Giving your healthcare info to a chatbot is, unsurprisingly, a terrible idea by Robert Hart

Whichever security assurance we take, however, it is far from watertight. Users for tools like ChatGPT Health often have little safeguarding against breaches or unauthorized use beyond what’s in the terms of use and privacy policies

I had the same thought when I first heard of ChatGPT health and then OpenAI’s similar offering.

We are inadvertently putting so much private stuff in the hands of these companies. And as countless companies with ads as the primary money making thing, we are not the customers. For some time it will be the people paying for the ads. And then after a bit, not even them. Thank enshittification!

Finland sets tougher guidelines: No social media or smartphones for under-13s

The agencies recommend that children under the age of 13 should not have smartphones of their own or be allowed to use social media. The recommendations cover youngsters’ free time, not homework or other school-related tasks.

For younger kids, no screen time at all is recommended for children aged under the age of two, with a maximum of one hour of screen time daily for those aged 2–10, rising to two hours for kids aged 11–13.

After reading this I was not sure if this is a done deal or it’s just a recommendation like the dietary guidelines?

I think it’s the latter.

Apple Pay Likely to Launch in India This Year by Tim Hardwick

Once launched, Apple Pay is also expected to offer its Tap to Pay on iPhone feature, allowing users in India to make contactless payments at point-of-sale terminals via NFC. But before that can happen, Apple will have to negotiate fees with major card issuers for use of the payment gateway.

Good news. It works here in Finland. And it’s magic - a better user interaction experience than UPI.

If the future of e-readers is getting weird, I’m here for it by

If I were Xteink or any similar hardware developer, I’d be looking hard at giving support to the CrossPoint project and then focusing my efforts on making a device with simpler controls (fewer buttons!). Adding lighting and potentially a touchscreen would make this interesting, too. There are a lot of directions this sort of product could go—so let’s get to experimenting.

I was similarly looking at this device. I had seen it somewhere on threads and thought this looked cool.

But then I looked at the feature set and given that most of my reading is happening via the e-library app. It did not make sense.

Spotify is testing a feature that syncs audiobooks with paper editions by Jess Weatherbed

Using Page Match will require users to unlock or purchase the audiobook on Spotify, and own either the paper or ebook version of the same book. The feature works by scanning the page you’re currently reading with your device camera, using optical character recognition (OCR) to identify passages that are then matched to specific timestamps in the audiobook.

I wrote about a similar idea in mixed format books. It would be good to see it out in the world.