Australia proposes to require people to prove their identity to sign up for a dating app, and undergo criminal background checks.

This is likely to mean that the app companies get a lot more data about each user, which they can then abuse.

If Australia passes a law to require these checks, it should also pass a law strictly limiting what other personal data the company can collect. It should not be allowed to know any user's location, ever, and it must delete all copies of a user's data when the user says to do so. Messages between users should be encrypted such that the company cannot decrypt them.

Even with this law, I would refuse to use those apps because they are nonfree software.

The US is throwing a monkey wrench into the WTO's system for business-friendly resolution of trade disputes, by blocking nomination of judges to hear appeals. If you are in favor of business-friendly resolution of trade disputes, as the author of the article is, you will conclude that the US is doing something wrong.

I've condemned the WTO since the beginning, first because of its patent rules, and later because its system for "resolution of trade disputes" is used to stop countries from protecting themselves against harmful products that happen to be imported from other countries. The US tried to protect itself against flavored cigarettes, and to protect marine mammals from tuna caught in ways that killed them, and each time the WTO reached a judgment that compelled the US to give up on it.

I am sure the WTO has harmed other countries in similar ways, all based on the idea that every kind of business opportunity must be permitted.

The Department of Justice has joined the lawsuit against Georgia election vigilantes.

Long Covid is sometimes fatal. Just how often that occurs is an open question.

Dean Baker: *Industrial Policy Is Not a Remedy for Income Inequality.*