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The European Union has launched a formal investigation into the short video platform, TikTok. The European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, announced that it has launched official proceedings against the platform owned by China, for possible violations of the Digital Services Act (DSA).

As it became known, the investigators will verify whether the platform protects minors, keeps records of advertising content and whether its algorithms direct users to harmful content.

Thierry Breton, the European Union Commissioner for Internal Markets, stated that the protection of children is one of the top priorities to be implemented for the DSA.

The investigation into the safety of minors on the platform includes checks on the age verification process as well as the pre-selected privacy settings used for children’s accounts.

“As the platform is accessed by millions of children and teenagers, TikTok must be in full compliance with the DSA and has a special role to play in the protection of minors,” stated Breton.

“We are launching this formal proceeding today to ensure that proportionate action is taken to protect the physical and emotional well-being of Europe’s young people. We must spare no effort to protect our children.”

Companies that break DSA rules face potential fines of up to 6% of their global turnover.

TikTok, which does not disclose its revenue, is owned by Chinese technology company ByteDance.

The platform announced that it will continue to work with experts to keep its young users safe and that it looks forward to explaining this issue in detail to the European Commission.

This is the second case that a technology company has been accused of violating the DSA, after Elon Musk’s “X”, which became the subject of an official investigation by Brussels in December last year.

👁️[WPPV-TOTAL-VIEWS]

More than fingerprints or facial recognition. In the future, our mobile phones will be unlocked with our breath, writes focus.it.

Each individual, in fact, is equipped with a unique way of allowing air to flow through the mouth, due to the different conformation of the airways, pharynx, larynx and paranasal cavities, as well as differences in the speed of respiratory emission.

This feature could help develop a new type of identification test to make our mobile phones even more secure, overcoming a weakness that exists with the methodologies currently in use.

The first to realize the potential of the new type of release was a team of Indian scientists from the Madras Institute of Technology in Chennai, who began almost casually experimenting with breathing data recorded by an air velocity sensor to see if it could to be read by Artificial Intelligence.

“The initial aim was to understand if the technology could help us identify people suffering from breathing difficulties, with the aim of being able to create more effective medicines. However, it soon became clear that the data collected showed much more,” they emphasized.

The tests were performed on 94 volunteers of both sexes, from whom 10 consecutive breaths were recorded, using an air velocity sensor capable of taking over 10,000 readings per second.

The collected data were analyzed by the IA software by creating a breathing profile for each of the individuals.

Thanks to this, the researchers were able to verify with 97% accuracy whether or not a new breath was coming from the subject in question, simply based on the speed of the emission.

According to Mahesh Panchagnula, head of the experiments, the results can be drastically improved by perfecting the procedure thanks to the inclusion of new parameters to be measured (air density, temperature, composition, etc…).

Current smartphones can, in fact, be unlocked even using a dead person’s finger or face, but in no case would it be possible to replicate their breathing.

👁️[WPPV-TOTAL-VIEWS]