UNBIASED - August 14, 2024: Campaign Ads or News Articles? Here's What You Need to Know. Texas Sues GM Over Illegal Driver Data, Google Explains Why Assassination Attempt Search Predictions Were Off, and More.

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

Welcome back to UNBIASED. In today's episode: Harris and Trump Campaigns Using Google Ads to Target Voters. Here's What To Look For (0:35) Texas AG Sues General Motors Over Illegal Acquisition of Driver Data (4:36) Google Explains Why Assassination Attempt Searches Weren't AutoCompleting After Senator Calls for Investigation (8:06) Quick Hitters: Consumer Price Index Falls to 2.9%, Former House Rep. Says She's Been Placed on TSA Watch List, U.S. Sends Congress Notification of $20B Weapons Sale to Israel, Defense Contractor Arrested After Printing Classified Docs and Attempting to Flee (10:27) Support ‘UNBIASED’ on Patreon. Watch this episode on YouTube. Follow Jordan on Instagram and TikTok. All sources for this episode can be found here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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share the show with your friends, and if you're watching on YouTube, please go ahead and hit that thumbs up button and subscribe to the channel if you're not already. All of those things really help me out, so thank you very much. And without further ado, we can get into today's stories, starting off with something to keep on your election information radar. The Harris campaign has been buying Google ads that feature edited headlines and descriptions so as to put off the image that mainstream networks like CNN, NPR, and Reuters are writing these headlines when really it's the Harris campaign making the headline. Now, Trump is doing something similar, but his method is a little different and it's not so extensive, but I will cover both so that way you're informed as to what both campaigns

are doing. So you've probably seen Google ads in the past. You search for something on Google and the top one or two search results will look like actual search results, but then you'll see that there's a sponsored label around or near the search result. It's usually, like I said, the top one or two results that are sponsored. That's what the Harris campaign has been doing with mainstream articles. And what it does is it makes it seem as if these mainstream outlets like CNN, NPR, Reuters, etc. are putting

out these headlines themselves when really, yes, they're putting out the articles, but these search results specifically are being bought and edited by the Harris campaign. So what does that look like in practice? Let's say you do a search for Kamala Harris healthcare, and a search result comes up from NPR, and it's an article titled Harris will lower health costs. When you click on that link, it's a real NPR article about Harris herself, but the actual article has a different headline. What happened is when the Harris campaign bought that search result as an ad, they changed the title of the article. So it shows up as a different title in the search results, but pulls up a real actual article from NPR.

An indicator, though, of what's sponsored and what's not is, of course, that sponsored label. So if something is sponsored, if an article is sponsored, it will come up. You will see a disclosure right above the headline in the Google search that says sponsored. In some cases, you may even see sponsored and paid for by the Harris for President presidential campaign. As I said, Harris's campaign is a bit more extensive and specifically targets articles written by these mainstream media networks. Trump's campaign is doing it a little bit differently. So Trump's campaign only has two Google ads going right now in this current moment,

and both were bought before Biden dropped out of the race back in June. So they both target Biden. One is a link to josephrbiden.com that the Trump campaign bought and made the headline join Biden to destroy America. And then the subtext of that reads, Read the Biden Plan to Destroy America. This will shock you. The second ad links to factcheckbiden.com. And the headline for that reads, Biden's 10 Biggest Lies Ranked, The Real Truth About Biden. So what the Trump campaign is doing is on a much smaller scale with only two ads and is different than the Harris campaign in that the Trump campaign isn't buying mainstream URL links.

The Trump campaign is instead buying ads and changing headlines linked to websites like josephrbiden.com and factcheckbiden.com, whereas the Harris campaign is buying ads and changing headlines to websites like CNN, Reuters, and NPR. and factcheckbiden.com, whereas the Harris campaign is buying ads and changing headlines to websites like CNN, Reuters, and NPR. So it's just another thing for you to keep your eye out for this election season. And if you want to verify this for yourself, you're more than welcome. You can either go to the sources section of this episode or go directly to adstransparency.google.com, click political ads in the ad type box, and then search for Harris for president and or Trump for president. It'll pull up the associated entities advertising with Google. And from there, you can see exactly what each entity's Google ads

are, how much they're paying for them, when they were bought, when they expired, and how many impressions each ad has had. Again, either just go to the sources section of this episode or go directly to adstransparency.google.com. In some other news, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against General Motors claiming it violated state law by installing technology that collects data from drivers illegally and then sells that data to companies which licenses the data to insurance companies. This lawsuit comes after Paxton announced an investigation into several car manufacturers this past June. According to the lawsuit, quote, General Motors deceptively collected scores of data points from consumers about their driving habits, monetized that data by selling it to

other commercial actors, and permitted those actors to use the ill-gotten data to make adverse decisions when dealing with the same consumers. Since 2015, General Motors has installed technology in its vehicles that it advertised as improving the safety, functionality, and operability of its vehicles. But this technology can also collect, record, analyze, and transmit highly specific driving data about a vehicle's usage. That driving data consisted of the date, start time, end time, vehicle speed, driver and passenger seatbelt status, distance driven each time a customer drove their vehicle, and more, end quote. The lawsuit then says that this data was sold to outside companies and that these sales were formalized through agreements. And under these agreements, the purchasing companies were allegedly told to use the driving data to calculate a customer

driving score based on risk factors developed by GM. Bad driving factors included late night driving, driver and passenger seatbelt status, instances of sharp turns, hard braking, hard acceleration, and driving over 80 miles per hour. GM then allegedly used these driving scores for its own purposes, but also the agreements required the purchasing companies to license access to this data to car insurance companies. And from there, insurance companies allegedly use that data to make decisions about monthly premium increases, dropped coverage, or coverage denials. The lawsuit claims GM profited, quote-unquote, handsomely from these agreements through royalty payments from the licenses that were sold to the insurers.

Notably, GM does provide its customers with a privacy policy, but Texas says the privacy disclosures are confusing and misleading. Texas wrote, quote, to other companies, nor did General Motors disclose that it contracted to permit companies to resell customers' driving scores to insurers, end quote. So again, Texas says GM violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act by making various misrepresentations, including misrepresentations about its products, driving data, and the sale of driving data. It also alleges that GM engaged in

other deceptive techniques related to these same processes. The state of Texas is seeking monetary damages amounting to a maximum $10,000 per violation and a court order which would declare GM to be in violation of the law, order GM to destroy all driving data, and pay consumers restitution. Moving on to another big company. Google is saying that following Trump's assassination attempt, autocomplete search results regarding the assassination attempt were prohibited as part of the company's policy. So Google's statement comes after a senator said that he was launching an investigation

into Google because following that assassination attempt, when you went to search for it on a Google search, Google wasn't auto-populating the search as it usually does. Google especially does this when stories are trending. So in response to the senator's announcement of an investigation, Google wrote him a letter, and it reads in part, quote, We do not allow predictions that can be interpreted as accusations against individuals or groups of serious malevolent events where there is a lack of well-established or expert-supporting evidence.

End quote. The letter also says that Google prohibits the autocomplete function when it comes to election-related predictions, health-related predictions, and sensitive and disparaging terms associated with named individuals. The letter continues and says, As a result, prior to July 13, 2024, it would have been inappropriate for our systems to offer any predictions involving possible assassination attempts on President Trump. In the immediate aftermath of the horrific events in Butler, Pennsylvania, these systems were still in place and predictions related to the assassination attempt failed to appear. We recognize that these out-of-date systems led to an inadequate user experience. Once the issue was brought to our attention, we began working

on improvements that have already started rolling out. To be clear, these were systematic improvements, not manual fixes, that affected a range of autocomplete predictions. You can see many relevant predictions now as the illustrative example below demonstrates." And then below is exactly that. It's an illustration of a search of the word assassination and then half of the word attempt. And the suggestions below are assassination attempt on Trump, assassination attempt on president, and assassination attempt on Reagan. Google's response though, the senator that initially called for that investigation is now calling for Google's top executives to testify under oath before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Now we can finish with a few quick hitters, starting with some good news. For the first time in over three years, the consumer price index is below 3%, rising just 2.9% for the 12 months ended in July.

So the consumer price index measures the monthly change in prices paid by consumers here in the United States, and it's one of the most popular measures of inflation. Basically, it's calculated by dividing the cost of a consumer's quote-unquote basket of goods and services in the current year by the cost of the prior year. So how much would your representative basket of goods and services in the current year by the cost of the prior year. So how much would your representative basket of goods and services cost you today versus August of 2023? The Fed tries to hit a target inflation rate of 2%. The highest consumer price index we've seen in the last few years was in 2022 when it hit almost 9%. But as I said, today's report is the first time we've seen a number below 3% since the spring of 2021. Whistleblowers at the TSA say that former

Democratic House Representative Tulsi Gabbard was placed on TSA's Quiet Skies watch list, otherwise known as their terror watch list. Gabbard now says she's taking legal action against the Biden administration. While Gabbard says there hasn't yet been an explanation as to why she's on the list, she believes it's due to her criticism of the Biden administration. She says there have been times where she's been followed onto flights by air marshals, and she's been given the SSS boarding pass designation, which stands for secondary security screening selection. This SSS designation, she says, is odd considering that when she travels,

she often uses her military ID. As for the TSA, it is reportedly investigating the identities of the whistleblowers and declined to comment on this situation. The U.S. State Department approved potential weapons sales to Israel totaling roughly $20 billion. This potential sale still has to be approved by Congress, which was notified yesterday. So from here, from the point of notification, Congress has 30 days, 29 at this point, to block the sale by passing a joint resolution of disapproval. If the sale isn't blocked though, or it is approved, deliveries of this particular equipment, which includes F-15 fighter jets, are not expected until 2029. An electrical engineer working with the Air Force has been charged with unauthorized removal and retention of classified material after allegedly printing

150 pages of top-secret government documents and then attempting to leave for Mexico. On Friday, as the man was about to leave for the airport, FBI agents searched his home and found top-secret documents inside a backpack in front of his house and more documents in his dining room. Apparently, since starting as a defense contractor with the Air Force in 2020, the man has printed around 3,400 pages of classified and non-classified material, which he transported in plastic shopping bags. Despite prosecutors asking that he be kept in custody over flight risk concerns, a judge ruled yesterday that he can be placed on home detention while he awaits trial.

That is what I have for you today. Thank you so much for being here. Have a great night and I will talk to you tomorrow.