After becoming an overnight success during the pandemic, Zoom received criticism for its privacy practices. We as an organization concerned with privacy even tried every possible way to avoid using it, as described here, in 2021. It seems Zoom reacted and improved its privacy practices however. That’s good news because it does have many useful features other tools don’t.

Epic Games will pay $275 million for “violating children’s privacy law”, in addition to another payment of $245 million in refunds for “tricking users into making unwanted charges” within Fortnite‘s in-game store.

Consumers who believe they were unfairly charged for in-game purchases can go to a website set up by the FTC to request refunds. It is likely to take several months or longer to process those claims, the FTC said.

After it was found, in November 2022, that the bankrupt crypto currency exchange FTX had no financial reporting whatsoever, despite having big name investors like Black Rock, Sequoia, the ontario Teachers Pension Fund and SoftBank, its safe to assume another round of Tech hype has come and gone – since the 2000 era boom and bust. But teachers, while they’re not traded (yet?), I wonder how much of students’ futures is lost when they spend hours on YouTube on the school-supplied Chromebook or iPad and what’s the cost to them and us all as a society ?