October 2013

Recent technology breakthroughs promise to greatly improve the lives of the disabled:

• Smartphones: a device that once was used only to make phone calls could connect users to data and each other with a minimum of keystrokes, making it especially useful for those with limited digital dexterity.
• Voice-recognition and text-to-speech software: The continuing refinement of speech recognition technology has evolved to the point where the visually impaired can hear a computer speak the words in a document or hear an incoming text message or voice mail from a friend.
• Social media platforms: these sites serve to connect people who otherwise might remain out of touch -- a service with immeasurable emotional value to those whose disabilities limit their time out of the home.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) released a new report from the Everyone Graduates Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education confirming the impact that public media stations continue to have in helping to improve high school graduation rates.

The report finds that the American Graduate initiative has succeeded in building community capacity to meet the national priority of ending America’s high school dropout crisis. Public media has achieved this success by raising awareness and building knowledge of the issue, highlighting proven solutions, ensuring a sustained multi-sector response and fostering collective community action toward common goals -- key strategies identified in the Civic Martial Plan for a Grad Nation as essential for progress. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s initiative, American Graduate: Let’s Make It Happen, has demonstrated that by combining personal communication with high-quality media products, public media have a critical, unique and valuable role in meeting this national priority. The evidence from the first 18 months of American Graduate shows the value of public media’s role in helping communities understand and address pressing national challenges. The initial successes set the stage for sustainable on-going work and show that American Graduate has the potential for long- term impact through its public media stations, in partnership with each community they serve.

The National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) expects to have a full docket in 2014, but when asked to boil down the organization’s priorities heading into next year, president and CEO (and former FCC chairman) Michael Powell identified three: “Broadband, broadband, and broadband.”

That’s partly because broadband “is still relatively virgin from a policy and regulatory standpoint. It’s not really very old,” he said. Powell echoed the NCTA’s stance that network neutrality rules “were fundamentally unnecessary,” noting that cable has no economic desire to prevent customers from accessing content over broadband. “An open Internet is critical to the vibrancy to that platform.”

Aaron’s, a rent-to-own retailer, has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it knowingly played a direct and vital role in its franchisees’ installation and use of software on rental computers that secretly monitored consumers including by taking webcam pictures of them in their homes.

According to the FTC’s complaint, Aaron’s franchisees used the software, which surreptitiously tracked consumers’ locations, captured images through the computers’ webcams -- including those of adults engaged in intimate activities -- and activated keyloggers that captured users’ login credentials for e-mail accounts and financial and social media sites.

Under the terms of the proposed consent agreement with the FTC, Aaron’s will be:

• Prohibited from using monitoring technology that captures keystrokes or screenshots, or activates the camera or microphone on a consumer’s computer, except to provide technical support requested by the consumer.
• Required to give clear notice and obtain express consent from consumers at the time of rental in order to install technology that allows location tracking of a rented product. For computer rentals, the company will have to give notice to consumers not only when it initially rents the product, but also at the time the tracking technology is activated, unless the product has been reported by the consumer as lost or stolen.
• Prohibited from deceptively gathering consumer information.
• Prevented from using any information it obtained through improper means in connection with the collection of any debt, money or property as part of a rent-to-own transaction.
• Required to delete or destroy any information it has improperly collected and transmit in an encrypted format any location or tracking data it collects properly. Required to conduct annual monitoring and oversight of its franchisees and hold them to the requirements in the agreement that apply to Aaron’s and its corporate stores, and to terminate the franchise agreements of franchises that do not meet those requirements.