By Nicole Winfield
ROME (AP) --The Venice Film Festival, the first major in-person cinema showcase of the COVID-19 era, is requiring participants to wear face masks during screenings and take a coronavirus test if they are arriving from outside Europe.
According to guidelines published Thursday, fans and the general public will be kept away from the red carpet during the Sept. 2-12 festival, and movie-goers will have to buy tickets and reserve seats online to ensure every other seat is left vacant.
Nine gates set up at various points around the Venice Lido will take temperatures of movie-goers and media, and stars will have transport and red carpet arrivals arranged by festival organizers to prevent crowds from forming even within official delegations.
Festival-goers attending indoor events will be tracked to guarantee contact tracing if necessary.
The film festival will be the first in-person movie event since the pandemic began and it is one of the first major international events that Italy is hosting after becoming the onetime COVID-19 epicenter in Europe. After getting infections under control with a strict, 10-week national lockdown that ended in May, Italy is now dealing with a rebound in cases as a result of summer vacation travel.
The Toronto and New York film festivals that follow Venice will be largely virtual this year, and the Telluride festival has been reborn as a drive-in series in Los Angeles.
In Italy, movie-goers must wear face masks to enter movie theaters but can remove them once seated. Biennale, organizers however, are requiring masks indoors and out as well as throughout the screenings.
In addition, anyone arriving from outside Europe's open-border Shengen area must take a virus test before arriving and will be tested again courtesy of the Biennale once in Venice, the guidelines said.
Biennale organizers said the guidelines were worked out with local health care officials.
South Korea fines Meta $15 million for illegally collecting information on Facebook users
South Korea's privacy watchdog on Tuesday fined social media company Meta 21.6 billion won ($15 million) for illegally collecting sensitive personal information from Facebook users, including data about their political views and sexual orientation, and sharing it with thousands of advertisers.
It was the latest in a series of penalties against Meta by South Korean authorities in recent years as they increase their scrutiny of how the company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, handles private information.
Following a four-year investigation, South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission concluded that Meta unlawfully collected sensitive information about around 980,000 Facebook users, including their religion, political views and whether they were in same-sex unions, from July 2018 to March 2022.
It said the company shared the data with around 4,000 advertisers.
South Korea's privacy law provides strict protection for information related to personal beliefs, political views and sexual behavior, and bars companies from processing or using such data without the specific consent of the person involved.
The commission said Meta amassed sensitive information by analyzing the pages the Facebook users liked or the advertisements they clicked on.
The company categorized ads to identify users interested in themes such as specific religions, same-sex and transgender issues, and issues related to North Korean escapees, said Lee Eun Jung, a director at the commission who led the investigation on Meta.
"While Meta collected this sensitive information and used it for individualized services, they made only vague mentions of this use in their data policy and did not obtain specific consent," Lee said.
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