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Apple was hit with a 150 million euro ($162.4 million) fine by French antitrust regulators on Monday for abusing its dominant position in mobile app advertising on its devices via a privacy control tool. The finethe first by any antitrust regulator over Apple’s App Tracking Transparency toolcomes a year after the European Union hit the company with a 1.8 billion euro antitrust fine for thwarting rival music streaming services on its App Store. The head of the French Competition Authority dismissed worries that the decision would prompt retaliation from U.S. President Donald Trump who has threatened to slap fines on EU countries fining U.S. companies. “We apply competition law in an apolitical manner,” Benoit Coeuré told a press conference. “But what we have heard . . . is that they (U.S. authorities) intend to apply antitrust law to the big digital platforms as strictly as their predecessors. So in terms of antitrust, I don’t see any controversy between the United States and Europe on how we apply the law,” he said. The ATT tool lets iPhone and iPad users decide which apps can track their activity. Digital advertising and mobile gaming companies complained it made it more expensive and difficult for brands to advertise on Apple’s platforms. “While we are disappointed with today’s decision, the French Competition Authority has not required any specific changes to ATT,” Apple said in a statement. Coeuré told reporters the regulator had not spelled out how Apple should change its app, but that it was up to the company to make sure it now complied with the ruling. The compliance process could take some time, he added, because Apple was waiting for rulings on regulators in Germany, Italy, Poland, and Romania who are also investigating the ATT tool. The French case, which covered the period 2021 to 2023, was triggered by complaints from several associations for online advertisers, publishers and internet networks accusing Apple of abusing its market power. “While the objective pursued by ATT is not in itself open to criticism, the way it is implemented is neither necessary nor proportionate to Apple’s stated objective of protecting personal data,” the regulator said in a statement. It added that the privacy tool “particularly penalized smaller publishers,” as they depend to a large extent on the collection of third-party data to fund their businesses. Alliance Digitale, the Syndicat des Regies Internet (SRI), the Union des Entreprises de Conseil et d’Achat Média (Udecam), and the Groupement des Éditeurs de Services en Ligne, which had complained to the French watchdog, said the decision was a significant victory for advertisers. ($1 = 0.9239 euros) Florence Loeve and Foo Yun Chee, Reuters
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U.S. immigration officials are asking the public and federal agencies to comment on a proposal to collect social media handles from people applying for benefits such as green cards or citizenship, to comply with an executive order from President Donald Trump.The March 5 notice raised alarms from immigration and free speech advocates because it appears to expand the government’s reach in social media surveillance to people already vetted and in the U.S. legally, such as asylum seekers, green card, and citizenship applicantsand not just those applying to enter the country. That said, social media monitoring by immigration officials has been a practice for over a decade, since at least the second Obama administration and ramping up under Trump’s first term.Below are some questions and answers on what the new proposal means and how it might expand social media surveillance. What is the proposal? The Department of Homeland Security issued a 60-day notice asking for public commentary on its plan to comply with Trump’s executive order titled “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.” The plan calls for “uniform vetting standards” and screening people for grounds of inadmissibility to the U.S., as well as identify verification and “national security screening.” It seeks to collect social media handles and the names of platforms, although not passwords.The policy seeks to require people to share their social media handles when applying for U.S. citizenship, green card, asylum, and other immigration benefits. The proposal is open to feedback from the public until May 5. What is changing? “The basic requirements that are in place right now is that people who are applying for immigrant and nonimmigrant visas have to provide their social media handles,” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, managing director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program at New York University. “Where I could see this impacting is someone who came into the country before visa-related social media handle collection started, so they wouldn’t have provided it before and now they’re being required to. Or maybe they did before, but their social media use has changed.”“This fairly widely expanded policy to collect them for everyone applying for any kind of immigration benefit, including people who have already been vetted quite extensively,” she added.What this points toalong with other signals the administration is sending such as detaining people and revoking student visas for participating in campus protests that the government deems antisemitic and sympathetic to the militant Palestinian group HamasLevinson-Waldman added, is the increased use of social media to “make these very high-stakes determinations about people.”In a statement, a spokesperson for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service said the agency seeks to “strengthen fraud detection, prevent identity theft, and support the enforcement of rigorous screening and vetting measures to the fullest extent possible.”“These efforts ensure that those seeking immigration benefits to live and work in the United States do not threaten public safety, undermine national security, or promote harmful anti-American ideologies,” the statement continued. USCIS estimates that the proposed policy change will affect about 3.6 million people. How are social media accounts used now? The U.S. government began ramping up the use of social media for immigration vetting in 2014 under then-President Barack Obama, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. In late 2015, the Department of Homeland Security began both “manual and automatic screening of the social media accounts of a limited number of individuals applying to travel to the United States, through various non-public pilot programs,” the nonpartisan law and policy institute explains on its website.In May 2017, the U.S. Department of State issued an emergency notice to increase the screening of visa applicants. Brennan, along with other civil and human rights groups, opposed the move, arguing that it is “excessively burdensome and vague, is apt to chill speech, is discriminatory against Muslims, and has no security benefit.”Two years later, the State Department began collecting social media handles from “nearly all foreigners” applying for visas to travel to the U.S.about 15 million people a year. How is AI used? Artificial intelligence tools used to comb through potentially millions of social media accounts have evolved over the past decade, although experts caution that such tools have limits and can make mistakes.Leon Rodriguez, who served as the director of USCIS from 2014 to 2017 and now practices as an immigration attorney, said while AI could be used as a first screening tool, he doesn’t think “we’re anywhere close to where AI will be able to exercise the judgment of a trained fraud detection and national security officer” or that of someone in an intelligence agency.“It’s also possible that I will miss stuff,” he added. “Because AI is still very much driven by specific search criteria and it’s possible that the search criteria won’t hit actionable content.” What are the concerns? “Social media is just a stew, so much different informationsome of it is reliable, some of it isn’t. Some of it can be clearly attributed to somebody, some of it can’t. And it can be very hard to interpret,” Levinson-Waldman said. “So I think as a baseline matter, just using social media to make high-stakes decisions is quite concerning.”Then there’s the First Amendment.“It’s by and large established that people in the U.S. have First Amendment rights,” she said. This includes people who are not citizens. “And obviously, there are complicated ways that that plays out. There is also fairly broad authority for the government to do something like revoking somebody’s visa, if you’re not a citizen, then there’s steps that the government can takebut by and large, with very narrow exceptions, that cannot be on the grounds of speech that would be protected (by the First Amendment).” Barbara Ortutay, AP Technology Writer
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In Uganda’s Mbale district, famous for its production of arabica coffee, a plague of plastic bags locally known as buveera is creeping beyond the city.It’s a problem that has long littered the landscape in Kampala, the capital, where buveera are woven into the fabric of daily life. They show up in layers of excavated dirt roads and clog waterways. But now, they can be found in remote areas of farmland, too. Some of the debris includes the thick plastic bags used for planting coffee seeds in nurseries.Some farmers are complaining, said Wilson Watira, head of a cultural board for the coffee-growing Bamasaba people. “They are concernedthose farmers who know the effects of buveera on the land,” he said.Around the world, plastics find their way into farm fields. Climate change makes agricultural plastic, already a necessity for many crops, even more unavoidable for some farmers. Meanwhile, research continues to show that itty-bitty microplastics alter ecosystems and end up in human bodies. Scientists, farmers, and consumers all worry about how that’s affecting human health, and many seek solutions. But industry experts say it’s difficult to know where plastic ends up or get rid of it completely, even with the best intentions of reuse and recycling programs.According to a 2021 report on plastics in agriculture by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, soils are one of the main receptors of agricultural plastics. Some studies have estimated that soils are more polluted by microplastics than the oceans.“These things are being released at such a huge, huge scale that it’s going to require major engineering solutions,” said Sarah Zack, an Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Great Lakes Contaminant Specialist who communicates about microplastics to the public. Why researchers want to study plastics in farm fields Microparticles of plastic that come from items like clothes, medications, and beauty products sometimes appear in fertilizer made from the solid byproducts of wastewater treatmentcalled biosolidswhich can also be smelly and toxic to nearby residents depending on the treatment process used. Some seeds are coated in plastic polymers designed to strategically disintegrate at the right time of the season, used in containers to hold pesticides or stretched over fields to lock in moisture.But the agriculture industry itself only accounts for a little over 3% of all plastics used globally. About 40% of all plastics are used in packaging, including single-use plastic food and beverage containers.Microplastics, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration defines as being smaller than five millimeters long, are their largest at about the size of a pencil eraser. Some are much smaller.Studies have already shown that microplastics can be taken up by plants on land or plankton in the ocean and subsequently eaten by animals or humans. Scientists are still studying the long-term effects of the plastic that’s been found in human organs. Early findings suggest possible links to a host of health conditions including heart disease and some cancers.Despite “significant research gaps,” the evidence related to the land-based food chain “is certainly raising alarm,” said Lev Neretin, environment lead at the FAO, which is currently working on another technical report looking deeper into the problem of microplastic pollution in soils and crops.A study out this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that microplastics pollution can even impact plants’ ability to photosynthesize, the process of turning light from the sun into energy. That doesn’t “justify excessive concern” but does “underscore food security risks that necessitate scientific attention,” wrote Fei Dang, one of the study’s authors. Climate change making matters worse The use of plastics has quadrupled over the past 30 years. Plastic is ubiquitous. And most of the world’s plastic goes to landfills, pollutes the environment, or is burned. Less than 10% of plastics are recycled.At the same time, some farmers are becoming more reliant on plastics to shelter crops from the effects of extreme weather. They’re using tarps, hoop houses, and other technology to try to control conditions for their crops. And they’re depending more on chemicals like pesticides and fertilizers to buffer against unreliable weather and more pervasive pest issues.“Through global warming, we have less and less arable land to make crops on. But we need more crops. So therefore the demand on agricultural chemicals is increasing,” said Ole Rosgaard, president and CEO of Greif, a company that makes packaging used for industrial agriculture products like pesticides and other chemicals.Extreme weather, fueled by climate change, also contributes to the breakdown and transport of agricultural plastics. Beating sun can wear on materials over time. And more frequent and intense rainfall events in some areas could drive more plastic particles running into fields and eventually waterways, said Maryam Salehi, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Missouri. Can agriculture escape the plastic problem? This past winter, leaders from around the world gathered in South Korea to produce the first legally binding global treaty on plastics pollution. They didn’t reach an agreement, but the negotiations are scheduled to resume in August.Neretin said the FAO produced a provisional, voluntary code of conduct on sustainable management of plastics in agriculture. But without a formal treaty in place, most countries don’t have a strong incentive to follow it.“The mood is certainly not cheery, that’s for sure,” he said, adding global cooperation “takes time, but the problem does not disappear.”Without political will, much of the onus falls on companies.Rosgaard, of Greif, said that his company has worked to make their products recyclable, and that farmers have incentives to return them because they can get paid in exchange. But he added it’s sometimes hard to prevent people from just burning the plastic or letting it end up in fields or waterways.“We just don’t know where they end up all the time,” he said.Some want to stop the flow of plastic and microplastic waste into ecosystems. Boluwatife Olubusoye, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Mississippi, is trying to see whether biochar, remains of organic matter and plant waste burned under controlled conditions, can filter out microplastics that run from farm fields into wterways. His early experiments have shown promise.He said he was motivated by the feeling that there was “never any timely solution in terms of plastic waste” ending up in fields in the first place, especially in developing countries.Even for farmers who care about plastics in soils, it can be challenging for them to do anything about it. In Uganda, owners of nursery beds cannot afford proper seedling trays, so they resort to cheaply made plastic bags used to germinate seeds, said Jacob Ogola, an independent agronomist there.Farmers hardest hit by climate change are least able to reduce the presence of cheap plastic waste in soils. That frustrates Innocent Piloya, an agroecology entrepreneur who grows coffee in rural Uganda with her company Ribbo Coffee.“It’s like little farmers fighting plastic manufacturers,” she said. Walling reported from Chicago. The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org. Melina Walling and Rodney Muhumuza, Associated Press
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