I hadn’t read Snow Crash. So I first learned about the metaverse in 2008, right after returning from a family trip around the world and a few months before Barack Obama was elected President for the first time. I was a little disoriented coming back to America after 10 months in many other countries, especially during an election year, and it didn’t help that I was attending my very first ISTE … [Read more...] about The metaverse and the Meta part
Take-aways from the ‘Facebook Files’
What a week it has been, right? At least for those of us who follow and/or use social media. There was the naming of whistleblower Frances Haugen on “60 Minutes” Sunday night, US time; the hours-long outage of all of Facebook’s products Monday; Haugen’s testimony on Capitol Hill Tuesday, a report that hackers were offering for sale 1.5 billion people’s public data they scraped from Facebook; and … [Read more...] about Take-aways from the ‘Facebook Files’
Apple & the child online safety challenge
2nd important update Sept. 19: As if in direct response to the open letter from privacy activists around the world, the WeProtect Global Alliance published their own statement saying Apple must not pause its expanded protections, the Guardian reported. I stand by my thoughts in the update just below. We need privacy activists and protection activists in the same room answering the questions: Would … [Read more...] about Apple & the child online safety challenge
If anything needs to go viral, it’s this…
...the message, "Report it. Don't share it." The "it" in this public awareness campaign Facebook just launched is child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the accurate term for what is typically called "child pornography" in the United States. Thankfully, it's extremely unlikely you'll ever see content like this. "The prevalence of this content on our platform is very low," Facebook researchers … [Read more...] about If anything needs to go viral, it’s this…
Online safety after Trump’s deplatforming
Among many other things, the past 24 hours were a pivotal moment for content moderation – for online safety worldwide. I'm usually not US-centric in the way I think about online safety, but what happened in Washington and online, yesterday and since, and then with the global platforms, showed us how far our thinking – and questions – about Internet safety have come. Last night Facebook and … [Read more...] about Online safety after Trump’s deplatforming