Bipartisan senators sent letters to telehealth providers Monument, Workit Health and Cerebral urging the companies to better protect users' healthcare data.
Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Susan Collins (R-Me.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wa.) and Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo,) expressed concerns that the companies are "tracking and sharing sensitive and personally-identifiable health data with third-party...
Facebook is looking to further position its virtual reality technology, the Oculus Quest 2, in the fitness space, and yesterday it announced a fitness accessory. The new pack is designed to help customers use the VR headset more comfortably when working out.
“We’re making a fitness accessory pack that makes Quest 2 more comfortable with controller grips for when things get a bit intense, and a...
Facebook said it removed more than three dozen pages, groups and Facebook or Instagram accounts for spreading misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
The social media giant said the accounts were linked to 12 people who were accused in a much cited report by Center for Countering Digital Hate of disseminating the vast majority of vaccine misinformation on the network.
But Facebook disputes that...
When social media companies like Facebook and YouTube were founded, it’s a good bet that their founders didn’t imagine themselves to be creating public health tools. But in the face of a global pandemic, it’s become obvious that that’s exactly what they created.
And as far as health leaders at these companies are concerned, that’s a good thing.
“As someone who’s been in public health for about 20...
Facebook removed 65 of its own and 243 Instagram accounts for spreading misinformation about AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, according to the social media giant’s July Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report.
The report found the misinformation network was tied to Fazze, a subsidiary of a U.K.-registered marketing firm, but operations were conducted in Russia. It targeted users in India, Latin...
Before COVID-19, it would have been easy to imagine that producing and distributing an effective vaccine would have been the biggest challenge of fighting a global pandemic. But as it’s turned out, some of the biggest challenges of the COVID-19 virus have been public health challenges – getting people to behave in ways that reduce the spread of disease and getting them to take the vaccine in...
More than a year after Facebook pledged to curb the spread of COVID-19 misinformation on its platform, the social media giant blocked content under the #VaccinesKill hashtag.
Now, instead of showing fear-mongering posts about vaccines, searches for the hashtag lead users to a “keeping our community safe” page that says some of the posts with the hashtag go against the website’s community...
Results from a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine show a potential breakthrough for helping individuals who have lost the ability to speak and are impacted by paralysis by using a new technology that gives them a way to type by just attempting to speak.
In the Facebook-backed UCSF study, researchers surgically implanted a "subdural, high-density, multielectrode array" over...
A group of organizations across the technology, healthcare, global development and academic sectors are convening on a new initiative that hopes to advance public understanding of how social media and behavioral sciences can be used to improve public health globally.
Called the Alliance for Advancing Health Online, the project’s partners include Bay Area Global Health Alliance, the CDC Foundation...
More information has emerged about Facebook's potential new wearable. According to The Verge, the social media company is developing a new smartwatch that includes two cameras, which customers can use to upload photos to social media.
Rumors of a potential wearable have been circulating since at least February when The Information cited four anonymous Facebook sources claiming a watch was in the...
