Page 22 - Florida Sentinel 5-3-2019

National
Diagnosis To Blessing: Friends Find Out They Are Brothers After Cancer
Facebook Is Anticipating A $5B Fine For Privacy Violations
Facebook and privacy do not exactly go hand-in-hand. The social media company has con- sistently been criticized by in- dividuals, advocates, and government officials for its in- ability or unwillingness to pro- tect the private data of its users, and now that may cost them. According to the New York Times, Facebook will likely pay a $5 billion fine to the Federal Trade Commission relating to 2011 privacy con- sent violations.
It was only April of last year that founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat in front of Congress and answered ques- tions about a 2016 privacy
MARK ZUCKERBERG
breach in which Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm that “offered tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior” to the Trump
campaign, was able to access user information on 87 million users, 70 million of whom were Americans. (Similarly, there was a massive security breach in 2018, in which hackers were able to access approximately 50 million accounts.)
This whopping fine — which Facebook revealed in its quar- terly earnings reportis likely to be anywhere from $3 billion to $5 billion — is related to a 2011 privacy breach. The social media giant promised in 2011 to develop safety measures to guarantee user privacy after an FTC investigation had found that it improperly handled in- formation.
WALTER GORDY, MARK TOLSON AND FAMILY
ESPN The Magazine Will Stop Publishing In September
Boy Scouts: Handful Of Sex-Abuse Cases Emerged In 2018
Cancer is almost always a devastating diagnosis, espe- cially at a young age. But for 37-year-old Walter Gordy, the diagnosis came with a blessing. As reported by Peo- ple.com, Gordy’s lymphoma diagnosis led him to his half- brother. Surprisingly, he al- ready knew him. His friend of 12 years, Mark Tolson, 37, was, like Gordy, raised by a single mother who had him via artificial insemination.
After beating cancer, Gordy registered with the site 23andme.com and found out that Tolson had already registered and was listed as his closest relative match. To
make things even crazier, their mothers knew each other from church but had no idea they’d used the same sperm donor.
Tolson broke the news to Gordy on a phone call. Gordy said he couldn’t be- lieve what he was hearing at first. Now, he said, he views the discovery as the ultimate blessing.
“The cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me because I was able to find a blessing on the end,” Gordy said. “I feel like any- body that has cancer you can look up and see something better in the end.”
In 1998, ESPN decided to make a foray into the print world with ESPN The Maga- zine, a competitor to Sports Il- lustrated that would feature longform features, columns, photos, and more.
After 21 years in publica- tion, the print version of that magazine will cease to exist, as ESPN has decided to end the publication in September, ac- cording to John Ourand of the Sports Business Journal. Ourand notes this won’t see any writers laid off, as ESPN’s magazine writers have all been doing work for their digital
ESPN
platforms over recent years and now all of their written works will land online. Some on the publishing and circula- tion side will likely be without jobs after September.
In a statement emailed to Ourand, ESPN explained the decision, and it really can’t come as that big of a surprise
given the cost of publishing, printing, and distributing a na- tional magazine — although the door remains open for spe- cial editions to be made in the future, such as the Body Issue.
“Consumer habits are evolv- ing rapidly, and this requires ESPN to evolve as well. The only change here is that we are moving away from printing it on paper and sending it in the mail. ... Our data shows the vast majority of readers al- ready consume our print jour- nalism on digital platforms, and this approach will maxi- mize our reach and impact.”
NEW YORK (AP) — Under pressure over past allegations of child sex abuse, the Boy Scouts of America defended its current prevention policies on Wednesday and said there were five known victims in 2018 out of roughly 2.2 million youth members.
“Scouting programs today are safe,” said Erin Eisner, a chief strategy officer for the BSA and the mother of two scouts. “If I felt for a second that scouting was unsafe, I would not be associated with nor advocate for the BSA.”
Eisner, who joined Chief Scout Executive Mike Sur- baugh in a telephone news conference, urged the creation of a national registry in which the BSA and other youth-serv- ing organizations could pool information they had gathered about confirmed or suspected predators in order to lessen the chances that any of them could obtain positions working with children. Eisner said the Boy Scouts were collaborating on that project with the Centers for Disease Control and Pre- vention and with the National Center for Missing and Ex- ploited Children.
The BSA convened the news
THE BOY SCOUTS
conference in response to flurry of news reports about abuse-related challenges fac- ing the 109-year-old organiza- tion.
Across the U. S., lawyers are recruiting clients to join in sex- abuse lawsuits against Boy Scouts as states have moved to ease statute-of-limitations laws. New York enacted a law earlier this year creating a win- dow for victims of long-ago abuse to file such suits, and several other states are consid- ering such measures.
Eisner and Surbaugh de- fended the BSA’s century-old practice of compiling “ineligi- ble files,” which list adult vol- unteers considered to pose a risk of child molestation. About 5,000 of these files have been made public as a result of court action; others remain
confidential. Minnesota-based lawyer
Jeff Anderson, who special- izes in sex-abuse litigation, re- leased a court deposition in New York on Tuesday with tes- timony from Janet Warren, a University of Virginia psychi- atry professor hired by the Boy Scouts to review its files. In her deposition, Warren said there were 7,819 individuals in the “ineligible files” as of January, as well as 12,254 victims.
Warren joined in Wed- nesday’s news briefing, de- scribing the BSA’s sex-abuse database as “cutting edge’ and contending that the organiza- tion’s rate of reported sex abuse was lower than in society as a whole.
According to the BSA, when any volunteer is added to the database for suspected abuse, they are reported to law en- forcement, removed entirely from all scouting programs and prohibited from rejoining anywhere. However, the BSA does not proactively make the names in the database public.
Eisner said doing so in the cases of volunteers who have never been arrested or con- victed might raise issues of civil liberties and due process.
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