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Telstra CEO to face parliamentary inquiry over national outage
Telstra’s bosses are set to be grilled over a nationwide outage that affected triple zero calls and businesses, disrupted payment systems and stopped trains in two states.
Telstra’s chief executive, Vicki Brady, will be among a group of executives who will front a parliamentary inquiry into the incident in Canberra on Friday.
The Greens communication spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, said the committee holding the probe had called an emergency hearing over the outage.
“The truth is, Telstra, just like Optus, has put their profits ahead of public safety and public service for far too long, and the law allows them to,” she told reporters at Parliament House on Thursday.
“We need better laws in place, stronger laws that protect the rights of the public, the rights of the consumer, and to force these companies to actually deliver a reliable service.”
Telstra is accepting compensation claims from affected customers and small businesses who can provide evidence to support their case.
Hanson-Young said the telco “has done the bare minimum when it comes to compensation for consumers”.
“The company should be taking responsibility, and it should be offering automatic compensation to everyone who they put in a difficult and dangerous position.”
Representatives from the Australian Communications and Media Authority and the communications department will also give evidence at the inquiry.
Key events
Pauline Hanson is due to speak at a gathering of hard right figures from around the world being held in London this week.
Former UK prime minister Liz Truss is hosting the event which is the inaugural British spin-off from America’s influential CPAC gathering which powered the rise of Donald Trump.
Ben Quinn has the full story:
Meta to alert parents when teens discuss self-harm with Instagram’s AI
Achol Arok
Social media giant Meta has rolled out new safety features that will alert parents using Instagram’s supervision tools if their teen talk about suicide or self-harm with the platform’s AI feature.
The change comes after the platform sought feedback from more than ۷۵ youth mental health clinicians on how to improve Meta AI’s responses to teens’ distressing prompts.
Currently, the platform’s AI chatbot directs teen users to crisis helplines and encourages them to reach out to a parent or another trusted adult. Meta says it will now “proactively alert supervising parents” based on signals developed with experts.
The company said:
We worked with parents and experts to understand which AI conversations warrant an alert – such as those where a teen makes a clear reference to hurting themselves, even if that reference is subtle. We then built a dedicated AI system to identify these conversations.
The feature, now live in the US, UK, Australia and Canada, is expected to be available to users globally by the end of the year.
Telstra CEO to face parliamentary inquiry over national outage
Telstra’s bosses are set to be grilled over a nationwide outage that affected triple zero calls and businesses, disrupted payment systems and stopped trains in two states.
Telstra’s chief executive, Vicki Brady, will be among a group of executives who will front a parliamentary inquiry into the incident in Canberra on Friday.
The Greens communication spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, said the committee holding the probe had called an emergency hearing over the outage.
“The truth is, Telstra, just like Optus, has put their profits ahead of public safety and public service for far too long, and the law allows them to,” she told reporters at Parliament House on Thursday.
“We need better laws in place, stronger laws that protect the rights of the public, the rights of the consumer, and to force these companies to actually deliver a reliable service.”
Telstra is accepting compensation claims from affected customers and small businesses who can provide evidence to support their case.
Hanson-Young said the telco “has done the bare minimum when it comes to compensation for consumers”.
“The company should be taking responsibility, and it should be offering automatic compensation to everyone who they put in a difficult and dangerous position.”
Representatives from the Australian Communications and Media Authority and the communications department will also give evidence at the inquiry.
Welcome
Good morning and welcome to our live news blog. I’m Martin Farrer with the top overnight stories and then it’ll be Kat Wong with the main action.
Telstra’s chief executive, Vicki Brady, can expect some tough questions when she goes before a parliamentary inquiry today. The snap two-day inquiry was called to look at last week’s Telstra mobile outage that shut down trains and payment systems across the nation, and meant some couldn’t make triple zero calls.
And we have news from Instagram, which has announced a new AI safety feature that will alert parents if their children’s chats turn to self harm.
