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TikTok is a thriving learning community—and may be the future of education

Posted onApril 12, 2021Authoradmin

Even pre-pandemic, the decline of traditional education was already underway. With exorbitant costs and a focus on standardized test scores, the industrial education model has become increasingly disconnected from the needs of both students and employers. Worse, little attention goes toward encouraging the skills and mentality needed for lifelong learning. As the cofounder of an education startup, I don’t think it has to be this way. A recent Harvard study showed that students actually learn more when education is built on “active learning,” which promotes working collaboratively on projects. And now, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the disruption of education as kids and young adults have been forced to learn from home Read More …

This musician is calling on Spotify to ditch any plans to track listeners’ emotions

Posted onApril 9, 2021Authoradmin

Earlier this year, Spotify elicited sheer panic when it was granted a patent for analyzing users’ voices to decipher their emotional state and then make music recommendations to match. Under the patent’s description, Spotify would also be able to use your speech to identify gender, age, accents, and even if you’re with someone or alone. It’s just a patent and that technology may never find its way into the platform. But in an era of surveillance capitalism and ever-heightening privacy and data concerns, artificial intelligence that tries to feed you music based on what it thinks you’re feeling seems like yet another dystopian future that’s almost here. After all, emotion-recognition technology is already being used in marketing, security, and hiring. But musician and activist Evan Greer is doing what she can to make sure Spotify’s patents never become a reality. [Screenshot: Evan Greer] In conjunction with the release of her single “Surveillance Capitalism” off her new album, Spotify Is Surveillance , Greer is also calling for Spotify to ditch any plans of surveilling its users. Launched in partnership with nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future, where she is the deputy director, StopSpotifySurveillance.org lays out the stakes of the issue at hand and provides a petition to sign. “The fact that Spotify filed a patent for this type of emotional surveillance and manipulation is beyond chilling,” Greer said in a statement. “It’s not enough for them to say that they have no plans to use this technology right now, they should publicly commit to never conducting this type of surveillance on music listeners.” To drive that point home, Greer explains the song “Surveillance Capitalism” is meant to underscore how the internet still has “the potential to profoundly transform our society for the better, abolishing false scarcity, and enabling universal access to human knowledge and creativity, while ensuring marginalized and independent artists and creators are fairly compensated for our labor. “But if we allow a small handful of companies to dominate the web and the music industry with a parasitic business model based on surveillance and exploitation,” she adds, “we’re headed for the opposite: a dystopian future where algorithms decide what we see and hear based on profit, rather than artistry.” [Screenshot: Evan Greer] Greer isn’t the only one pushing back against Spotify, which hasn’t faced the same kind of attention as other large tech firms regarding privacy and surveillance. The digital civil rights group Access Now has also demanded that Spotify withdraw any plans to implement its patent. “This technology is dangerous, a violation of privacy and other human rights, and should be abandoned,” the nonprofit wrote in a letter to Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, which was reported by Axios . Read more about StopSpotifySurveillance.org here and check out Greer’s album here . The proceeds from the song will be donated to the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) to support their #JusticeAtSpotify campaign. Read More …

How the tech industry is sewing confusion about privacy laws

Posted onApril 9, 2021Authoradmin

Alastair Mactaggart founded and bankrolled the privacy activism organization that pushed California’s landmark privacy law–the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)–into the books in 2018. The law spurred the introduction of similar privacy bills in states around the country, and it will likely give shape to an eventual federal privacy law. As the story goes, Mactaggart, who made his fortune in the Bay Area real estate market, spoke to a Google employee at a cocktail party in 2016 who told him he’d be surprised at the amount of data the search giant had on him. Alarmed, Mactaggart and his friend Rick Arney hatched the idea of proposing a ballot measure to ensure privacy rights for Californians, and signed on attorney Mary Stone Ross to help shape a new law. The ballot measure eventually gave rise to a comparable bill in the state legislature, which, despite heavy blowback from the tech and telecom lobbies, was quickly passed and signed into law by then-governor Jerry Brown. The CCPA gives Californians the right to know what data tech companies like Google and Facebook are collecting on them, the right to stop that data from being shared or sold, and the right to sue if a tech company fails to protect their personal data. It was the most extensive consumer privacy law in the country at the time. Mactaggart’s group, Californians for Consumer Privacy , pushed another ballot measure in 2020, Proposition 24, that strengthened the CCPA. Voters passed the measure, and the proposition became the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), which goes into effect at the start of 2023. The law also establishes a new privacy agency called the California Privacy Protection Agency, with a 5-member board and a $10 million annual budget. While a number of states have followed California in passing their own consumer privacy laws , the vast majority of states still have weak or nonexistent privacy laws. Now Democrats and Republicans in Congress are trying to how to work together to pass a national privacy bill . A number of bills were floated in 2020, along with a major bill (from Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash.) in 2021, but none has advanced very far. Meanwhile, the tech and online advertising industries are lobbying hard for a weak federal privacy law that might preempt stronger state laws, such as California’s. I spoke with Mactaggart about the state of data privacy today, and about the chances for a meaningful federal privacy law in the near future. The interview has been edited for length and clarity Read More …

Tracy Chou’s Block Party is fighting online trolls—and the startup ecosystem itself

Posted onApril 8, 2021Authoradmin

In January 2021, prominent software engineer Tracy Chou opened up registrations for her company’s first product. The service—like the company, called Block Party—is designed to help people who experience harassment online, starting on Twitter but with the ambition to expand to other platforms. By giving users more control over what they see on Twitter, Chou is hoping to solve one of the biggest and most intractable problems with social media. The problem is also deeply personal. “I have some dedicated harassers who are proud to have been harassing me for six or seven years,” says Chou, who grew up in Silicon Valley as the child of Taiwanese immigrants. “Platforms are really bad at detecting this and don’t really care.” Chou’s experiences with online abuse began when she was in high school, she recalls, but slowly escalated when she became an early employee at Quora and then Pinterest. While at Pinterest, she published a blog post encouraging tech companies to reveal how many female engineers they employed, sparking a movement toward publishing diversity metrics. In 2016, she cofounded Project Include, solidifying her position as an outspoken advocate for equity and inclusion in the tech industry. But as her profile has risen—she now has more than 100,000 Twitter followers —the more she has been forced to deal with trolls, stalkers, and serial harassers sending her abusive, horrifying messages everywhere she goes online. “My whole life is oriented around how I can be safe, psychologically, mentally, and physically,” she says. Now, as Block Party’s founder and CEO, Chou is confronting a new challenge: a well-capitalized competitor offering a free alternative to Block Party. Just a few weeks after Chou opened Block Party to the public, another startup called Sentropy announced a similar product. Like Block Party, Sentropy Protect is designed to help Twitter users manage online harassment by filtering out abusive messages. While Chou ultimately plans to sell subscriptions to Block Party, Sentropy, whose core business is enterprise software, says it will always offer Protect to individual users for free. My whole life is oriented around how I can be safe, psychologically, mentally, and physically.” Tracy Chou, Block Party The financial disparity between the two companies is stark. Though both launched their consumer products in early 2021 and were founded around the same time in 2018, Sentropy has raised a total of $13 million in funding. Block Party has raised less than $1.5 million, from Precursor Ventures and a handful of angel investors including Project Include CEO Ellen Pao, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos, and former TechCrunch editor Alexia Bonatsos. When we spoke in early March, Chou was her company’s only full-time employee and she’d built most of the product on her own. Sentropy, meanwhile, has a team of 26. For some in Silicon Valley, news that Sentropy would be competing with Block Party touched a raw nerve Read More …

Why do startups fail? This Harvard professor blames the ‘speed trap’

Posted onApril 7, 2021Authoradmin

How fast is too fast? Fab.com cofounder and CEO Jason Goldberg learned the hard way. When it launched in 2011, Fab was a flash-sale site that curated distinctively designed consumer products and sold them at deeply discounted prices. It was an instant hit. Fab’s featured offers spread like wildfire through social media, so Fab didn’t have to spend any money on marketing—initially. The products were shipped directly to consumers by their designers, so Fab didn’t hold any inventory—initially. As a result, the fledgling venture had positive cash flow—temporarily. To prepare for further growth, Fab raised $320 million in venture capital Read More …