We’re not getting a national vaccine passport. Here’s why it never stood a chance

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Political arguments about vaccine passports have been raging for months : whether we need them, if they could be built equitably , and if they are ultimately an infringement on Americans’ rights to keep their health information private. But while other countries experiment with rolling out digital vaccination credentials, the U.S. national effort was doomed before it ever began. Security experts had hoped that the government would develop a national system for credentialing vaccine recipients. A national vaccine passport would create a single standard that could be used everywhere and would be potentially difficult to fake. But on Tuesday, the White House announced the federal government would not be “supporting” a vaccine credential system. Part of what that means is that there will be no centralized database where all vaccination records live—a crucial feature of vaccine verification systems in other countries like Israel and Estonia. “Unless there was a major change in how health data is viewed from a public and government perspective, it wouldn’t even be possible to create the database,” says JP Pollak, cofounder and chief architect of the Commons Project, which has developed a globally available mobile app for storing COVID-19 testing results. “States have the mandate for maintaining vaccination registries and states are required to report things like how many people have been vaccinated for COVID-19, but they actually are not permitted to transmit the personal information of people back to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].” . @PressSec Jen Psaki on possibility of the federal government supporting vaccine passports: “The government is not now, nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential.” Full video here: https://t.co/TLFF718hVo pic.twitter.com/jJP0Ph95jH — CSPAN (@cspan) April 6, 2021 Since states are charged with maintaining vaccine registries, some, like New York, are creating their own credentialing systems Read More …

How the tech industry is sewing confusion about privacy laws

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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 …

Applying for Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech: the secrets of success

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Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech is our newest recognition program. It’s the first one focused entirely on technological advances, and also our most forward-looking such program. As such, the criteria that will make for a winning entry are unique. Here’s a look at the factors our judges will be considering—and some tips on optimizing your entry for the best chances of becoming an honoree. Say what it is and why it’s a breakthrough Submitting your technology for consideration begins with telling us what it does—and, just as important, why it’s exceptional. We’re looking for products, services, research products, and other efforts that showcase significant innovations. Providing context—such as explaining how what you’re doing fits into larger trends, or how an ingredient technology will enable further innovation by others—is essential. So is avoiding buzzwords and hype. One note: You can submit technologies that have existed for any amount of time. But it’s recent progress we care about, so focus your explanations and examples on the last 12 months. Tell us a story At Fast Company , we love behind-the-scenes tales of innovation, That’s why we ask you to provide a story relating to your technology, such as a challenge you overcame, a surprise you encountered, or a discovery you made. With a 250-word maximum, you must tell it concisely. But doing so gives you the opportunity to convey what’s special about your submission in a most tangible way. Share some signs you’re succeeding You’re welcome to enter technologies that haven’t reached the market yet—in fact, we hope you do. But evidence that your technology is more than a good idea will still help your case. That could come in the form of promising research data, testimonials from third parties, fundraising announcements, or any other objective signs that you’ve created something that matters Read More …

How U.S. schools proved Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was safe

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When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the use of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines last December—a year after the coronavirus was first identified in Wuhan, China—it was a dramatic piece of good news after one of the most disruptive years the country has ever experienced. Now consider the thrill people felt in April 1955 when Dr. Jonas Salk’s new polio vaccine was officially declared to be “safe, effective, and potent.” That came more than 60 years after the first known polio outbreak in the U.S., which took place in rural Rutland County, Vermont in 1894. It killed 18—mostly children below the age of 12–and left 123 permanently paralyzed. From there, polio became an enduring, mysterious scourge. In 1916, it hit New York City, killing 2,343 out of a total of 6,000 nationwide that year. In the 1940s and early 1950s, the number of incidents in the U.S. grew eightfold, reaching 37 per 100,000 population by 1952. The fact that children were most susceptible to the disease made it only more terrifying. The Salk vaccine was approved only after going through the largest clinical trial in history. Rather than being a government project, this test was overseen and paid for by a nonprofit organization founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938: The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, better known as the March of Dimes. (Roosevelt himself had contracted polio at the unusually advanced age of 39.) More than 1.3 million children participated; some got either the vaccine, which required three shots over a five-week period, or a placebo, while others underwent observation for polio. The only logical way to reach so many children was through schools. The result was an unprecedented national effort built atop public-education infrastructure Read More …

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

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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 …