Vox

One Laptop Per Child wasn’t just a laptop, it was a philosophy. After announcing “the $100 Laptop,” OLPC had one job to do: make a laptop that cost $100. As the team developed the XO-1, they slowly realized that this wasn’t going to happen. OLPC pushed the laptop’s cost to a low of $130, but only by cutting so many corners that the laptop barely worked. Its price rose to around $180, and even then, the design had major tradeoffs. While Sugar was an elegant operating system, some potential buyers were dubious of anything that wasn’t Microsoft Windows.

If there’s ever a moment to capture the existential crisis at Facebook, it was these past couple of weeks. But while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was confronted by members of Congress with his company’s failures, more than 30,000 Oklahoma teachers were rallying at the state Capitol to demand better pay and funding for their state’s struggling schools. It was the teachers’ eighth day on strike.

Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Kennedy (R-LA) will introduce legislation to protect the privacy of users’ online data. Though a bill has not been drafted yet, the legislation would, among other things, give users recourse options if their data is breached, and the right to opt out of data tracking and collection.

The proposed legislation will:

[Commentary] While online rights are coming into question, it’s worth considering how those will overlap with offline rights and civic engagement. We need a conversation about data protections, empowering users with their own information, and transparency — ultimately, data rights are now civic rights.While the US still lacks such data standards, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), scheduled to take effect in May, demonstrates a path toward reliable online privacy balanced with transparency. 

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's appearance before Congress turned into something of a pointed gripe session, with both Democratic and Republican senators attacking Facebook for failing to protect users’ data and stop Russian election interference, and raising questions about whether Facebook should be more heavily regulated. Of specific interest were the revelations that sensitive data of as many as 87 million Facebook users were harvested without explicit permission by a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, which was connected to the Trump campaign.