Rob PegoraroI’m heading to Dulles before dawn tomorrow, but not for work: I’m flying to Dallas to try to see the solar eclipse, a friend having invited people to visit for the occasion. Please wish us luck with the weather!
4/3/2024: Ad Industry Unbothered by Federal Privacy Law (Because It’ll Probably Never Happen), PCMag
I wrote this from the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Public Policy and Legal Summit mindful of my past excessive optimism about Congress passing a comprehensive privacy law–and then Sunday brought news of another such attempt, the introduction of the American Privacy Rights Act by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R.-Wash.) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D.-Wash.). I would love to see this headline age as badly as the one PCMag ran above a January 2023 post of mine–“Is This the Year Congress Finally Tackles Privacy Legislation?”–but I’m not going to get my hopes up just yet.
4/3/2024: FCC to Try Again on Net-Neutrality Rules at April 25 Meeting, PCMag
Speaking of tech-policy stories that have been going on forever, I wrote about the latest twist in the net-neutrality plot: the Federal Communications Commission’s scheduled date to vote for rules reinstating strong rules along the lines of the net-neutrality regulations it passed in 2015 and then smashed the “delete” key on in 2017.
4/5/2024: In this California valley, machine vision meets grapevines, Fast Company
I did some of my most scenic reporting in Sonoma County two weeks ago to check out how one vineyard there is applying robotics and electric-vehicle technology to tend its vines in a greener way–while collecting much more data about them along the way.
4/5/2024: Facebook Really, Really Doesn’t Want You to Read This One Story, PCMag
I was going to spend Thursday afternoon writing about an exceptionally-informative panel about the hazards of age-verification requirements that I’d watched at the International Association of Privacy Professional’s Global Privacy Summit, but then I saw Bluesky lighting up with posts about Facebook not only blocking a Kansas Reflector op-ed critical of its downranking of climate-change discussions and then bulk-deleting every Facebook post sharing any link to the Reflector’s site. The story got increasingly bizarre as I exchanged e-mails with two editors at that publication–one of 39 funded around the U.S. by the nonprofit States Newsroom–while Meta limited its PR efforts to a vague and unhelpful tweet from publicist Andy Stone. Only on Saturday did it get into more specifics, in the form of a series of replies to Bluesky posts by Instagram head Adam Mosseri in which he said the problem was a phishing-site filter going awry.
4/6/2024: How manufacturing is discovering new virtuous circles as it moves toward a more circular economy, Fast Company
The last piece I wrote for the Most Innovative Companies project–I did the interview for this from National Airport on my way to Barcelona for MWC Feb. 23, then wrote and filed it from Newark Airport a few hours later–was also the last to be published.
#circularEconomy #cleantech #FacebookBlockingLinks #FacebookContentModeration #FCC #greentech #IAB #IAPP #KansasReflector #netNeutrality #onlinePrivacy #privacyLaw #sustainability
