SUMMARY: Following a week in the life of a middle schooler, the new film "Eighth Grade" sets the familiar fumblings of adolescence against the constant glare of a glowing screen or Snapchat filter. Jeffrey Brown takes a look at why it’s drawing strong critical praise for its raw portrayal of the challenges of being a teenager in the digital age.
SUMMARY: A Supreme Court case centering around a piece of technology that most of us have in hand's reach has the potential to transform privacy law in the digital age. John Yang sits down with Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal to explain the details and the potential effects of the case.
Top Republicans pushed a measure through the House on Tuesday that overturns Obama-era regulations intended to protect consumers' data from being shared with advertisers without consent. If you're reading this story on a computer or internet-connected device, that obviously includes you.
The bill, which passed 215-205 in the House, pulls back legislation passed by Congress in 2016. Originally proposed by the Federal Communications Commission, the measure would have broadened FCC privacy rules so they also applied to broadband internet service providers. In other words, it required companies like AT&T, Verizon and others to get consent from customers like you before sharing (or selling) your personal data and web browsing history with advertisers.
A companion bill passed 50-48 last week in the Senate. President Donald Trump signed the bill Monday.
Now, before you lament the end of your internet privacy — take a deep breath.
As Wired reporter Klint Finley told the NewsHour, those FCC rules never actually went into effect, meaning technically, Tuesday's measure doesn't change anything. The rules to protect customer data were passed in October of last year but wouldn't have taken effect until December 2017, Finley said. So the bill passed on Tuesday simply blocks those rules from taking effect, Finley said.
That said, Tuesday's measure does create some wrinkles in the debate over consumer privacy in the rapidly growing Internet of Things. Namely, the measure blocks the FCC not only from implementing the 2016 rules, but pursuing others like them.
“Mostly it means that internet service providers now have the go-ahead to sell data,” Finley explained. “It was already technically legal, but if any companies were holding off on doing it while they waited to see if the laws went into effect or not, they don't have to wait anymore.”
SUMMARY: New legislation signed by President Trump blocks the implementation of internet privacy rules that would have stopped service providers from collecting and selling information about your web browsing to advertisers without your permission. William Brangham gets two views from Gigi Sohn of the Open Society Foundations and Scott Cleland, chairman of NetCompetition.org.
SUMMARY: Public education is becoming increasingly digitized -- these days, schools can compile everything from a student’s grades to their eating habits in online profiles. But while this technology facilitates personalized learning, it also puts student data at risk of being compromised and misused, and extra security could come at the expense of education. John Tulenko of Education Week reports.
JOHN TULENKO (NewsHour): Miami, Florida, is taking on one of public education’s oldest problems: With so many students, how do you personalize instruction? One answer is with computers.
At Miami’s iPrep Academy, one-size-fits-all lessons are a thing of the past.
NICOLE RASMUSON, iPrep Academy: We all started at the very beginning, and then some just took off.
JOHN TULENKO: Nicole Rasmuson teaches math, using innovative software.
NICOLE RASMUSON: It’s about 70 percent online. And it’s a smart program, and so it checks, are they understanding, are they answering questions correctly right away? Are they struggling? Is it taking them a long time to answer questions? Do they keep making mistakes?
JOHN TULENKO: All the while, the computer is crunching and storing data about the students and sending back customized lessons.
NICOLE RASMUSON: It’ll ask them, what are your interests? And so, in the word problems, it’ll — if one kid’s really interested in food, it’ll talk about cookies and that kind of stuff. It’ll even ask them, what are your friends’ names? And then it’ll put their friends’ names in the problems, too.
JOHN TULENKO: All that gets uploaded, along with student schedules, grades, discipline records, homework and even e-mails, the makings of what some have called a digital profile, that privacy expert Joel Reidenberg fears could someday be used in unauthorized ways.
SUMMARY: Hackers dumped troves of personal information stolen from the adultery website Ashley Madison this week. Millions of names, email addresses and partial credit card numbers were released, raising alarms about how much privacy any of us enjoy online. Hari Sreenivasan discusses the fallout with Neil Richards of Washington University and Julia Angwin of ProPublica.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Internet hackers dumped troves of personal information this week stolen from an adultery Web site, raising new questions about online privacy and the ability of Web sites to protect it.
Hari Sreenivasan has our look.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): The hackers said the attack on Ashley Madison was motivated by the failure of its parent company to deliver on a service that promised to erase users’ information for a fee. Millions of names, e-mail addresses and partial credit card numbers were released, a public outing that has raised questions about how much privacy any of us enjoy online.
Joining me to discuss this are Neil Richards, a professor of law at Washington University in Saint Louis, where he studies privacy and the Internet. His recent book is “Intellectual Privacy: Rethinking Civil Liberties in the Digital Age.” And Julia Angwin, who covers privacy for ProPublica, her most recent book is called “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.”
All right, so, Neil, I want to start with you first.
We have had the Sony Pictures hack, where thousands of employees of a corporation had their communication and their information released. We have had the Office of Personnel Management hacked, 22 million employees of the federal government, right?
We have also had celebrity hacks before, where unsuspecting celebrities had their photos from iPhones or iClouds released. What makes this different?
NEIL RICHARDS, Washington University: Well, it’s certainly different because it’s more salacious. Right? It involves sex and betrayal.
I think the magnitude of the hack and the sensitivity of the information that is being exposed. I think it’s important that we think about these questions, because this is a little more juicy in terms of — maybe like tabloid news, than some of the other hacks, but it’s important to draw attention to what is an increasingly enormous problem.
HARI SREENIVASAN: So, Julia, I want to ask. There is this notion that your information, especially on a sensitive site like this, sits in a lockbox. And to credit this site, this digital set of locks that they had was actually better than average.
But is there such a thing as true security? As soon as you type something, is it out there forever?
JULIA ANGWIN, ProPublica: Sadly, what we’re learning is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of true security out there in the real world.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): He’s written books about individuals who changed the game, from Benjamin Franklin to Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs.
But in his latest work, “The Innovators,” Walter Isaacson pulls together a story about the group of creative minds who brought us into the digital age, from an English countess to a California hippie. Isaacson weaves the tale of the inventive thinkers who programmed computers and gave us the Internet.
I spoke to Walter Isaacson a few days ago.
Walter Isaacson, thank you for talking with us.
WALTER ISAACSON, Author, “The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution”: It’s great to be back with you, Judy.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, congratulations on the book.
You have mainly written about one person at a time. And you have mainly focused on history, politics. Why science and technology and why everybody who was involved?
WALTER ISAACSON: You know, those of us who are biographers know that we distort history sometimes, and we make it sound like it’s a gal or a guy in a garage or a garret with a singular lightbulb moment, and one person changes things.
As you know, most innovation comes from people working together, collaborating in teams. So I wanted to show how groups of people brought together to form teams that created the digital revolution. I also think it’s fun to understand where our technology comes from.
I mean, you and I love understanding American Revolution, but let’s also understand the digital revolution, because that makes us more comfortable with our technology.
SUMMARY: The purchase of The Washington Post by Internet mogul Jeff Bezos for $250 million will end nearly eight decades of that newspaper's ownership by the Graham family. Donald Graham, chairman and CEO of the Washington Post Company, joins Gwen Ifill to discuss the sale and the future of news media in an increasingly digital age.
SUMMARY: Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen explore the intersection of technology and democracy in their new book, "The Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business." Judy Woodruff talks to the authors about the promise and pitfalls of the digital future.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): What a high-tech future may mean for your standard of living, personal privacy and how governments deal with their citizenry, a big subject, to be sure.
But those visions are the focus of a book called "The New Digital Age" by Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and his co-author, Jared Cohen, who recently worked at the State Department. He's now at Google as well.
I sat down with them in Washington recently.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): Next: another of our conversations about the digital world's cultural impact.
NewsHour political editor Christina Bellantoni is here with our Daily Download team.
CHRISTINA BELLANTONI (Newshour): Chances are these days that when you log into Facebook, you will be asked to like just about anything, from a brave police dog to a mom fighting bullying. Is this trend just another online popularity contest, or does it mark a societal shift?
We explore the question with two journalists from the website Daily Download. Lauren Ashburn is the site's editor in chief. Howard Kurtz is Newsweek's Washington bureau chief and host of CNN's "Reliable Sources."
Taxes and government spending. Health care. Immigration. Financial regulation.
They are the issues that have dominated the political debate in recent years and have played a prominent role in this presidential campaign. But in many ways they have obscured what is arguably the nation’s biggest challenge: breaking out of a decade of income stagnation that has afflicted the middle class and the poor and exacerbated inequality.
Many of the bedrock assumptions of American culture — about work, progress, fairness and optimism — are being shaken as successive generations worry about the prospect of declining living standards. No question, perhaps, is more central to the country’s global standing than whether the economy will perform better on that score in the future than it has in the recent past.
The question has helped create a volatile period in American politics, with Democrats gaining large victories in 2006 and 2008, only to have Republicans return the favor in 2010. This year, economic anxiety, especially in industrial battlegrounds like Ohio, is driving the campaign strategies of both President Obama and Mitt Romney.
The causes of income stagnation are varied and lack the political simplicity of calls to bring down the deficit or avert another Wall Street meltdown. They cannot be quickly remedied through legislation from Washington. The biggest causes, according to interviews with economists over the last several months, are not the issues that dominate the political debate.
At the top of the list are the digital revolution, which has allowed machines to replace many forms of human labor, and the modern wave of globalization, which has allowed millions of low-wage workers around the world to begin competing with Americans.
Not much further down the list is education, probably the country’s most diffuse, localized area of government policy. As skill levels have become even more important for prosperity, the United States has lost its once-large global lead in educational attainment.
Some of the disconnect between the economy’s problems and the solutions offered by Washington stem from the nature of the current political debate. The presidential campaign has been more focused on Bain Capital and an “apology tour” than on the challenges created by globalization and automation.
But economists and other analysts also point to the scale of the problem. No other rich country — not Japan, not any nation in Europe — has figured out exactly how to respond to the challenges. “The whole notion of the American dream,” said Frank Levy, an M.I.T. economist, “described a mass upward mobility that is just a lot harder to achieve right now.”
For the first time since the Great Depression, median family income has fallen substantially over an entire decade. Income grew slowly through most of the last decade, except at the top of the distribution, before falling sharply when the financial crisis began.
By last year, family income was 8 percent lower than it had been 11 years earlier, at its peak in 2000, according to inflation-adjusted numbers from the Census Bureau. On average in 11-year periods in the decades just after World War II, inflation-adjusted median income rose by almost 30 percent.
Matching the growth rates of the postwar period — when the country was poorer, when harsh discrimination against women and minorities was receding and when the rest of the world was weaker — is probably impossible. Yet there is still a vast difference, both economically and politically, between incomes that are rising modestly and not at all.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Next, a different concept of health and nutrition in the age of digital technology.
Hari Sreenivasan has our book conversation.
HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour): Information has become so abundant and so cheap that, like food, many of us consume too much of it. And what we consume isn't always the best around.
In "The Information Diet," author Clay Johnson lays out the case for
conscious consumption.
