Tech Policy Leaders

Today's global economy has made it easier than ever to explore opportunities and access resources. However, this comes with the challenge of understanding how these new markets and opportunities can be beneficial or harmful to your family. Technology is a powerful tool that can help you stay informed, connected, and entertained wherever you are in the world. As content from different countries and cultures becomes more accessible, it's important for parents and caregivers to learn about new media so they can make informed decisions about what content is appropriate for their family.

Vicki Shotbolt

@VShotbolt

Vicki Shotbolt is the founder and CEO of Parent Zone which keeps families informed and works with partners on digital literacy issues. Sh's worked with global brands including Microsoft and Vodafone to make Britain more Family Friendly. Her passion is in finding practical solutions to complex problems.She often speaks publicly about parenting and digital issues and is on the executive board of the UK Council for Internet Safety (UKCIS). Vicki likes sailing and is proud rescuer and owner of Teddy the dog.

Geraldine Bedell

@geraldineBedell

Geraldine is Parent Zone's Executive Editor. Prior to joining Parent Zone, Geraldine worked for 10 years as a writer at the Observer in Britain. Before that she was a columnist and writer for the Independent. She has written for most national newspapers and a wide range of magazines in the UK. She has also produced and presented documentaries for Radio 4. She was the founding editor of Gransnet and has published several books of fiction and non-fiction.

Resources

Parent Zone

Tech Shock Podcast

Fifth Circuit Upholds State of Texas' Content Moderation Ban

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling to strike down the State of Texas' controversial statute that created a private right of action for anyone who thinks they were banned from a social media platform because of their "viewpoint." With the Texas law back in effect, platforms with more than 50 million users, like Twitter & YouTube, must notify users in Texas when they remove their content and give them a chance to appeal. If the user isn't happy with the decision, they can sue. Experts are now waiting to hear whether the Supreme Court will take up the case.

In the meantime, Elon Musk Tweeted earlier today that his acquisition of Twitter is on hold as he seeks to verify that fewer than 5% of its accounts are fake. And the number of conservative users who re-joined Twitter after Musk announced he'd be acquiring the company skyrocketed, according to the Washington Post.

State of Virginia Lifts Facial Recognition Ban

The State of Virginia announced that it will be lifting its ban on facial recognition technology. Many states began implementing a facial recognition ban after a study by the Algorithmic Justice League found facial recognition software disproportionately misidentified Black people. Reuters reports that many jurisdictions, including New Orleans, are lifting their facial recognition bans as well, saying accuracy has improved.

Sony Playstation CEO Triggers Pro-Choice Staffers Over With 'Lighthearted' Abortion Email

Sony Playstation CEO Jim Ryan sent a company-wide email requesting staff to respect differences of opinion regarding the leak of the draft Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. In the same email, Ryan celebrated his two cats' first birthday, shared their birthday cakes, and joked that they may someday want a dog. One employee told a Bloomberg reporter that they have never been so mad about a cat's birthday before.

Apple Memo Shows Company's Opposition to Unions

Motherboard reports that Apple is circulating a set of talking points to store managers to help them push back against unionization efforts by retail employees. The memo warns employees that joining a union may affect their career prospects, flexibility, and paid time off. In recent weeks, Apple Stores in Atlanta, New York City, and Towson, Maryland have filed for union elections, becoming the first Apple stores to do so.

Afua Bruce is a leading public interest technologist whose career has spanned the government, non-profit, private, and academic sectors, as she has held senior science and technology positions at the White House, the FBI, IBM, and the nonprofit sector. Her new book, The Tech That Comes Next: How Changemakers, Philanthropists, and Technologists Can Build an Equitable World, explores how technology can advance equity.

Resources

The Tech that Comes Next: How Changemakers, Philanthropists can Build a More Equitable World by Amy Sample Ward and Afua Bruce

@afua_bruce

Tech companies use data to spot patterns in their users' search histories. They use this information to understand how customers behave. But in the 6 years since the Cambridge Analytica scandal happened, the details of how tech companies use our data are still murky. Ranking Digital Rights' Jessica Dheere joined Joe Miller to discuss where the gaps are and what the public needs to know.

Bio

Jessica Dheere is the Director of Ranking Digital Rights. She founded and was Executive Director of SMEX, the Middle East's leading digital rights research and advocacy organization.

In 2018, she was a research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. and a Technology and Human Rights Fellow at Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She was part of the 2019-20 cohort of Technology and Human Rights Fellows at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Her publications include "Misguiding Multistakeholderism: A Nongovernmental Perspective on the Arab IGF", and a legal research methodology for locating digital rights-related law.

Resources

Ranking Digital Rights 2022 Big Tech Scorecard

@JessDheere

With the convergence of the Metaverse, Web 3.0 and the blockchain, it's hard to imagine just how far we have come over the last century. We can't fully appreciate this giant leap forward, without examining the origins of the internet. Who better to help us understand this journey and how we got where we are today than Dr. Vinton Cerf. Dr. Cerf, widely considered "One of the Fathers of the Internet," helped to develop the TCP/IP protocol.

Since 2005, Dr. Cerf has served as Google's vice president and chief Internet evangelist. He identifies new technologies to support the development of advanced, Internet-based products and services.

Dr. Cerf is the former Senior Vice President of Technology Strategy for MCI. There, he guided MCI's technical strategy.

In December 1997, President Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Cerf and his colleague, Robert E. Kahn, for founding and developing the Internet.

In 2004, Drs. Kahn and Cerf won the Alan M. Turing Award for their work on the Internet protocols. The Turing award is sometimes called the "Nobel Prize of Computer Science."

In November 2005, President George Bush awarded Cerf and Kahn the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their work. The medal is the highest civilian award given by the United States to its citizens. In April 2008, Cerf and Kahn received the prestigious Japan Prize.

Prior to rejoining MCI in 1994, Cerf was vice president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982 to 1986, he led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service, to be connected to the Internet. During his tenure from 1976 to 1982 with the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Cerf played a key role leading the development of Internet and Internet-related packet data and security technologies.

We are in the middle of a disruptive tech revolution, and it will take some time for society to adjust. Tech, media, and telecom companies turn to Jonathan Cohen for advice as they navigate a continually shifting legal, technological and political landscape. Decades of transactional and policy experience (in private practice and in government) enable him to efficiently advise clients regarding strategies and details in their dealings with other industry players, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and other executive branch agencies to align the private sector with the public interest. His expertise ranges from media (both traditional and social) to broadband wireless, and from commercial transactions to regulatory policy. Mr. Cohen's government service included stints at The White House and the FCC, and he is an expert in platform regulation issues, spectrum licensing and transactions, and the rules and processes governing participation in FCC auctions. His clients have singled out his "outstanding service" on corporate and commercial transactions for nationwide recognition. He holds the Martindale Hubbell AV® Preeminent Peer Review Rating and is perennially selected as a Washington DC Super Lawyer. After announcing football and basketball games for his college radio station, Jonathan's career began as a radio news reporter in New York City. Communications law therefore was a natural fit for him after obtaining his law degree. Over his legal career in the media and telecom arenas, Jonathan has negotiated and closed countless telecom transactions and worked on a wide variety of policy issues. He is a proud alumnus of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University Law Center.

Links:

Wilkinson Barker Knauer LLP

Jonathan Cohen on LinkedIn

Book mentioned:

Talking about God: Exploring the Meaning of Religious Life with Kierkegaard, Buber, Tillich, and Heschel by Daniel F. Polish P.h.D.

From Guttenburg to Google by Tom Wheeler

The way you process information will affect your survival. It's just a fact. Without the ability to evaluate information through a critical lens, it's hard to discern fact from fiction. Kyle Williams and Kamal Carter of A Long Talk About An Uncomfortable Truth joined Joe Miller to discuss their work to go beyond critical race theory. In partnership with colleges and universities, Mr. Williams and Mr. Carter teach important facts about America's racial history. These facts are missing from most K-12 history curricula in the United States. Through their efforts to promote awareness about what Black people experience in their day-to-day lives, Mr. Williams and Mr. Carter seek to promote empathy. Over the last 19 months, A Long Talk has reached over 4,000 people. But their goal is to bring their expertise to every kitchen table in America. Links:

A Long Talk

Book: Antisocial by Andrew Marantz

A Long Talk is on all social media platforms @ALongTalk2020

A Long Talk on LinkedIn

A lack of a unifying federal privacy law in the U.S. like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and a growing patchwork of state regulations to keep track of, can make it tricky for your business to maintain compliance. This is exactly why we have today's guest here to help us navigate the difficult eco-system of state privacy laws. Donata Stroink-Skillrud is the President of Termageddon and the engineer behind Termageddon's policy questions and text. She is a licensed attorney and a certified information privacy professional. She often volunteers at the Illinois State Bar Association holding courses on the General Data Protection Regulation where she teaches other attorneys on the importance of privacy and what Privacy Policies should contain.

Trusting Companies With Your Data

Privacy and protecting your personal data has probably shown up on your radar a lot lately because of the number of merchants that have reported data breaches. Target had a huge data breach of 40 million customers back in 2013. When an event of this scale happens, you realize we can't depend on others to protect our data. It was her experience with having her own data compromised in that breach that led Donata to pursue a career in privacy law and policy.

Consumers Pay the Price When there is a data breach, consumers are the ones who pay the price. Between monitoring your credit report to make sure no unauthorized lines of credit have been opened, to closing credit accounts or getting new credit cards reissued, there is a great deal of time and effort needed to mitigate the impact of the data breach. This all comes at the expense of the consumer, who has to invest their time in making all the right moves to protect themselves. The High Price on Non-Compliance for Businesses It can be costly for companies when they don't comply with privacy laws. Depending on the state, there can be huge penalties and fines at stake.

However, there is also an enormous cost involved in compliance. Having a privacy policy on your website is just the first step in compliance. Each state has their own privacy laws, so understanding those laws and making sure you comply, for many businesses, requires a full time Compliance Officer.

Automating Privacy Policies

At one point in her career, Donata ended up being the person that fielded all of the business privacy compliance questions, and she found that meeting the compliance standards for each state was rather repetitive.

This led to the quest for automating this repetitive process of asking the same questions and gathering the same data, and with that automation process, Termageddon was born.

Business After GDPR

Businesses were thrown another "privacy curveball" in 2014 when the EU passed GDPR. Today, companies don't just have to worry about privacy laws in the U.S., they now have to worry about international privacy laws.

GDPR standardized the privacy laws for all the EU countries. The US has not taken that step yet, so business owners and the public must grapple with a bevy of very complex privacy laws in each state.

Consenting to Privacy Policies

From the consumer standpoint, it's very difficult because these state privacy laws require all these disclosures, making privacy policies really long, really difficult to read. There's a lot of information there. It's very hard for consumers to understand which privacy rights apply to whom. The privacy laws also don't explain the gray areas like how they define a resident, and when a person officially becomes a resident of a state.

Pitfalls of the Patchwork

Different state laws have different definitions of what it means to sell data. But some companies are saying, we don't really sell your data, but according to California's law, we do.

This makes it confusing for both businesses and consumers to understand what their privacy rights and obligations are.

Links:

Termageddon

IAPP Committee

ABA Committees

Donata on LinkedIn

You're well aware that this podcast is about public policy and so often we focus on that, but today, we're also bringing you the creative side of policy making. So many of the policies that we fight to implement are created as a way to protect and preserve our ability to be creative. We know that for many professionals, it's hard to be able to live a completely creative life, while balancing it with work and earning a living.

In a podcast first, we begin today's episode with a poem by our guest, Anita Balaraman. The poem is called "Doubt" and you can read it on Medium.com.

Anita is a technology product leader with more than 10 years of experience in building technology products that delight the customer both in the B2B and B2C domain. She is also an adjunct faculty at UC Berkeley, teaching and coaching hi-tech product management. She is currently the founder of an early stage ed-tech startup. Most recently she led the digital customer experience practice at Cisco Systems, designing and launching enterprise solutions for customer experience. Prior to that, she led the product team at WalmartLabs launching products that combine machine learning, predictive analytics and personalization. She consults independently and on the board of technology startups in the advertising, ecommerce, and ed-tech space. Anita received her MS in toxicology and applied statistics, and an MBA, both from the University of California, Berkeley.

Links:

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Washingtech.org

Berkeley College of Engineering

Doubt, by Anita Balaraman

An obedient child

Never wild

Begged to be schooled

Never one to do, what she wants to.

Somewhere in my teens I grew

To my parents, a quarrelsome, defiant point of view.

Aspired to cross the oceans blue

To America for graduate school to pursue.

Girls can't be safe, outside of parents' purview

Unless she has a husband, never mind she is just twenty-two!

In Berkeley, I was told you can be what you want to

Even a brown girl with big starry eyes, can dream one day

to be a researcher, a professional, or a professor someday.

Worked hard, very hard, or at least I thought,

For I've been given a chance, a really long shot.

But told that I may never be a researcher sought

There must be more than just the grades, I thought.

Despite how hard I fought…

Hiding my feminine brownness was like adding a nought[*].

Perhaps they are right, went my train of thought…

Why else would I not see someone like me in doctoral gown?

Oh don't be sad, said my loved ones around

You can be happy, rich, and successful without a doctoral gown- hands down.

Look at the valley of silicon and sand

A dreamland of success, prestige and wealth

For those that are committed to technology at hand.

Yes, but my mind wandered…

Where did I lose the defiance in my view?

I really care about children and leukemia

And I can build risk models that I learned in academia.

But can you blame them if they did not trust

The models I built that needed their process to adjust.

I don't look like them, or speak like them

The assumptions in my models are hard to trust.

I found my kind, the brown variety,

Who spoke bad English with no anxiety.

The friends at home and those at work

Looked and spoke like they belong to the same network.

No apologies for being a vegetarian during team lunch

Who clairvoyantly knew that salad wasn't a good munch.

This must be beautiful- to feel like you belong

Without having to rehearse your lines so I don't say something wrong.

To work with the bunch where I hoped I belonged,

I got another graduate degree, not the Ph.D. I longed.

A business degree, hoping to correct the wronged.

A Mom twice over, a wife and an employee,

'you can't get promoted if you leave at 5', would annoy me.

Benevolent prejudice, paternalism, and sexism:

Belonging, I understood, with deep skepticism.

A misfit perhaps, have always been

A toxicologist, but not the wet-lab kind

A technologist, but not an engineer's mind

An entrepreneur, who venture capital declined

An educator, living the adjunct grind

A researcher, without the terminal degree- unrefined.

Seeking belonging, but always unaligned.

Perhaps down in my subconscious mind

the fringes appeal more than the straight jacket kind?

The fringes feed concern for mistakes,

Suspended between two or more contradictory states.

An indecision between belief and non-belief

Hiding, somewhere, is a fictitious fig leaf?

Belonging requires suspending the lunatic fringe

To honor and reflect the collective doubt.

But that is harder to live, day in and day out

Easier it seems to simply not honor their doubts?

Now more than ever we need to protect our kids as they have more exposure online than ever before. Children's Online Safety is a priority that we are taking very seriously. We're living in a hyperconnected age and we've got the Metaverse bearing down on us, so online safety for our children needs to be the first priority.

Today's guest is Dana Miller, the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Commander, with the Wisconsin Department of Justice. She joins Joe to talk about her career, some more tips on how to interact with your kids to protect them online, and what kinds of issues policymakers should be paying attention to as the internet evolves.

Dana has worked in ICAC since 2014 and manages the Wisconsin ICAC Task Force Program, including oversight of Wisconsin CyberTips from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and the ICAC Victim Services Program. Prior to joining the ICAC Task Force, Dana worked for the University of Wisconsin-Platteville's Criminal Justice program, teaching courses in classroom, online and hybrid formats and managing the online undergraduate Criminal Justice program. Throughout her career, Dana has provided online safety outreach through numerous media outlets, including live presentations and training, television and radio appearances, live and recorded webinars, and streamed social media appearances.

Dana is creator and co-creator of multiple safety programs for the Wisconsin Department of Justice, including their online safety interact! e-course and the Protect Kids Online (PKO) podcast.

Online Safety Day

It's hard to know where to focus efforts to keep your children safe online, and that's something that Dana understands. In a post-pandemic and Metaverse world - kids will be more exposed online than ever before, so it's important to understand both the threats and the vulnerabilities our kids face.

Recently, Dana hosted Online Safety Day to try to bring awareness to the issue.

Non-Profit and Sexual Assault Support Background

Dana started out working for a local non-profit in Wisconsin and part of her role was to work with victims of sexual assualt. Early in her career, she was doing talks about online safety, but its evolved into much more in recent years.

Even though much of the threats remain the same, what we're seeing currently is more of a focus on that recovery of a victim centered approach to things and recognizing that we have to really focus on their needs as we're responding in a law enforcement world. And so that's a really great perspective that is coming into play with our work everyday.

Links:

https://www.doj.state.wi.us/dci/icac/icac-task-force-home

https://www.thorn.org/

https://www.stopsextortion.com/

https://www.fosi.org/

https://connect.missingkids.org/products/parent-connect-a-child-safety-virtual-discussion-series-summer-2021#tab-product_tab_speaker_s

https://twitter.com/icactaskforce

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-miller-46038280/