Month: January 2023

The public school district in Seattle has filed a novel lawsuit against the tech giants behind TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat, seeking to hold them accountable for the mental health crisis among youth.

Seattle Public Schools filed the lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court. The 91-page complaint says the social media companies have created a public nuisance by targeting their products to children.

It blames them for worsening mental health and behavioral disorders including anxiety, depression, disordered eating and cyberbullying; making it more difficult to educate students; and forcing schools to take steps such as hiring additional mental health professionals, developing lesson plans about the effects of social media and providing additional training to teachers.

“Defendants have successfully exploited the vulnerable brains of youth, hooking tens of millions of students across the country into positive feedback loops of excessive use and abuse of Defendants’ social media platforms,” the complaint said. “Worse, the content Defendants curate and direct to youth is too often harmful and exploitive ….”

While federal law — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — helps protect online companies from liability arising from what third-party users post on their platforms, the lawsuit argues that provision does not protect the tech giants’ behavior in this case.

“Plaintiff is not alleging Defendants are liable for what third-parties have said on Defendants’ platforms but, rather, for Defendants’ own conduct,” the lawsuit said. “Defendants affirmatively recommend and promote harmful content to youth, such as pro-anorexia and eating disorder content.”

In emailed statements Sunday, Google and Snap said they had worked to protect young people who use their platforms.

Snap launched an in-app support system called ‘Here For You’ in 2020, to help those who might be having a mental health or emotional crisis find expert resources, and it also has enabled settings that allow parents to see whom their children contact on Snapchat, though not the content of those messages. It also has recently expanded content about the new 988 suicide and crisis phone system in the U.S.

“We will continue working to make sure our platform is safe and to give Snapchatters dealing with mental health issues resources to help them deal with the challenges facing young people today,” the company said in a written statement.

José Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, said Google, which owns YouTube, had also given parents the ability to set reminders, limit screen time and block certain types of content on their children’s devices.

“We have invested heavily in creating safe experiences for children across our platforms and have introduced strong protections and dedicated features to prioritize their well-being,” Castañeda said.

Meta and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit says that from 2009 to 2019, there was on average a 30% increase in the number of Seattle Public Schools students who reported feeling “so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row” that they stopped doing some typical activities.

The school district is asking the court to order the companies to stop creating a public nuisance, to award damages, and to pay for prevention education and treatment for excessive and problematic use of social media.

While hundreds of families are pursuing lawsuits against the companies over the harm they allege their children suffered from social media, it’s not clear if any other school districts have filed a complaint like Seattle’s.

Internal studies revealed by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021 showed that the company knew that Instagram negatively affected teenagers by harming their body image and making eating disorders and thoughts of suicide worse. She alleged that the platform prioritized profits over safety and hid its own research from investors and the public.
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Is the metaverse closer than we think?

It depends on whom you ask at CES, where companies are showing off innovations that could immerse us deeper into virtual reality, otherwise known as VR.

The metaverse — essentially a buzzword for three-dimensional virtual communities where people can meet, work and play — was a key theme during the four-day tech gathering in Las Vegas that ends Sunday.

Taiwanese tech giant HTC unveiled a high-end VR headset that aims to compete with market leader Meta, and a slew of other companies and startups touted augmented reality glasses and sensory technologies that can help users feel — and even smell — in a virtual environment.

Among them, Vermont-based OVR Technology showcased a headset containing a cartridge with eight primary aromas that can be combined to create different scents. It’s scheduled to be released later this year.

An earlier, business-focused version used primarily for marketing fragrances and beauty products is integrated into VR goggles and allows users to smell anything from a romantic bed of roses to a marshmallow roasting over a fire at a campsite.

The company says it aims to help consumers relax and is marketing the product, which comes with an app, as a sort of digital spa mixed with Instagram.

“We are entering an era in which extended reality will drive commerce, entertainment, education, social connection, and wellbeing,” the company’s CEO and co-founder Aaron Wisniewski said in a statement. “The quality of these experiences will be measured by how immersive and emotionally engaging they are. Scent imbues them with an unmatched power.”

But more robust and immersive uses of scent — and its close cousin, taste — are still further away on the innovation spectrum. Experts say even VR technologies that are more accessible are in the early days of their development and too expensive for many consumers to purchase.

The numbers show there’s waning interest. According to the research firm NPD Group, sales of VR headsets, which found popular use in gaming, declined by 2% last year, a sour note for companies betting big on more adoption.

Still, big companies like Microsoft and Meta are investing billions. And many others are joining the race to grab some market share in supporting technologies, including wearables that replicate touch.

Customers, though, aren’t always impressed by what they find. Ozan Ozaskinli, a tech consultant who traveled more than 29 hours from Istanbul to attend CES, suited up with yellow gloves and a black vest to test out a so-called haptics product, which relays sensations through buzzes and vibrations and stimulates our sense of touch.

Ozaskinli was attempting to punch in a code on a keypad that allowed him to pull a lever and unlock a box containing a shiny gemstone. But the experience was mostly a letdown.

“I think that’s far from reality right now,” Ozaskinli said. “But if I was considering it to replace Zoom meetings, why not? At least you can feel something.”

Proponents say widespread adoption of virtual reality will ultimately benefit different parts of society by essentially unlocking the ability to be with anyone, anywhere at any time. Though it’s too early to know what these technologies can do once they fully mature, companies looking to achieve the most immersive experiences for users are welcoming them with open arms.

Aurora Townsend, the chief marketing officer at Flare, a company slated to launch a VR dating app called Planet Theta next month, said her team is building its app to incorporate more sensations like touch once the technology becomes more widely available on the consumer market.

“Being able to feel the ground when you’re walking with your partner, or holding their hands while you’re doing that… subtle ways we engage people will change once haptic technology is fully immersive in VR,” Townsend said.

Still, it’s unlikely that many of these products will become widely used in the next few years, even in gaming, said Matthew Ball, a metaverse expert. Instead, he said the pioneers of adoption are likely to be fields that have higher budgets and more precise needs, such as bomb units using haptics and virtual reality to help with their work and others in the medical field.

In 2021, Johns Hopkins neurosurgeons said they used augmented reality to perform spinal fusion surgery and remove a cancerous tumor from a patient’s spine.

And optical technology from Lumus, an Israeli company that makes AR glasses, is already being used by underwater welders, fighter pilots and surgeons who want to monitor a patient’s vital signs or MRI scans during a procedure without having to look up at several screens, said David Goldman, vice president of marketing for the company.

Meanwhile, Xander, a Boston-based startup which makes smart glasses that display real-time captions of in-person conversations for people with hearing loss, will launch a pilot program with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs next month to test out some of its technology, said Alex Westner, the company’s co-founder and CEO. He said the agency will allow veterans who have appointments for hearing loss or other audio issues to try out the glasses in some of their clinics. And if it goes well, the agency would likely become a customer, Westner said.

Elsewhere, big companies from Walmart to Nike have been launching different initiatives in virtual reality. But it’s not clear how much they can benefit during the early stages of the technology. The consulting firm McKinsey says the metaverse could generate up to $5 trillion by 2030. But outside of gaming, much of today’s VR use remains somewhat of a marginal amusement, said Michael Kleeman, a tech strategist and visiting scholar at the University of California San Diego.

“When people are promoting this, what they have to answer is — where’s the value in this? Where’s the profit? Not what’s fun, what’s cute and what’s interesting.”

For more coverage of CES, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/technology
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The past year has been difficult for startups everywhere, but running a company in Ukraine during the Russian invasion comes with a whole different set of challenges.

Clinical psychologist Ivan Osadchyy brought his medical device, called Knopka, to this year’s consumer technology show known as CES in Las Vegas in hopes of getting it into U.S. hospitals.

His is one of a dozen Ukrainian startups backed by a government fund that are at CES this year to show their technology to the world.

“Two of our hospitals we operated before are ruined already and one is still occupied. So this is the biggest challenge,” Osadchyy said.

“The second challenge is for production and our team because they are shelling our electricity system and people are hard to work without lights, without heating in their flats,” he said.

Inspired by grandmother

He came up with the device after spending a year with his own grandmother in the hospital and finding that he had to track down nurses when she needed something.

The system works by notifying nurses when a patient has an abnormal heart rate, is due for treatment or otherwise needs help. The nurse can’t turn off their button until they’ve dealt with the issue.

“We are still working and operating because hospitals are open and we need to support them and provide efficiency and safety for patients as well,” he said.

Karina Kudriavtseva of the government-backed Ukrainian Startup Fund, says that, like Knopka, all the country’s startups have kept going since Russia’s invasion almost a year ago.

“The times have changed, their conditions have changed, but it can only make them stronger because all of the startups are working on the thing that to save the company, save the team, save the business, and save their lives, of course,” she said.

Conflict led to relocation, innovation

The invasion forced Valentyn Frechka to relocate to France, but he says his Releaf paper company has never stopped production.

When he was 16, Frechka decided to study alternative sources of cellulose in order to decrease deforestation. He’s now developed a technology that uses fallen leaves and recycled fiber to make paper.

The company’s main product is paper shopping bags, but they also make food packaging, egg trays and corrugated boxes.

Frechka said the conflict has forced the company to become more flexible and more open to opportunities.

“When this conflict happened and we located our company to France, we have found a lot of new partners and we have raised fundraising. We have raised the money for our needs,” he said. “So, it really makes us more open for the world.”
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