIAMI (AP) — Elon Musk fought court cases on opposite coasts Monday, raising a question about the billionaire that could either speed his plan to put self-driving Teslas on U.S. roads or throw up a major roadblock: Can this wildly successful man who tends to exaggerate really be trusted?

In Miami, a Tesla driver who has admitted he was wrong to reach for a dropped cell phone moments before a deadly accident, spoke of the danger of putting too much faith in Musk’s technology — in this case his Autopilot program.

“I trusted the technology too much,” said George McGee, who ran off the road and killed a woman out stargazing with her boyfriend. “I believed that if the car saw something in front of it, it would provide a warning and apply the brakes.”

In unusual coincidence, regulators arguing an Oakland, California, case tried to pin exaggerated talk about the same Tesla technology at the center of a request to suspend the carmaker from being able to sell vehicles in the state.

Musk’s tendency to talk big — whether it’s his cars, his rockets or his government costing-cutting efforts — have landed him in trouble with investors, regulators and courts before, but rarely at such a delicate moment.

After his social media spat with President Donald Trump, Musk can no longer count on a light regulatory touch from Washington. Meanwhile, sales of his electric cars have plunged and so a hit to his safety reputation could threaten his next big project: rolling out driverless robotaxis — hundreds of thousands of them — in several U.S. cities by the end of next year.

The Miami case holds other dangers, too. Lawyers for the family of the dead woman, Naibel Benavides Leon, recently convinced the judge overseeing the jury trial to allow them to argue for punitive damages. A car crash lawyer not involved in the case, but closely following it, said that could cost Tesla tens of millions of dollars, or possibly more.

“I’ve seen punitive damages go to the hundreds of millions, so that is the floor,” said Miguel Custodio of Los Angeles-based Custodio & Dubey. “It is also a signal to other plaintiffs that they can also ask for punitive damages, and then the payments could start compounding.”

That Tesla has allowed the Miami case to proceed to trial is surprising. It has settled at least four deadly accidents involving Autopilot, including payments just last week to a Florida family of a Tesla driver. That said, Tesla was victorious in two other jury cases, both in California, that also sought to lay blame on its technology for crashes.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the Miami case argue that Tesla’s driver-assistance feature, called Autopilot, should have warned the driver and braked when his Model S sedan blew through flashing lights, a stop sign and a T-intersection at 62 miles-an-hour in an April 2019 crash. Tesla said that drivers are warned not to rely on Autopilot, or its more advanced Full Self-Driving system. It says the fault entirely lies with the “distracted driver” just like so many other “accidents since cellphones were invented.”

Driver McGee settled a separate suit brought by the family of Benavides and her severely injured boyfriend, Dillon Angulo.

McGee was clearly shaken when shown a dashcam video Monday of his car jumping a Key West, Florida, road and hitting a parked Chevrolet Tahoe which then slammed into Benavides and sent her 75 feet through the air to her death. Asked if he had seen those images before, McGee pinched his lips, shook his head, then squeaked out a response, “No.”

Tesla’s attorney sought to show that McGee was fully to blame, asking if he had ever contacted Tesla for additional instructions about how Autopilot or any other safety features worked. McGee said he had not, though he was heavy user of the features. He said he had driven the same road home from work 30 or 40 times. Under questioning, he also acknowledged he alone was responsible for watching the road and hitting the brakes.

Summarizing the testimony, Tesla said in a statement after the court adjourned that McGee had “stated the simple truth that we all know: If he had just paid attention to the road instead of searching for his dropped cell phone and pressing the accelerator —which he was doing for over a minute before the crash — this tragic accident would never have happened.”

But lawyers for the Benavides family had a chance in the courtroom at parrying that line of argument, asking McGee if he would have taken his eyes off the road and reached for his phone had he been driving any car other than a Tesla on Autopilot.

McGee responded, “I don’t believe so.”

The case is expected to continue for two more weeks.

In the California case, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles is arguing before an administrative judge that Tesla has misled drivers by exaggerating the capabilities of its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving features. A court filing claims even those feature names are misleading because they offer just partial self-driving

Musk has been warned by federal regulators to stop making public comments suggesting Full Self-Driving allows his cars to drive themselves because it could lead to overreliance on the system, resulting in possible crashes and deaths. He also has run into trouble with regulators for Autopilot. In 2023, the company had to recall 2.3 million vehicles for problems with the technology and is now under investigation for saying it fixed the issue though it’s unclear it has, according to regulatory documents.

The California case is expected to last another four days.

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Condon reported from New York.

LONDON (AP) — A routine moment of crowdwork at a Coldplay concert went viral last week when a couple tried to avoid the spotlight after they were caught hugging on the jumbotron. Internet sleuths quickly figured out that they were the CEO and chief people officer of a little-known tech company called Astronomer.

The snippet of video set the internet alight, fueling a wave of memes and drawing attention to the erosion of privacy in public spaces.

Here are some things to know:

What happened at the concert

During the concert on Wednesday at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, lead singer Chris Martin asked the cameras to scan the crowd for his “Jumbotron Song,” when he sings a few lines about the people the camera lands on.

A man wearing a birthday sash was up first. Two people in banana costumes were highlighted.

But in between, something unexpected happened. For several seconds, a couple was shown on the big screen. They were cuddling and smiling, his arms wrapped around her, as she leaned back into him.

When they saw themselves on the big screen, her jaw dropped, her hands flew to her face and she spun away from the camera. He ducked out of the frame, as did she.

“Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy,” Martin joked.

It didn’t end there.

Who was involved

After the video went viral, the internet got to work.

Online sleuths rapidly figured out that the man was Andy Byron, chief executive officer, while she was Kristin Cabot, the chief people officer — in other words, the head of human resources.

Astronomer, based in New York, provides big companies with a platform that helps them organize their data.

The company at first said little about the incident. In response to an initial inquiry from The Associated Press, Astronomer’s spokesman said only that a statement attributed to Byron that circulated online immediately after the incident was a “fake from a clearly labeled parody account.”

The company later confirmed the identities of the couple in a statement to AP.

What happened to the CEO

In the hours after the video went viral, Byron’s name was at one point the most searched term on Google.

Astronomer eventually addressed the situation, announcing in a LinkedIn post late Friday that Byron had been placed on leave and that the board of directors had launched a formal investigation.

The company said a day later that Byron had resigned, and that its cofounder and chief product officer, Pete DeJoy, was tapped as interim CEO while it searches for Byron’s successor.

“Astronomer is committed to the values and culture that have guided us since our founding. Our leaders are expected to set the standard in both conduct and accountability, and recently, that standard was not met,” the company said in its post on LinkedIn.

DeJoy weighed in on Monday how the company was thrust into the spotlight.

“The events of the past few days have received a level of media attention that few companies—let alone startups in our small corner of the data and AI world — ever encounter,” he wrote on Linkedin. “The spotlight has been unusual and surreal for our team and, while I would never have wished for it to happen like this, Astronomer is now a household name.

Why you should read those warnings about being filmed

It’s easy to miss, but most concert venues have signs informing the audience that they could be filmed during the event. Look for them on the walls when you arrive and around the bar areas or toilets. It’s common practice especially when bands like to use performances for music videos or concert films.

The venue in this case, Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, also has a privacy policy online which states: “When you visit our location or attend or participate in an event at our location, we may capture your image, voice and/or likeness, including through the use of CCTV cameras and/or when we film or photograph you in a public location.”

What it says about privacy

In the internet age, such videos — or ones taken on someone’s smartphone — can quickly zip around the world.

This video rocketed around social media, as people speculated about why the couple dodged the camera.

Empathy for the pair and their families was mixed with plenty of snarky commentary and countless memes, with the fake statement from the chief executive generating a lot of additional vitriol. And news reports said that Byron’s LinkedIn account was disabled after it was flooded by a wave of comments.

“It’s a little bit unsettling how easily we can be identified with biometrics, how our faces are online, how social media can track us — and how the internet has gone from being a place of interaction, to a gigantic surveillance system,” said Mary Angela Bock, an associate professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media. “We are being surveilled by our social media. They’re tracking us in exchange for entertaining us.”

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AP Business Writer Wyatte Grantham-Philips contributed to this report from New York.