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"content": "\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003cem>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Before Apple Watches, Oura Rings and Fitbits delivered mountains of health data to the masses, a group of obsessive self-tracking enthusiasts in Silicon Valley started a movement with the tagline “self-knowledge through numbers.” This was the Quantified Self. From tracking “urges to take aspirin” to using infrared cameras to keep tabs on sleeping positions while snoring, these eccentric knowledge-seekers built a community around technical expertise and an ethos of self-discovery. Reporter Gabriela Glueck traces what happened when self-tracking went mainstream — and how the data-obsessed idealists watched their movement get swallowed up by corporate tech giants with products to sell.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-wp-embed is-provider-megaphone wp-block-embed-megaphone\">\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\nhttps://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC7979965838\n\u003c/div>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://bookpassage.com/book/9781523527922\">The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe\u003c/a> — Gary Wolf, \u003cem>Workman Publishing Company\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/data-overload-quantified-self-really-future-n189596\">Data Overload: Is the ‘Quantified Self’ Really the Future?\u003c/a> — John Fortt, \u003cem>NBC News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/kg8-D4h5miE?si=3_PxJY0A6qK4qz6c\">Wearable Health Tech: Helpful Tool Or Health Hype\u003c/a> — @TalkingWithDocs, \u003cem>YouTube\u003c/em> \u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.seattletimes.com/business/the-cutthroat-wearables-battle-is-about-more-than-tracking-your-fitness/\">The cutthroat wearables battle is about more than tracking your fitness\u003c/a> — Brent Crane, \u003cem>The Seattle Times\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.businessinsider.com/wellness-tracking-apps-sleep-score-stress-hurting-health-2026-6\">Wearables, Health-Tracking Apps Are Stressing Users, Causing Harm\u003c/a> — Emily Stewart, \u003cem>Business Insider\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2026/08/25/the-new-world-of-wearables-from-health-monitoring-to-human-augmentation/\">The New World Of Wearables: From Health Monitoring To Human Augmentation\u003c/a> — Chuck Brooks, \u003cem>Forbes\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Follow us on \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Instagram\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">TikTok\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> Hey Tabbies! We cover a lot on this show, but it’s basically impossible to keep tabs on everything going on online. So if there is a specific topic or story or rabbit hole you’re curious about that we haven’t done a deep dive into yet, you’re in luck! We just launched a listener question form, so you can ask us about internet trends, tech subcultures, or other online oddities you want Close All Tabs to cover! Check it out at KQED.org/closealltabs, and scroll to the bottom of the page. Or, click the link in our show notes. Ok, let’s get to the episode.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There’s a good chance you’re being tracked, by you. Nearly one in three U.S. adults uses a wearable device to track their health and fitness. I’m talking Apple Watches, Oura Rings, Fitbits. Even our phones and cars have trackers. We track our sleep, heart rate, steps, location, behaviors, habits, and so much more. Self-tracking has become the norm but it wasn’t always this way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For much of history, self-tracking was the domain of eccentrics and obsessive academics. They were the freaks to the rest of polite society. Like in the 1600s, Venetian physician, Santorio Santorio built the weighing chair and obsessively tracked his weight. He measured everything he ate and drank, as well as everything that came out of his body. Founding father, Benjamin Franklin, also a meticulous self-tracker. He kept detailed accounts of his daily activities. But these were more than just diary entries. They were detailed charts, a rubric of the 13 virtues he wanted to live up to, logged every day of the week, also known as a habit tracker. And then there’s Buckminster Fuller, the architect, philosopher, inventor, and all-around futurist. From 1917 up until his death in the 1980s, Buckminster Fuller kept an exhaustive archive of his life: newspaper clippings, drawings, blueprints, receipts, and all correspondence. As a lifelong journaler, I aspire to archive my life like that. But again, these were outliers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Then, in the late 2000s, a group of self-tracking enthusiasts started a movement to create and share ways of obsessively collecting data on themselves. It was called the quantified self. Today, we’re exploring the early days of this obscure tech subculture and what changed when tracking went mainstream. And we’ll try to understand whether our mountains of self-track data are actually helpful.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ready? This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. This week, I’m passing the mouse and the mic to KQED reporter and producer, Gabriela Glueck. She is going to lead this deep dive.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Thanks, Morgan. I’ll start like you do, by opening a new tab: The Quantified Self Movement. We’re going back to 2007, 2008, a time, technologically speaking, that feels so far from where we are today, you could consider christening it vintage. Apple had just released the first model of something they decided to call the iPhone.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Apple Event]\u003cbr>Voice Over: Apple is going to reinvent the phone.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Lots of people were getting online to join a thing called Facebook.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Film The Social Network (2010)] \u003cbr>\u003cem>Mark Zuckerberg character: That’s what the Facebook is going to be about. People are going to log on because after all the cake and watermelon there’s a chance they’re actually going..\u003cbr>Eduardo Saverin character: …to get laid\u003cbr>Mark Zuckerberg character: …meet a girl. Yes.\u003cbr>Eduardo Saverin character: That is really good.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>And the first Kindle even made its debut.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Kindle Commercial] \u003cbr>Voice Over: Now there’s a way to put 80,000 books, newspapers, and blogs right in the palm of your hand.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Complete with Blackberry-esque buttons that made it look more like a giant calculator than a book. Culturally, things were also a buzz. The final installment of Harry Potter had hit bookstores, Obama was about to get elected, and Rihanna was dropping bangers. -.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Rihanna song] \u003cbr>♪ You can stand under my umbrella. You can stand under my umbrella.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>This was the backdrop that Gary Wolf found himself in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>I was working as a journalist at that time and writing about the cultural impacts of new technologies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Gary was working for Wired Magazine, and he’d been getting interested in a new tech trend – self-tracking. More specifically, he was interested in how technology was allowing people to track their lives in novel and interesting ways. Suddenly, you could do things like input everything you ate into an online calculator to track calories, or clock every single restaurant, coffee shop, and store you went to.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>The very first popular geolocation systems were just coming out. So Foursquare, which is ancient now, so people were tracking where they had been.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>And courtesy of 23andMe, you could even spit into a test tube, mail it back to a lab, and log online to find out more about your own DNA. People had begun thinking about themselves and their behaviors as data. It was all enough to make Gary wonder.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>How are we going to use those tools? And what effect were they going to have on how they thought about ourselves?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>That question fascinated Gary. It brought together both his love of new technology with his penchant for philosophizing. So he brought the idea to his editor at Wired Magazine, a guy named Kevin Kelly. Basically saying, ‘hey, this seems really interesting. Nobody is talking about it that much. I feel like we should report on it.’ Then they came up with the name for the new beat.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>We put up some things on a whiteboard and I put the name “quantified self” on it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Quantified self.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>The self is the topic, and the quantified is, okay, what is the effect on the self of having access to data, access to new reasoning capacity, access to observational capacity through sensing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>When Gary told me the story about how it all went down, the quantified self, or QS, sounded interesting, but still kind of abstract and theoretical. And maybe the Wired duo were dealing with that same feeling because their next step was all about grounding their questions in the real world, finding people who were doing early self-tracking projects and trying to understand why.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>We didn’t know that we would be encountering an already existing DIY culture of knowledge making, but it was there. So where did it come from? How did it get there?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>They decided the best way to get answers would be to bring the stories to them. So they organized a meetup. It was gonna be at Kevin’s house in Pacifica, a coastal bay area town right next to tech’s epicenter. Although they didn’t know what to expect, the turnout was pretty good, about 20 or so people. Being basically right on top of Silicon Valley probably helped them draw a crowd. Anyways, they were all crowded into the space, sitting in an assortment of chairs. All pointed towards the front of the room.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>And we were sitting around talking about what we were doing, very informally, and introducing ourselves, and somebody walked in late, and Kevin turned to him, his name was Ka-Ping Yee,, and said, “okay, you came in last, you go first, what are you doing? “\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Instead of offering up a standard introduction, Ka-Ping Yee opened his computer.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>And showed this detailed time diary of everything he’d done in the last year while he was working on his dissertation in 15-minute increments. And it was so fascinating.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>After Ka-Ping, other people presented their projects. There was Berkeley psychology professor, Seth Roberts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>I think he presented something about improving his balance. He was measuring it by standing on one foot. And so he would just start a timer and he would stand on one and he would see how long he could stand on a foot for.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>When I talked to engineer and businessman Rajiv Mehta, who was at that first meeting, he said the common reaction from people who showed up was shock, shock that there were enough people nerdy enough to care about this sort of thing at all.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rajiv Mehta: \u003c/strong>And so it was just fantastic that there were other people interested in, just as importantly, to discover the huge range of interests in that tiny little group, which gave us all a sense of, this is much richer than any of us actually had thought.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>And among the attendees were people who’d later go on to become famous, like Tim Ferriss, author of “The Four Hour Workweek.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rajiv Mehta: \u003c/strong>He’d been a wrestler in high school and college and so forth and he talked about how, like, he had these detailed records of what he ate and his exercise and so forth. And he made the claim that even today, if he wanted to hit a certain weight that he would be able to reproduce it by going to his old notes and following them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Even though everyone’s project was different, a kind of unifying undercurrent ran through the group. They were all the type of people who would spend their free time doing a QS project.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>People were sort of attracted to this kind of self-tracking practice because they had two interests at the same time. On the one hand, they had a personal question that they were really interested in and they were scientific and technical professionals.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>When they had a personal question, it made sense to use the science techie tools they were already familiar with. As Gary tells it,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Without us really even doing anything, this genre was born.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The Pacifica Meetup became the first of many, something called the Quantified Self Show and Tell.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Like looking back to second grade. And it was really nice and interesting because it wasn’t about pitching anything, it wasn’t about convincing anybody that you had some magic solution, which was very common in the tech world. It was really just about saying what you personally had learned from doing something that you hadn’t necessarily been able to do even a year or two ago with the tools that were available then.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Though they didn’t fully know it at the time, the Pacifica meeting was the start of something, something that was about to get big, or at least bigger. To get into that, let’s open a new tab: quantified self goes mainstream.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>After that first meeting in 2008, QS started to generate some buzz. Gary and his Wired editor, Kevin, made a blog for the quantified self as a way to catalog their discoveries and possibly showcase their incredible tagline, “self-knowledge through numbers. “There was also a QS forum and it gained traction as people shared their idiosyncratic projects and experiences online. Gary says this kind of knowledge sharing was a big part of the early community’s ethos. Very much in line with the budding DIY culture of the late 2000s and early 2010s.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So people were sharing information on the internet about how to do things that were part really of a professional research repertoire but had started to become available to somewhat technical people to do at home.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>QSers began spreading the show-and-tell format nationally and then internationally. One 2014 report points to over 100 QS meetup groups in 30 countries, with about 20,000 overall participants. Clearly, they’d hit upon something that resonated.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bob Troia: \u003c/strong>It was just a great way to just connect with a community of people all like-minded folks and really just learning from each other.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Bob Troia attended one of the early QS meetings in New York City, after hearing about some Bay Area folks who’d started some kind of self-research movement. He was already interested in tracking himself, and the association with Tim Ferriss didn’t hurt either.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bob Troia: \u003c/strong>And I showed up one day and watched people get these like 10, 12 minute talks about their own self-experiments, very informal, very casual, but it was very inspirational. And then I was like, wow, there’s actually a lot of people out there just, just like me. I’m not the weird one.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Bob quickly got deep into QS. He even visited the Bay Area for a QS conference. After that…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bob Troia: \u003c/strong>I set up a blog that night like while I was in a hotel room and I just started writing I think my first post and I went and got a domain name quantifiedbob.com\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>If you talk to more people in the early QS movement, you’ll hear a similar story. They were outcasts, nerds, the weird ones tracking their every move. Here’s Gary again.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>I think people who have really intense scientific and technical interests, many of them are used to being outliers in some way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>He says this outsider identity became something like a point of pride and made the meetups that much more important. When you’re doing something that’s so far from the mainstream, community really matters. It’s kind of hard to imagine today since Apple Watches and self-tracking devices like Oura rings, a wearable smart ring, are so popular. But back in the 2010s, this was really niche stuff. And there was another piece of it. Because the technology was less advanced with way more friction. You had to put in a lot of effort to get data on yourself. Instead of just strapping on an Apple Watch and checking your phone, it was more like…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Okay I set up an infrared camera and I recorded myself as I slept and tried to figure out if my snoring was connected to my posture.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>To understand just how intensive or well thought out early QS projects were, Gary likes to point to examples, and there are many to choose from. But for the sake of time, we’ll look at one: the story of Jakob Eg Larsen. He’s one of Gary’s friends and co-founder of Quantified Self Copenhagen. His problem? Headaches.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>He took regular medication for those headaches, painkillers, and he decided that he wanted to really understand whether there was some pattern to his headaches and whether there were some things he could do besides take painkillers that would help him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Step one for Jakob, figure out how to measure a headache.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>And he found it surprisingly difficult. There are so many apps for recording headaches, but they require you to make a lot of subtle judgments like, ‘okay, my headache started and now I think it’s gone and now it’s back again. Does that count as one headache or two headaches?’\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Gary calls these moments of evaluation “little frictions.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>They’re just demoralizing and they become a bother.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Jakob needed to come up with a better metric, narrow his focus, figure out what data he could get that could help him understand his problem. So he decided to track each time he took an aspirin. That’d mean the headache had reached a certain threshold worth noting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So he just focused on observing. He didn’t focus on intervening. And already he started to learn a lot.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>He learned he was taking aspirins more than he thought, and more than was recommended. One side effect of too much aspirin consumption? More headaches.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>By tracking the aspirins, he sort of adjusted his willingness to sit with the headache a little bit longer before taking the aspirin, and eventually his headaches got better and his aspirin consumption went to zero.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>But Jakob wanted to keep up his tracking, so he refined his data metric, this time to the urge to take aspirin.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So this was a wonderful example of being able to get really useful empirical data from your daily life, even though you’re not really following any kind of pre-established or vetted protocol that comes to us from biomedicine.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>This project is a classic example of many early self-tracking efforts. It took a lot of thinking, refining, and all in all, a lot mental work. Also, it didn’t necessarily take fancy technology, just a little persistence. And for many people who were, for lack of a better word, desperate to learn something about themselves, that effort was worth it. Take Swedish engineer Sara Riggare. She’s quite famous in the QS world and has done many self-experiments, including one to help her understand how medication for her Parkinson’s was actually impacting her. Here she is in a short video from Salzburg Global.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Salzburg Global Video]\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sara Riggare: Patients can do a lot for themselves in that I have actually optimized my own medication effect by learning about my individual responses over time.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>As she likes to point out, many patients see their neurologist or doctor once or twice a year, maybe for an hour or less. The rest of the year is self-care.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>If you have a good medical practitioner, they are gonna use a lot of trial and error with you. They’re gonna ask you, ‘how did that work?’ And you’re getting a better answer about how that worked is very helpful.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Projects like Sarah’s and Jacob’s helped reveal the potential of self-investigation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So there was this feeling that there were new possibilities. They hadn’t been turned into products yet. At those very early meetings, you know, we were just meeting the people who would go on to start Oura Ring and the Fitbit and other tools that were just a few years down the road.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>But of course, if an impulse can be had, it can be sold. That’s next, after this break.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In 2014, Tim Cook walked onto the Apple stage wearing an Apple Watch, the ad for Apple’s first watch iteration playing on the screen.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Apple’s September 2014 Event] \u003cbr>Tim Cook: Apple Watch is the most personal device we’ve ever created.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Because you wear it, he says, they invented new, intimate ways to connect and communicate directly from your wrist.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Apple’s September 2014 Event] \u003c/em>\u003cbr>\u003cem>Tim Cook: And it’s also a comprehensive health and fitness device.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>By 2014, the Fitbit had already been out for a fat minute, and the Oura ring was just around the corner. And as the 2010s climbed to their peak, Gary says something about the QS movement started to shift too.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>There’s a way in which those ideas have become very mainstream. And when that happens, you don’t necessarily need a special place to work them through. Like, okay, I’m the only one doing this, I’m using these DIY tools, I need to meet some other people so I don’t feel like I’m crazy to apply scientific methods to my own questions. That stopped really being the case.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>A blog from the time declared the quantified self-movement dead, but many QS enthusiasts online begged to differ. One commentator on the QS forum wrote, It’s a bit dystopian to think that big companies can/should/will replace the basic agency of I want to understand something in my life by handing answers to people. But of course, in some ways, that’s what happened. And the questions that first drew Gary in, ‘how people would use the technology’ and ‘how it would shape their lives’ were no longer being answered by a careful group of self-experimenters, but by everyone else. Which brings us to a new tab: Is all this tracking actually helping us?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>These days, wearable tracking devices are everywhere, and they collect health data seamlessly. So what’s the impact of all this automated number crunching? Are we any healthier or happier? Have we all finally achieved self-understanding? And what, if anything, have we lost? To help answer these questions, I’m fast forwarding. From where we left off around 2017, 2018 to present day.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The term “obsessive tracker” has now taken on a different meaning. It’s for people obsessed with their Fitbits, not their infrared camera setup that helps them track their posture in relation to snoring. I figured I needed to talk to someone who had at one point been a bit of an obsessive tracker. So I called up the host of this very show, Morgan Sung. She got into the whole thing a couple years back, when she switched her ADHD meds and realized they weren’t really working.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And I was having like these really weird reactions and like, I was so sweaty and my heart rate was like kind of all over the place and I just like felt kind of sick all the time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>As one does, Morgan got on Reddit and came across a post from a user recounting a similar experience. That user was wearing an Oura ring when it all happened and was able to collect some data validating their symptoms. So Morgan got a ring.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>I was like, for the next two weeks, I’m going to be a little bit miserable, but I can probably at least see if like what I’m feeling is real or maybe I’m just making it up. Cause I think I was, like, oh, maybe, maybe this is purely psychosomatic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Turns out it was real. Her heart rate and body temperature were spiking dramatically throughout the day. And Morgan says it was kind of reassuring to have what she thought she was feeling confirmed by data.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Especially if you’re a marginalized person in any way who is maybe not often listened to by doctors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The Oura Ring was also giving her insight into things she hadn’t necessarily asked for and offered up mountains of sleep data. Over time, her relationship with the device began to change.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So at first it started as a novelty, and then I think, yeah, it did kind of become a little bit of a compulsion. I don’t think it was, like, obsessive, but, you know, I would, like, wake up in the morning, turn off my alarm, open the app, and check how I slept instead of just thinking, hmm, I slept this way. You know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>If the app said she slept badly, it’d put a damper on her day, even if she herself disagreed. If she went out drinking with friends the night before, her ring would clock that. If she pushed herself harder at the gym, she’d find herself wondering what her ring would say, if it would notice, if would tell her she did well. After a while, it all started to get into her head.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>I think like trying to optimize my body in that way made me feel like I was having less fun in my life.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Then something happened that forced her to cut ties with the ring for good.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>She lost the charger. I was visiting my parents on the other side of the country and I left it at their house. I was like, I’m not gonna buy a new charger. I’m just gonna go visit my parents and pick up my charger then. And it was funny because I went back home and my charger wasn’t there. And at that point, I think I just, I don’t know, it fizzled out. The novelty wore off and I guess I was, like, wow, I don’t know if this has added to my life significantly. I felt like I wasn’t missing anything.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Morgan likens her experience before, during, and after wearing her Oura ring to this meme that’s popular online. It has three characters in it, all at different stages of enlightenment about wearable trackers. On the far left of the spectrum is this guy who’s a total beginner. He’s never touched a wearable. He thinks the whole idea is stupid. Then in the middle, there’s a guy who has become obsessed with them, kind of like Morgan at the height of her Oura-ring obsession. And he’s like…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Oh, I wear the wearables. I know I can’t sleep without my Oura ring. I need to use my Whoop, or I need my Apple Watch to tell me if I slept well. And then on the far right is this guy who’s reached full enlightenment. Like, very sage-looking, hooded figure who’s like, you don’t need a wearable to be happy. These days, Morgan says she feels more like him. I think wearables can be really helpful, but I do kind of feel like that meme sometimes where I’m like, oh, you know, I can trust my body. I can be intuitive. You know, I can, kind of, trust myself to tell when something is feeling off.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Of course, this is just Morgan’s story, but take a look at the Oura Ring Forum and you’ll find similar tales. Still, I was curious if at a large scale these tracking devices are helpful for most people. So I gave Australian sociologist Deborah Lupton a call. She studied health tracking for quite a long time and she gave me a very good scientist answer: kinda, maybe, sometimes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Lupton: \u003c/strong>I’ve done research where people have said, look I’m bored with self-tracking, I’ve had enough of it, I’m just, you know, it hasn’t helped me, so I’m stopping. I’ve had research findings where people have said, say with chronic health conditions that on the one hand, yes it gives me control over my condition, it makes me feel as I have more control, but on the other hand I’m sick of it. It’s turning my home into a clinic. It’s complicated.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Take some of the recent research on sleep trackers, for instance. One survey from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine says that more than half of adults who use sleep trackers say they’ve changed their sleep habits based on what they’ve learned. So on one hand, tracking can encourage healthy habits. But this effort at sleepmaxing, like so many optimization dreams, can also hurt.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Lupton: \u003c/strong>In fact, in some ways it can make things worse because we know from sleep studies and studies with people with insomnia that the more you fret and worry about your sleep, the more it can then have this vicious circle where you can’t sleep.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>For Gary’s part, these tracking devices have kind of lost the plot of what the original quantified self-movement was all about, an approach to self-discovery, not a technology or a product.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>The idea is something like I’m just gonna get the tool and something great is gonna happen. But what did you care about? That question was never answered.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The early days, that first meeting in Pacifica, the thousands of personalized science projects, they all took so much effort, thinking, adjustment, and reflection. Just strapping on an Apple Watch, he’d argue, can’t be a replacement for all that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>I think, thinking about what’s going on and learning about what is going on with yourself, it requires active processing, right? Being told what’s happening is not the same thing as learning what’s happening from observation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The effort, it turns out, was part of the quest for self-knowledge too.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>That whole process led to a kind of deeper insight, which is commercial self-tracking tools, they’re products and products are designed to serve people who have needs, specific needs. They’re fantastic if that’s your goal. What if your goal lies outside that area where all the attention has been focused? Nobody’s gonna make a product for you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>These days, the movement, if it should be called that, is in a limbo state. One QS member told me that COVID basically killed the last of the meetups, although apparently there are some people trying to pick them back up. Gary says that for anyone wanting to carry on the spirit of quantified self, he has one piece of advice.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Don’t start with the data. That’s often a big mistake.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Start with the question and work backwards. Ask yourself what it is about yourself you want to learn. Then become your own personal scientist, figuring out how you might answer it, going back to the drawing board again and again and again.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Like, scientific practice and a scientific mindset, it belongs to absolutely everybody. And if we want to solve problems, it helps to think about them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>It feels like an obvious takeaway, but maybe these days it’s not.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That was KQED reporter and producer, Gabriela Glueck. That’s it for today’s deep dive. If you need to open more tabs on the quantified self-movement and the mass adoption of wearable trackers, check out the show notes for some further reading. And if that’s not enough, stick around after the credits for some bonus content. And if you need to close your rings or whatever, well, that’s not my problem. I’m finally free from the wearables. Okay, let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was reported by Gabriela Glueck. It was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor, Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor-in-chief.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local. This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran, and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. Thanks for listening.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>I thought Apple Watches, and I still do, and I maintain this, I’m sorry if you get offended, anyone else, I think Apple Watches are very ugly. I’m so sorry to anyone who wears an Apple Watch, but I will not get that tan line. Like, I have yet to see a wearable tracker that isn’t a little bit heinous.\u003c/p>\n",
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"The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe — Gary Wolf, Workman Publishing Company",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> Hey Tabbies! We cover a lot on this show, but it’s basically impossible to keep tabs on everything going on online. So if there is a specific topic or story or rabbit hole you’re curious about that we haven’t done a deep dive into yet, you’re in luck! We just launched a listener question form, so you can ask us about internet trends, tech subcultures, or other online oddities you want Close All Tabs to cover! Check it out at KQED.org/closealltabs, and scroll to the bottom of the page. Or, click the link in our show notes. Ok, let’s get to the episode.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> Hey Tabbies! We cover a lot on this show, but it’s basically impossible to keep tabs on everything going on online. So if there is a specific topic or story or rabbit hole you’re curious about that we haven’t done a deep dive into yet, you’re in luck! We just launched a listener question form, so you can ask us about internet trends, tech subcultures, or other online oddities you want Close All Tabs to cover! Check it out at KQED.org/closealltabs, and scroll to the bottom of the page. Or, click the link in our show notes. Ok, let’s get to the episode.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There’s a good chance you’re being tracked, by you. Nearly one in three U.S. adults uses a wearable device to track their health and fitness. I’m talking Apple Watches, Oura Rings, Fitbits. Even our phones and cars have trackers. We track our sleep, heart rate, steps, location, behaviors, habits, and so much more. Self-tracking has become the norm but it wasn’t always this way.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There’s a good chance you’re being tracked, by you. Nearly one in three U.S. adults uses a wearable device to track their health and fitness. I’m talking Apple Watches, Oura Rings, Fitbits. Even our phones and cars have trackers. We track our sleep, heart rate, steps, location, behaviors, habits, and so much more. Self-tracking has become the norm but it wasn’t always this way.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>For much of history, self-tracking was the domain of eccentrics and obsessive academics. They were the freaks to the rest of polite society. Like in the 1600s, Venetian physician, Santorio Santorio built the weighing chair and obsessively tracked his weight. He measured everything he ate and drank, as well as everything that came out of his body. Founding father, Benjamin Franklin, also a meticulous self-tracker. He kept detailed accounts of his daily activities. But these were more than just diary entries. They were detailed charts, a rubric of the 13 virtues he wanted to live up to, logged every day of the week, also known as a habit tracker. And then there’s Buckminster Fuller, the architect, philosopher, inventor, and all-around futurist. From 1917 up until his death in the 1980s, Buckminster Fuller kept an exhaustive archive of his life: newspaper clippings, drawings, blueprints, receipts, and all correspondence. As a lifelong journaler, I aspire to archive my life like that. But again, these were outliers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>For much of history, self-tracking was the domain of eccentrics and obsessive academics. They were the freaks to the rest of polite society. Like in the 1600s, Venetian physician, Santorio Santorio built the weighing chair and obsessively tracked his weight. He measured everything he ate and drank, as well as everything that came out of his body. Founding father, Benjamin Franklin, also a meticulous self-tracker. He kept detailed accounts of his daily activities. But these were more than just diary entries. They were detailed charts, a rubric of the 13 virtues he wanted to live up to, logged every day of the week, also known as a habit tracker. And then there’s Buckminster Fuller, the architect, philosopher, inventor, and all-around futurist. From 1917 up until his death in the 1980s, Buckminster Fuller kept an exhaustive archive of his life: newspaper clippings, drawings, blueprints, receipts, and all correspondence. As a lifelong journaler, I aspire to archive my life like that. But again, these were outliers.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Then, in the late 2000s, a group of self-tracking enthusiasts started a movement to create and share ways of obsessively collecting data on themselves. It was called the quantified self. Today, we’re exploring the early days of this obscure tech subculture and what changed when tracking went mainstream. And we’ll try to understand whether our mountains of self-track data are actually helpful.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Ready? This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. This week, I’m passing the mouse and the mic to KQED reporter and producer, Gabriela Glueck. She is going to lead this deep dive.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Thanks, Morgan. I’ll start like you do, by opening a new tab: The Quantified Self Movement. We’re going back to 2007, 2008, a time, technologically speaking, that feels so far from where we are today, you could consider christening it vintage. Apple had just released the first model of something they decided to call the iPhone.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Thanks, Morgan. I’ll start like you do, by opening a new tab: The Quantified Self Movement. We’re going back to 2007, 2008, a time, technologically speaking, that feels so far from where we are today, you could consider christening it vintage. Apple had just released the first model of something they decided to call the iPhone.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Lots of people were getting online to join a thing called Facebook.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Complete with Blackberry-esque buttons that made it look more like a giant calculator than a book. Culturally, things were also a buzz. The final installment of Harry Potter had hit bookstores, Obama was about to get elected, and Rihanna was dropping bangers. -.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Gary was working for Wired Magazine, and he’d been getting interested in a new tech trend – self-tracking. More specifically, he was interested in how technology was allowing people to track their lives in novel and interesting ways. Suddenly, you could do things like input everything you ate into an online calculator to track calories, or clock every single restaurant, coffee shop, and store you went to.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>The very first popular geolocation systems were just coming out. So Foursquare, which is ancient now, so people were tracking where they had been.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>And courtesy of 23andMe, you could even spit into a test tube, mail it back to a lab, and log online to find out more about your own DNA. People had begun thinking about themselves and their behaviors as data. It was all enough to make Gary wonder.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>How are we going to use those tools? And what effect were they going to have on how they thought about ourselves?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>That question fascinated Gary. It brought together both his love of new technology with his penchant for philosophizing. So he brought the idea to his editor at Wired Magazine, a guy named Kevin Kelly. Basically saying, ‘hey, this seems really interesting. Nobody is talking about it that much. I feel like we should report on it.’ Then they came up with the name for the new beat.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>We put up some things on a whiteboard and I put the name “quantified self” on it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Quantified self.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>The self is the topic, and the quantified is, okay, what is the effect on the self of having access to data, access to new reasoning capacity, access to observational capacity through sensing.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>The self is the topic, and the quantified is, okay, what is the effect on the self of having access to data, access to new reasoning capacity, access to observational capacity through sensing.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>When Gary told me the story about how it all went down, the quantified self, or QS, sounded interesting, but still kind of abstract and theoretical. And maybe the Wired duo were dealing with that same feeling because their next step was all about grounding their questions in the real world, finding people who were doing early self-tracking projects and trying to understand why.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>When Gary told me the story about how it all went down, the quantified self, or QS, sounded interesting, but still kind of abstract and theoretical. And maybe the Wired duo were dealing with that same feeling because their next step was all about grounding their questions in the real world, finding people who were doing early self-tracking projects and trying to understand why.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>We didn’t know that we would be encountering an already existing DIY culture of knowledge making, but it was there. So where did it come from? How did it get there?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>They decided the best way to get answers would be to bring the stories to them. So they organized a meetup. It was gonna be at Kevin’s house in Pacifica, a coastal bay area town right next to tech’s epicenter. Although they didn’t know what to expect, the turnout was pretty good, about 20 or so people. Being basically right on top of Silicon Valley probably helped them draw a crowd. Anyways, they were all crowded into the space, sitting in an assortment of chairs. All pointed towards the front of the room.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>They decided the best way to get answers would be to bring the stories to them. So they organized a meetup. It was gonna be at Kevin’s house in Pacifica, a coastal bay area town right next to tech’s epicenter. Although they didn’t know what to expect, the turnout was pretty good, about 20 or so people. Being basically right on top of Silicon Valley probably helped them draw a crowd. Anyways, they were all crowded into the space, sitting in an assortment of chairs. All pointed towards the front of the room.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>And we were sitting around talking about what we were doing, very informally, and introducing ourselves, and somebody walked in late, and Kevin turned to him, his name was Ka-Ping Yee,, and said, “okay, you came in last, you go first, what are you doing? “\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>And we were sitting around talking about what we were doing, very informally, and introducing ourselves, and somebody walked in late, and Kevin turned to him, his name was Ka-Ping Yee,, and said, “okay, you came in last, you go first, what are you doing? “\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Instead of offering up a standard introduction, Ka-Ping Yee opened his computer.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>And showed this detailed time diary of everything he’d done in the last year while he was working on his dissertation in 15-minute increments. And it was so fascinating.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>And showed this detailed time diary of everything he’d done in the last year while he was working on his dissertation in 15-minute increments. And it was so fascinating.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>After Ka-Ping, other people presented their projects. There was Berkeley psychology professor, Seth Roberts.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>I think he presented something about improving his balance. He was measuring it by standing on one foot. And so he would just start a timer and he would stand on one and he would see how long he could stand on a foot for.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>When I talked to engineer and businessman Rajiv Mehta, who was at that first meeting, he said the common reaction from people who showed up was shock, shock that there were enough people nerdy enough to care about this sort of thing at all.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rajiv Mehta: \u003c/strong>And so it was just fantastic that there were other people interested in, just as importantly, to discover the huge range of interests in that tiny little group, which gave us all a sense of, this is much richer than any of us actually had thought.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rajiv Mehta: \u003c/strong>And so it was just fantastic that there were other people interested in, just as importantly, to discover the huge range of interests in that tiny little group, which gave us all a sense of, this is much richer than any of us actually had thought.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>And among the attendees were people who’d later go on to become famous, like Tim Ferriss, author of “The Four Hour Workweek.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>And among the attendees were people who’d later go on to become famous, like Tim Ferriss, author of “The Four Hour Workweek.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rajiv Mehta: \u003c/strong>He’d been a wrestler in high school and college and so forth and he talked about how, like, he had these detailed records of what he ate and his exercise and so forth. And he made the claim that even today, if he wanted to hit a certain weight that he would be able to reproduce it by going to his old notes and following them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rajiv Mehta: \u003c/strong>He’d been a wrestler in high school and college and so forth and he talked about how, like, he had these detailed records of what he ate and his exercise and so forth. And he made the claim that even today, if he wanted to hit a certain weight that he would be able to reproduce it by going to his old notes and following them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Even though everyone’s project was different, a kind of unifying undercurrent ran through the group. They were all the type of people who would spend their free time doing a QS project.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Even though everyone’s project was different, a kind of unifying undercurrent ran through the group. They were all the type of people who would spend their free time doing a QS project.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>People were sort of attracted to this kind of self-tracking practice because they had two interests at the same time. On the one hand, they had a personal question that they were really interested in and they were scientific and technical professionals.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>People were sort of attracted to this kind of self-tracking practice because they had two interests at the same time. On the one hand, they had a personal question that they were really interested in and they were scientific and technical professionals.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>When they had a personal question, it made sense to use the science techie tools they were already familiar with. As Gary tells it,\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>When they had a personal question, it made sense to use the science techie tools they were already familiar with. As Gary tells it,\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Without us really even doing anything, this genre was born.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Without us really even doing anything, this genre was born.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The Pacifica Meetup became the first of many, something called the Quantified Self Show and Tell.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The Pacifica Meetup became the first of many, something called the Quantified Self Show and Tell.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Like looking back to second grade. And it was really nice and interesting because it wasn’t about pitching anything, it wasn’t about convincing anybody that you had some magic solution, which was very common in the tech world. It was really just about saying what you personally had learned from doing something that you hadn’t necessarily been able to do even a year or two ago with the tools that were available then.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Like looking back to second grade. And it was really nice and interesting because it wasn’t about pitching anything, it wasn’t about convincing anybody that you had some magic solution, which was very common in the tech world. It was really just about saying what you personally had learned from doing something that you hadn’t necessarily been able to do even a year or two ago with the tools that were available then.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Though they didn’t fully know it at the time, the Pacifica meeting was the start of something, something that was about to get big, or at least bigger. To get into that, let’s open a new tab: quantified self goes mainstream.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Though they didn’t fully know it at the time, the Pacifica meeting was the start of something, something that was about to get big, or at least bigger. To get into that, let’s open a new tab: quantified self goes mainstream.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>After that first meeting in 2008, QS started to generate some buzz. Gary and his Wired editor, Kevin, made a blog for the quantified self as a way to catalog their discoveries and possibly showcase their incredible tagline, “self-knowledge through numbers. “There was also a QS forum and it gained traction as people shared their idiosyncratic projects and experiences online. Gary says this kind of knowledge sharing was a big part of the early community’s ethos. Very much in line with the budding DIY culture of the late 2000s and early 2010s.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>After that first meeting in 2008, QS started to generate some buzz. Gary and his Wired editor, Kevin, made a blog for the quantified self as a way to catalog their discoveries and possibly showcase their incredible tagline, “self-knowledge through numbers. “There was also a QS forum and it gained traction as people shared their idiosyncratic projects and experiences online. Gary says this kind of knowledge sharing was a big part of the early community’s ethos. Very much in line with the budding DIY culture of the late 2000s and early 2010s.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So people were sharing information on the internet about how to do things that were part really of a professional research repertoire but had started to become available to somewhat technical people to do at home.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So people were sharing information on the internet about how to do things that were part really of a professional research repertoire but had started to become available to somewhat technical people to do at home.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>QSers began spreading the show-and-tell format nationally and then internationally. One 2014 report points to over 100 QS meetup groups in 30 countries, with about 20,000 overall participants. Clearly, they’d hit upon something that resonated.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>QSers began spreading the show-and-tell format nationally and then internationally. One 2014 report points to over 100 QS meetup groups in 30 countries, with about 20,000 overall participants. Clearly, they’d hit upon something that resonated.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bob Troia: \u003c/strong>It was just a great way to just connect with a community of people all like-minded folks and really just learning from each other.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bob Troia: \u003c/strong>It was just a great way to just connect with a community of people all like-minded folks and really just learning from each other.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Bob Troia attended one of the early QS meetings in New York City, after hearing about some Bay Area folks who’d started some kind of self-research movement. He was already interested in tracking himself, and the association with Tim Ferriss didn’t hurt either.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Bob Troia attended one of the early QS meetings in New York City, after hearing about some Bay Area folks who’d started some kind of self-research movement. He was already interested in tracking himself, and the association with Tim Ferriss didn’t hurt either.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bob Troia: \u003c/strong>And I showed up one day and watched people get these like 10, 12 minute talks about their own self-experiments, very informal, very casual, but it was very inspirational. And then I was like, wow, there’s actually a lot of people out there just, just like me. I’m not the weird one.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bob Troia: \u003c/strong>And I showed up one day and watched people get these like 10, 12 minute talks about their own self-experiments, very informal, very casual, but it was very inspirational. And then I was like, wow, there’s actually a lot of people out there just, just like me. I’m not the weird one.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Bob quickly got deep into QS. He even visited the Bay Area for a QS conference. After that…\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Bob quickly got deep into QS. He even visited the Bay Area for a QS conference. After that…\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bob Troia: \u003c/strong>I set up a blog that night like while I was in a hotel room and I just started writing I think my first post and I went and got a domain name quantifiedbob.com\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bob Troia: \u003c/strong>I set up a blog that night like while I was in a hotel room and I just started writing I think my first post and I went and got a domain name quantifiedbob.com\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>If you talk to more people in the early QS movement, you’ll hear a similar story. They were outcasts, nerds, the weird ones tracking their every move. Here’s Gary again.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>If you talk to more people in the early QS movement, you’ll hear a similar story. They were outcasts, nerds, the weird ones tracking their every move. Here’s Gary again.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>I think people who have really intense scientific and technical interests, many of them are used to being outliers in some way.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>I think people who have really intense scientific and technical interests, many of them are used to being outliers in some way.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>He says this outsider identity became something like a point of pride and made the meetups that much more important. When you’re doing something that’s so far from the mainstream, community really matters. It’s kind of hard to imagine today since Apple Watches and self-tracking devices like Oura rings, a wearable smart ring, are so popular. But back in the 2010s, this was really niche stuff. And there was another piece of it. Because the technology was less advanced with way more friction. You had to put in a lot of effort to get data on yourself. Instead of just strapping on an Apple Watch and checking your phone, it was more like…\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Okay I set up an infrared camera and I recorded myself as I slept and tried to figure out if my snoring was connected to my posture.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Okay I set up an infrared camera and I recorded myself as I slept and tried to figure out if my snoring was connected to my posture.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>To understand just how intensive or well thought out early QS projects were, Gary likes to point to examples, and there are many to choose from. But for the sake of time, we’ll look at one: the story of Jakob Eg Larsen. He’s one of Gary’s friends and co-founder of Quantified Self Copenhagen. His problem? Headaches.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>To understand just how intensive or well thought out early QS projects were, Gary likes to point to examples, and there are many to choose from. But for the sake of time, we’ll look at one: the story of Jakob Eg Larsen. He’s one of Gary’s friends and co-founder of Quantified Self Copenhagen. His problem? Headaches.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>He took regular medication for those headaches, painkillers, and he decided that he wanted to really understand whether there was some pattern to his headaches and whether there were some things he could do besides take painkillers that would help him.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>He took regular medication for those headaches, painkillers, and he decided that he wanted to really understand whether there was some pattern to his headaches and whether there were some things he could do besides take painkillers that would help him.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Step one for Jakob, figure out how to measure a headache.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Step one for Jakob, figure out how to measure a headache.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>And he found it surprisingly difficult. There are so many apps for recording headaches, but they require you to make a lot of subtle judgments like, ‘okay, my headache started and now I think it’s gone and now it’s back again. Does that count as one headache or two headaches?’\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>And he found it surprisingly difficult. There are so many apps for recording headaches, but they require you to make a lot of subtle judgments like, ‘okay, my headache started and now I think it’s gone and now it’s back again. Does that count as one headache or two headaches?’\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Gary calls these moments of evaluation “little frictions.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Gary calls these moments of evaluation “little frictions.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>They’re just demoralizing and they become a bother.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Jakob needed to come up with a better metric, narrow his focus, figure out what data he could get that could help him understand his problem. So he decided to track each time he took an aspirin. That’d mean the headache had reached a certain threshold worth noting.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Jakob needed to come up with a better metric, narrow his focus, figure out what data he could get that could help him understand his problem. So he decided to track each time he took an aspirin. That’d mean the headache had reached a certain threshold worth noting.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So he just focused on observing. He didn’t focus on intervening. And already he started to learn a lot.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>He learned he was taking aspirins more than he thought, and more than was recommended. One side effect of too much aspirin consumption? More headaches.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>He learned he was taking aspirins more than he thought, and more than was recommended. One side effect of too much aspirin consumption? More headaches.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>By tracking the aspirins, he sort of adjusted his willingness to sit with the headache a little bit longer before taking the aspirin, and eventually his headaches got better and his aspirin consumption went to zero.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>By tracking the aspirins, he sort of adjusted his willingness to sit with the headache a little bit longer before taking the aspirin, and eventually his headaches got better and his aspirin consumption went to zero.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>But Jakob wanted to keep up his tracking, so he refined his data metric, this time to the urge to take aspirin.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>But Jakob wanted to keep up his tracking, so he refined his data metric, this time to the urge to take aspirin.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So this was a wonderful example of being able to get really useful empirical data from your daily life, even though you’re not really following any kind of pre-established or vetted protocol that comes to us from biomedicine.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So this was a wonderful example of being able to get really useful empirical data from your daily life, even though you’re not really following any kind of pre-established or vetted protocol that comes to us from biomedicine.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>This project is a classic example of many early self-tracking efforts. It took a lot of thinking, refining, and all in all, a lot mental work. Also, it didn’t necessarily take fancy technology, just a little persistence. And for many people who were, for lack of a better word, desperate to learn something about themselves, that effort was worth it. Take Swedish engineer Sara Riggare. She’s quite famous in the QS world and has done many self-experiments, including one to help her understand how medication for her Parkinson’s was actually impacting her. Here she is in a short video from Salzburg Global.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>This project is a classic example of many early self-tracking efforts. It took a lot of thinking, refining, and all in all, a lot mental work. Also, it didn’t necessarily take fancy technology, just a little persistence. And for many people who were, for lack of a better word, desperate to learn something about themselves, that effort was worth it. Take Swedish engineer Sara Riggare. She’s quite famous in the QS world and has done many self-experiments, including one to help her understand how medication for her Parkinson’s was actually impacting her. Here she is in a short video from Salzburg Global.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Salzburg Global Video]\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sara Riggare: Patients can do a lot for themselves in that I have actually optimized my own medication effect by learning about my individual responses over time.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Salzburg Global Video]\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sara Riggare: Patients can do a lot for themselves in that I have actually optimized my own medication effect by learning about my individual responses over time.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>As she likes to point out, many patients see their neurologist or doctor once or twice a year, maybe for an hour or less. The rest of the year is self-care.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>As she likes to point out, many patients see their neurologist or doctor once or twice a year, maybe for an hour or less. The rest of the year is self-care.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>If you have a good medical practitioner, they are gonna use a lot of trial and error with you. They’re gonna ask you, ‘how did that work?’ And you’re getting a better answer about how that worked is very helpful.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>If you have a good medical practitioner, they are gonna use a lot of trial and error with you. They’re gonna ask you, ‘how did that work?’ And you’re getting a better answer about how that worked is very helpful.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Projects like Sarah’s and Jacob’s helped reveal the potential of self-investigation.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Projects like Sarah’s and Jacob’s helped reveal the potential of self-investigation.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So there was this feeling that there were new possibilities. They hadn’t been turned into products yet. At those very early meetings, you know, we were just meeting the people who would go on to start Oura Ring and the Fitbit and other tools that were just a few years down the road.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So there was this feeling that there were new possibilities. They hadn’t been turned into products yet. At those very early meetings, you know, we were just meeting the people who would go on to start Oura Ring and the Fitbit and other tools that were just a few years down the road.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>But of course, if an impulse can be had, it can be sold. That’s next, after this break.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>But of course, if an impulse can be had, it can be sold. That’s next, after this break.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In 2014, Tim Cook walked onto the Apple stage wearing an Apple Watch, the ad for Apple’s first watch iteration playing on the screen.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In 2014, Tim Cook walked onto the Apple stage wearing an Apple Watch, the ad for Apple’s first watch iteration playing on the screen.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Apple’s September 2014 Event] \u003cbr>Tim Cook: Apple Watch is the most personal device we’ve ever created.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Apple’s September 2014 Event] \u003cbr>Tim Cook: Apple Watch is the most personal device we’ve ever created.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Because you wear it, he says, they invented new, intimate ways to connect and communicate directly from your wrist.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Because you wear it, he says, they invented new, intimate ways to connect and communicate directly from your wrist.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Apple’s September 2014 Event] \u003c/em>\u003cbr>\u003cem>Tim Cook: And it’s also a comprehensive health and fitness device.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Apple’s September 2014 Event] \u003c/em>\u003cbr>\u003cem>Tim Cook: And it’s also a comprehensive health and fitness device.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>By 2014, the Fitbit had already been out for a fat minute, and the Oura ring was just around the corner. And as the 2010s climbed to their peak, Gary says something about the QS movement started to shift too.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>By 2014, the Fitbit had already been out for a fat minute, and the Oura ring was just around the corner. And as the 2010s climbed to their peak, Gary says something about the QS movement started to shift too.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>There’s a way in which those ideas have become very mainstream. And when that happens, you don’t necessarily need a special place to work them through. Like, okay, I’m the only one doing this, I’m using these DIY tools, I need to meet some other people so I don’t feel like I’m crazy to apply scientific methods to my own questions. That stopped really being the case.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>There’s a way in which those ideas have become very mainstream. And when that happens, you don’t necessarily need a special place to work them through. Like, okay, I’m the only one doing this, I’m using these DIY tools, I need to meet some other people so I don’t feel like I’m crazy to apply scientific methods to my own questions. That stopped really being the case.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>A blog from the time declared the quantified self-movement dead, but many QS enthusiasts online begged to differ. One commentator on the QS forum wrote, It’s a bit dystopian to think that big companies can/should/will replace the basic agency of I want to understand something in my life by handing answers to people. But of course, in some ways, that’s what happened. And the questions that first drew Gary in, ‘how people would use the technology’ and ‘how it would shape their lives’ were no longer being answered by a careful group of self-experimenters, but by everyone else. Which brings us to a new tab: Is all this tracking actually helping us?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>A blog from the time declared the quantified self-movement dead, but many QS enthusiasts online begged to differ. One commentator on the QS forum wrote, It’s a bit dystopian to think that big companies can/should/will replace the basic agency of I want to understand something in my life by handing answers to people. But of course, in some ways, that’s what happened. And the questions that first drew Gary in, ‘how people would use the technology’ and ‘how it would shape their lives’ were no longer being answered by a careful group of self-experimenters, but by everyone else. Which brings us to a new tab: Is all this tracking actually helping us?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>These days, wearable tracking devices are everywhere, and they collect health data seamlessly. So what’s the impact of all this automated number crunching? Are we any healthier or happier? Have we all finally achieved self-understanding? And what, if anything, have we lost? To help answer these questions, I’m fast forwarding. From where we left off around 2017, 2018 to present day.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>These days, wearable tracking devices are everywhere, and they collect health data seamlessly. So what’s the impact of all this automated number crunching? Are we any healthier or happier? Have we all finally achieved self-understanding? And what, if anything, have we lost? To help answer these questions, I’m fast forwarding. From where we left off around 2017, 2018 to present day.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The term “obsessive tracker” has now taken on a different meaning. It’s for people obsessed with their Fitbits, not their infrared camera setup that helps them track their posture in relation to snoring. I figured I needed to talk to someone who had at one point been a bit of an obsessive tracker. So I called up the host of this very show, Morgan Sung. She got into the whole thing a couple years back, when she switched her ADHD meds and realized they weren’t really working.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The term “obsessive tracker” has now taken on a different meaning. It’s for people obsessed with their Fitbits, not their infrared camera setup that helps them track their posture in relation to snoring. I figured I needed to talk to someone who had at one point been a bit of an obsessive tracker. So I called up the host of this very show, Morgan Sung. She got into the whole thing a couple years back, when she switched her ADHD meds and realized they weren’t really working.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And I was having like these really weird reactions and like, I was so sweaty and my heart rate was like kind of all over the place and I just like felt kind of sick all the time.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And I was having like these really weird reactions and like, I was so sweaty and my heart rate was like kind of all over the place and I just like felt kind of sick all the time.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>As one does, Morgan got on Reddit and came across a post from a user recounting a similar experience. That user was wearing an Oura ring when it all happened and was able to collect some data validating their symptoms. So Morgan got a ring.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>As one does, Morgan got on Reddit and came across a post from a user recounting a similar experience. That user was wearing an Oura ring when it all happened and was able to collect some data validating their symptoms. So Morgan got a ring.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>I was like, for the next two weeks, I’m going to be a little bit miserable, but I can probably at least see if like what I’m feeling is real or maybe I’m just making it up. Cause I think I was, like, oh, maybe, maybe this is purely psychosomatic.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>I was like, for the next two weeks, I’m going to be a little bit miserable, but I can probably at least see if like what I’m feeling is real or maybe I’m just making it up. Cause I think I was, like, oh, maybe, maybe this is purely psychosomatic.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Turns out it was real. Her heart rate and body temperature were spiking dramatically throughout the day. And Morgan says it was kind of reassuring to have what she thought she was feeling confirmed by data.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Turns out it was real. Her heart rate and body temperature were spiking dramatically throughout the day. And Morgan says it was kind of reassuring to have what she thought she was feeling confirmed by data.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Especially if you’re a marginalized person in any way who is maybe not often listened to by doctors.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Especially if you’re a marginalized person in any way who is maybe not often listened to by doctors.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The Oura Ring was also giving her insight into things she hadn’t necessarily asked for and offered up mountains of sleep data. Over time, her relationship with the device began to change.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The Oura Ring was also giving her insight into things she hadn’t necessarily asked for and offered up mountains of sleep data. Over time, her relationship with the device began to change.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So at first it started as a novelty, and then I think, yeah, it did kind of become a little bit of a compulsion. I don’t think it was, like, obsessive, but, you know, I would, like, wake up in the morning, turn off my alarm, open the app, and check how I slept instead of just thinking, hmm, I slept this way. You know?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>If the app said she slept badly, it’d put a damper on her day, even if she herself disagreed. If she went out drinking with friends the night before, her ring would clock that. If she pushed herself harder at the gym, she’d find herself wondering what her ring would say, if it would notice, if would tell her she did well. After a while, it all started to get into her head.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>If the app said she slept badly, it’d put a damper on her day, even if she herself disagreed. If she went out drinking with friends the night before, her ring would clock that. If she pushed herself harder at the gym, she’d find herself wondering what her ring would say, if it would notice, if would tell her she did well. After a while, it all started to get into her head.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>She lost the charger. I was visiting my parents on the other side of the country and I left it at their house. I was like, I’m not gonna buy a new charger. I’m just gonna go visit my parents and pick up my charger then. And it was funny because I went back home and my charger wasn’t there. And at that point, I think I just, I don’t know, it fizzled out. The novelty wore off and I guess I was, like, wow, I don’t know if this has added to my life significantly. I felt like I wasn’t missing anything.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Morgan likens her experience before, during, and after wearing her Oura ring to this meme that’s popular online. It has three characters in it, all at different stages of enlightenment about wearable trackers. On the far left of the spectrum is this guy who’s a total beginner. He’s never touched a wearable. He thinks the whole idea is stupid. Then in the middle, there’s a guy who has become obsessed with them, kind of like Morgan at the height of her Oura-ring obsession. And he’s like…\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Oh, I wear the wearables. I know I can’t sleep without my Oura ring. I need to use my Whoop, or I need my Apple Watch to tell me if I slept well. And then on the far right is this guy who’s reached full enlightenment. Like, very sage-looking, hooded figure who’s like, you don’t need a wearable to be happy. These days, Morgan says she feels more like him. I think wearables can be really helpful, but I do kind of feel like that meme sometimes where I’m like, oh, you know, I can trust my body. I can be intuitive. You know, I can, kind of, trust myself to tell when something is feeling off.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Oh, I wear the wearables. I know I can’t sleep without my Oura ring. I need to use my Whoop, or I need my Apple Watch to tell me if I slept well. And then on the far right is this guy who’s reached full enlightenment. Like, very sage-looking, hooded figure who’s like, you don’t need a wearable to be happy. These days, Morgan says she feels more like him. I think wearables can be really helpful, but I do kind of feel like that meme sometimes where I’m like, oh, you know, I can trust my body. I can be intuitive. You know, I can, kind of, trust myself to tell when something is feeling off.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Of course, this is just Morgan’s story, but take a look at the Oura Ring Forum and you’ll find similar tales. Still, I was curious if at a large scale these tracking devices are helpful for most people. So I gave Australian sociologist Deborah Lupton a call. She studied health tracking for quite a long time and she gave me a very good scientist answer: kinda, maybe, sometimes.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Lupton: \u003c/strong>I’ve done research where people have said, look I’m bored with self-tracking, I’ve had enough of it, I’m just, you know, it hasn’t helped me, so I’m stopping. I’ve had research findings where people have said, say with chronic health conditions that on the one hand, yes it gives me control over my condition, it makes me feel as I have more control, but on the other hand I’m sick of it. It’s turning my home into a clinic. It’s complicated.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Take some of the recent research on sleep trackers, for instance. One survey from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine says that more than half of adults who use sleep trackers say they’ve changed their sleep habits based on what they’ve learned. So on one hand, tracking can encourage healthy habits. But this effort at sleepmaxing, like so many optimization dreams, can also hurt.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Take some of the recent research on sleep trackers, for instance. One survey from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine says that more than half of adults who use sleep trackers say they’ve changed their sleep habits based on what they’ve learned. So on one hand, tracking can encourage healthy habits. But this effort at sleepmaxing, like so many optimization dreams, can also hurt.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Lupton: \u003c/strong>In fact, in some ways it can make things worse because we know from sleep studies and studies with people with insomnia that the more you fret and worry about your sleep, the more it can then have this vicious circle where you can’t sleep.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Lupton: \u003c/strong>In fact, in some ways it can make things worse because we know from sleep studies and studies with people with insomnia that the more you fret and worry about your sleep, the more it can then have this vicious circle where you can’t sleep.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>For Gary’s part, these tracking devices have kind of lost the plot of what the original quantified self-movement was all about, an approach to self-discovery, not a technology or a product.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>For Gary’s part, these tracking devices have kind of lost the plot of what the original quantified self-movement was all about, an approach to self-discovery, not a technology or a product.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>The idea is something like I’m just gonna get the tool and something great is gonna happen. But what did you care about? That question was never answered.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>The idea is something like I’m just gonna get the tool and something great is gonna happen. But what did you care about? That question was never answered.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The early days, that first meeting in Pacifica, the thousands of personalized science projects, they all took so much effort, thinking, adjustment, and reflection. Just strapping on an Apple Watch, he’d argue, can’t be a replacement for all that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The early days, that first meeting in Pacifica, the thousands of personalized science projects, they all took so much effort, thinking, adjustment, and reflection. Just strapping on an Apple Watch, he’d argue, can’t be a replacement for all that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>I think, thinking about what’s going on and learning about what is going on with yourself, it requires active processing, right? Being told what’s happening is not the same thing as learning what’s happening from observation.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>I think, thinking about what’s going on and learning about what is going on with yourself, it requires active processing, right? Being told what’s happening is not the same thing as learning what’s happening from observation.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The effort, it turns out, was part of the quest for self-knowledge too.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>That whole process led to a kind of deeper insight, which is commercial self-tracking tools, they’re products and products are designed to serve people who have needs, specific needs. They’re fantastic if that’s your goal. What if your goal lies outside that area where all the attention has been focused? Nobody’s gonna make a product for you.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>That whole process led to a kind of deeper insight, which is commercial self-tracking tools, they’re products and products are designed to serve people who have needs, specific needs. They’re fantastic if that’s your goal. What if your goal lies outside that area where all the attention has been focused? Nobody’s gonna make a product for you.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>These days, the movement, if it should be called that, is in a limbo state. One QS member told me that COVID basically killed the last of the meetups, although apparently there are some people trying to pick them back up. Gary says that for anyone wanting to carry on the spirit of quantified self, he has one piece of advice.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>These days, the movement, if it should be called that, is in a limbo state. One QS member told me that COVID basically killed the last of the meetups, although apparently there are some people trying to pick them back up. Gary says that for anyone wanting to carry on the spirit of quantified self, he has one piece of advice.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Don’t start with the data. That’s often a big mistake.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Don’t start with the data. That’s often a big mistake.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Start with the question and work backwards. Ask yourself what it is about yourself you want to learn. Then become your own personal scientist, figuring out how you might answer it, going back to the drawing board again and again and again.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Start with the question and work backwards. Ask yourself what it is about yourself you want to learn. Then become your own personal scientist, figuring out how you might answer it, going back to the drawing board again and again and again.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Like, scientific practice and a scientific mindset, it belongs to absolutely everybody. And if we want to solve problems, it helps to think about them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That was KQED reporter and producer, Gabriela Glueck. That’s it for today’s deep dive. If you need to open more tabs on the quantified self-movement and the mass adoption of wearable trackers, check out the show notes for some further reading. And if that’s not enough, stick around after the credits for some bonus content. And if you need to close your rings or whatever, well, that’s not my problem. I’m finally free from the wearables. Okay, let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That was KQED reporter and producer, Gabriela Glueck. That’s it for today’s deep dive. If you need to open more tabs on the quantified self-movement and the mass adoption of wearable trackers, check out the show notes for some further reading. And if that’s not enough, stick around after the credits for some bonus content. And if you need to close your rings or whatever, well, that’s not my problem. I’m finally free from the wearables. Okay, let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was reported by Gabriela Glueck. It was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor, Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor-in-chief.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was reported by Gabriela Glueck. It was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor, Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor-in-chief.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local. This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran, and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. Thanks for listening.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>I thought Apple Watches, and I still do, and I maintain this, I’m sorry if you get offended, anyone else, I think Apple Watches are very ugly. I’m so sorry to anyone who wears an Apple Watch, but I will not get that tan line. Like, I have yet to see a wearable tracker that isn’t a little bit heinous.\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003cem>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Before Apple Watches, Oura Rings and Fitbits delivered mountains of health data to the masses, a group of obsessive self-tracking enthusiasts in Silicon Valley started a movement with the tagline “self-knowledge through numbers.” This was the Quantified Self. From tracking “urges to take aspirin” to using infrared cameras to keep tabs on sleeping positions while snoring, these eccentric knowledge-seekers built a community around technical expertise and an ethos of self-discovery. Reporter Gabriela Glueck traces what happened when self-tracking went mainstream — and how the data-obsessed idealists watched their movement get swallowed up by corporate tech giants with products to sell.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-wp-embed is-provider-megaphone wp-block-embed-megaphone\">\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\nhttps://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC7979965838\n\u003c/div>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://bookpassage.com/book/9781523527922\">The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe\u003c/a> — Gary Wolf, \u003cem>Workman Publishing Company\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/data-overload-quantified-self-really-future-n189596\">Data Overload: Is the ‘Quantified Self’ Really the Future?\u003c/a> — John Fortt, \u003cem>NBC News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://youtu.be/kg8-D4h5miE?si=3_PxJY0A6qK4qz6c\">Wearable Health Tech: Helpful Tool Or Health Hype\u003c/a> — @TalkingWithDocs, \u003cem>YouTube\u003c/em> \u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.seattletimes.com/business/the-cutthroat-wearables-battle-is-about-more-than-tracking-your-fitness/\">The cutthroat wearables battle is about more than tracking your fitness\u003c/a> — Brent Crane, \u003cem>The Seattle Times\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.businessinsider.com/wellness-tracking-apps-sleep-score-stress-hurting-health-2026-6\">Wearables, Health-Tracking Apps Are Stressing Users, Causing Harm\u003c/a> — Emily Stewart, \u003cem>Business Insider\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckbrooks/2026/08/25/the-new-world-of-wearables-from-health-monitoring-to-human-augmentation/\">The New World Of Wearables: From Health Monitoring To Human Augmentation\u003c/a> — Chuck Brooks, \u003cem>Forbes\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Follow us on \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Instagram\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">TikTok\u003c/a>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> Hey Tabbies! We cover a lot on this show, but it’s basically impossible to keep tabs on everything going on online. So if there is a specific topic or story or rabbit hole you’re curious about that we haven’t done a deep dive into yet, you’re in luck! We just launched a listener question form, so you can ask us about internet trends, tech subcultures, or other online oddities you want Close All Tabs to cover! Check it out at KQED.org/closealltabs, and scroll to the bottom of the page. Or, click the link in our show notes. Ok, let’s get to the episode.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There’s a good chance you’re being tracked, by you. Nearly one in three U.S. adults uses a wearable device to track their health and fitness. I’m talking Apple Watches, Oura Rings, Fitbits. Even our phones and cars have trackers. We track our sleep, heart rate, steps, location, behaviors, habits, and so much more. Self-tracking has become the norm but it wasn’t always this way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For much of history, self-tracking was the domain of eccentrics and obsessive academics. They were the freaks to the rest of polite society. Like in the 1600s, Venetian physician, Santorio Santorio built the weighing chair and obsessively tracked his weight. He measured everything he ate and drank, as well as everything that came out of his body. Founding father, Benjamin Franklin, also a meticulous self-tracker. He kept detailed accounts of his daily activities. But these were more than just diary entries. They were detailed charts, a rubric of the 13 virtues he wanted to live up to, logged every day of the week, also known as a habit tracker. And then there’s Buckminster Fuller, the architect, philosopher, inventor, and all-around futurist. From 1917 up until his death in the 1980s, Buckminster Fuller kept an exhaustive archive of his life: newspaper clippings, drawings, blueprints, receipts, and all correspondence. As a lifelong journaler, I aspire to archive my life like that. But again, these were outliers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Then, in the late 2000s, a group of self-tracking enthusiasts started a movement to create and share ways of obsessively collecting data on themselves. It was called the quantified self. Today, we’re exploring the early days of this obscure tech subculture and what changed when tracking went mainstream. And we’ll try to understand whether our mountains of self-track data are actually helpful.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ready? This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. This week, I’m passing the mouse and the mic to KQED reporter and producer, Gabriela Glueck. She is going to lead this deep dive.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Thanks, Morgan. I’ll start like you do, by opening a new tab: The Quantified Self Movement. We’re going back to 2007, 2008, a time, technologically speaking, that feels so far from where we are today, you could consider christening it vintage. Apple had just released the first model of something they decided to call the iPhone.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Apple Event]\u003cbr>Voice Over: Apple is going to reinvent the phone.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Lots of people were getting online to join a thing called Facebook.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Film The Social Network (2010)] \u003cbr>\u003cem>Mark Zuckerberg character: That’s what the Facebook is going to be about. People are going to log on because after all the cake and watermelon there’s a chance they’re actually going..\u003cbr>Eduardo Saverin character: …to get laid\u003cbr>Mark Zuckerberg character: …meet a girl. Yes.\u003cbr>Eduardo Saverin character: That is really good.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>And the first Kindle even made its debut.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Kindle Commercial] \u003cbr>Voice Over: Now there’s a way to put 80,000 books, newspapers, and blogs right in the palm of your hand.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Complete with Blackberry-esque buttons that made it look more like a giant calculator than a book. Culturally, things were also a buzz. The final installment of Harry Potter had hit bookstores, Obama was about to get elected, and Rihanna was dropping bangers. -.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Rihanna song] \u003cbr>♪ You can stand under my umbrella. You can stand under my umbrella.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>This was the backdrop that Gary Wolf found himself in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>I was working as a journalist at that time and writing about the cultural impacts of new technologies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Gary was working for Wired Magazine, and he’d been getting interested in a new tech trend – self-tracking. More specifically, he was interested in how technology was allowing people to track their lives in novel and interesting ways. Suddenly, you could do things like input everything you ate into an online calculator to track calories, or clock every single restaurant, coffee shop, and store you went to.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>The very first popular geolocation systems were just coming out. So Foursquare, which is ancient now, so people were tracking where they had been.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>And courtesy of 23andMe, you could even spit into a test tube, mail it back to a lab, and log online to find out more about your own DNA. People had begun thinking about themselves and their behaviors as data. It was all enough to make Gary wonder.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>How are we going to use those tools? And what effect were they going to have on how they thought about ourselves?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>That question fascinated Gary. It brought together both his love of new technology with his penchant for philosophizing. So he brought the idea to his editor at Wired Magazine, a guy named Kevin Kelly. Basically saying, ‘hey, this seems really interesting. Nobody is talking about it that much. I feel like we should report on it.’ Then they came up with the name for the new beat.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>We put up some things on a whiteboard and I put the name “quantified self” on it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Quantified self.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>The self is the topic, and the quantified is, okay, what is the effect on the self of having access to data, access to new reasoning capacity, access to observational capacity through sensing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>When Gary told me the story about how it all went down, the quantified self, or QS, sounded interesting, but still kind of abstract and theoretical. And maybe the Wired duo were dealing with that same feeling because their next step was all about grounding their questions in the real world, finding people who were doing early self-tracking projects and trying to understand why.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>We didn’t know that we would be encountering an already existing DIY culture of knowledge making, but it was there. So where did it come from? How did it get there?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>They decided the best way to get answers would be to bring the stories to them. So they organized a meetup. It was gonna be at Kevin’s house in Pacifica, a coastal bay area town right next to tech’s epicenter. Although they didn’t know what to expect, the turnout was pretty good, about 20 or so people. Being basically right on top of Silicon Valley probably helped them draw a crowd. Anyways, they were all crowded into the space, sitting in an assortment of chairs. All pointed towards the front of the room.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>And we were sitting around talking about what we were doing, very informally, and introducing ourselves, and somebody walked in late, and Kevin turned to him, his name was Ka-Ping Yee,, and said, “okay, you came in last, you go first, what are you doing? “\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Instead of offering up a standard introduction, Ka-Ping Yee opened his computer.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>And showed this detailed time diary of everything he’d done in the last year while he was working on his dissertation in 15-minute increments. And it was so fascinating.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>After Ka-Ping, other people presented their projects. There was Berkeley psychology professor, Seth Roberts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>I think he presented something about improving his balance. He was measuring it by standing on one foot. And so he would just start a timer and he would stand on one and he would see how long he could stand on a foot for.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>When I talked to engineer and businessman Rajiv Mehta, who was at that first meeting, he said the common reaction from people who showed up was shock, shock that there were enough people nerdy enough to care about this sort of thing at all.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rajiv Mehta: \u003c/strong>And so it was just fantastic that there were other people interested in, just as importantly, to discover the huge range of interests in that tiny little group, which gave us all a sense of, this is much richer than any of us actually had thought.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>And among the attendees were people who’d later go on to become famous, like Tim Ferriss, author of “The Four Hour Workweek.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rajiv Mehta: \u003c/strong>He’d been a wrestler in high school and college and so forth and he talked about how, like, he had these detailed records of what he ate and his exercise and so forth. And he made the claim that even today, if he wanted to hit a certain weight that he would be able to reproduce it by going to his old notes and following them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Even though everyone’s project was different, a kind of unifying undercurrent ran through the group. They were all the type of people who would spend their free time doing a QS project.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>People were sort of attracted to this kind of self-tracking practice because they had two interests at the same time. On the one hand, they had a personal question that they were really interested in and they were scientific and technical professionals.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>When they had a personal question, it made sense to use the science techie tools they were already familiar with. As Gary tells it,\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Without us really even doing anything, this genre was born.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The Pacifica Meetup became the first of many, something called the Quantified Self Show and Tell.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Like looking back to second grade. And it was really nice and interesting because it wasn’t about pitching anything, it wasn’t about convincing anybody that you had some magic solution, which was very common in the tech world. It was really just about saying what you personally had learned from doing something that you hadn’t necessarily been able to do even a year or two ago with the tools that were available then.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Though they didn’t fully know it at the time, the Pacifica meeting was the start of something, something that was about to get big, or at least bigger. To get into that, let’s open a new tab: quantified self goes mainstream.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>After that first meeting in 2008, QS started to generate some buzz. Gary and his Wired editor, Kevin, made a blog for the quantified self as a way to catalog their discoveries and possibly showcase their incredible tagline, “self-knowledge through numbers. “There was also a QS forum and it gained traction as people shared their idiosyncratic projects and experiences online. Gary says this kind of knowledge sharing was a big part of the early community’s ethos. Very much in line with the budding DIY culture of the late 2000s and early 2010s.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So people were sharing information on the internet about how to do things that were part really of a professional research repertoire but had started to become available to somewhat technical people to do at home.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>QSers began spreading the show-and-tell format nationally and then internationally. One 2014 report points to over 100 QS meetup groups in 30 countries, with about 20,000 overall participants. Clearly, they’d hit upon something that resonated.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bob Troia: \u003c/strong>It was just a great way to just connect with a community of people all like-minded folks and really just learning from each other.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Bob Troia attended one of the early QS meetings in New York City, after hearing about some Bay Area folks who’d started some kind of self-research movement. He was already interested in tracking himself, and the association with Tim Ferriss didn’t hurt either.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bob Troia: \u003c/strong>And I showed up one day and watched people get these like 10, 12 minute talks about their own self-experiments, very informal, very casual, but it was very inspirational. And then I was like, wow, there’s actually a lot of people out there just, just like me. I’m not the weird one.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Bob quickly got deep into QS. He even visited the Bay Area for a QS conference. After that…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Bob Troia: \u003c/strong>I set up a blog that night like while I was in a hotel room and I just started writing I think my first post and I went and got a domain name quantifiedbob.com\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>If you talk to more people in the early QS movement, you’ll hear a similar story. They were outcasts, nerds, the weird ones tracking their every move. Here’s Gary again.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>I think people who have really intense scientific and technical interests, many of them are used to being outliers in some way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>He says this outsider identity became something like a point of pride and made the meetups that much more important. When you’re doing something that’s so far from the mainstream, community really matters. It’s kind of hard to imagine today since Apple Watches and self-tracking devices like Oura rings, a wearable smart ring, are so popular. But back in the 2010s, this was really niche stuff. And there was another piece of it. Because the technology was less advanced with way more friction. You had to put in a lot of effort to get data on yourself. Instead of just strapping on an Apple Watch and checking your phone, it was more like…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Okay I set up an infrared camera and I recorded myself as I slept and tried to figure out if my snoring was connected to my posture.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>To understand just how intensive or well thought out early QS projects were, Gary likes to point to examples, and there are many to choose from. But for the sake of time, we’ll look at one: the story of Jakob Eg Larsen. He’s one of Gary’s friends and co-founder of Quantified Self Copenhagen. His problem? Headaches.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>He took regular medication for those headaches, painkillers, and he decided that he wanted to really understand whether there was some pattern to his headaches and whether there were some things he could do besides take painkillers that would help him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Step one for Jakob, figure out how to measure a headache.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>And he found it surprisingly difficult. There are so many apps for recording headaches, but they require you to make a lot of subtle judgments like, ‘okay, my headache started and now I think it’s gone and now it’s back again. Does that count as one headache or two headaches?’\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Gary calls these moments of evaluation “little frictions.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>They’re just demoralizing and they become a bother.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Jakob needed to come up with a better metric, narrow his focus, figure out what data he could get that could help him understand his problem. So he decided to track each time he took an aspirin. That’d mean the headache had reached a certain threshold worth noting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So he just focused on observing. He didn’t focus on intervening. And already he started to learn a lot.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>He learned he was taking aspirins more than he thought, and more than was recommended. One side effect of too much aspirin consumption? More headaches.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>By tracking the aspirins, he sort of adjusted his willingness to sit with the headache a little bit longer before taking the aspirin, and eventually his headaches got better and his aspirin consumption went to zero.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>But Jakob wanted to keep up his tracking, so he refined his data metric, this time to the urge to take aspirin.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So this was a wonderful example of being able to get really useful empirical data from your daily life, even though you’re not really following any kind of pre-established or vetted protocol that comes to us from biomedicine.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>This project is a classic example of many early self-tracking efforts. It took a lot of thinking, refining, and all in all, a lot mental work. Also, it didn’t necessarily take fancy technology, just a little persistence. And for many people who were, for lack of a better word, desperate to learn something about themselves, that effort was worth it. Take Swedish engineer Sara Riggare. She’s quite famous in the QS world and has done many self-experiments, including one to help her understand how medication for her Parkinson’s was actually impacting her. Here she is in a short video from Salzburg Global.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Salzburg Global Video]\u003c/em>\u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sara Riggare: Patients can do a lot for themselves in that I have actually optimized my own medication effect by learning about my individual responses over time.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>As she likes to point out, many patients see their neurologist or doctor once or twice a year, maybe for an hour or less. The rest of the year is self-care.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>If you have a good medical practitioner, they are gonna use a lot of trial and error with you. They’re gonna ask you, ‘how did that work?’ And you’re getting a better answer about how that worked is very helpful.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Projects like Sarah’s and Jacob’s helped reveal the potential of self-investigation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>So there was this feeling that there were new possibilities. They hadn’t been turned into products yet. At those very early meetings, you know, we were just meeting the people who would go on to start Oura Ring and the Fitbit and other tools that were just a few years down the road.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>But of course, if an impulse can be had, it can be sold. That’s next, after this break.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In 2014, Tim Cook walked onto the Apple stage wearing an Apple Watch, the ad for Apple’s first watch iteration playing on the screen.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Apple’s September 2014 Event] \u003cbr>Tim Cook: Apple Watch is the most personal device we’ve ever created.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Because you wear it, he says, they invented new, intimate ways to connect and communicate directly from your wrist.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip of Apple’s September 2014 Event] \u003c/em>\u003cbr>\u003cem>Tim Cook: And it’s also a comprehensive health and fitness device.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>By 2014, the Fitbit had already been out for a fat minute, and the Oura ring was just around the corner. And as the 2010s climbed to their peak, Gary says something about the QS movement started to shift too.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>There’s a way in which those ideas have become very mainstream. And when that happens, you don’t necessarily need a special place to work them through. Like, okay, I’m the only one doing this, I’m using these DIY tools, I need to meet some other people so I don’t feel like I’m crazy to apply scientific methods to my own questions. That stopped really being the case.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>A blog from the time declared the quantified self-movement dead, but many QS enthusiasts online begged to differ. One commentator on the QS forum wrote, It’s a bit dystopian to think that big companies can/should/will replace the basic agency of I want to understand something in my life by handing answers to people. But of course, in some ways, that’s what happened. And the questions that first drew Gary in, ‘how people would use the technology’ and ‘how it would shape their lives’ were no longer being answered by a careful group of self-experimenters, but by everyone else. Which brings us to a new tab: Is all this tracking actually helping us?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>These days, wearable tracking devices are everywhere, and they collect health data seamlessly. So what’s the impact of all this automated number crunching? Are we any healthier or happier? Have we all finally achieved self-understanding? And what, if anything, have we lost? To help answer these questions, I’m fast forwarding. From where we left off around 2017, 2018 to present day.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The term “obsessive tracker” has now taken on a different meaning. It’s for people obsessed with their Fitbits, not their infrared camera setup that helps them track their posture in relation to snoring. I figured I needed to talk to someone who had at one point been a bit of an obsessive tracker. So I called up the host of this very show, Morgan Sung. She got into the whole thing a couple years back, when she switched her ADHD meds and realized they weren’t really working.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And I was having like these really weird reactions and like, I was so sweaty and my heart rate was like kind of all over the place and I just like felt kind of sick all the time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>As one does, Morgan got on Reddit and came across a post from a user recounting a similar experience. That user was wearing an Oura ring when it all happened and was able to collect some data validating their symptoms. So Morgan got a ring.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>I was like, for the next two weeks, I’m going to be a little bit miserable, but I can probably at least see if like what I’m feeling is real or maybe I’m just making it up. Cause I think I was, like, oh, maybe, maybe this is purely psychosomatic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Turns out it was real. Her heart rate and body temperature were spiking dramatically throughout the day. And Morgan says it was kind of reassuring to have what she thought she was feeling confirmed by data.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Especially if you’re a marginalized person in any way who is maybe not often listened to by doctors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The Oura Ring was also giving her insight into things she hadn’t necessarily asked for and offered up mountains of sleep data. Over time, her relationship with the device began to change.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So at first it started as a novelty, and then I think, yeah, it did kind of become a little bit of a compulsion. I don’t think it was, like, obsessive, but, you know, I would, like, wake up in the morning, turn off my alarm, open the app, and check how I slept instead of just thinking, hmm, I slept this way. You know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>If the app said she slept badly, it’d put a damper on her day, even if she herself disagreed. If she went out drinking with friends the night before, her ring would clock that. If she pushed herself harder at the gym, she’d find herself wondering what her ring would say, if it would notice, if would tell her she did well. After a while, it all started to get into her head.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>I think like trying to optimize my body in that way made me feel like I was having less fun in my life.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Then something happened that forced her to cut ties with the ring for good.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>She lost the charger. I was visiting my parents on the other side of the country and I left it at their house. I was like, I’m not gonna buy a new charger. I’m just gonna go visit my parents and pick up my charger then. And it was funny because I went back home and my charger wasn’t there. And at that point, I think I just, I don’t know, it fizzled out. The novelty wore off and I guess I was, like, wow, I don’t know if this has added to my life significantly. I felt like I wasn’t missing anything.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Morgan likens her experience before, during, and after wearing her Oura ring to this meme that’s popular online. It has three characters in it, all at different stages of enlightenment about wearable trackers. On the far left of the spectrum is this guy who’s a total beginner. He’s never touched a wearable. He thinks the whole idea is stupid. Then in the middle, there’s a guy who has become obsessed with them, kind of like Morgan at the height of her Oura-ring obsession. And he’s like…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Oh, I wear the wearables. I know I can’t sleep without my Oura ring. I need to use my Whoop, or I need my Apple Watch to tell me if I slept well. And then on the far right is this guy who’s reached full enlightenment. Like, very sage-looking, hooded figure who’s like, you don’t need a wearable to be happy. These days, Morgan says she feels more like him. I think wearables can be really helpful, but I do kind of feel like that meme sometimes where I’m like, oh, you know, I can trust my body. I can be intuitive. You know, I can, kind of, trust myself to tell when something is feeling off.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Of course, this is just Morgan’s story, but take a look at the Oura Ring Forum and you’ll find similar tales. Still, I was curious if at a large scale these tracking devices are helpful for most people. So I gave Australian sociologist Deborah Lupton a call. She studied health tracking for quite a long time and she gave me a very good scientist answer: kinda, maybe, sometimes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Lupton: \u003c/strong>I’ve done research where people have said, look I’m bored with self-tracking, I’ve had enough of it, I’m just, you know, it hasn’t helped me, so I’m stopping. I’ve had research findings where people have said, say with chronic health conditions that on the one hand, yes it gives me control over my condition, it makes me feel as I have more control, but on the other hand I’m sick of it. It’s turning my home into a clinic. It’s complicated.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Take some of the recent research on sleep trackers, for instance. One survey from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine says that more than half of adults who use sleep trackers say they’ve changed their sleep habits based on what they’ve learned. So on one hand, tracking can encourage healthy habits. But this effort at sleepmaxing, like so many optimization dreams, can also hurt.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Lupton: \u003c/strong>In fact, in some ways it can make things worse because we know from sleep studies and studies with people with insomnia that the more you fret and worry about your sleep, the more it can then have this vicious circle where you can’t sleep.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>For Gary’s part, these tracking devices have kind of lost the plot of what the original quantified self-movement was all about, an approach to self-discovery, not a technology or a product.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>The idea is something like I’m just gonna get the tool and something great is gonna happen. But what did you care about? That question was never answered.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The early days, that first meeting in Pacifica, the thousands of personalized science projects, they all took so much effort, thinking, adjustment, and reflection. Just strapping on an Apple Watch, he’d argue, can’t be a replacement for all that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>I think, thinking about what’s going on and learning about what is going on with yourself, it requires active processing, right? Being told what’s happening is not the same thing as learning what’s happening from observation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>The effort, it turns out, was part of the quest for self-knowledge too.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>That whole process led to a kind of deeper insight, which is commercial self-tracking tools, they’re products and products are designed to serve people who have needs, specific needs. They’re fantastic if that’s your goal. What if your goal lies outside that area where all the attention has been focused? Nobody’s gonna make a product for you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>These days, the movement, if it should be called that, is in a limbo state. One QS member told me that COVID basically killed the last of the meetups, although apparently there are some people trying to pick them back up. Gary says that for anyone wanting to carry on the spirit of quantified self, he has one piece of advice.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Don’t start with the data. That’s often a big mistake.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>Start with the question and work backwards. Ask yourself what it is about yourself you want to learn. Then become your own personal scientist, figuring out how you might answer it, going back to the drawing board again and again and again.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gary Wolf: \u003c/strong>Like, scientific practice and a scientific mindset, it belongs to absolutely everybody. And if we want to solve problems, it helps to think about them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gabriela Glueck: \u003c/strong>It feels like an obvious takeaway, but maybe these days it’s not.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That was KQED reporter and producer, Gabriela Glueck. That’s it for today’s deep dive. If you need to open more tabs on the quantified self-movement and the mass adoption of wearable trackers, check out the show notes for some further reading. And if that’s not enough, stick around after the credits for some bonus content. And if you need to close your rings or whatever, well, that’s not my problem. I’m finally free from the wearables. Okay, let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was reported by Gabriela Glueck. It was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor, Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor-in-chief.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local. This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran, and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. Thanks for listening.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>I thought Apple Watches, and I still do, and I maintain this, I’m sorry if you get offended, anyone else, I think Apple Watches are very ugly. I’m so sorry to anyone who wears an Apple Watch, but I will not get that tan line. Like, I have yet to see a wearable tracker that isn’t a little bit heinous.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "ex-google-engineer-gets-nearly-1-year-for-stealing-ai-secrets",
"title": "Ex-Google Engineer Gets Nearly 1 Year for Stealing AI Secrets",
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"content": "\n\u003cp>A former \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/google\">Google\u003c/a> software engineer found guilty of stealing the tech giant’s trade secrets was sentenced to just under a year in prison Tuesday. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria called Linwei Ding’s theft of proprietary information a “systematic, brazen effort to steal Google’s property,” during Tuesday’s sentencing in San Francisco. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“He knew very well what he was doing. He hurt people along the way,” Chhabria added.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In January, a San Francisco jury found Ding, then 38, guilty of seven counts of theft of proprietary information related to Google’s artificial intelligence efforts and economic espionage, based on charges that he intended to use that information to benefit China.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1980\" height=\"1374\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2259952730.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12079890\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2259952730.jpg 1980w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2259952730-160x111.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2259952730-1536x1066.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1980px) 100vw, 1980px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A sign is posted at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, on Feb. 4, 2026. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Chhabria vacated the espionage conviction in August, finding that a reasonable jury would have had insufficient evidence to find Ding guilty. Ding came to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree in 2010. He worked at multiple tech companies in the Silicon Valley before Google hired him as a software engineer in 2019.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He became a lawful permanent resident in 2021. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>At trial in January, the prosecution showed that Ding uploaded more than 500 confidential files over a course of a year from Google’s network to a personal Google Cloud account.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Prosecutors said the files included trade secrets related to Google’s hardware infrastructure and software for supercomputing data centers to train large AI models. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Prosecutors also laid out Ding’s ties to multiple technology companies in China purportedly working on related AI efforts amid the U.S. and China’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c145enxln0go\">race\u003c/a> to dominate the industry. They said Ding stole and copied trade secrets with the intention of benefitting the Chinese government. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Months after Ding began uploading confidential information to his personal Cloud, prosecutors said an early-stage technology company in China offered him chief technology officer position.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ding visited the company, Rongshu, in late 2022 and began participating in investor meetings around December. In 2023, Ding founded Zhisuan, his own technology company based in China, which proposed to train large AI models.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ding’s indictment quotes a Zhisuan document Ding circulated in November 2023 as touting: “We have experience with Google’s ten-thousand-card computational power platform; we just need to replicate and upgrade it and then further develop a computational power platform suited to China’s national conditions.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GoogleQuantumAI_WillowChip_Closeup04.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12019335\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GoogleQuantumAI_WillowChip_Closeup04.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GoogleQuantumAI_WillowChip_Closeup04-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GoogleQuantumAI_WillowChip_Closeup04-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GoogleQuantumAI_WillowChip_Closeup04-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GoogleQuantumAI_WillowChip_Closeup04-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GoogleQuantumAI_WillowChip_Closeup04-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Google’s quantum computer chip, Willow. (Courtesy of Google Quantum AI)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In late 2023, Ding also applied to a Chinese government program that aimed to attract technological talent to China with funding and investments, according to the court documents. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ding never told Google about his affiliation with either company, prosecutors said, and he had an intern swipe his Google identification card multiple times when he was in China pitching Zhisuan, “to make it appear as though he was working from his office.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While Ding was initially found guilty of both the trade-secrets and espionage counts, Chhabria made the rare move to overturn the latter in August.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In his order to partially acquit Ding, Chhabria wrote: “The evidence was insufficient for a rational jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Ding knew or intended during the May 2022–April 2023 timeframe that his actions would benefit the Chinese government.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Defense attorneys requested a more lenient sentence of three months in home confinement so that Ding could continue to be the primary caregiver for his 8-year-old son, and, they argued, because he had already been punished by the case and conviction.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Mr. Ding will never again hold a position of trust at a technology company,” the sentencing memo states. “His convictions and the publicity surrounding them have foreclosed the career he went to school for, enjoyed, and at which he thrived. Zhisuan is defunct, and Mr. Ding faces possible removal from the United States.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1980\" height=\"1320\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2266645921.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12079043\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2266645921.jpg 1980w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2266645921-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2266645921-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1980px) 100vw, 1980px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Close-up of Google Gemini logo branding on shared bike basket in San Francisco on March 12, 2026. (Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ding’s defense also argued that his circumstances — including widespread press coverage and professional, personal and financial “ruin” — were also sufficient to deter others from taking similar actions. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But Chhabria said that a sentence between zero and six months didn’t capture the crime that Ding committed. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“If you think about it from the standpoint of the seriousness of his offense … whether you think about it from standpoint of general deterrence or specific deterrence — the idea of a noncustodial sentence is hard to swallow for me,” Chhabria said, before handing down the sentence. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ding will also be subject to two years of supervised release after his prison term, and he owes restitution of more than $189,000, plus a $25,000 fine.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/nvoynovskaya\">\u003cem>Nastia Voynovskaya\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Chhabria vacated the espionage conviction in August, finding that a reasonable jury would have had insufficient evidence to find Ding guilty. Ding came to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree in 2010. He worked at multiple tech companies in the Silicon Valley before Google hired him as a software engineer in 2019.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Prosecutors said the files included trade secrets related to Google’s hardware infrastructure and software for supercomputing data centers to train large AI models. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Prosecutors also laid out Ding’s ties to multiple technology companies in China purportedly working on related AI efforts amid the U.S. and China’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c145enxln0go\">race\u003c/a> to dominate the industry. They said Ding stole and copied trade secrets with the intention of benefitting the Chinese government. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Ding visited the company, Rongshu, in late 2022 and began participating in investor meetings around December. In 2023, Ding founded Zhisuan, his own technology company based in China, which proposed to train large AI models.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Ding’s indictment quotes a Zhisuan document Ding circulated in November 2023 as touting: “We have experience with Google’s ten-thousand-card computational power platform; we just need to replicate and upgrade it and then further develop a computational power platform suited to China’s national conditions.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In late 2023, Ding also applied to a Chinese government program that aimed to attract technological talent to China with funding and investments, according to the court documents. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Ding never told Google about his affiliation with either company, prosecutors said, and he had an intern swipe his Google identification card multiple times when he was in China pitching Zhisuan, “to make it appear as though he was working from his office.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>While Ding was initially found guilty of both the trade-secrets and espionage counts, Chhabria made the rare move to overturn the latter in August.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In his order to partially acquit Ding, Chhabria wrote: “The evidence was insufficient for a rational jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Ding knew or intended during the May 2022–April 2023 timeframe that his actions would benefit the Chinese government.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Mr. Ding will never again hold a position of trust at a technology company,” the sentencing memo states. “His convictions and the publicity surrounding them have foreclosed the career he went to school for, enjoyed, and at which he thrived. Zhisuan is defunct, and Mr. Ding faces possible removal from the United States.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Ding’s defense also argued that his circumstances — including widespread press coverage and professional, personal and financial “ruin” — were also sufficient to deter others from taking similar actions. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“If you think about it from the standpoint of the seriousness of his offense … whether you think about it from standpoint of general deterrence or specific deterrence — the idea of a noncustodial sentence is hard to swallow for me,” Chhabria said, before handing down the sentence. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Ding will also be subject to two years of supervised release after his prison term, and he owes restitution of more than $189,000, plus a $25,000 fine.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/nvoynovskaya\">\u003cem>Nastia Voynovskaya\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "A federal judge in San Francisco said the sentence reflected the “seriousness” of stealing proprietary information related to training large AI models.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>A former \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/google\">Google\u003c/a> software engineer found guilty of stealing the tech giant’s trade secrets was sentenced to just under a year in prison Tuesday. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria called Linwei Ding’s theft of proprietary information a “systematic, brazen effort to steal Google’s property,” during Tuesday’s sentencing in San Francisco. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“He knew very well what he was doing. He hurt people along the way,” Chhabria added.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In January, a San Francisco jury found Ding, then 38, guilty of seven counts of theft of proprietary information related to Google’s artificial intelligence efforts and economic espionage, based on charges that he intended to use that information to benefit China.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1980\" height=\"1374\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2259952730.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12079890\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2259952730.jpg 1980w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2259952730-160x111.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2259952730-1536x1066.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1980px) 100vw, 1980px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A sign is posted at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, on Feb. 4, 2026. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Chhabria vacated the espionage conviction in August, finding that a reasonable jury would have had insufficient evidence to find Ding guilty. Ding came to the U.S. to pursue a master’s degree in 2010. He worked at multiple tech companies in the Silicon Valley before Google hired him as a software engineer in 2019.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He became a lawful permanent resident in 2021. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>At trial in January, the prosecution showed that Ding uploaded more than 500 confidential files over a course of a year from Google’s network to a personal Google Cloud account.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Prosecutors said the files included trade secrets related to Google’s hardware infrastructure and software for supercomputing data centers to train large AI models. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Prosecutors also laid out Ding’s ties to multiple technology companies in China purportedly working on related AI efforts amid the U.S. and China’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c145enxln0go\">race\u003c/a> to dominate the industry. They said Ding stole and copied trade secrets with the intention of benefitting the Chinese government. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Months after Ding began uploading confidential information to his personal Cloud, prosecutors said an early-stage technology company in China offered him chief technology officer position.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ding visited the company, Rongshu, in late 2022 and began participating in investor meetings around December. In 2023, Ding founded Zhisuan, his own technology company based in China, which proposed to train large AI models.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ding’s indictment quotes a Zhisuan document Ding circulated in November 2023 as touting: “We have experience with Google’s ten-thousand-card computational power platform; we just need to replicate and upgrade it and then further develop a computational power platform suited to China’s national conditions.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GoogleQuantumAI_WillowChip_Closeup04.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12019335\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GoogleQuantumAI_WillowChip_Closeup04.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GoogleQuantumAI_WillowChip_Closeup04-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GoogleQuantumAI_WillowChip_Closeup04-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GoogleQuantumAI_WillowChip_Closeup04-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GoogleQuantumAI_WillowChip_Closeup04-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/GoogleQuantumAI_WillowChip_Closeup04-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Google’s quantum computer chip, Willow. (Courtesy of Google Quantum AI)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In late 2023, Ding also applied to a Chinese government program that aimed to attract technological talent to China with funding and investments, according to the court documents. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ding never told Google about his affiliation with either company, prosecutors said, and he had an intern swipe his Google identification card multiple times when he was in China pitching Zhisuan, “to make it appear as though he was working from his office.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While Ding was initially found guilty of both the trade-secrets and espionage counts, Chhabria made the rare move to overturn the latter in August.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In his order to partially acquit Ding, Chhabria wrote: “The evidence was insufficient for a rational jury to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Ding knew or intended during the May 2022–April 2023 timeframe that his actions would benefit the Chinese government.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Defense attorneys requested a more lenient sentence of three months in home confinement so that Ding could continue to be the primary caregiver for his 8-year-old son, and, they argued, because he had already been punished by the case and conviction.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Mr. Ding will never again hold a position of trust at a technology company,” the sentencing memo states. “His convictions and the publicity surrounding them have foreclosed the career he went to school for, enjoyed, and at which he thrived. Zhisuan is defunct, and Mr. Ding faces possible removal from the United States.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1980\" height=\"1320\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2266645921.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12079043\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2266645921.jpg 1980w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2266645921-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/04/GettyImages-2266645921-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1980px) 100vw, 1980px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Close-up of Google Gemini logo branding on shared bike basket in San Francisco on March 12, 2026. (Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ding’s defense also argued that his circumstances — including widespread press coverage and professional, personal and financial “ruin” — were also sufficient to deter others from taking similar actions. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But Chhabria said that a sentence between zero and six months didn’t capture the crime that Ding committed. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“If you think about it from the standpoint of the seriousness of his offense … whether you think about it from standpoint of general deterrence or specific deterrence — the idea of a noncustodial sentence is hard to swallow for me,” Chhabria said, before handing down the sentence. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ding will also be subject to two years of supervised release after his prison term, and he owes restitution of more than $189,000, plus a $25,000 fine.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/nvoynovskaya\">\u003cem>Nastia Voynovskaya\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "chatbots-data-centers-and-surveillance-5-silicon-valley-bills-land-on-newsoms-desk",
"title": "Chatbots, Data Centers and Surveillance: 5 Silicon Valley Bills Land on Newsom’s Desk",
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"headTitle": "Chatbots, Data Centers and Surveillance: 5 Silicon Valley Bills Land on Newsom’s Desk | KQED",
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"content": "\n\u003cp>California’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/politics\">legislative session\u003c/a> ended at midnight on Monday, and numerous bills ranging from housing to health care to technology cleared both the Senate and the Assembly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Gov. Gavin Newsom has until Sept. 30 to decide whether he’ll veto or sign the measures. Here’s where some of the most closely watched \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/technology\">tech\u003c/a> bills landed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Companion chatbots and children’s safety\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California lawmakers on Monday approved a sweeping set of safety requirements for artificial intelligence chatbots used by children and teens. The bill, known as \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb1119\">Adam’s Law\u003c/a>, builds on last year’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12052617/newsoms-tightrope-walk-between-ai-regulation-and-silicon-valley-cash\">SB 243\u003c/a>, which required chatbot operators to disclose when users were interacting with AI companions and to maintain protocols for detecting self-harm content. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Co-authored by San Diego Democrat Sen. Steve Padilla and Assemblymembers Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda) and Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), the bill adds requirements for user age checks, safety-risk assessments before new or substantially modified companion chatbots are released, independent audits and crisis-support resources. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/GettyImages-2159671948-scaled-e1781542152687.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12058035\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Close-up of a phone screen in Lafayette, California, on June 27, 2024, displaying Claude, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot from Anthropic powered by large language model (or LLM). (Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The bill also requires default protections for young users, including limits on notifications, usage and persistent conversational memory. It restricts targeted advertising to children and imposes additional privacy protections. Chatbot operators could face liability for failing to take reasonable measures to prevent certain harmful outputs, including content involving self-harm, sexually explicit material, romantic role-playing and emotionally manipulative behavior. Families would have a private right of redress for certain violations. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The legislation is named for \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12080610/california-mom-who-lost-her-son-to-an-ai-chatbot-is-now-fighting-to-regulate-them\">Adam Raine\u003c/a>, a California teenager who died by suicide in 2025. Raine’s parents have said that Adam spent months discussing his loneliness and plans to harm himself with ChatGPT before his death. In a joint statement released after the bill successfully passed through the Legislature, Maria Raine called it “a serious and much-needed step forward for AI companion chatbot safety.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This year, lawmakers also passed another bill by Padilla that enacts a four-year moratorium on the sale and manufacturing of AI-chatbot-powered toys over concerns that the technology can harm children.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The technology industry has not been uniformly opposed. OpenAI supports SB 1119 and has urged Newsom to sign it, saying the legislation establishes meaningful safeguards while preserving young people’s ability to use AI for learning, creativity and other purposes. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Teens are the first generation growing up with AI,” OpenAI said in a \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/index/supporting-california-bill-advance-ai-youth-safety/\">statement\u003c/a>. “Nearly nine in ten teens who use ChatGPT turn to it for learning, information, skill-building, or productivity in a given week.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“That opportunity comes with a clear responsibility: teens should have experiences designed around their distinct developmental needs, with strong default protections and appropriate opportunities to learn, create, and explore.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Opponents of the legislation include the California Chamber of Commerce, the Software Information Industry Association and TechNet.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Newsom vetoed a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12059714/newsom-vetoes-most-watched-childrens-ai-bill-signs-16-others-targeting-tech\">stronger child-safety bill\u003c/a> last year after raising concerns that its restrictions could effectively prevent teenagers from accessing conversational AI. Though his office has not indicated whether Newsom will sign, the version now on his desk was negotiated with those concerns in mind. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Data centers and ratepayer protections \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California lawmakers on Monday approved two linked bills that would require the state to establish special rules for how large data centers pay for electricity and the infrastructure needed to serve them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb886\">SB 886\u003c/a>, also authored by Padilla, and \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab2383\">AB 2383\u003c/a>, by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles), would require the California Public Utilities Commission to create separate electricity rates and updated interconnection rules for data centers. The measures are designed to prevent electricity customers from bearing the costs of new power generation and grid upgrades needed to serve the facilities. AB 2383 is contingent on SB 886 becoming law. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Big Tech keeps promising to be good neighbors, and these bills will make those promises legally enforceable,” Padilla said in a press release celebrating the passage of SB 886 and a related bill, \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb887\">887\u003c/a>. “No more saying one thing in the White House and doing the opposite in our local communities.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1980\" height=\"1231\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2267080472.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12094084\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2267080472.jpg 1980w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2267080472-160x99.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2267080472-1536x955.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1980px) 100vw, 1980px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">San Diego Democrat Sen. Steve Padilla. (Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The legislation follows a year of intensifying political pressure over the expansion of data centers, which are being built to meet the enormous computing demands of AI. California has fewer giant data centers than Virginia and Texas, but the state still has \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101912379/californias-ai-data-centers-taking-growing-environmental-toll\">one of the largest counts overall\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The facilities have \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12028158/crackdown-on-power-guzzling-data-centers-may-soon-come-online-in-california\">generated growing concern\u003c/a> over their electricity and water use, as well as the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12064265/new-report-reveals-strain-of-data-centers-on-californias-grid\">lack of transparency\u003c/a> about their potential effect on utility bills. A Public Policy Institute of California poll released in July found that \u003ca href=\"https://www.ppic.org/publication/ppic-statewide-survey-californians-and-the-environment-july-2026/\">73%\u003c/a> of Californians opposed building data centers in their communities. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In March 2026, the Little Hoover Commission released \u003ca href=\"https://lhc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/LHC-Report-292-Data-Centers-California-Electricity-Policy-FINAL-PUBLIC-3.3.26.pdf\">\u003cem>Data Centers and California Electricity Policy\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, a report that explicitly recommends making tech companies and data center developers cover their own grid-integration costs rather than shifting the burden to everyday ratepayers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“California’s electricity rates are among the highest in the nation, and affordability remains a top concern for residents,” the report states.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Supporters — including The Utility Reform Network, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council and utility-worker unions — argued that companies building the facilities should pay for the infrastructure their electricity demand requires. Bill sponsor TURN pointed to a California grid-planning estimate that increased demand from data centers in PG&E’s service territory, where most of the state’s projects are concentrated, could generate as much as $1.8 billion in transmission-upgrade costs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00394_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097519\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00394_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00394_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00394_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A flyer that says, “No Data Center,” is posted at the Church of All Faiths in Oakland, California, on Aug. 29, 2026. (Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Data Center Coalition, which represents companies including Google and Microsoft, opposed the legislation, arguing that it unfairly singled out one type of electricity customer. PG&E also opposed the original approach, warning that it could increase costs for customers and delay infrastructure needed to meet the state’s broader energy demand. Business groups argued that California’s high energy costs, limited land and additional regulation could make the state less attractive for data-center development. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The bills were substantially worked over in the final weeks of the session. Earlier drafts were far more prescriptive, including provisions for mandatory on-site batteries and 100% carbon-free power for data centers by 2030. Both were stripped out in favor of giving the CPUC until July 1, 2027, to establish special tariffs and rules. Newsom and regulators in turn secured more control over how the new rate structure will work. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The final compromise drew criticism from some environmental and consumer advocates. They say data centers could find loopholes to avoid paying some grid costs and wriggle out of clean-energy requirements for facilities that generate their own electricity. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Newsom’s position has shifted noticeably during the course of the debate. Last year, he \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/AB-93-Veto.pdf\">vetoed \u003c/a>legislation requiring data centers to disclose their water consumption, writing: “I am reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements about operational details on this sector without understanding the full impact on businesses and the consumers of their technology.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1337\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12087658\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty-1536x1027.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks as his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom (left), looks on during an election night gathering at California Democratic headquarters in Sacramento, California, on Nov. 4, 2025. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This year, however, Newsom became directly involved in negotiations over both bills. On Monday in the state Capitol, he said his administration had been working with lawmakers on several data-center bills, and that the final versions “landed fairly well,” \u003ca href=\"https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/01/california-lawmakers-big-swing-newsom-data-centers-01058848\">\u003cem>Politico \u003c/em>reported\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“You’re seeing states all across this country leaning in,” Newsom said. “We’ll be leaning in.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He also said last month that companies, rather than other electricity customers, should bear the costs associated with their data-center investments. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We believe that all of these investments, the costs, should be borne by the companies,” Newsom said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That makes a Newsom signature more likely here than it appeared earlier in the year, although the governor has not formally committed to signing either bill.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Social media’s addictive features\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The California Senate \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab1709\">voted\u003c/a> to bar social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok from offering certain addictive features to users younger than 16. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The measure, authored by Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal (D-Long Beach), targets features on so-called “covered platforms” — which predominantly share user-generated content — designed to keep people engaged, including algorithmically driven feeds and other mechanisms that can encourage prolonged use. It also would establish an e-Safety Advisory Commission within the California Department of Justice to advise state officials on online safety and report annually to the governor and Legislature.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Common Sense Media, which sponsored the bill, is among its major supporters, along with Mothers Against Media Addiction and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The bill was amended as it moved through the Legislature, narrowing some of its provisions and changing how the state would oversee online safety. For supporters, the changes don’t go nearly far enough. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/AIGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12092171\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/AIGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/AIGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/AIGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A 14-year-old boy looks at an iPhone screen displaying various social media and messaging apps on March 29, 2026. (Anna Barclay/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/press-releases/common-sense-media-statement-on-passage-of-ab-1709\">wrote Monday\u003c/a> that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12096647/why-metas-landmark-settlement-could-be-social-medias-big-tobacco-moment\">recent litigation\u003c/a> against major technology companies has exposed how deliberately social media platforms have been designed to keep children engaged.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Social media companies have engineered their products to hook children, and their own researchers proved it worked,” Steyer said in a statement. “Parents cannot out-parent an algorithm built in a lab to keep kids scrolling.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Civil Justice Association of California and trade group NetChoice, which represents major technology companies including Google, Meta and Snap, oppose the measure. Civil liberties advocates, in particular, have raised First Amendment and privacy concerns, particularly around how platforms would determine which users are under 16 and which features should be considered addictive.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This well-intentioned, but deeply flawed piece of legislation, cuts young people off from essential information and experiences, particularly harming vulnerable youth and marginalized groups who often find safety in supportive online communities they can’t access offline,” the EFF \u003ca href=\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/eff-gov-newsom-veto-californias-ab-1709\">wrote\u003c/a> in a statement.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Newsom has already signed several California laws aimed at \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12005803/newsom-signs-law-to-protect-children-from-social-media-addiction\">protecting children online\u003c/a>, including legislation requiring warning labels on social media platforms. But AB 1709 could face the same free-speech and age-verification challenges that have complicated the state’s broader effort to regulate social media. A federal judge has already blocked portions of California’s existing law restricting addictive social media feeds while a legal challenge proceeds.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Newsom has not publicly indicated whether he will sign the bill, but he called on lawmakers to explore stricter youth online safety guardrails during his \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069094/in-final-state-of-state-speech-gov-newsom-says-california-offers-model-for-the-nation\">final State of the State\u003c/a> address. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Workplace surveillance\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California employers could face new limits on the use of AI to monitor workers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab1883\">AB 1883\u003c/a>, authored by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), would prohibit employers from using AI-powered workplace-surveillance tools to collect \u003ca href=\"https://law.stanford.edu/2024/12/02/what-are-neural-data-an-invitation-to-flexible-regulatory-implementation/\">neural data\u003c/a> — sensitive personal information from a user’s nervous system — or recognize an employee’s emotional state, with some exceptions. It also covers certain other AI-based inferences about workers and allows civil penalties of up to $500 per violation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The measure is part of a small but growing effort by states to regulate how employers use AI to monitor and manage their workers. California’s bill is unusually focused on technologies that attempt to infer what is happening inside an employee’s body or mind. There is a narrower approach in Illinois, which regulates AI-analyzed video interviews in hiring, and in Maryland, which restricts the use of facial-recognition technology.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/12/RS46155_GettyImages-1139953504-qut.jpg\" alt=\"""\" class=\"wp-image-11849216\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/12/RS46155_GettyImages-1139953504-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/12/RS46155_GettyImages-1139953504-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/12/RS46155_GettyImages-1139953504-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/12/RS46155_GettyImages-1139953504-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/12/RS46155_GettyImages-1139953504-qut-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A view of Slack headquarters on April 2, 2019, in San Francisco, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>AB 1883 was sponsored by major state labor unions and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Business groups representing various employers opposed the bill, ranging from the American Petroleum and Convenience Store Association to the Wine Institute.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The legislation’s ambitions were softened in committees. The latest version exempts certain workplace-surveillance uses required by federal law, regulation or binding federal contracts involving aircraft, national security, military, space or defense work. Senate amendments also modified the bill’s enforcement provisions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Still, the core prohibition survived.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Workers should have a general expectation of privacy in certain areas,” said Lorena Gonzalez, who heads up the powerful California Federation of Labor Unions, to KQED’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12097046/california-labor-leader-on-ai-bills-and-billionaire-tax-measure-splitting-unions\">Political Breakdown\u003c/a> last week. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Employers, Gonzalez said, are able to take advantage of outdated laws that don’t account for changes in technology. Labor interests have been at the forefront of legislation addressing \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12076608/what-do-san-franciscos-ai-vs-humans-billboards-say-about-our-working-futures\">AI anxieties\u003c/a> this session. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“You don’t want the boss reading your mind,” Gonzalez added.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The measure comes a year after Newsom vetoed the “No Robo Bosses Act,” which would have required employers to notify workers when AI was used in disciplinary or termination decisions and let employees challenge certain AI-generated decisions. In his \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/SB-7-Veto.pdf\">veto message\u003c/a> last year, Newsom wrote the bill “imposes unfocused notification requirements on any business using even the most innocuous tools.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>AB 1883 is narrower in scope. Rather than governing how AI makes decisions about workers, it bans a single, especially invasive use. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Newsom has not said whether he will sign it. With a widely expected presidential run ahead, his decision will signal whether he’s willing to side with workers over employers and draw a hard line against AI that tries to read a worker’s mind.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Gov. Gavin Newsom has until Sept. 30 to decide whether he’ll veto or sign the measures. Here’s where some of the most closely watched \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/technology\">tech\u003c/a> bills landed.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Gov. Gavin Newsom has until Sept. 30 to decide whether he’ll veto or sign the measures. Here’s where some of the most closely watched \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/technology\">tech\u003c/a> bills landed.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>California lawmakers on Monday approved a sweeping set of safety requirements for artificial intelligence chatbots used by children and teens. The bill, known as \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb1119\">Adam’s Law\u003c/a>, builds on last year’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12052617/newsoms-tightrope-walk-between-ai-regulation-and-silicon-valley-cash\">SB 243\u003c/a>, which required chatbot operators to disclose when users were interacting with AI companions and to maintain protocols for detecting self-harm content. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>California lawmakers on Monday approved a sweeping set of safety requirements for artificial intelligence chatbots used by children and teens. The bill, known as \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb1119\">Adam’s Law\u003c/a>, builds on last year’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12052617/newsoms-tightrope-walk-between-ai-regulation-and-silicon-valley-cash\">SB 243\u003c/a>, which required chatbot operators to disclose when users were interacting with AI companions and to maintain protocols for detecting self-harm content. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Co-authored by San Diego Democrat Sen. Steve Padilla and Assemblymembers Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda) and Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), the bill adds requirements for user age checks, safety-risk assessments before new or substantially modified companion chatbots are released, independent audits and crisis-support resources. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Co-authored by San Diego Democrat Sen. Steve Padilla and Assemblymembers Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda) and Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), the bill adds requirements for user age checks, safety-risk assessments before new or substantially modified companion chatbots are released, independent audits and crisis-support resources. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/GettyImages-2159671948-scaled-e1781542152687.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12058035\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Close-up of a phone screen in Lafayette, California, on June 27, 2024, displaying Claude, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot from Anthropic powered by large language model (or LLM).\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/GettyImages-2159671948-scaled-e1781542152687.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12058035\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Close-up of a phone screen in Lafayette, California, on June 27, 2024, displaying Claude, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot from Anthropic powered by large language model (or LLM).\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The bill also requires default protections for young users, including limits on notifications, usage and persistent conversational memory. It restricts targeted advertising to children and imposes additional privacy protections. Chatbot operators could face liability for failing to take reasonable measures to prevent certain harmful outputs, including content involving self-harm, sexually explicit material, romantic role-playing and emotionally manipulative behavior. Families would have a private right of redress for certain violations. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The bill also requires default protections for young users, including limits on notifications, usage and persistent conversational memory. It restricts targeted advertising to children and imposes additional privacy protections. Chatbot operators could face liability for failing to take reasonable measures to prevent certain harmful outputs, including content involving self-harm, sexually explicit material, romantic role-playing and emotionally manipulative behavior. Families would have a private right of redress for certain violations. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The legislation is named for \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12080610/california-mom-who-lost-her-son-to-an-ai-chatbot-is-now-fighting-to-regulate-them\">Adam Raine\u003c/a>, a California teenager who died by suicide in 2025. Raine’s parents have said that Adam spent months discussing his loneliness and plans to harm himself with ChatGPT before his death. In a joint statement released after the bill successfully passed through the Legislature, Maria Raine called it “a serious and much-needed step forward for AI companion chatbot safety.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The legislation is named for \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12080610/california-mom-who-lost-her-son-to-an-ai-chatbot-is-now-fighting-to-regulate-them\">Adam Raine\u003c/a>, a California teenager who died by suicide in 2025. Raine’s parents have said that Adam spent months discussing his loneliness and plans to harm himself with ChatGPT before his death. In a joint statement released after the bill successfully passed through the Legislature, Maria Raine called it “a serious and much-needed step forward for AI companion chatbot safety.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This year, lawmakers also passed another bill by Padilla that enacts a four-year moratorium on the sale and manufacturing of AI-chatbot-powered toys over concerns that the technology can harm children.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This year, lawmakers also passed another bill by Padilla that enacts a four-year moratorium on the sale and manufacturing of AI-chatbot-powered toys over concerns that the technology can harm children.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The technology industry has not been uniformly opposed. OpenAI supports SB 1119 and has urged Newsom to sign it, saying the legislation establishes meaningful safeguards while preserving young people’s ability to use AI for learning, creativity and other purposes. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The technology industry has not been uniformly opposed. OpenAI supports SB 1119 and has urged Newsom to sign it, saying the legislation establishes meaningful safeguards while preserving young people’s ability to use AI for learning, creativity and other purposes. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Teens are the first generation growing up with AI,” OpenAI said in a \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/index/supporting-california-bill-advance-ai-youth-safety/\">statement\u003c/a>. “Nearly nine in ten teens who use ChatGPT turn to it for learning, information, skill-building, or productivity in a given week.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“Teens are the first generation growing up with AI,” OpenAI said in a \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/index/supporting-california-bill-advance-ai-youth-safety/\">statement\u003c/a>. “Nearly nine in ten teens who use ChatGPT turn to it for learning, information, skill-building, or productivity in a given week.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“That opportunity comes with a clear responsibility: teens should have experiences designed around their distinct developmental needs, with strong default protections and appropriate opportunities to learn, create, and explore.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“That opportunity comes with a clear responsibility: teens should have experiences designed around their distinct developmental needs, with strong default protections and appropriate opportunities to learn, create, and explore.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Opponents of the legislation include the California Chamber of Commerce, the Software Information Industry Association and TechNet.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Opponents of the legislation include the California Chamber of Commerce, the Software Information Industry Association and TechNet.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Newsom vetoed a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12059714/newsom-vetoes-most-watched-childrens-ai-bill-signs-16-others-targeting-tech\">stronger child-safety bill\u003c/a> last year after raising concerns that its restrictions could effectively prevent teenagers from accessing conversational AI. Though his office has not indicated whether Newsom will sign, the version now on his desk was negotiated with those concerns in mind. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Newsom vetoed a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12059714/newsom-vetoes-most-watched-childrens-ai-bill-signs-16-others-targeting-tech\">stronger child-safety bill\u003c/a> last year after raising concerns that its restrictions could effectively prevent teenagers from accessing conversational AI. Though his office has not indicated whether Newsom will sign, the version now on his desk was negotiated with those concerns in mind. \u003c/p>\n"
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"attrs": {
"text": "Data centers and ratepayer protections ",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Data centers and ratepayer protections \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n",
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"\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Data centers and ratepayer protections \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>California lawmakers on Monday approved two linked bills that would require the state to establish special rules for how large data centers pay for electricity and the infrastructure needed to serve them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>California lawmakers on Monday approved two linked bills that would require the state to establish special rules for how large data centers pay for electricity and the infrastructure needed to serve them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb886\">SB 886\u003c/a>, also authored by Padilla, and \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab2383\">AB 2383\u003c/a>, by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles), would require the California Public Utilities Commission to create separate electricity rates and updated interconnection rules for data centers. The measures are designed to prevent electricity customers from bearing the costs of new power generation and grid upgrades needed to serve the facilities. AB 2383 is contingent on SB 886 becoming law. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb886\">SB 886\u003c/a>, also authored by Padilla, and \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab2383\">AB 2383\u003c/a>, by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles), would require the California Public Utilities Commission to create separate electricity rates and updated interconnection rules for data centers. The measures are designed to prevent electricity customers from bearing the costs of new power generation and grid upgrades needed to serve the facilities. AB 2383 is contingent on SB 886 becoming law. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Big Tech keeps promising to be good neighbors, and these bills will make those promises legally enforceable,” Padilla said in a press release celebrating the passage of SB 886 and a related bill, \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb887\">887\u003c/a>. “No more saying one thing in the White House and doing the opposite in our local communities.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“Big Tech keeps promising to be good neighbors, and these bills will make those promises legally enforceable,” Padilla said in a press release celebrating the passage of SB 886 and a related bill, \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb887\">887\u003c/a>. “No more saying one thing in the White House and doing the opposite in our local communities.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2267080472.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12094084\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2267080472.jpg 1980w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2267080472-160x99.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2267080472-1536x955.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">San Diego Democrat Sen. Steve Padilla.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2267080472.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12094084\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">San Diego Democrat Sen. Steve Padilla.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The legislation follows a year of intensifying political pressure over the expansion of data centers, which are being built to meet the enormous computing demands of AI. California has fewer giant data centers than Virginia and Texas, but the state still has \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101912379/californias-ai-data-centers-taking-growing-environmental-toll\">one of the largest counts overall\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The legislation follows a year of intensifying political pressure over the expansion of data centers, which are being built to meet the enormous computing demands of AI. California has fewer giant data centers than Virginia and Texas, but the state still has \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101912379/californias-ai-data-centers-taking-growing-environmental-toll\">one of the largest counts overall\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The facilities have \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12028158/crackdown-on-power-guzzling-data-centers-may-soon-come-online-in-california\">generated growing concern\u003c/a> over their electricity and water use, as well as the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12064265/new-report-reveals-strain-of-data-centers-on-californias-grid\">lack of transparency\u003c/a> about their potential effect on utility bills. A Public Policy Institute of California poll released in July found that \u003ca href=\"https://www.ppic.org/publication/ppic-statewide-survey-californians-and-the-environment-july-2026/\">73%\u003c/a> of Californians opposed building data centers in their communities. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The facilities have \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12028158/crackdown-on-power-guzzling-data-centers-may-soon-come-online-in-california\">generated growing concern\u003c/a> over their electricity and water use, as well as the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12064265/new-report-reveals-strain-of-data-centers-on-californias-grid\">lack of transparency\u003c/a> about their potential effect on utility bills. A Public Policy Institute of California poll released in July found that \u003ca href=\"https://www.ppic.org/publication/ppic-statewide-survey-californians-and-the-environment-july-2026/\">73%\u003c/a> of Californians opposed building data centers in their communities. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In March 2026, the Little Hoover Commission released \u003ca href=\"https://lhc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/LHC-Report-292-Data-Centers-California-Electricity-Policy-FINAL-PUBLIC-3.3.26.pdf\">\u003cem>Data Centers and California Electricity Policy\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, a report that explicitly recommends making tech companies and data center developers cover their own grid-integration costs rather than shifting the burden to everyday ratepayers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In March 2026, the Little Hoover Commission released \u003ca href=\"https://lhc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/LHC-Report-292-Data-Centers-California-Electricity-Policy-FINAL-PUBLIC-3.3.26.pdf\">\u003cem>Data Centers and California Electricity Policy\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, a report that explicitly recommends making tech companies and data center developers cover their own grid-integration costs rather than shifting the burden to everyday ratepayers. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“California’s electricity rates are among the highest in the nation, and affordability remains a top concern for residents,” the report states.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“California’s electricity rates are among the highest in the nation, and affordability remains a top concern for residents,” the report states.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Supporters — including The Utility Reform Network, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council and utility-worker unions — argued that companies building the facilities should pay for the infrastructure their electricity demand requires. Bill sponsor TURN pointed to a California grid-planning estimate that increased demand from data centers in PG&E’s service territory, where most of the state’s projects are concentrated, could generate as much as $1.8 billion in transmission-upgrade costs. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Supporters — including The Utility Reform Network, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council and utility-worker unions — argued that companies building the facilities should pay for the infrastructure their electricity demand requires. Bill sponsor TURN pointed to a California grid-planning estimate that increased demand from data centers in PG&E’s service territory, where most of the state’s projects are concentrated, could generate as much as $1.8 billion in transmission-upgrade costs. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00394_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097519\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00394_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00394_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00394_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A flyer that says, “No Data Center,” is posted at the Church of All Faiths in Oakland, California, on Aug. 29, 2026.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00394_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097519\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A flyer that says, “No Data Center,” is posted at the Church of All Faiths in Oakland, California, on Aug. 29, 2026.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The Data Center Coalition, which represents companies including Google and Microsoft, opposed the legislation, arguing that it unfairly singled out one type of electricity customer. PG&E also opposed the original approach, warning that it could increase costs for customers and delay infrastructure needed to meet the state’s broader energy demand. Business groups argued that California’s high energy costs, limited land and additional regulation could make the state less attractive for data-center development. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The Data Center Coalition, which represents companies including Google and Microsoft, opposed the legislation, arguing that it unfairly singled out one type of electricity customer. PG&E also opposed the original approach, warning that it could increase costs for customers and delay infrastructure needed to meet the state’s broader energy demand. Business groups argued that California’s high energy costs, limited land and additional regulation could make the state less attractive for data-center development. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The bills were substantially worked over in the final weeks of the session. Earlier drafts were far more prescriptive, including provisions for mandatory on-site batteries and 100% carbon-free power for data centers by 2030. Both were stripped out in favor of giving the CPUC until July 1, 2027, to establish special tariffs and rules. Newsom and regulators in turn secured more control over how the new rate structure will work. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The bills were substantially worked over in the final weeks of the session. Earlier drafts were far more prescriptive, including provisions for mandatory on-site batteries and 100% carbon-free power for data centers by 2030. Both were stripped out in favor of giving the CPUC until July 1, 2027, to establish special tariffs and rules. Newsom and regulators in turn secured more control over how the new rate structure will work. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The final compromise drew criticism from some environmental and consumer advocates. They say data centers could find loopholes to avoid paying some grid costs and wriggle out of clean-energy requirements for facilities that generate their own electricity. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The final compromise drew criticism from some environmental and consumer advocates. They say data centers could find loopholes to avoid paying some grid costs and wriggle out of clean-energy requirements for facilities that generate their own electricity. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Newsom’s position has shifted noticeably during the course of the debate. Last year, he \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/AB-93-Veto.pdf\">vetoed \u003c/a>legislation requiring data centers to disclose their water consumption, writing: “I am reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements about operational details on this sector without understanding the full impact on businesses and the consumers of their technology.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Newsom’s position has shifted noticeably during the course of the debate. Last year, he \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/AB-93-Veto.pdf\">vetoed \u003c/a>legislation requiring data centers to disclose their water consumption, writing: “I am reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements about operational details on this sector without understanding the full impact on businesses and the consumers of their technology.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"srcset": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty-1536x1027.jpg 1536w",
"sizes": "(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12087658\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty-1536x1027.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks as his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom (left), looks on during an election night gathering at California Democratic headquarters in Sacramento, California, on Nov. 4, 2025.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12087658\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks as his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom (left), looks on during an election night gathering at California Democratic headquarters in Sacramento, California, on Nov. 4, 2025.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This year, however, Newsom became directly involved in negotiations over both bills. On Monday in the state Capitol, he said his administration had been working with lawmakers on several data-center bills, and that the final versions “landed fairly well,” \u003ca href=\"https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/01/california-lawmakers-big-swing-newsom-data-centers-01058848\">\u003cem>Politico \u003c/em>reported\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This year, however, Newsom became directly involved in negotiations over both bills. On Monday in the state Capitol, he said his administration had been working with lawmakers on several data-center bills, and that the final versions “landed fairly well,” \u003ca href=\"https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/01/california-lawmakers-big-swing-newsom-data-centers-01058848\">\u003cem>Politico \u003c/em>reported\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“You’re seeing states all across this country leaning in,” Newsom said. “We’ll be leaning in.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“You’re seeing states all across this country leaning in,” Newsom said. “We’ll be leaning in.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>He also said last month that companies, rather than other electricity customers, should bear the costs associated with their data-center investments. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>He also said last month that companies, rather than other electricity customers, should bear the costs associated with their data-center investments. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“We believe that all of these investments, the costs, should be borne by the companies,” Newsom said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“We believe that all of these investments, the costs, should be borne by the companies,” Newsom said. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That makes a Newsom signature more likely here than it appeared earlier in the year, although the governor has not formally committed to signing either bill.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>That makes a Newsom signature more likely here than it appeared earlier in the year, although the governor has not formally committed to signing either bill.\u003c/p>\n"
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{
"blockName": "core/heading",
"attrs": {
"text": "Social media’s addictive features",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Social media’s addictive features\u003c/h2>\n",
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"\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Social media’s addictive features\u003c/h2>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The California Senate \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab1709\">voted\u003c/a> to bar social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok from offering certain addictive features to users younger than 16. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The California Senate \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab1709\">voted\u003c/a> to bar social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok from offering certain addictive features to users younger than 16. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The measure, authored by Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal (D-Long Beach), targets features on so-called “covered platforms” — which predominantly share user-generated content — designed to keep people engaged, including algorithmically driven feeds and other mechanisms that can encourage prolonged use. It also would establish an e-Safety Advisory Commission within the California Department of Justice to advise state officials on online safety and report annually to the governor and Legislature.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The measure, authored by Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal (D-Long Beach), targets features on so-called “covered platforms” — which predominantly share user-generated content — designed to keep people engaged, including algorithmically driven feeds and other mechanisms that can encourage prolonged use. It also would establish an e-Safety Advisory Commission within the California Department of Justice to advise state officials on online safety and report annually to the governor and Legislature.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Common Sense Media, which sponsored the bill, is among its major supporters, along with Mothers Against Media Addiction and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The bill was amended as it moved through the Legislature, narrowing some of its provisions and changing how the state would oversee online safety. For supporters, the changes don’t go nearly far enough. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Common Sense Media, which sponsored the bill, is among its major supporters, along with Mothers Against Media Addiction and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The bill was amended as it moved through the Legislature, narrowing some of its provisions and changing how the state would oversee online safety. For supporters, the changes don’t go nearly far enough. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/AIGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12092171\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/AIGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/AIGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/AIGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A 14-year-old boy looks at an iPhone screen displaying various social media and messaging apps on March 29, 2026.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Anna Barclay/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/AIGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12092171\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A 14-year-old boy looks at an iPhone screen displaying various social media and messaging apps on March 29, 2026.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Anna Barclay/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/press-releases/common-sense-media-statement-on-passage-of-ab-1709\">wrote Monday\u003c/a> that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12096647/why-metas-landmark-settlement-could-be-social-medias-big-tobacco-moment\">recent litigation\u003c/a> against major technology companies has exposed how deliberately social media platforms have been designed to keep children engaged.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/press-releases/common-sense-media-statement-on-passage-of-ab-1709\">wrote Monday\u003c/a> that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12096647/why-metas-landmark-settlement-could-be-social-medias-big-tobacco-moment\">recent litigation\u003c/a> against major technology companies has exposed how deliberately social media platforms have been designed to keep children engaged.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Social media companies have engineered their products to hook children, and their own researchers proved it worked,” Steyer said in a statement. “Parents cannot out-parent an algorithm built in a lab to keep kids scrolling.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“Social media companies have engineered their products to hook children, and their own researchers proved it worked,” Steyer said in a statement. “Parents cannot out-parent an algorithm built in a lab to keep kids scrolling.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Civil Justice Association of California and trade group NetChoice, which represents major technology companies including Google, Meta and Snap, oppose the measure. Civil liberties advocates, in particular, have raised First Amendment and privacy concerns, particularly around how platforms would determine which users are under 16 and which features should be considered addictive.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Civil Justice Association of California and trade group NetChoice, which represents major technology companies including Google, Meta and Snap, oppose the measure. Civil liberties advocates, in particular, have raised First Amendment and privacy concerns, particularly around how platforms would determine which users are under 16 and which features should be considered addictive.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“This well-intentioned, but deeply flawed piece of legislation, cuts young people off from essential information and experiences, particularly harming vulnerable youth and marginalized groups who often find safety in supportive online communities they can’t access offline,” the EFF \u003ca href=\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/eff-gov-newsom-veto-californias-ab-1709\">wrote\u003c/a> in a statement.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“This well-intentioned, but deeply flawed piece of legislation, cuts young people off from essential information and experiences, particularly harming vulnerable youth and marginalized groups who often find safety in supportive online communities they can’t access offline,” the EFF \u003ca href=\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/eff-gov-newsom-veto-californias-ab-1709\">wrote\u003c/a> in a statement.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Newsom has already signed several California laws aimed at \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12005803/newsom-signs-law-to-protect-children-from-social-media-addiction\">protecting children online\u003c/a>, including legislation requiring warning labels on social media platforms. But AB 1709 could face the same free-speech and age-verification challenges that have complicated the state’s broader effort to regulate social media. A federal judge has already blocked portions of California’s existing law restricting addictive social media feeds while a legal challenge proceeds.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Newsom has already signed several California laws aimed at \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12005803/newsom-signs-law-to-protect-children-from-social-media-addiction\">protecting children online\u003c/a>, including legislation requiring warning labels on social media platforms. But AB 1709 could face the same free-speech and age-verification challenges that have complicated the state’s broader effort to regulate social media. A federal judge has already blocked portions of California’s existing law restricting addictive social media feeds while a legal challenge proceeds.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Newsom has not publicly indicated whether he will sign the bill, but he called on lawmakers to explore stricter youth online safety guardrails during his \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069094/in-final-state-of-state-speech-gov-newsom-says-california-offers-model-for-the-nation\">final State of the State\u003c/a> address. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Newsom has not publicly indicated whether he will sign the bill, but he called on lawmakers to explore stricter youth online safety guardrails during his \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069094/in-final-state-of-state-speech-gov-newsom-says-california-offers-model-for-the-nation\">final State of the State\u003c/a> address. \u003c/p>\n"
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"attrs": {
"text": "Workplace surveillance",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Workplace surveillance\u003c/h2>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>California employers could face new limits on the use of AI to monitor workers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab1883\">AB 1883\u003c/a>, authored by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), would prohibit employers from using AI-powered workplace-surveillance tools to collect \u003ca href=\"https://law.stanford.edu/2024/12/02/what-are-neural-data-an-invitation-to-flexible-regulatory-implementation/\">neural data\u003c/a> — sensitive personal information from a user’s nervous system — or recognize an employee’s emotional state, with some exceptions. It also covers certain other AI-based inferences about workers and allows civil penalties of up to $500 per violation.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab1883\">AB 1883\u003c/a>, authored by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), would prohibit employers from using AI-powered workplace-surveillance tools to collect \u003ca href=\"https://law.stanford.edu/2024/12/02/what-are-neural-data-an-invitation-to-flexible-regulatory-implementation/\">neural data\u003c/a> — sensitive personal information from a user’s nervous system — or recognize an employee’s emotional state, with some exceptions. It also covers certain other AI-based inferences about workers and allows civil penalties of up to $500 per violation.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The measure is part of a small but growing effort by states to regulate how employers use AI to monitor and manage their workers. California’s bill is unusually focused on technologies that attempt to infer what is happening inside an employee’s body or mind. There is a narrower approach in Illinois, which regulates AI-analyzed video interviews in hiring, and in Maryland, which restricts the use of facial-recognition technology.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The measure is part of a small but growing effort by states to regulate how employers use AI to monitor and manage their workers. California’s bill is unusually focused on technologies that attempt to infer what is happening inside an employee’s body or mind. There is a narrower approach in Illinois, which regulates AI-analyzed video interviews in hiring, and in Maryland, which restricts the use of facial-recognition technology.\u003c/p>\n"
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/12/RS46155_GettyImages-1139953504-qut.jpg\" alt=\"""\" class=\"wp-image-11849216\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A view of Slack headquarters on April 2, 2019, in San Francisco, California. \u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>AB 1883 was sponsored by major state labor unions and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Business groups representing various employers opposed the bill, ranging from the American Petroleum and Convenience Store Association to the Wine Institute.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>AB 1883 was sponsored by major state labor unions and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Business groups representing various employers opposed the bill, ranging from the American Petroleum and Convenience Store Association to the Wine Institute.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The legislation’s ambitions were softened in committees. The latest version exempts certain workplace-surveillance uses required by federal law, regulation or binding federal contracts involving aircraft, national security, military, space or defense work. Senate amendments also modified the bill’s enforcement provisions.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The legislation’s ambitions were softened in committees. The latest version exempts certain workplace-surveillance uses required by federal law, regulation or binding federal contracts involving aircraft, national security, military, space or defense work. Senate amendments also modified the bill’s enforcement provisions.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Still, the core prohibition survived.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Workers should have a general expectation of privacy in certain areas,” said Lorena Gonzalez, who heads up the powerful California Federation of Labor Unions, to KQED’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12097046/california-labor-leader-on-ai-bills-and-billionaire-tax-measure-splitting-unions\">Political Breakdown\u003c/a> last week. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“Workers should have a general expectation of privacy in certain areas,” said Lorena Gonzalez, who heads up the powerful California Federation of Labor Unions, to KQED’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12097046/california-labor-leader-on-ai-bills-and-billionaire-tax-measure-splitting-unions\">Political Breakdown\u003c/a> last week. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Employers, Gonzalez said, are able to take advantage of outdated laws that don’t account for changes in technology. Labor interests have been at the forefront of legislation addressing \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12076608/what-do-san-franciscos-ai-vs-humans-billboards-say-about-our-working-futures\">AI anxieties\u003c/a> this session. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“You don’t want the boss reading your mind,” Gonzalez added.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The measure comes a year after Newsom vetoed the “No Robo Bosses Act,” which would have required employers to notify workers when AI was used in disciplinary or termination decisions and let employees challenge certain AI-generated decisions. In his \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/SB-7-Veto.pdf\">veto message\u003c/a> last year, Newsom wrote the bill “imposes unfocused notification requirements on any business using even the most innocuous tools.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The measure comes a year after Newsom vetoed the “No Robo Bosses Act,” which would have required employers to notify workers when AI was used in disciplinary or termination decisions and let employees challenge certain AI-generated decisions. In his \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/SB-7-Veto.pdf\">veto message\u003c/a> last year, Newsom wrote the bill “imposes unfocused notification requirements on any business using even the most innocuous tools.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>AB 1883 is narrower in scope. Rather than governing how AI makes decisions about workers, it bans a single, especially invasive use. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>AB 1883 is narrower in scope. Rather than governing how AI makes decisions about workers, it bans a single, especially invasive use. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Newsom has not said whether he will sign it. With a widely expected presidential run ahead, his decision will signal whether he’s willing to side with workers over employers and draw a hard line against AI that tries to read a worker’s mind.\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "California lawmakers took on data centers, addictive social media features and AI-powered workplace monitoring with this legislative session’s bills. Which will Newsom sign into law?",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>California’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/politics\">legislative session\u003c/a> ended at midnight on Monday, and numerous bills ranging from housing to health care to technology cleared both the Senate and the Assembly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Gov. Gavin Newsom has until Sept. 30 to decide whether he’ll veto or sign the measures. Here’s where some of the most closely watched \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/technology\">tech\u003c/a> bills landed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Companion chatbots and children’s safety\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California lawmakers on Monday approved a sweeping set of safety requirements for artificial intelligence chatbots used by children and teens. The bill, known as \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb1119\">Adam’s Law\u003c/a>, builds on last year’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12052617/newsoms-tightrope-walk-between-ai-regulation-and-silicon-valley-cash\">SB 243\u003c/a>, which required chatbot operators to disclose when users were interacting with AI companions and to maintain protocols for detecting self-harm content. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Co-authored by San Diego Democrat Sen. Steve Padilla and Assemblymembers Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda) and Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), the bill adds requirements for user age checks, safety-risk assessments before new or substantially modified companion chatbots are released, independent audits and crisis-support resources. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/GettyImages-2159671948-scaled-e1781542152687.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12058035\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Close-up of a phone screen in Lafayette, California, on June 27, 2024, displaying Claude, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot from Anthropic powered by large language model (or LLM). (Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The bill also requires default protections for young users, including limits on notifications, usage and persistent conversational memory. It restricts targeted advertising to children and imposes additional privacy protections. Chatbot operators could face liability for failing to take reasonable measures to prevent certain harmful outputs, including content involving self-harm, sexually explicit material, romantic role-playing and emotionally manipulative behavior. Families would have a private right of redress for certain violations. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The legislation is named for \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12080610/california-mom-who-lost-her-son-to-an-ai-chatbot-is-now-fighting-to-regulate-them\">Adam Raine\u003c/a>, a California teenager who died by suicide in 2025. Raine’s parents have said that Adam spent months discussing his loneliness and plans to harm himself with ChatGPT before his death. In a joint statement released after the bill successfully passed through the Legislature, Maria Raine called it “a serious and much-needed step forward for AI companion chatbot safety.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This year, lawmakers also passed another bill by Padilla that enacts a four-year moratorium on the sale and manufacturing of AI-chatbot-powered toys over concerns that the technology can harm children.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The technology industry has not been uniformly opposed. OpenAI supports SB 1119 and has urged Newsom to sign it, saying the legislation establishes meaningful safeguards while preserving young people’s ability to use AI for learning, creativity and other purposes. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Teens are the first generation growing up with AI,” OpenAI said in a \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/index/supporting-california-bill-advance-ai-youth-safety/\">statement\u003c/a>. “Nearly nine in ten teens who use ChatGPT turn to it for learning, information, skill-building, or productivity in a given week.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“That opportunity comes with a clear responsibility: teens should have experiences designed around their distinct developmental needs, with strong default protections and appropriate opportunities to learn, create, and explore.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Opponents of the legislation include the California Chamber of Commerce, the Software Information Industry Association and TechNet.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Newsom vetoed a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12059714/newsom-vetoes-most-watched-childrens-ai-bill-signs-16-others-targeting-tech\">stronger child-safety bill\u003c/a> last year after raising concerns that its restrictions could effectively prevent teenagers from accessing conversational AI. Though his office has not indicated whether Newsom will sign, the version now on his desk was negotiated with those concerns in mind. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Data centers and ratepayer protections \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California lawmakers on Monday approved two linked bills that would require the state to establish special rules for how large data centers pay for electricity and the infrastructure needed to serve them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb886\">SB 886\u003c/a>, also authored by Padilla, and \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab2383\">AB 2383\u003c/a>, by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles), would require the California Public Utilities Commission to create separate electricity rates and updated interconnection rules for data centers. The measures are designed to prevent electricity customers from bearing the costs of new power generation and grid upgrades needed to serve the facilities. AB 2383 is contingent on SB 886 becoming law. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Big Tech keeps promising to be good neighbors, and these bills will make those promises legally enforceable,” Padilla said in a press release celebrating the passage of SB 886 and a related bill, \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260sb887\">887\u003c/a>. “No more saying one thing in the White House and doing the opposite in our local communities.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1980\" height=\"1231\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2267080472.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12094084\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2267080472.jpg 1980w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2267080472-160x99.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2267080472-1536x955.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1980px) 100vw, 1980px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">San Diego Democrat Sen. Steve Padilla. (Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The legislation follows a year of intensifying political pressure over the expansion of data centers, which are being built to meet the enormous computing demands of AI. California has fewer giant data centers than Virginia and Texas, but the state still has \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101912379/californias-ai-data-centers-taking-growing-environmental-toll\">one of the largest counts overall\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The facilities have \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12028158/crackdown-on-power-guzzling-data-centers-may-soon-come-online-in-california\">generated growing concern\u003c/a> over their electricity and water use, as well as the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12064265/new-report-reveals-strain-of-data-centers-on-californias-grid\">lack of transparency\u003c/a> about their potential effect on utility bills. A Public Policy Institute of California poll released in July found that \u003ca href=\"https://www.ppic.org/publication/ppic-statewide-survey-californians-and-the-environment-july-2026/\">73%\u003c/a> of Californians opposed building data centers in their communities. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In March 2026, the Little Hoover Commission released \u003ca href=\"https://lhc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/LHC-Report-292-Data-Centers-California-Electricity-Policy-FINAL-PUBLIC-3.3.26.pdf\">\u003cem>Data Centers and California Electricity Policy\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, a report that explicitly recommends making tech companies and data center developers cover their own grid-integration costs rather than shifting the burden to everyday ratepayers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“California’s electricity rates are among the highest in the nation, and affordability remains a top concern for residents,” the report states.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Supporters — including The Utility Reform Network, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council and utility-worker unions — argued that companies building the facilities should pay for the infrastructure their electricity demand requires. Bill sponsor TURN pointed to a California grid-planning estimate that increased demand from data centers in PG&E’s service territory, where most of the state’s projects are concentrated, could generate as much as $1.8 billion in transmission-upgrade costs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00394_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097519\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00394_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00394_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00394_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A flyer that says, “No Data Center,” is posted at the Church of All Faiths in Oakland, California, on Aug. 29, 2026. (Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Data Center Coalition, which represents companies including Google and Microsoft, opposed the legislation, arguing that it unfairly singled out one type of electricity customer. PG&E also opposed the original approach, warning that it could increase costs for customers and delay infrastructure needed to meet the state’s broader energy demand. Business groups argued that California’s high energy costs, limited land and additional regulation could make the state less attractive for data-center development. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The bills were substantially worked over in the final weeks of the session. Earlier drafts were far more prescriptive, including provisions for mandatory on-site batteries and 100% carbon-free power for data centers by 2030. Both were stripped out in favor of giving the CPUC until July 1, 2027, to establish special tariffs and rules. Newsom and regulators in turn secured more control over how the new rate structure will work. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The final compromise drew criticism from some environmental and consumer advocates. They say data centers could find loopholes to avoid paying some grid costs and wriggle out of clean-energy requirements for facilities that generate their own electricity. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Newsom’s position has shifted noticeably during the course of the debate. Last year, he \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/AB-93-Veto.pdf\">vetoed \u003c/a>legislation requiring data centers to disclose their water consumption, writing: “I am reluctant to impose rigid reporting requirements about operational details on this sector without understanding the full impact on businesses and the consumers of their technology.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1337\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12087658\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/06/GavinJenniferNewsomGetty-1536x1027.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks as his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom (left), looks on during an election night gathering at California Democratic headquarters in Sacramento, California, on Nov. 4, 2025. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This year, however, Newsom became directly involved in negotiations over both bills. On Monday in the state Capitol, he said his administration had been working with lawmakers on several data-center bills, and that the final versions “landed fairly well,” \u003ca href=\"https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/01/california-lawmakers-big-swing-newsom-data-centers-01058848\">\u003cem>Politico \u003c/em>reported\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“You’re seeing states all across this country leaning in,” Newsom said. “We’ll be leaning in.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He also said last month that companies, rather than other electricity customers, should bear the costs associated with their data-center investments. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We believe that all of these investments, the costs, should be borne by the companies,” Newsom said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That makes a Newsom signature more likely here than it appeared earlier in the year, although the governor has not formally committed to signing either bill.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Social media’s addictive features\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The California Senate \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab1709\">voted\u003c/a> to bar social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok from offering certain addictive features to users younger than 16. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The measure, authored by Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal (D-Long Beach), targets features on so-called “covered platforms” — which predominantly share user-generated content — designed to keep people engaged, including algorithmically driven feeds and other mechanisms that can encourage prolonged use. It also would establish an e-Safety Advisory Commission within the California Department of Justice to advise state officials on online safety and report annually to the governor and Legislature.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Common Sense Media, which sponsored the bill, is among its major supporters, along with Mothers Against Media Addiction and the American Academy of Pediatrics. The bill was amended as it moved through the Legislature, narrowing some of its provisions and changing how the state would oversee online safety. For supporters, the changes don’t go nearly far enough. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/AIGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12092171\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/AIGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/AIGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/AIGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A 14-year-old boy looks at an iPhone screen displaying various social media and messaging apps on March 29, 2026. (Anna Barclay/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/press-releases/common-sense-media-statement-on-passage-of-ab-1709\">wrote Monday\u003c/a> that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12096647/why-metas-landmark-settlement-could-be-social-medias-big-tobacco-moment\">recent litigation\u003c/a> against major technology companies has exposed how deliberately social media platforms have been designed to keep children engaged.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Social media companies have engineered their products to hook children, and their own researchers proved it worked,” Steyer said in a statement. “Parents cannot out-parent an algorithm built in a lab to keep kids scrolling.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Civil Justice Association of California and trade group NetChoice, which represents major technology companies including Google, Meta and Snap, oppose the measure. Civil liberties advocates, in particular, have raised First Amendment and privacy concerns, particularly around how platforms would determine which users are under 16 and which features should be considered addictive.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This well-intentioned, but deeply flawed piece of legislation, cuts young people off from essential information and experiences, particularly harming vulnerable youth and marginalized groups who often find safety in supportive online communities they can’t access offline,” the EFF \u003ca href=\"https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/eff-gov-newsom-veto-californias-ab-1709\">wrote\u003c/a> in a statement.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Newsom has already signed several California laws aimed at \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12005803/newsom-signs-law-to-protect-children-from-social-media-addiction\">protecting children online\u003c/a>, including legislation requiring warning labels on social media platforms. But AB 1709 could face the same free-speech and age-verification challenges that have complicated the state’s broader effort to regulate social media. A federal judge has already blocked portions of California’s existing law restricting addictive social media feeds while a legal challenge proceeds.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Newsom has not publicly indicated whether he will sign the bill, but he called on lawmakers to explore stricter youth online safety guardrails during his \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069094/in-final-state-of-state-speech-gov-newsom-says-california-offers-model-for-the-nation\">final State of the State\u003c/a> address. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Workplace surveillance\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California employers could face new limits on the use of AI to monitor workers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab1883\">AB 1883\u003c/a>, authored by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), would prohibit employers from using AI-powered workplace-surveillance tools to collect \u003ca href=\"https://law.stanford.edu/2024/12/02/what-are-neural-data-an-invitation-to-flexible-regulatory-implementation/\">neural data\u003c/a> — sensitive personal information from a user’s nervous system — or recognize an employee’s emotional state, with some exceptions. It also covers certain other AI-based inferences about workers and allows civil penalties of up to $500 per violation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The measure is part of a small but growing effort by states to regulate how employers use AI to monitor and manage their workers. California’s bill is unusually focused on technologies that attempt to infer what is happening inside an employee’s body or mind. There is a narrower approach in Illinois, which regulates AI-analyzed video interviews in hiring, and in Maryland, which restricts the use of facial-recognition technology.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1280\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/12/RS46155_GettyImages-1139953504-qut.jpg\" alt=\"""\" class=\"wp-image-11849216\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/12/RS46155_GettyImages-1139953504-qut.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/12/RS46155_GettyImages-1139953504-qut-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/12/RS46155_GettyImages-1139953504-qut-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/12/RS46155_GettyImages-1139953504-qut-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/12/RS46155_GettyImages-1139953504-qut-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A view of Slack headquarters on April 2, 2019, in San Francisco, California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>AB 1883 was sponsored by major state labor unions and Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Business groups representing various employers opposed the bill, ranging from the American Petroleum and Convenience Store Association to the Wine Institute.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The legislation’s ambitions were softened in committees. The latest version exempts certain workplace-surveillance uses required by federal law, regulation or binding federal contracts involving aircraft, national security, military, space or defense work. Senate amendments also modified the bill’s enforcement provisions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Still, the core prohibition survived.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Workers should have a general expectation of privacy in certain areas,” said Lorena Gonzalez, who heads up the powerful California Federation of Labor Unions, to KQED’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12097046/california-labor-leader-on-ai-bills-and-billionaire-tax-measure-splitting-unions\">Political Breakdown\u003c/a> last week. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Employers, Gonzalez said, are able to take advantage of outdated laws that don’t account for changes in technology. Labor interests have been at the forefront of legislation addressing \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12076608/what-do-san-franciscos-ai-vs-humans-billboards-say-about-our-working-futures\">AI anxieties\u003c/a> this session. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“You don’t want the boss reading your mind,” Gonzalez added.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The measure comes a year after Newsom vetoed the “No Robo Bosses Act,” which would have required employers to notify workers when AI was used in disciplinary or termination decisions and let employees challenge certain AI-generated decisions. In his \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/SB-7-Veto.pdf\">veto message\u003c/a> last year, Newsom wrote the bill “imposes unfocused notification requirements on any business using even the most innocuous tools.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>AB 1883 is narrower in scope. Rather than governing how AI makes decisions about workers, it bans a single, especially invasive use. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Newsom has not said whether he will sign it. With a widely expected presidential run ahead, his decision will signal whether he’s willing to side with workers over employers and draw a hard line against AI that tries to read a worker’s mind.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "going-down-the-ai-music-slop-chute-with-camilo-landau-dream-machines",
"title": "Going Down the AI Music Slop Chute with Camilo Landau",
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"content": "\n\u003cp>Can people tell the difference between a song made by human musicians, and one prompted by AI? Oftentimes not, it turns out. But that doesn’t make the distinction any less important. Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk to longtime musician Camilo Landau, who also works in music analysis at \u003ca href=\"https://www.pandora.com/about/mgp\">The Music Genome Project\u003c/a> at streaming service Pandora. Camilo and his colleagues have sifted through millions of tracks uploaded by musicians and users to catalogue their musical elements, all with the aim of curating personalized music recommendations. And he says most of the new music he’s seeing these days is generated by AI. On today’s show, they discuss whether AI music is connecting with listeners, delve into San Francisco’s AI slop music “scene,” and contemplate the consequences of a world where music is produced in the time it takes a finger to tap a screen. \u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest: \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://camilolandau.com/home\">Camilo Landau\u003c/a>, musician and music analyst\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>I’m Alexis Madrigal.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>I’m Robin Sloan and this is KQED’s Dream Machines, a podcast about AI, how it works, what it means, how it feels. Yeah, how I feel. And importantly, it’s rooted here in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>So the other day, I was sitting with a friend of mine, prize fighter in Emeryville, great bar in the East Bay. And he was kind of blowing my mind about the current state of music. He works at Pandora now, but he’s a long time musician in Latin American music. He’s been like recording and playing music all over the Bay Area and the world since he was like 15 years old. And now that he works at pandora, he’s encountering this strange flood. Of things that is sort of like coming through the doors that is not made by any human being, maybe somebody pushed a button. And it’s AI-generated music that is now sitting there right next to the stuff that was made by someone with a heart and big toes and eyes and a brain. And a guitar. And a a guitar, perhaps, or maybe a theremin. And when we’re sitting at this bar, it was just kind of blowing my mind with this new world. Of AI and music. And it was basically saying something like, close to half of the songs that are getting on the streaming platforms are just AI music entirely. And that like, no one’s actually listening to it. So you have this strange situation where the platforms are being absolutely flooded with these songs. And also they’re just sitting there not even racking up the listens. So please welcome Camila Landa. Yes, thank you. It could be here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, it’s fascinating that the volume is just so enormous. Like you said, flooded with these AI-generated songs that nobody wants to hear, and no one asked for, and no ones listening to. And it’s these prompt-based platforms where you just say, I would like 1,000 melancholy pop songs, and then it just generates them faster than real time. So faster than you could play it or listen to it a single time. It’s actually just printing sound files. It’s not like creating music in the way that we think of assembling these different instruments and we’re recording them and layering them. Not like that at all. It’s like, I’ve seen 100,000 reggae songs, so I know what a sound file of a reggae song looks like and I can print something that looks very similar. I can’t I just cannot help imagine it coming out of\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>the like the pasta extruder. Yeah, it’s a sausage, sausage extruder actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Just a tube, just a tube of audio. For me, that’s kind of the disappointment. So a lot of this I feel is a big disappointment because it’s what could, what could you be doing with AI generation of music? You could be making sounds that we can’t physically make. You could invent, anything you can imagine suddenly can be music. But we’re not seeing anything like that. We’re seeing just, you know, tens of millions of boring pop songs. So as you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>At your, from your desk, see what’s uploaded day by day, is that your characterization that it’s far more of this kind of automatic slop?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, I mean by far more, I mean all, all, you know, like, or maybe there’s like a few dozen interesting ones out of, you know, tens of millions. Okay, I’m going to, uh, point to this Deezer report, uh French, I believe they’re French music streaming service company. Deezers put out, um, a report on, on AI generated music, 45% they’re saying 45% of the music that’s delivered to platforms is AI generated. And this I think this is industry wide. Yeah. So that’s almost half.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>I mean, what a what a curve. This is new in the last two years. Yes. Yeah\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>And, like, if we were to just hear it, could I tell the difference, do you think? Well, I mean…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Also, according to Deezer’s report, I think it’s 97% of people. And they did this blind test in different countries. 97% percent of people can’t tell the difference. But even though they don’t know it’s AI music, they don’t seem to be liking it or connecting with it. So a very small percentage of the music that people listen to is AI-generated, even though almost half of it that is being created. Proof.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Like the proof is in the pudding there, you know, right? Like people don’t, they don’t like it even if they can’t tell the difference. That’s like.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah. I mean, it really made me rethink what is music, right? Because I spent a long time learning how to play music good, right, and like mastering skills because I thought that like, yeah, if you can play it good, then that makes better music. Now, I think I was wrong. Right. The point of music is not to play a music good. The point a music is to have a human expression and connect with other people through human communication. And that’s the piece that AI can’t do.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Oh, that’s so interesting. It’s almost like a unintentional natural experiment where they said, okay, let’s take out that technical competence piece and just do that. Let’s say like, cause you can do that before. To have technical competence, you had to also be a living, breathing human musician with like a heart and ideas. And they’re like, oh no, no, no, we can do it without that. And let’s see. And now we have the result of that experiment, which is that it is somehow hollow. Yeah, yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>I mean, how do you even know, you know, from your position, like how do even know that it is AI generated? Like how, are there tells? Are there like detectors? Like how does that work?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yes, there are tells, there’re detectors. Well, sometimes they’ll just say, composer, UDio, Suno, something like that. So they just tell you. Yeah, and then sometimes it’s, oh, here’s a brand new artist who just dropped 30 albums and 1,200 songs or something like that and let’s look them up online. Oh, they don’t exist. There is no artist. They had a really busy weekend, okay? They were locked in. So some of the tells can be something like, all right, well, each song has a different singer, right? Like male, female, different range, tonalities, vocal qualities. Each song is a different style. So OK, oh, you got a hard rock song followed by a country song followed by electronic music, and completely disjointed, right. And so there’s another one. Fully produced songs that sound like incredible studio musicians, incredible recording. But maybe they didn’t master the record or something like that. Like, why would they have spent so much money on this production? And it still has this kind of like gauzy sound to it a little bit. And then it’s other sort of like, remember with photos you see like the third hand and stuff like that, so sometimes it’s stuff like that like the track starts super abruptly or ends super abruptly. Or… This section comes in in a super weird place where people wouldn’t put it. No human musician would ever score it like that. And then sometimes it’s almost the opposite. It’s like too formulaic and perfect. Yeah. Yes. AI has solved the wrong problem here. The wrong problem was never that we don’t have enough music, right? We’ve had plenty of music. We have more music than we could possibly listen to. But that piece of connecting with the artist, I think, is actually completely fundamental, right, because best case scenario, And it’s highly likely that an AI will produce a song that fits really well on a particular playlist and resonate really well with people. Cause it’s producing tens of millions of songs. So just statistically, it’s gonna be one that’s gonna fit really well. So you’re listening to whatever you listen, you hear a new song and you like it. Oh, that’s kind of cool. What is this? And you go and look it up and check it out. And you realize, I’ve been fooled. I’ve be tricked. I’ve bee deceived. That’s the feeling that you get. And, and cause that is the impetus. You want to connect with the artist and there’s no artist and it’s wild that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>You would try to put out music without that stuff, because it’s so clear there’s that drive to know about where did this, what soul did this song come from? It’s like that gets kind of like maybe the core lie of the current AI era. Like the thing that we didn’t have to do, but that we did do was to like give these the chatbots and these things like an eye, to let them pretend to be a human. Like everything else could work exactly the same, and I feel like, oh man. I wish we hadn’t done that, you know? I wish they hadn’t been like, yes, I am a being in here that you can sort of connect with, because it is, it’s fundamentally deceitful, I think, about what’s happening behind the curtain. Sure, yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I think so. I mean, I think, yeah, like the tool itself isn’t the problem. It’s, somebody has to be making those decisions and that’s not happening, right? Like it’s the human decisions are what make the art, right. And, and there is no decision here. You’re just prompting a thing and then it’s going to make the decisions, right I mean we have music that’s completely electronically produced by humans using machines. Yeah, right, like, but somebody’s making those decisions somebody’s deciding this is where I want the hi-hats to come in. Or whatever it is, and that’s not what’s happening with AI. It’s like, print me 5,000 songs, and then in five minutes later, you have, you know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Robyn, so there’s none of that scene, there’s not of that like playing music good and transmission of all these things. But you went to what Passage for. You\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, maybe. Of AI music. Maybe, maybe it is the seed being planted, you know, as this, as the stuff emerges. I saw a digital poster for a scene, for a show in San Francisco, and it was called the Gen Punk Slop Show. Slop, right there in the title, not hiding it, celebrating it. It was in a big, cruddy art warehouse in Soma, you know, kind of hard to find. One. They had a stage set up, but the host, who’s also an open AI researcher, just deeply embedded in the AI scene and obviously a great enthusiast, announced that we were gonna hear a whole night, hours and hours full of songs, that’s sort of a sequence of performers, were they even performers, that they had organized and all this music had come straight out of the AI machines. And this was something we heard. That was magical, what a thing to hear music from nowhere. They started out with a set glitchy, pitched up, hyper-pop, like super high tempo. I will tell you, in those first moments, it was a wild thing to see a group of people dancing, I mean really dancing in that bad Burning Man way. It’s a music that came from nowhere, music without a musician, music without Bye! A reason behind it other than a prompt. This goes on through the night and I have to say, on these big speakers, it sounded good. I mean, it was technically very- But that beat drop. It was very competent. It was smooth. It shined in the right places. One of the producers at the end of their bundle of songs leaned into the microphone. There’s the only words we heard from them the whole time. They said, shout out Claude. Yeah. These are the new superstar DJs. Yeah. Claude does your taxes and produces your EDM. What a world. Superstar DJs! Yeah. And then I kept expecting there to be someone who maybe had, I don’t know, pieced parts together or used AI samples. But no, it was all these just like soup to nuts AI generations. And the thing that struck me the most, maybe the glimpse of something truly new in this event, was about midway through getting close to midnight, One of the performers came up, I say performer, but I don’t even know if that’s what they were doing. The figure took the stage wearing one of those great, shiny, reflective helmets. That’s the helmet? Yeah, kind of like dead mouse or something, one of these cool new cyber DJs. So they stood up to the front with a laptop, and they’re actually projecting their screen up on the wall behind them, and it was Suno. So just completely shamelessly, unapologetically, They were clicking through their generations. You saw the prompts, you know, dark EDM with skittering beats. And it just was, it was wild because already, you know, we had the figure of the DJ who would stand at the front of a stage with their laptop. And people would say, oh man, what is he even doing? He’s just like pressing play on an MP3. So this person was just pressing play on an mp3 that they hadn’t even made. And in a weird way, it was kind of radical. It’s like, okay, what are they now? What is their role? And is this the new performer of the 21st century? You get to wear a shiny helmet and press play and.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Life is good. It’s a scene of some kind, you know, that essentially like celebrated the sausage. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>You’ve never, boy, you have never seen more people more excited about AI Slab.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I mean, I almost think that if it were sort of like live generation, that’s kind of more interesting because that’s almost the promise of AI that is not being explored much, which is why even print these songs in the first place? You can actually create the perfect song for this particular moment. I can check out your playlists, your play lists, my play lists. Know that we’re all in proximity. We have our Geolocation, we know what the weather is here. We can have our Apple watches on and can be reading our heart rate and biometrics. It can be adjusting in real time. The tempos of the songs based on all of those factors. Why bother printing that? That could be the perfect song for us three right now, right here. And that goes more to what the heart of what is music. It’s vibrations in the air. That might not be good for anyone else ever, which is what we’re seeing where nobody’s listening to these songs, right? But why not just like make something that’s for here and now. Vibe composing. Vibe, composing!\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>I didn’t prompt that and so I left the show, walked out into the San Francisco drizzle, thinking that maybe that was the most interesting thing I’d seen, that it creates this new stand.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>The freedom to just create without responsibility, because you can always just pass it off. I didn’t actually create it, something else did.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>You do see like if AI can just produce a pop song perfectly, instantly, every time, the value of doing that as a human being just feels like it goes to zero, you know? Right.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, of course, I want to believe that’s right, but I do think we underestimate the power of things being easy at our peril. You know, the last great music technology scare, you know, synthesizers created as simulations of, you know strings and, you know, brass and everything else. But like then. Drum machines. And the drum machine, right. And again, and as you all know, invented as accompaniment, you know, it was like, oh, you can’t afford a drummer, get this little box to go. Right\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>But that organ, it’s attached to the organ.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, and then, but then it was, but, but then it, you know, repurposed and adapted and, and sort of gave rise to wild new genres. I mean, these were tools that kind of had a grain and they pushed back and they both, um, demanded and sort of invited mastery and boy, Suno just wants you to say, give me a song and I’ll do the rest. Maybe that there’s a bit of danger there and it’s something that is new. I mean\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>So the thing with the drum machine and the synthesizers and stuff, yes, there was a scare, right? People are like, oh, now people aren’t gonna hire drummers. This is gonna kill music. Oh, that’s so squared off. It doesn’t have any of the human swing and feel. That all turned out to be, I think, wrong, right, because people found this new tool and started using it for super cool, interesting stuff. They created whole new cultures and subcultures and whole new art forms, hip hop. You know, I mean, you know, people are like, oh, wait, you’re just sampling somebody else’s, you’re not even playing music, you just sampling it. No, they were creating new stuff on top of that, and they were using a new tool to create new art forms, right? They started connecting it with whole larger subcultures, but we’re not seeing any of that. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Is it different this time? That’s ultimately the thing. That is the question.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>It feels like it’s different this time. And there are reasons that it could be different. Again, this sense of ease, you know, there’s a difference, right, between a musician and a user. I feel like a lot of folks are stuck in the mode of being a user, there’s also a difference between a tool, even if it is a high-tech tool, a drum machine, a synthesizer, that you have in your garage or your basement versus a service that exists only on this far-off server controlled by this company and they change it whenever they want, however they want. You know let’s say you learn how to use it. You’ve become a virtuoso and then they announce the big upgrades to know 7.0 and you’re like wait Wait a minute. Where did my piano go? So these are I think these are real risks. It’s it is kind of new new territory\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>I mean, we’ve talked a little bit about drum machines and the way that drum machines and that form of technology created new genres of music and new realms of culture. You know, there were other musical technologies through time that also had kind of this fascinating impact. You know one, recently there was a big show of Bernie Krause’s work at the Exploratorium, you know, recording these soundscapes all across there. The world and really showing the way that these ecologies as they degraded, their soundscapes also degraded. One thing that felt so important about that show, because it is fundamentally about climate change, is that music, even though it was essentially nature and a microphone, and the selection apparatus, a human making a decision there, it was really deeply political in its orientation. It wasn’t just sounds to make you feel good, it was sounds to you realize we’re destroying the earth and it’s species.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>And the drum machine, you know, this would begin as the most robotic, you know, tick, boom, tick boom, powers them probably the most political music. It’s been made certainly, certainly in the 20th century. Yeah. Incredible.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Do you think there’s a pathway? Does AI music have an inherent politics? Is it just because it’s slop, it’s just conservative in some deep sense, or could it have some other politics?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Well, I mean, one interesting thing is that you can always, in many of these platforms, you can insert your own lyrics or suggest lyrics. So there actually is quite a bit of right-wing country AI music. Like hard-right, like racist and stuff, right? Which is, I’m mean, problematic in many ways, but. But so typical. It’s just like expect.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Well, and sort of, you imagine the strange liberation of the person saying, oh, I could never get anybody to sing these before, but the robot will sing whatever I want. I mean, that’s pretty grim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, but there’s also something liberating, I think, about being able to create any kinds of music, right? Like, you can create whatever you’re imagining, you should be able to create it. Okay, well, maybe it doesn’t work perfectly like that today. But that is the promise, is that, like, you have an idea and something in your imagination, and if you can get it out, if this can help you get it out, then that’s cool. It’s not exactly what’s happening, but there is a promise there. There is a promise there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Some liberatory little grain of potential in there that could take off. I mean, uh, maybe just to wrap us up back into sort of Pandora and what you, we know you don’t speak for the company, but just if you like, imagine what streaming services might look like in response to what is likely to be an increasing onslaught of this. It’s like half the music is probably the best it’s going to get. So, all right, five years from now. Now it’s. 99% of the music that is submitted to, you know, Pandora or Spotify or whatever is all AI slop. Like, what happens?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. So there’s a few things. Spotify and Warner and the major labels and UDO or Suno, one of the AI companies, there was a lawsuit, they came to an agreement, which essentially they acquired, they become the same company. And so it’s. Spotify purportedly is working on a feature for like basically AI remix of any song in there, in these certain catalogs that they control. So the idea would be like, I don’t know, you could be like okay, I want this Daft Punk song, but in the style of Lofi Beats or whatever. Yeah. You kind of just like create these sort of AI remixes on the fly using this particular catalog that’s licensed to do so. I mean, I kind of don’t f-\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>think that that’s what people want. I mean, you know this well from the front lines of Pandora, the way we know that people listen to music. Every listen of every track is not an emotional resonance. It is this lull. Elevator music.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Music for everything yeah\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, yeah this music it’s the it’s the final the final victory of music\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>in this functional music space, I do think there is like, I kind of think that’s the sweet spot for this AI music, right? These lo-fi beats for studying or whatever. You don’t, you’re not listening to the songs. You have it on the background. You’re just trying to get a vibe. AI can do quite a convincing job of doing that, you know, a stream, like a constant stream of lo-Fi stuff. And it just, I pretty sure it was all. Just to drown out your roommate, Tony. I’m pretty sure was all the AI generated. Hey, if it can do a perfectly good job of this and people don’t really care, then fine, whatever. On the other hand, there’s also plenty of human created lo-fi beats that, you know, plenty like, you know, millions of hours or whatever, like, so why not prioritize that? And, you know, is, is the AI doing it better? No. Is it doing it competently? Sure. But is it doing a better job? So no. So then why use that? Why not prioritize the human stuff? And now the AI does that endlessly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Simulations of simulations of simulations\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>It is a grim, grim vision of the world, so I like some of your other visions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>In our conversation, I feel like we’ve come up with between three and five actually exciting paths and gestures, and it just so happens that we’re stuck with the very worst one at this moment, but that’s okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, which is that the vast, vast like almost all majority of AI generated music is really just used for fraud to try to trick people into playing they’re just putting out massive volumes of music just in the off chance somebody might accidentally click on one or one of them might get on something and they can make a few cents.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>It’s like the worst arbitrage, like tokens into streams. And they’re trying to make like one fraction of one cent on each of those things. That is depressing. Um, well, um, Camilo, I feel like I have learned, uh, so much about the strange state of AI.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I mean, I think there are a lot of interesting AI tools being used in music, in production, right? I mean there’s AI mastering AI, you know, like, okay, here’s a thing. I know what a finished song should sound like and what an unfinished song sounds like and I can help you make your unfinished song sound sparklier and louder, right. Great. I mean it’s not as good as hiring a real mastering engineer, but it’s, that’s a good tool for musicians to be able to have to make their music sound better. Great. Yeah, yeah. But there’s still somebody making music in that instance, right? There’s somebody assembling, somebody making decisions. A human making decisions, I think, is the important element.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>The core, right? It’s almost a filter. You can say like, did somebody have an opinion or a vision or one tiny idea? I’ll take it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>There it is, lowest common denominator, we have found it. One tiny idea.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I think people connect because they’re connecting with the artists, with the music, and if that’s not how this music is being made, then I’m not convinced it’ll work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>I had like the worst possible scenario where it’s like, do-do-do, do-doodle-do. Five years later, we’re here. It’s like the most popular song in the world is AI, you know, and we’re like, ah. We’ll come back to Camilo on that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>We got to trust and hope that listeners will hold the line. It’s actually heartening in a way that, you know, all the machinations are certainly at the platforms. We’d love to be able to serve music without authors that you didn’t have to pay for. But if listeners won’t take it, they can’t get around that. So, hey, let’s all stay real. Stay positive. Let’s stay all very persnickety in our listening.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>KQED’s Dream Machines is made by humans and hosted by me, Robin Sloan and Alexis Madrigal. Our series is produced by Anayansi Diaz-Cortez and Derek Lartaud. Sound design by Brendan Willard. Jen Chien is the executive producer and Ethan Toven-Lindsey, our editor-in-chief. Support for the production of Dream Machines comes from the Krishnan Shah family, Dorothy Marsh and other generous KQED members. Special thanks to Chris Egusa, Annie Fruit, Paul Lancour, Vivian Morales, Zaldy Serrano, Xtine Tiñoso, Hazel Tesoro, and Alex Tran. And of course, thank you to the Close All Tabs team for letting us visit their feed this month.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Can people tell the difference between a song made by human musicians, and one prompted by AI? Oftentimes not, it turns out. But that doesn’t make the distinction any less important. Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk to longtime musician Camilo Landau, who also works in music analysis at \u003ca href=\"https://www.pandora.com/about/mgp\">The Music Genome Project\u003c/a> at streaming service Pandora. Camilo and his colleagues have sifted through millions of tracks uploaded by musicians and users to catalogue their musical elements, all with the aim of curating personalized music recommendations. And he says most of the new music he’s seeing these days is generated by AI. On today’s show, they discuss whether AI music is connecting with listeners, delve into San Francisco’s AI slop music “scene,” and contemplate the consequences of a world where music is produced in the time it takes a finger to tap a screen. \u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Can people tell the difference between a song made by human musicians, and one prompted by AI? Oftentimes not, it turns out. But that doesn’t make the distinction any less important. Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk to longtime musician Camilo Landau, who also works in music analysis at \u003ca href=\"https://www.pandora.com/about/mgp\">The Music Genome Project\u003c/a> at streaming service Pandora. Camilo and his colleagues have sifted through millions of tracks uploaded by musicians and users to catalogue their musical elements, all with the aim of curating personalized music recommendations. And he says most of the new music he’s seeing these days is generated by AI. On today’s show, they discuss whether AI music is connecting with listeners, delve into San Francisco’s AI slop music “scene,” and contemplate the consequences of a world where music is produced in the time it takes a finger to tap a screen. \u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest: \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://camilolandau.com/home\">Camilo Landau\u003c/a>, musician and music analyst\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>I’m Robin Sloan and this is KQED’s Dream Machines, a podcast about AI, how it works, what it means, how it feels. Yeah, how I feel. And importantly, it’s rooted here in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>So the other day, I was sitting with a friend of mine, prize fighter in Emeryville, great bar in the East Bay. And he was kind of blowing my mind about the current state of music. He works at Pandora now, but he’s a long time musician in Latin American music. He’s been like recording and playing music all over the Bay Area and the world since he was like 15 years old. And now that he works at pandora, he’s encountering this strange flood. Of things that is sort of like coming through the doors that is not made by any human being, maybe somebody pushed a button. And it’s AI-generated music that is now sitting there right next to the stuff that was made by someone with a heart and big toes and eyes and a brain. And a guitar. And a a guitar, perhaps, or maybe a theremin. And when we’re sitting at this bar, it was just kind of blowing my mind with this new world. Of AI and music. And it was basically saying something like, close to half of the songs that are getting on the streaming platforms are just AI music entirely. And that like, no one’s actually listening to it. So you have this strange situation where the platforms are being absolutely flooded with these songs. And also they’re just sitting there not even racking up the listens. So please welcome Camila Landa. Yes, thank you. It could be here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>So the other day, I was sitting with a friend of mine, prize fighter in Emeryville, great bar in the East Bay. And he was kind of blowing my mind about the current state of music. He works at Pandora now, but he’s a long time musician in Latin American music. He’s been like recording and playing music all over the Bay Area and the world since he was like 15 years old. And now that he works at pandora, he’s encountering this strange flood. Of things that is sort of like coming through the doors that is not made by any human being, maybe somebody pushed a button. And it’s AI-generated music that is now sitting there right next to the stuff that was made by someone with a heart and big toes and eyes and a brain. And a guitar. And a a guitar, perhaps, or maybe a theremin. And when we’re sitting at this bar, it was just kind of blowing my mind with this new world. Of AI and music. And it was basically saying something like, close to half of the songs that are getting on the streaming platforms are just AI music entirely. And that like, no one’s actually listening to it. So you have this strange situation where the platforms are being absolutely flooded with these songs. And also they’re just sitting there not even racking up the listens. So please welcome Camila Landa. Yes, thank you. It could be here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, it’s fascinating that the volume is just so enormous. Like you said, flooded with these AI-generated songs that nobody wants to hear, and no one asked for, and no ones listening to. And it’s these prompt-based platforms where you just say, I would like 1,000 melancholy pop songs, and then it just generates them faster than real time. So faster than you could play it or listen to it a single time. It’s actually just printing sound files. It’s not like creating music in the way that we think of assembling these different instruments and we’re recording them and layering them. Not like that at all. It’s like, I’ve seen 100,000 reggae songs, so I know what a sound file of a reggae song looks like and I can print something that looks very similar. I can’t I just cannot help imagine it coming out of\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, it’s fascinating that the volume is just so enormous. Like you said, flooded with these AI-generated songs that nobody wants to hear, and no one asked for, and no ones listening to. And it’s these prompt-based platforms where you just say, I would like 1,000 melancholy pop songs, and then it just generates them faster than real time. So faster than you could play it or listen to it a single time. It’s actually just printing sound files. It’s not like creating music in the way that we think of assembling these different instruments and we’re recording them and layering them. Not like that at all. It’s like, I’ve seen 100,000 reggae songs, so I know what a sound file of a reggae song looks like and I can print something that looks very similar. I can’t I just cannot help imagine it coming out of\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>the like the pasta extruder. Yeah, it’s a sausage, sausage extruder actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>the like the pasta extruder. Yeah, it’s a sausage, sausage extruder actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Just a tube, just a tube of audio. For me, that’s kind of the disappointment. So a lot of this I feel is a big disappointment because it’s what could, what could you be doing with AI generation of music? You could be making sounds that we can’t physically make. You could invent, anything you can imagine suddenly can be music. But we’re not seeing anything like that. We’re seeing just, you know, tens of millions of boring pop songs. So as you.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Just a tube, just a tube of audio. For me, that’s kind of the disappointment. So a lot of this I feel is a big disappointment because it’s what could, what could you be doing with AI generation of music? You could be making sounds that we can’t physically make. You could invent, anything you can imagine suddenly can be music. But we’re not seeing anything like that. We’re seeing just, you know, tens of millions of boring pop songs. So as you.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>At your, from your desk, see what’s uploaded day by day, is that your characterization that it’s far more of this kind of automatic slop?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>At your, from your desk, see what’s uploaded day by day, is that your characterization that it’s far more of this kind of automatic slop?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, I mean by far more, I mean all, all, you know, like, or maybe there’s like a few dozen interesting ones out of, you know, tens of millions. Okay, I’m going to, uh, point to this Deezer report, uh French, I believe they’re French music streaming service company. Deezers put out, um, a report on, on AI generated music, 45% they’re saying 45% of the music that’s delivered to platforms is AI generated. And this I think this is industry wide. Yeah. So that’s almost half.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, I mean by far more, I mean all, all, you know, like, or maybe there’s like a few dozen interesting ones out of, you know, tens of millions. Okay, I’m going to, uh, point to this Deezer report, uh French, I believe they’re French music streaming service company. Deezers put out, um, a report on, on AI generated music, 45% they’re saying 45% of the music that’s delivered to platforms is AI generated. And this I think this is industry wide. Yeah. So that’s almost half.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>I mean, what a what a curve. This is new in the last two years. Yes. Yeah\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>I mean, what a what a curve. This is new in the last two years. Yes. Yeah\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>And, like, if we were to just hear it, could I tell the difference, do you think? Well, I mean…\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>And, like, if we were to just hear it, could I tell the difference, do you think? Well, I mean…\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Also, according to Deezer’s report, I think it’s 97% of people. And they did this blind test in different countries. 97% percent of people can’t tell the difference. But even though they don’t know it’s AI music, they don’t seem to be liking it or connecting with it. So a very small percentage of the music that people listen to is AI-generated, even though almost half of it that is being created. Proof.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Also, according to Deezer’s report, I think it’s 97% of people. And they did this blind test in different countries. 97% percent of people can’t tell the difference. But even though they don’t know it’s AI music, they don’t seem to be liking it or connecting with it. So a very small percentage of the music that people listen to is AI-generated, even though almost half of it that is being created. Proof.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Like the proof is in the pudding there, you know, right? Like people don’t, they don’t like it even if they can’t tell the difference. That’s like.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Like the proof is in the pudding there, you know, right? Like people don’t, they don’t like it even if they can’t tell the difference. That’s like.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah. I mean, it really made me rethink what is music, right? Because I spent a long time learning how to play music good, right, and like mastering skills because I thought that like, yeah, if you can play it good, then that makes better music. Now, I think I was wrong. Right. The point of music is not to play a music good. The point a music is to have a human expression and connect with other people through human communication. And that’s the piece that AI can’t do.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah. I mean, it really made me rethink what is music, right? Because I spent a long time learning how to play music good, right, and like mastering skills because I thought that like, yeah, if you can play it good, then that makes better music. Now, I think I was wrong. Right. The point of music is not to play a music good. The point a music is to have a human expression and connect with other people through human communication. And that’s the piece that AI can’t do.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Oh, that’s so interesting. It’s almost like a unintentional natural experiment where they said, okay, let’s take out that technical competence piece and just do that. Let’s say like, cause you can do that before. To have technical competence, you had to also be a living, breathing human musician with like a heart and ideas. And they’re like, oh no, no, no, we can do it without that. And let’s see. And now we have the result of that experiment, which is that it is somehow hollow. Yeah, yeah.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Oh, that’s so interesting. It’s almost like a unintentional natural experiment where they said, okay, let’s take out that technical competence piece and just do that. Let’s say like, cause you can do that before. To have technical competence, you had to also be a living, breathing human musician with like a heart and ideas. And they’re like, oh no, no, no, we can do it without that. And let’s see. And now we have the result of that experiment, which is that it is somehow hollow. Yeah, yeah.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>I mean, how do you even know, you know, from your position, like how do even know that it is AI generated? Like how, are there tells? Are there like detectors? Like how does that work?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>I mean, how do you even know, you know, from your position, like how do even know that it is AI generated? Like how, are there tells? Are there like detectors? Like how does that work?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yes, there are tells, there’re detectors. Well, sometimes they’ll just say, composer, UDio, Suno, something like that. So they just tell you. Yeah, and then sometimes it’s, oh, here’s a brand new artist who just dropped 30 albums and 1,200 songs or something like that and let’s look them up online. Oh, they don’t exist. There is no artist. They had a really busy weekend, okay? They were locked in. So some of the tells can be something like, all right, well, each song has a different singer, right? Like male, female, different range, tonalities, vocal qualities. Each song is a different style. So OK, oh, you got a hard rock song followed by a country song followed by electronic music, and completely disjointed, right. And so there’s another one. Fully produced songs that sound like incredible studio musicians, incredible recording. But maybe they didn’t master the record or something like that. Like, why would they have spent so much money on this production? And it still has this kind of like gauzy sound to it a little bit. And then it’s other sort of like, remember with photos you see like the third hand and stuff like that, so sometimes it’s stuff like that like the track starts super abruptly or ends super abruptly. Or… This section comes in in a super weird place where people wouldn’t put it. No human musician would ever score it like that. And then sometimes it’s almost the opposite. It’s like too formulaic and perfect. Yeah. Yes. AI has solved the wrong problem here. The wrong problem was never that we don’t have enough music, right? We’ve had plenty of music. We have more music than we could possibly listen to. But that piece of connecting with the artist, I think, is actually completely fundamental, right, because best case scenario, And it’s highly likely that an AI will produce a song that fits really well on a particular playlist and resonate really well with people. Cause it’s producing tens of millions of songs. So just statistically, it’s gonna be one that’s gonna fit really well. So you’re listening to whatever you listen, you hear a new song and you like it. Oh, that’s kind of cool. What is this? And you go and look it up and check it out. And you realize, I’ve been fooled. I’ve be tricked. I’ve bee deceived. That’s the feeling that you get. And, and cause that is the impetus. You want to connect with the artist and there’s no artist and it’s wild that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yes, there are tells, there’re detectors. Well, sometimes they’ll just say, composer, UDio, Suno, something like that. So they just tell you. Yeah, and then sometimes it’s, oh, here’s a brand new artist who just dropped 30 albums and 1,200 songs or something like that and let’s look them up online. Oh, they don’t exist. There is no artist. They had a really busy weekend, okay? They were locked in. So some of the tells can be something like, all right, well, each song has a different singer, right? Like male, female, different range, tonalities, vocal qualities. Each song is a different style. So OK, oh, you got a hard rock song followed by a country song followed by electronic music, and completely disjointed, right. And so there’s another one. Fully produced songs that sound like incredible studio musicians, incredible recording. But maybe they didn’t master the record or something like that. Like, why would they have spent so much money on this production? And it still has this kind of like gauzy sound to it a little bit. And then it’s other sort of like, remember with photos you see like the third hand and stuff like that, so sometimes it’s stuff like that like the track starts super abruptly or ends super abruptly. Or… This section comes in in a super weird place where people wouldn’t put it. No human musician would ever score it like that. And then sometimes it’s almost the opposite. It’s like too formulaic and perfect. Yeah. Yes. AI has solved the wrong problem here. The wrong problem was never that we don’t have enough music, right? We’ve had plenty of music. We have more music than we could possibly listen to. But that piece of connecting with the artist, I think, is actually completely fundamental, right, because best case scenario, And it’s highly likely that an AI will produce a song that fits really well on a particular playlist and resonate really well with people. Cause it’s producing tens of millions of songs. So just statistically, it’s gonna be one that’s gonna fit really well. So you’re listening to whatever you listen, you hear a new song and you like it. Oh, that’s kind of cool. What is this? And you go and look it up and check it out. And you realize, I’ve been fooled. I’ve be tricked. I’ve bee deceived. That’s the feeling that you get. And, and cause that is the impetus. You want to connect with the artist and there’s no artist and it’s wild that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>You would try to put out music without that stuff, because it’s so clear there’s that drive to know about where did this, what soul did this song come from? It’s like that gets kind of like maybe the core lie of the current AI era. Like the thing that we didn’t have to do, but that we did do was to like give these the chatbots and these things like an eye, to let them pretend to be a human. Like everything else could work exactly the same, and I feel like, oh man. I wish we hadn’t done that, you know? I wish they hadn’t been like, yes, I am a being in here that you can sort of connect with, because it is, it’s fundamentally deceitful, I think, about what’s happening behind the curtain. Sure, yeah.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>You would try to put out music without that stuff, because it’s so clear there’s that drive to know about where did this, what soul did this song come from? It’s like that gets kind of like maybe the core lie of the current AI era. Like the thing that we didn’t have to do, but that we did do was to like give these the chatbots and these things like an eye, to let them pretend to be a human. Like everything else could work exactly the same, and I feel like, oh man. I wish we hadn’t done that, you know? I wish they hadn’t been like, yes, I am a being in here that you can sort of connect with, because it is, it’s fundamentally deceitful, I think, about what’s happening behind the curtain. Sure, yeah.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I think so. I mean, I think, yeah, like the tool itself isn’t the problem. It’s, somebody has to be making those decisions and that’s not happening, right? Like it’s the human decisions are what make the art, right. And, and there is no decision here. You’re just prompting a thing and then it’s going to make the decisions, right I mean we have music that’s completely electronically produced by humans using machines. Yeah, right, like, but somebody’s making those decisions somebody’s deciding this is where I want the hi-hats to come in. Or whatever it is, and that’s not what’s happening with AI. It’s like, print me 5,000 songs, and then in five minutes later, you have, you know.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I think so. I mean, I think, yeah, like the tool itself isn’t the problem. It’s, somebody has to be making those decisions and that’s not happening, right? Like it’s the human decisions are what make the art, right. And, and there is no decision here. You’re just prompting a thing and then it’s going to make the decisions, right I mean we have music that’s completely electronically produced by humans using machines. Yeah, right, like, but somebody’s making those decisions somebody’s deciding this is where I want the hi-hats to come in. Or whatever it is, and that’s not what’s happening with AI. It’s like, print me 5,000 songs, and then in five minutes later, you have, you know.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Robyn, so there’s none of that scene, there’s not of that like playing music good and transmission of all these things. But you went to what Passage for. You\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Robyn, so there’s none of that scene, there’s not of that like playing music good and transmission of all these things. But you went to what Passage for. You\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, maybe. Of AI music. Maybe, maybe it is the seed being planted, you know, as this, as the stuff emerges. I saw a digital poster for a scene, for a show in San Francisco, and it was called the Gen Punk Slop Show. Slop, right there in the title, not hiding it, celebrating it. It was in a big, cruddy art warehouse in Soma, you know, kind of hard to find. One. They had a stage set up, but the host, who’s also an open AI researcher, just deeply embedded in the AI scene and obviously a great enthusiast, announced that we were gonna hear a whole night, hours and hours full of songs, that’s sort of a sequence of performers, were they even performers, that they had organized and all this music had come straight out of the AI machines. And this was something we heard. That was magical, what a thing to hear music from nowhere. They started out with a set glitchy, pitched up, hyper-pop, like super high tempo. I will tell you, in those first moments, it was a wild thing to see a group of people dancing, I mean really dancing in that bad Burning Man way. It’s a music that came from nowhere, music without a musician, music without Bye! A reason behind it other than a prompt. This goes on through the night and I have to say, on these big speakers, it sounded good. I mean, it was technically very- But that beat drop. It was very competent. It was smooth. It shined in the right places. One of the producers at the end of their bundle of songs leaned into the microphone. There’s the only words we heard from them the whole time. They said, shout out Claude. Yeah. These are the new superstar DJs. Yeah. Claude does your taxes and produces your EDM. What a world. Superstar DJs! Yeah. And then I kept expecting there to be someone who maybe had, I don’t know, pieced parts together or used AI samples. But no, it was all these just like soup to nuts AI generations. And the thing that struck me the most, maybe the glimpse of something truly new in this event, was about midway through getting close to midnight, One of the performers came up, I say performer, but I don’t even know if that’s what they were doing. The figure took the stage wearing one of those great, shiny, reflective helmets. That’s the helmet? Yeah, kind of like dead mouse or something, one of these cool new cyber DJs. So they stood up to the front with a laptop, and they’re actually projecting their screen up on the wall behind them, and it was Suno. So just completely shamelessly, unapologetically, They were clicking through their generations. You saw the prompts, you know, dark EDM with skittering beats. And it just was, it was wild because already, you know, we had the figure of the DJ who would stand at the front of a stage with their laptop. And people would say, oh man, what is he even doing? He’s just like pressing play on an MP3. So this person was just pressing play on an mp3 that they hadn’t even made. And in a weird way, it was kind of radical. It’s like, okay, what are they now? What is their role? And is this the new performer of the 21st century? You get to wear a shiny helmet and press play and.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, maybe. Of AI music. Maybe, maybe it is the seed being planted, you know, as this, as the stuff emerges. I saw a digital poster for a scene, for a show in San Francisco, and it was called the Gen Punk Slop Show. Slop, right there in the title, not hiding it, celebrating it. It was in a big, cruddy art warehouse in Soma, you know, kind of hard to find. One. They had a stage set up, but the host, who’s also an open AI researcher, just deeply embedded in the AI scene and obviously a great enthusiast, announced that we were gonna hear a whole night, hours and hours full of songs, that’s sort of a sequence of performers, were they even performers, that they had organized and all this music had come straight out of the AI machines. And this was something we heard. That was magical, what a thing to hear music from nowhere. They started out with a set glitchy, pitched up, hyper-pop, like super high tempo. I will tell you, in those first moments, it was a wild thing to see a group of people dancing, I mean really dancing in that bad Burning Man way. It’s a music that came from nowhere, music without a musician, music without Bye! A reason behind it other than a prompt. This goes on through the night and I have to say, on these big speakers, it sounded good. I mean, it was technically very- But that beat drop. It was very competent. It was smooth. It shined in the right places. One of the producers at the end of their bundle of songs leaned into the microphone. There’s the only words we heard from them the whole time. They said, shout out Claude. Yeah. These are the new superstar DJs. Yeah. Claude does your taxes and produces your EDM. What a world. Superstar DJs! Yeah. And then I kept expecting there to be someone who maybe had, I don’t know, pieced parts together or used AI samples. But no, it was all these just like soup to nuts AI generations. And the thing that struck me the most, maybe the glimpse of something truly new in this event, was about midway through getting close to midnight, One of the performers came up, I say performer, but I don’t even know if that’s what they were doing. The figure took the stage wearing one of those great, shiny, reflective helmets. That’s the helmet? Yeah, kind of like dead mouse or something, one of these cool new cyber DJs. So they stood up to the front with a laptop, and they’re actually projecting their screen up on the wall behind them, and it was Suno. So just completely shamelessly, unapologetically, They were clicking through their generations. You saw the prompts, you know, dark EDM with skittering beats. And it just was, it was wild because already, you know, we had the figure of the DJ who would stand at the front of a stage with their laptop. And people would say, oh man, what is he even doing? He’s just like pressing play on an MP3. So this person was just pressing play on an mp3 that they hadn’t even made. And in a weird way, it was kind of radical. It’s like, okay, what are they now? What is their role? And is this the new performer of the 21st century? You get to wear a shiny helmet and press play and.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Life is good. It’s a scene of some kind, you know, that essentially like celebrated the sausage. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Life is good. It’s a scene of some kind, you know, that essentially like celebrated the sausage. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>You’ve never, boy, you have never seen more people more excited about AI Slab.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I mean, I almost think that if it were sort of like live generation, that’s kind of more interesting because that’s almost the promise of AI that is not being explored much, which is why even print these songs in the first place? You can actually create the perfect song for this particular moment. I can check out your playlists, your play lists, my play lists. Know that we’re all in proximity. We have our Geolocation, we know what the weather is here. We can have our Apple watches on and can be reading our heart rate and biometrics. It can be adjusting in real time. The tempos of the songs based on all of those factors. Why bother printing that? That could be the perfect song for us three right now, right here. And that goes more to what the heart of what is music. It’s vibrations in the air. That might not be good for anyone else ever, which is what we’re seeing where nobody’s listening to these songs, right? But why not just like make something that’s for here and now. Vibe composing. Vibe, composing!\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I mean, I almost think that if it were sort of like live generation, that’s kind of more interesting because that’s almost the promise of AI that is not being explored much, which is why even print these songs in the first place? You can actually create the perfect song for this particular moment. I can check out your playlists, your play lists, my play lists. Know that we’re all in proximity. We have our Geolocation, we know what the weather is here. We can have our Apple watches on and can be reading our heart rate and biometrics. It can be adjusting in real time. The tempos of the songs based on all of those factors. Why bother printing that? That could be the perfect song for us three right now, right here. And that goes more to what the heart of what is music. It’s vibrations in the air. That might not be good for anyone else ever, which is what we’re seeing where nobody’s listening to these songs, right? But why not just like make something that’s for here and now. Vibe composing. Vibe, composing!\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>I didn’t prompt that and so I left the show, walked out into the San Francisco drizzle, thinking that maybe that was the most interesting thing I’d seen, that it creates this new stand.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>I didn’t prompt that and so I left the show, walked out into the San Francisco drizzle, thinking that maybe that was the most interesting thing I’d seen, that it creates this new stand.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>The freedom to just create without responsibility, because you can always just pass it off. I didn’t actually create it, something else did.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>The freedom to just create without responsibility, because you can always just pass it off. I didn’t actually create it, something else did.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>You do see like if AI can just produce a pop song perfectly, instantly, every time, the value of doing that as a human being just feels like it goes to zero, you know? Right.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>You do see like if AI can just produce a pop song perfectly, instantly, every time, the value of doing that as a human being just feels like it goes to zero, you know? Right.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, of course, I want to believe that’s right, but I do think we underestimate the power of things being easy at our peril. You know, the last great music technology scare, you know, synthesizers created as simulations of, you know strings and, you know, brass and everything else. But like then. Drum machines. And the drum machine, right. And again, and as you all know, invented as accompaniment, you know, it was like, oh, you can’t afford a drummer, get this little box to go. Right\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, of course, I want to believe that’s right, but I do think we underestimate the power of things being easy at our peril. You know, the last great music technology scare, you know, synthesizers created as simulations of, you know strings and, you know, brass and everything else. But like then. Drum machines. And the drum machine, right. And again, and as you all know, invented as accompaniment, you know, it was like, oh, you can’t afford a drummer, get this little box to go. Right\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>But that organ, it’s attached to the organ.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, and then, but then it was, but, but then it, you know, repurposed and adapted and, and sort of gave rise to wild new genres. I mean, these were tools that kind of had a grain and they pushed back and they both, um, demanded and sort of invited mastery and boy, Suno just wants you to say, give me a song and I’ll do the rest. Maybe that there’s a bit of danger there and it’s something that is new. I mean\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, and then, but then it was, but, but then it, you know, repurposed and adapted and, and sort of gave rise to wild new genres. I mean, these were tools that kind of had a grain and they pushed back and they both, um, demanded and sort of invited mastery and boy, Suno just wants you to say, give me a song and I’ll do the rest. Maybe that there’s a bit of danger there and it’s something that is new. I mean\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>So the thing with the drum machine and the synthesizers and stuff, yes, there was a scare, right? People are like, oh, now people aren’t gonna hire drummers. This is gonna kill music. Oh, that’s so squared off. It doesn’t have any of the human swing and feel. That all turned out to be, I think, wrong, right, because people found this new tool and started using it for super cool, interesting stuff. They created whole new cultures and subcultures and whole new art forms, hip hop. You know, I mean, you know, people are like, oh, wait, you’re just sampling somebody else’s, you’re not even playing music, you just sampling it. No, they were creating new stuff on top of that, and they were using a new tool to create new art forms, right? They started connecting it with whole larger subcultures, but we’re not seeing any of that. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>So the thing with the drum machine and the synthesizers and stuff, yes, there was a scare, right? People are like, oh, now people aren’t gonna hire drummers. This is gonna kill music. Oh, that’s so squared off. It doesn’t have any of the human swing and feel. That all turned out to be, I think, wrong, right, because people found this new tool and started using it for super cool, interesting stuff. They created whole new cultures and subcultures and whole new art forms, hip hop. You know, I mean, you know, people are like, oh, wait, you’re just sampling somebody else’s, you’re not even playing music, you just sampling it. No, they were creating new stuff on top of that, and they were using a new tool to create new art forms, right? They started connecting it with whole larger subcultures, but we’re not seeing any of that. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Is it different this time? That’s ultimately the thing. That is the question.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Is it different this time? That’s ultimately the thing. That is the question.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>It feels like it’s different this time. And there are reasons that it could be different. Again, this sense of ease, you know, there’s a difference, right, between a musician and a user. I feel like a lot of folks are stuck in the mode of being a user, there’s also a difference between a tool, even if it is a high-tech tool, a drum machine, a synthesizer, that you have in your garage or your basement versus a service that exists only on this far-off server controlled by this company and they change it whenever they want, however they want. You know let’s say you learn how to use it. You’ve become a virtuoso and then they announce the big upgrades to know 7.0 and you’re like wait Wait a minute. Where did my piano go? So these are I think these are real risks. It’s it is kind of new new territory\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>It feels like it’s different this time. And there are reasons that it could be different. Again, this sense of ease, you know, there’s a difference, right, between a musician and a user. I feel like a lot of folks are stuck in the mode of being a user, there’s also a difference between a tool, even if it is a high-tech tool, a drum machine, a synthesizer, that you have in your garage or your basement versus a service that exists only on this far-off server controlled by this company and they change it whenever they want, however they want. You know let’s say you learn how to use it. You’ve become a virtuoso and then they announce the big upgrades to know 7.0 and you’re like wait Wait a minute. Where did my piano go? So these are I think these are real risks. It’s it is kind of new new territory\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>I mean, we’ve talked a little bit about drum machines and the way that drum machines and that form of technology created new genres of music and new realms of culture. You know, there were other musical technologies through time that also had kind of this fascinating impact. You know one, recently there was a big show of Bernie Krause’s work at the Exploratorium, you know, recording these soundscapes all across there. The world and really showing the way that these ecologies as they degraded, their soundscapes also degraded. One thing that felt so important about that show, because it is fundamentally about climate change, is that music, even though it was essentially nature and a microphone, and the selection apparatus, a human making a decision there, it was really deeply political in its orientation. It wasn’t just sounds to make you feel good, it was sounds to you realize we’re destroying the earth and it’s species.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>I mean, we’ve talked a little bit about drum machines and the way that drum machines and that form of technology created new genres of music and new realms of culture. You know, there were other musical technologies through time that also had kind of this fascinating impact. You know one, recently there was a big show of Bernie Krause’s work at the Exploratorium, you know, recording these soundscapes all across there. The world and really showing the way that these ecologies as they degraded, their soundscapes also degraded. One thing that felt so important about that show, because it is fundamentally about climate change, is that music, even though it was essentially nature and a microphone, and the selection apparatus, a human making a decision there, it was really deeply political in its orientation. It wasn’t just sounds to make you feel good, it was sounds to you realize we’re destroying the earth and it’s species.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>And the drum machine, you know, this would begin as the most robotic, you know, tick, boom, tick boom, powers them probably the most political music. It’s been made certainly, certainly in the 20th century. Yeah. Incredible.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>And the drum machine, you know, this would begin as the most robotic, you know, tick, boom, tick boom, powers them probably the most political music. It’s been made certainly, certainly in the 20th century. Yeah. Incredible.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Do you think there’s a pathway? Does AI music have an inherent politics? Is it just because it’s slop, it’s just conservative in some deep sense, or could it have some other politics?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Do you think there’s a pathway? Does AI music have an inherent politics? Is it just because it’s slop, it’s just conservative in some deep sense, or could it have some other politics?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Well, I mean, one interesting thing is that you can always, in many of these platforms, you can insert your own lyrics or suggest lyrics. So there actually is quite a bit of right-wing country AI music. Like hard-right, like racist and stuff, right? Which is, I’m mean, problematic in many ways, but. But so typical. It’s just like expect.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Well, I mean, one interesting thing is that you can always, in many of these platforms, you can insert your own lyrics or suggest lyrics. So there actually is quite a bit of right-wing country AI music. Like hard-right, like racist and stuff, right? Which is, I’m mean, problematic in many ways, but. But so typical. It’s just like expect.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Well, and sort of, you imagine the strange liberation of the person saying, oh, I could never get anybody to sing these before, but the robot will sing whatever I want. I mean, that’s pretty grim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Well, and sort of, you imagine the strange liberation of the person saying, oh, I could never get anybody to sing these before, but the robot will sing whatever I want. I mean, that’s pretty grim.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, but there’s also something liberating, I think, about being able to create any kinds of music, right? Like, you can create whatever you’re imagining, you should be able to create it. Okay, well, maybe it doesn’t work perfectly like that today. But that is the promise, is that, like, you have an idea and something in your imagination, and if you can get it out, if this can help you get it out, then that’s cool. It’s not exactly what’s happening, but there is a promise there. There is a promise there.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, but there’s also something liberating, I think, about being able to create any kinds of music, right? Like, you can create whatever you’re imagining, you should be able to create it. Okay, well, maybe it doesn’t work perfectly like that today. But that is the promise, is that, like, you have an idea and something in your imagination, and if you can get it out, if this can help you get it out, then that’s cool. It’s not exactly what’s happening, but there is a promise there. There is a promise there.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Some liberatory little grain of potential in there that could take off. I mean, uh, maybe just to wrap us up back into sort of Pandora and what you, we know you don’t speak for the company, but just if you like, imagine what streaming services might look like in response to what is likely to be an increasing onslaught of this. It’s like half the music is probably the best it’s going to get. So, all right, five years from now. Now it’s. 99% of the music that is submitted to, you know, Pandora or Spotify or whatever is all AI slop. Like, what happens?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Some liberatory little grain of potential in there that could take off. I mean, uh, maybe just to wrap us up back into sort of Pandora and what you, we know you don’t speak for the company, but just if you like, imagine what streaming services might look like in response to what is likely to be an increasing onslaught of this. It’s like half the music is probably the best it’s going to get. So, all right, five years from now. Now it’s. 99% of the music that is submitted to, you know, Pandora or Spotify or whatever is all AI slop. Like, what happens?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. So there’s a few things. Spotify and Warner and the major labels and UDO or Suno, one of the AI companies, there was a lawsuit, they came to an agreement, which essentially they acquired, they become the same company. And so it’s. Spotify purportedly is working on a feature for like basically AI remix of any song in there, in these certain catalogs that they control. So the idea would be like, I don’t know, you could be like okay, I want this Daft Punk song, but in the style of Lofi Beats or whatever. Yeah. You kind of just like create these sort of AI remixes on the fly using this particular catalog that’s licensed to do so. I mean, I kind of don’t f-\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. So there’s a few things. Spotify and Warner and the major labels and UDO or Suno, one of the AI companies, there was a lawsuit, they came to an agreement, which essentially they acquired, they become the same company. And so it’s. Spotify purportedly is working on a feature for like basically AI remix of any song in there, in these certain catalogs that they control. So the idea would be like, I don’t know, you could be like okay, I want this Daft Punk song, but in the style of Lofi Beats or whatever. Yeah. You kind of just like create these sort of AI remixes on the fly using this particular catalog that’s licensed to do so. I mean, I kind of don’t f-\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>think that that’s what people want. I mean, you know this well from the front lines of Pandora, the way we know that people listen to music. Every listen of every track is not an emotional resonance. It is this lull. Elevator music.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>think that that’s what people want. I mean, you know this well from the front lines of Pandora, the way we know that people listen to music. Every listen of every track is not an emotional resonance. It is this lull. Elevator music.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Music for everything yeah\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Music for everything yeah\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, yeah this music it’s the it’s the final the final victory of music\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, yeah this music it’s the it’s the final the final victory of music\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>in this functional music space, I do think there is like, I kind of think that’s the sweet spot for this AI music, right? These lo-fi beats for studying or whatever. You don’t, you’re not listening to the songs. You have it on the background. You’re just trying to get a vibe. AI can do quite a convincing job of doing that, you know, a stream, like a constant stream of lo-Fi stuff. And it just, I pretty sure it was all. Just to drown out your roommate, Tony. I’m pretty sure was all the AI generated. Hey, if it can do a perfectly good job of this and people don’t really care, then fine, whatever. On the other hand, there’s also plenty of human created lo-fi beats that, you know, plenty like, you know, millions of hours or whatever, like, so why not prioritize that? And, you know, is, is the AI doing it better? No. Is it doing it competently? Sure. But is it doing a better job? So no. So then why use that? Why not prioritize the human stuff? And now the AI does that endlessly.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>in this functional music space, I do think there is like, I kind of think that’s the sweet spot for this AI music, right? These lo-fi beats for studying or whatever. You don’t, you’re not listening to the songs. You have it on the background. You’re just trying to get a vibe. AI can do quite a convincing job of doing that, you know, a stream, like a constant stream of lo-Fi stuff. And it just, I pretty sure it was all. Just to drown out your roommate, Tony. I’m pretty sure was all the AI generated. Hey, if it can do a perfectly good job of this and people don’t really care, then fine, whatever. On the other hand, there’s also plenty of human created lo-fi beats that, you know, plenty like, you know, millions of hours or whatever, like, so why not prioritize that? And, you know, is, is the AI doing it better? No. Is it doing it competently? Sure. But is it doing a better job? So no. So then why use that? Why not prioritize the human stuff? And now the AI does that endlessly.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Simulations of simulations of simulations\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>It is a grim, grim vision of the world, so I like some of your other visions.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>It is a grim, grim vision of the world, so I like some of your other visions.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>In our conversation, I feel like we’ve come up with between three and five actually exciting paths and gestures, and it just so happens that we’re stuck with the very worst one at this moment, but that’s okay.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>In our conversation, I feel like we’ve come up with between three and five actually exciting paths and gestures, and it just so happens that we’re stuck with the very worst one at this moment, but that’s okay.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, which is that the vast, vast like almost all majority of AI generated music is really just used for fraud to try to trick people into playing they’re just putting out massive volumes of music just in the off chance somebody might accidentally click on one or one of them might get on something and they can make a few cents.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, which is that the vast, vast like almost all majority of AI generated music is really just used for fraud to try to trick people into playing they’re just putting out massive volumes of music just in the off chance somebody might accidentally click on one or one of them might get on something and they can make a few cents.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>It’s like the worst arbitrage, like tokens into streams. And they’re trying to make like one fraction of one cent on each of those things. That is depressing. Um, well, um, Camilo, I feel like I have learned, uh, so much about the strange state of AI.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>It’s like the worst arbitrage, like tokens into streams. And they’re trying to make like one fraction of one cent on each of those things. That is depressing. Um, well, um, Camilo, I feel like I have learned, uh, so much about the strange state of AI.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I mean, I think there are a lot of interesting AI tools being used in music, in production, right? I mean there’s AI mastering AI, you know, like, okay, here’s a thing. I know what a finished song should sound like and what an unfinished song sounds like and I can help you make your unfinished song sound sparklier and louder, right. Great. I mean it’s not as good as hiring a real mastering engineer, but it’s, that’s a good tool for musicians to be able to have to make their music sound better. Great. Yeah, yeah. But there’s still somebody making music in that instance, right? There’s somebody assembling, somebody making decisions. A human making decisions, I think, is the important element.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I mean, I think there are a lot of interesting AI tools being used in music, in production, right? I mean there’s AI mastering AI, you know, like, okay, here’s a thing. I know what a finished song should sound like and what an unfinished song sounds like and I can help you make your unfinished song sound sparklier and louder, right. Great. I mean it’s not as good as hiring a real mastering engineer, but it’s, that’s a good tool for musicians to be able to have to make their music sound better. Great. Yeah, yeah. But there’s still somebody making music in that instance, right? There’s somebody assembling, somebody making decisions. A human making decisions, I think, is the important element.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>The core, right? It’s almost a filter. You can say like, did somebody have an opinion or a vision or one tiny idea? I’ll take it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>The core, right? It’s almost a filter. You can say like, did somebody have an opinion or a vision or one tiny idea? I’ll take it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>There it is, lowest common denominator, we have found it. One tiny idea.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I think people connect because they’re connecting with the artists, with the music, and if that’s not how this music is being made, then I’m not convinced it’ll work.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>I had like the worst possible scenario where it’s like, do-do-do, do-doodle-do. Five years later, we’re here. It’s like the most popular song in the world is AI, you know, and we’re like, ah. We’ll come back to Camilo on that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>I had like the worst possible scenario where it’s like, do-do-do, do-doodle-do. Five years later, we’re here. It’s like the most popular song in the world is AI, you know, and we’re like, ah. We’ll come back to Camilo on that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>We got to trust and hope that listeners will hold the line. It’s actually heartening in a way that, you know, all the machinations are certainly at the platforms. We’d love to be able to serve music without authors that you didn’t have to pay for. But if listeners won’t take it, they can’t get around that. So, hey, let’s all stay real. Stay positive. Let’s stay all very persnickety in our listening.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>We got to trust and hope that listeners will hold the line. It’s actually heartening in a way that, you know, all the machinations are certainly at the platforms. We’d love to be able to serve music without authors that you didn’t have to pay for. But if listeners won’t take it, they can’t get around that. So, hey, let’s all stay real. Stay positive. Let’s stay all very persnickety in our listening.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>KQED’s Dream Machines is made by humans and hosted by me, Robin Sloan and Alexis Madrigal. Our series is produced by Anayansi Diaz-Cortez and Derek Lartaud. Sound design by Brendan Willard. Jen Chien is the executive producer and Ethan Toven-Lindsey, our editor-in-chief. Support for the production of Dream Machines comes from the Krishnan Shah family, Dorothy Marsh and other generous KQED members. Special thanks to Chris Egusa, Annie Fruit, Paul Lancour, Vivian Morales, Zaldy Serrano, Xtine Tiñoso, Hazel Tesoro, and Alex Tran. And of course, thank you to the Close All Tabs team for letting us visit their feed this month.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>KQED’s Dream Machines is made by humans and hosted by me, Robin Sloan and Alexis Madrigal. Our series is produced by Anayansi Diaz-Cortez and Derek Lartaud. Sound design by Brendan Willard. Jen Chien is the executive producer and Ethan Toven-Lindsey, our editor-in-chief. Support for the production of Dream Machines comes from the Krishnan Shah family, Dorothy Marsh and other generous KQED members. Special thanks to Chris Egusa, Annie Fruit, Paul Lancour, Vivian Morales, Zaldy Serrano, Xtine Tiñoso, Hazel Tesoro, and Alex Tran. And of course, thank you to the Close All Tabs team for letting us visit their feed this month.\u003c/p>\n"
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>Can people tell the difference between a song made by human musicians, and one prompted by AI? Oftentimes not, it turns out. But that doesn’t make the distinction any less important. Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk to longtime musician Camilo Landau, who also works in music analysis at \u003ca href=\"https://www.pandora.com/about/mgp\">The Music Genome Project\u003c/a> at streaming service Pandora. Camilo and his colleagues have sifted through millions of tracks uploaded by musicians and users to catalogue their musical elements, all with the aim of curating personalized music recommendations. And he says most of the new music he’s seeing these days is generated by AI. On today’s show, they discuss whether AI music is connecting with listeners, delve into San Francisco’s AI slop music “scene,” and contemplate the consequences of a world where music is produced in the time it takes a finger to tap a screen. \u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest: \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://camilolandau.com/home\">Camilo Landau\u003c/a>, musician and music analyst\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>I’m Alexis Madrigal.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>I’m Robin Sloan and this is KQED’s Dream Machines, a podcast about AI, how it works, what it means, how it feels. Yeah, how I feel. And importantly, it’s rooted here in San Francisco.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>So the other day, I was sitting with a friend of mine, prize fighter in Emeryville, great bar in the East Bay. And he was kind of blowing my mind about the current state of music. He works at Pandora now, but he’s a long time musician in Latin American music. He’s been like recording and playing music all over the Bay Area and the world since he was like 15 years old. And now that he works at pandora, he’s encountering this strange flood. Of things that is sort of like coming through the doors that is not made by any human being, maybe somebody pushed a button. And it’s AI-generated music that is now sitting there right next to the stuff that was made by someone with a heart and big toes and eyes and a brain. And a guitar. And a a guitar, perhaps, or maybe a theremin. And when we’re sitting at this bar, it was just kind of blowing my mind with this new world. Of AI and music. And it was basically saying something like, close to half of the songs that are getting on the streaming platforms are just AI music entirely. And that like, no one’s actually listening to it. So you have this strange situation where the platforms are being absolutely flooded with these songs. And also they’re just sitting there not even racking up the listens. So please welcome Camila Landa. Yes, thank you. It could be here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, it’s fascinating that the volume is just so enormous. Like you said, flooded with these AI-generated songs that nobody wants to hear, and no one asked for, and no ones listening to. And it’s these prompt-based platforms where you just say, I would like 1,000 melancholy pop songs, and then it just generates them faster than real time. So faster than you could play it or listen to it a single time. It’s actually just printing sound files. It’s not like creating music in the way that we think of assembling these different instruments and we’re recording them and layering them. Not like that at all. It’s like, I’ve seen 100,000 reggae songs, so I know what a sound file of a reggae song looks like and I can print something that looks very similar. I can’t I just cannot help imagine it coming out of\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>the like the pasta extruder. Yeah, it’s a sausage, sausage extruder actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Just a tube, just a tube of audio. For me, that’s kind of the disappointment. So a lot of this I feel is a big disappointment because it’s what could, what could you be doing with AI generation of music? You could be making sounds that we can’t physically make. You could invent, anything you can imagine suddenly can be music. But we’re not seeing anything like that. We’re seeing just, you know, tens of millions of boring pop songs. So as you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>At your, from your desk, see what’s uploaded day by day, is that your characterization that it’s far more of this kind of automatic slop?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, I mean by far more, I mean all, all, you know, like, or maybe there’s like a few dozen interesting ones out of, you know, tens of millions. Okay, I’m going to, uh, point to this Deezer report, uh French, I believe they’re French music streaming service company. Deezers put out, um, a report on, on AI generated music, 45% they’re saying 45% of the music that’s delivered to platforms is AI generated. And this I think this is industry wide. Yeah. So that’s almost half.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>I mean, what a what a curve. This is new in the last two years. Yes. Yeah\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>And, like, if we were to just hear it, could I tell the difference, do you think? Well, I mean…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Also, according to Deezer’s report, I think it’s 97% of people. And they did this blind test in different countries. 97% percent of people can’t tell the difference. But even though they don’t know it’s AI music, they don’t seem to be liking it or connecting with it. So a very small percentage of the music that people listen to is AI-generated, even though almost half of it that is being created. Proof.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Like the proof is in the pudding there, you know, right? Like people don’t, they don’t like it even if they can’t tell the difference. That’s like.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah. I mean, it really made me rethink what is music, right? Because I spent a long time learning how to play music good, right, and like mastering skills because I thought that like, yeah, if you can play it good, then that makes better music. Now, I think I was wrong. Right. The point of music is not to play a music good. The point a music is to have a human expression and connect with other people through human communication. And that’s the piece that AI can’t do.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Oh, that’s so interesting. It’s almost like a unintentional natural experiment where they said, okay, let’s take out that technical competence piece and just do that. Let’s say like, cause you can do that before. To have technical competence, you had to also be a living, breathing human musician with like a heart and ideas. And they’re like, oh no, no, no, we can do it without that. And let’s see. And now we have the result of that experiment, which is that it is somehow hollow. Yeah, yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>I mean, how do you even know, you know, from your position, like how do even know that it is AI generated? Like how, are there tells? Are there like detectors? Like how does that work?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yes, there are tells, there’re detectors. Well, sometimes they’ll just say, composer, UDio, Suno, something like that. So they just tell you. Yeah, and then sometimes it’s, oh, here’s a brand new artist who just dropped 30 albums and 1,200 songs or something like that and let’s look them up online. Oh, they don’t exist. There is no artist. They had a really busy weekend, okay? They were locked in. So some of the tells can be something like, all right, well, each song has a different singer, right? Like male, female, different range, tonalities, vocal qualities. Each song is a different style. So OK, oh, you got a hard rock song followed by a country song followed by electronic music, and completely disjointed, right. And so there’s another one. Fully produced songs that sound like incredible studio musicians, incredible recording. But maybe they didn’t master the record or something like that. Like, why would they have spent so much money on this production? And it still has this kind of like gauzy sound to it a little bit. And then it’s other sort of like, remember with photos you see like the third hand and stuff like that, so sometimes it’s stuff like that like the track starts super abruptly or ends super abruptly. Or… This section comes in in a super weird place where people wouldn’t put it. No human musician would ever score it like that. And then sometimes it’s almost the opposite. It’s like too formulaic and perfect. Yeah. Yes. AI has solved the wrong problem here. The wrong problem was never that we don’t have enough music, right? We’ve had plenty of music. We have more music than we could possibly listen to. But that piece of connecting with the artist, I think, is actually completely fundamental, right, because best case scenario, And it’s highly likely that an AI will produce a song that fits really well on a particular playlist and resonate really well with people. Cause it’s producing tens of millions of songs. So just statistically, it’s gonna be one that’s gonna fit really well. So you’re listening to whatever you listen, you hear a new song and you like it. Oh, that’s kind of cool. What is this? And you go and look it up and check it out. And you realize, I’ve been fooled. I’ve be tricked. I’ve bee deceived. That’s the feeling that you get. And, and cause that is the impetus. You want to connect with the artist and there’s no artist and it’s wild that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>You would try to put out music without that stuff, because it’s so clear there’s that drive to know about where did this, what soul did this song come from? It’s like that gets kind of like maybe the core lie of the current AI era. Like the thing that we didn’t have to do, but that we did do was to like give these the chatbots and these things like an eye, to let them pretend to be a human. Like everything else could work exactly the same, and I feel like, oh man. I wish we hadn’t done that, you know? I wish they hadn’t been like, yes, I am a being in here that you can sort of connect with, because it is, it’s fundamentally deceitful, I think, about what’s happening behind the curtain. Sure, yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I think so. I mean, I think, yeah, like the tool itself isn’t the problem. It’s, somebody has to be making those decisions and that’s not happening, right? Like it’s the human decisions are what make the art, right. And, and there is no decision here. You’re just prompting a thing and then it’s going to make the decisions, right I mean we have music that’s completely electronically produced by humans using machines. Yeah, right, like, but somebody’s making those decisions somebody’s deciding this is where I want the hi-hats to come in. Or whatever it is, and that’s not what’s happening with AI. It’s like, print me 5,000 songs, and then in five minutes later, you have, you know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Robyn, so there’s none of that scene, there’s not of that like playing music good and transmission of all these things. But you went to what Passage for. You\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, maybe. Of AI music. Maybe, maybe it is the seed being planted, you know, as this, as the stuff emerges. I saw a digital poster for a scene, for a show in San Francisco, and it was called the Gen Punk Slop Show. Slop, right there in the title, not hiding it, celebrating it. It was in a big, cruddy art warehouse in Soma, you know, kind of hard to find. One. They had a stage set up, but the host, who’s also an open AI researcher, just deeply embedded in the AI scene and obviously a great enthusiast, announced that we were gonna hear a whole night, hours and hours full of songs, that’s sort of a sequence of performers, were they even performers, that they had organized and all this music had come straight out of the AI machines. And this was something we heard. That was magical, what a thing to hear music from nowhere. They started out with a set glitchy, pitched up, hyper-pop, like super high tempo. I will tell you, in those first moments, it was a wild thing to see a group of people dancing, I mean really dancing in that bad Burning Man way. It’s a music that came from nowhere, music without a musician, music without Bye! A reason behind it other than a prompt. This goes on through the night and I have to say, on these big speakers, it sounded good. I mean, it was technically very- But that beat drop. It was very competent. It was smooth. It shined in the right places. One of the producers at the end of their bundle of songs leaned into the microphone. There’s the only words we heard from them the whole time. They said, shout out Claude. Yeah. These are the new superstar DJs. Yeah. Claude does your taxes and produces your EDM. What a world. Superstar DJs! Yeah. And then I kept expecting there to be someone who maybe had, I don’t know, pieced parts together or used AI samples. But no, it was all these just like soup to nuts AI generations. And the thing that struck me the most, maybe the glimpse of something truly new in this event, was about midway through getting close to midnight, One of the performers came up, I say performer, but I don’t even know if that’s what they were doing. The figure took the stage wearing one of those great, shiny, reflective helmets. That’s the helmet? Yeah, kind of like dead mouse or something, one of these cool new cyber DJs. So they stood up to the front with a laptop, and they’re actually projecting their screen up on the wall behind them, and it was Suno. So just completely shamelessly, unapologetically, They were clicking through their generations. You saw the prompts, you know, dark EDM with skittering beats. And it just was, it was wild because already, you know, we had the figure of the DJ who would stand at the front of a stage with their laptop. And people would say, oh man, what is he even doing? He’s just like pressing play on an MP3. So this person was just pressing play on an mp3 that they hadn’t even made. And in a weird way, it was kind of radical. It’s like, okay, what are they now? What is their role? And is this the new performer of the 21st century? You get to wear a shiny helmet and press play and.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Life is good. It’s a scene of some kind, you know, that essentially like celebrated the sausage. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>You’ve never, boy, you have never seen more people more excited about AI Slab.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I mean, I almost think that if it were sort of like live generation, that’s kind of more interesting because that’s almost the promise of AI that is not being explored much, which is why even print these songs in the first place? You can actually create the perfect song for this particular moment. I can check out your playlists, your play lists, my play lists. Know that we’re all in proximity. We have our Geolocation, we know what the weather is here. We can have our Apple watches on and can be reading our heart rate and biometrics. It can be adjusting in real time. The tempos of the songs based on all of those factors. Why bother printing that? That could be the perfect song for us three right now, right here. And that goes more to what the heart of what is music. It’s vibrations in the air. That might not be good for anyone else ever, which is what we’re seeing where nobody’s listening to these songs, right? But why not just like make something that’s for here and now. Vibe composing. Vibe, composing!\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>I didn’t prompt that and so I left the show, walked out into the San Francisco drizzle, thinking that maybe that was the most interesting thing I’d seen, that it creates this new stand.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>The freedom to just create without responsibility, because you can always just pass it off. I didn’t actually create it, something else did.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>You do see like if AI can just produce a pop song perfectly, instantly, every time, the value of doing that as a human being just feels like it goes to zero, you know? Right.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, of course, I want to believe that’s right, but I do think we underestimate the power of things being easy at our peril. You know, the last great music technology scare, you know, synthesizers created as simulations of, you know strings and, you know, brass and everything else. But like then. Drum machines. And the drum machine, right. And again, and as you all know, invented as accompaniment, you know, it was like, oh, you can’t afford a drummer, get this little box to go. Right\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>But that organ, it’s attached to the organ.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, and then, but then it was, but, but then it, you know, repurposed and adapted and, and sort of gave rise to wild new genres. I mean, these were tools that kind of had a grain and they pushed back and they both, um, demanded and sort of invited mastery and boy, Suno just wants you to say, give me a song and I’ll do the rest. Maybe that there’s a bit of danger there and it’s something that is new. I mean\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>So the thing with the drum machine and the synthesizers and stuff, yes, there was a scare, right? People are like, oh, now people aren’t gonna hire drummers. This is gonna kill music. Oh, that’s so squared off. It doesn’t have any of the human swing and feel. That all turned out to be, I think, wrong, right, because people found this new tool and started using it for super cool, interesting stuff. They created whole new cultures and subcultures and whole new art forms, hip hop. You know, I mean, you know, people are like, oh, wait, you’re just sampling somebody else’s, you’re not even playing music, you just sampling it. No, they were creating new stuff on top of that, and they were using a new tool to create new art forms, right? They started connecting it with whole larger subcultures, but we’re not seeing any of that. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Is it different this time? That’s ultimately the thing. That is the question.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>It feels like it’s different this time. And there are reasons that it could be different. Again, this sense of ease, you know, there’s a difference, right, between a musician and a user. I feel like a lot of folks are stuck in the mode of being a user, there’s also a difference between a tool, even if it is a high-tech tool, a drum machine, a synthesizer, that you have in your garage or your basement versus a service that exists only on this far-off server controlled by this company and they change it whenever they want, however they want. You know let’s say you learn how to use it. You’ve become a virtuoso and then they announce the big upgrades to know 7.0 and you’re like wait Wait a minute. Where did my piano go? So these are I think these are real risks. It’s it is kind of new new territory\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>I mean, we’ve talked a little bit about drum machines and the way that drum machines and that form of technology created new genres of music and new realms of culture. You know, there were other musical technologies through time that also had kind of this fascinating impact. You know one, recently there was a big show of Bernie Krause’s work at the Exploratorium, you know, recording these soundscapes all across there. The world and really showing the way that these ecologies as they degraded, their soundscapes also degraded. One thing that felt so important about that show, because it is fundamentally about climate change, is that music, even though it was essentially nature and a microphone, and the selection apparatus, a human making a decision there, it was really deeply political in its orientation. It wasn’t just sounds to make you feel good, it was sounds to you realize we’re destroying the earth and it’s species.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>And the drum machine, you know, this would begin as the most robotic, you know, tick, boom, tick boom, powers them probably the most political music. It’s been made certainly, certainly in the 20th century. Yeah. Incredible.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Do you think there’s a pathway? Does AI music have an inherent politics? Is it just because it’s slop, it’s just conservative in some deep sense, or could it have some other politics?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Well, I mean, one interesting thing is that you can always, in many of these platforms, you can insert your own lyrics or suggest lyrics. So there actually is quite a bit of right-wing country AI music. Like hard-right, like racist and stuff, right? Which is, I’m mean, problematic in many ways, but. But so typical. It’s just like expect.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Well, and sort of, you imagine the strange liberation of the person saying, oh, I could never get anybody to sing these before, but the robot will sing whatever I want. I mean, that’s pretty grim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, but there’s also something liberating, I think, about being able to create any kinds of music, right? Like, you can create whatever you’re imagining, you should be able to create it. Okay, well, maybe it doesn’t work perfectly like that today. But that is the promise, is that, like, you have an idea and something in your imagination, and if you can get it out, if this can help you get it out, then that’s cool. It’s not exactly what’s happening, but there is a promise there. There is a promise there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Some liberatory little grain of potential in there that could take off. I mean, uh, maybe just to wrap us up back into sort of Pandora and what you, we know you don’t speak for the company, but just if you like, imagine what streaming services might look like in response to what is likely to be an increasing onslaught of this. It’s like half the music is probably the best it’s going to get. So, all right, five years from now. Now it’s. 99% of the music that is submitted to, you know, Pandora or Spotify or whatever is all AI slop. Like, what happens?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. So there’s a few things. Spotify and Warner and the major labels and UDO or Suno, one of the AI companies, there was a lawsuit, they came to an agreement, which essentially they acquired, they become the same company. And so it’s. Spotify purportedly is working on a feature for like basically AI remix of any song in there, in these certain catalogs that they control. So the idea would be like, I don’t know, you could be like okay, I want this Daft Punk song, but in the style of Lofi Beats or whatever. Yeah. You kind of just like create these sort of AI remixes on the fly using this particular catalog that’s licensed to do so. I mean, I kind of don’t f-\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>think that that’s what people want. I mean, you know this well from the front lines of Pandora, the way we know that people listen to music. Every listen of every track is not an emotional resonance. It is this lull. Elevator music.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>Music for everything yeah\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, yeah this music it’s the it’s the final the final victory of music\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>in this functional music space, I do think there is like, I kind of think that’s the sweet spot for this AI music, right? These lo-fi beats for studying or whatever. You don’t, you’re not listening to the songs. You have it on the background. You’re just trying to get a vibe. AI can do quite a convincing job of doing that, you know, a stream, like a constant stream of lo-Fi stuff. And it just, I pretty sure it was all. Just to drown out your roommate, Tony. I’m pretty sure was all the AI generated. Hey, if it can do a perfectly good job of this and people don’t really care, then fine, whatever. On the other hand, there’s also plenty of human created lo-fi beats that, you know, plenty like, you know, millions of hours or whatever, like, so why not prioritize that? And, you know, is, is the AI doing it better? No. Is it doing it competently? Sure. But is it doing a better job? So no. So then why use that? Why not prioritize the human stuff? And now the AI does that endlessly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>Simulations of simulations of simulations\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>It is a grim, grim vision of the world, so I like some of your other visions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>In our conversation, I feel like we’ve come up with between three and five actually exciting paths and gestures, and it just so happens that we’re stuck with the very worst one at this moment, but that’s okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>Yeah, which is that the vast, vast like almost all majority of AI generated music is really just used for fraud to try to trick people into playing they’re just putting out massive volumes of music just in the off chance somebody might accidentally click on one or one of them might get on something and they can make a few cents.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>It’s like the worst arbitrage, like tokens into streams. And they’re trying to make like one fraction of one cent on each of those things. That is depressing. Um, well, um, Camilo, I feel like I have learned, uh, so much about the strange state of AI.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I mean, I think there are a lot of interesting AI tools being used in music, in production, right? I mean there’s AI mastering AI, you know, like, okay, here’s a thing. I know what a finished song should sound like and what an unfinished song sounds like and I can help you make your unfinished song sound sparklier and louder, right. Great. I mean it’s not as good as hiring a real mastering engineer, but it’s, that’s a good tool for musicians to be able to have to make their music sound better. Great. Yeah, yeah. But there’s still somebody making music in that instance, right? There’s somebody assembling, somebody making decisions. A human making decisions, I think, is the important element.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>The core, right? It’s almost a filter. You can say like, did somebody have an opinion or a vision or one tiny idea? I’ll take it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>There it is, lowest common denominator, we have found it. One tiny idea.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Camilo Landau \u003c/strong>I think people connect because they’re connecting with the artists, with the music, and if that’s not how this music is being made, then I’m not convinced it’ll work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal \u003c/strong>I had like the worst possible scenario where it’s like, do-do-do, do-doodle-do. Five years later, we’re here. It’s like the most popular song in the world is AI, you know, and we’re like, ah. We’ll come back to Camilo on that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>We got to trust and hope that listeners will hold the line. It’s actually heartening in a way that, you know, all the machinations are certainly at the platforms. We’d love to be able to serve music without authors that you didn’t have to pay for. But if listeners won’t take it, they can’t get around that. So, hey, let’s all stay real. Stay positive. Let’s stay all very persnickety in our listening.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robin Sloan \u003c/strong>KQED’s Dream Machines is made by humans and hosted by me, Robin Sloan and Alexis Madrigal. Our series is produced by Anayansi Diaz-Cortez and Derek Lartaud. Sound design by Brendan Willard. Jen Chien is the executive producer and Ethan Toven-Lindsey, our editor-in-chief. Support for the production of Dream Machines comes from the Krishnan Shah family, Dorothy Marsh and other generous KQED members. Special thanks to Chris Egusa, Annie Fruit, Paul Lancour, Vivian Morales, Zaldy Serrano, Xtine Tiñoso, Hazel Tesoro, and Alex Tran. And of course, thank you to the Close All Tabs team for letting us visit their feed this month.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\n\u003cp>The Rev. Jeffrey Parker spoke almost sermon-like in front of more than a hundred people in his \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/news/tag/oakland\">Oakland \u003c/a>church this weekend, but it wasn’t the typical service the place was used to hearing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He had something else in mind: data centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Parker joined organizers from the Party for Socialism and Liberation on Saturday to call for city leaders to stop the possibility of data centers in the city. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00383_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097522\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00383_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00383_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00383_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Rev. Jeffrey Parker speaks at an anti-data center meeting hosted by Party for Socialism and Liberation at the Church of All Faiths in Oakland on Aug. 29, 2026. (Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>PSL and around 7,000 petition signers have urged a citywide ban on the facilities after a proposal by Behring Companies to bring a 20,000-square-foot data center to downtown drew backlash. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ire among opponents has recently grown. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Tesla and Prometheus, an AI startup cofounded by Jeff Bezos, signed leases at another site in the city, according to the \u003cem>San Francisco Business Times\u003c/em>. It’s not yet known what Tesla and Prometheus have planned for the projects or if they’ll end up being data centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I am against Oakland becoming a place where powerful technology companies can come into our community, consume enormous amounts of resources, and potentially leave Oakland residents to deal with the consequences,” Parker said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-gallery has-nested-images columns-default is-cropped wp-block-gallery-3 is-layout-flex wp-block-gallery-is-layout-flex\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" data-id=\"12097523\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00391_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097523\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00391_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00391_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00391_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Oakland residents attend an anti-data center meeting hosted by Party for Socialism and Liberation at the Church of All Faiths in Oakland on Aug. 29, 2026. (Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" data-id=\"12097520\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00386_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097520\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00386_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00386_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00386_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Oakland residents attend an anti-data center meeting hosted by Party for Socialism and Liberation at the Church of All Faiths in Oakland on Aug. 29, 2026. (Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The AI industry as a whole has come under fire for concerns over environmental impacts — water and energy usage, along with noise pollution — that residents worry will disproportionately hurt lower-income or Black and Brown communities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Xavier Buck, executive director of the Huey P. Newton Foundation and founding director of the Black Panther Party Museum in Oakland, said he thinks cities like Oakland are intentionally targeted to be “sacrifice zones for the AI boom.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“The power structure is not choosing these cities by accident; it is choosing them because these are cities where we built the most powerful organizing models,” Buck said. “[It’s] the most efficient way to destroy both the communities and the blueprint simultaneously.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Oakland City Councilmember Carroll Fife, whose district the Behring proposal falls in, said in a social media post that she had already reached out to the city attorney about what it would mean to regulate data centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I’ve not shared my perspective on data centers or my political perspective because I’m forming it,” Fife \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcC9M7GkgSa/\">said \u003c/a>in her social media video. “I know what I’ve seen in other places is unacceptable, completely.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>More recently, the Bay Area News Group reported that Fife had been working on a \u003ca href=\"https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/08/30/billionaire-backed-data-center-proposals-cause-rift-in-oakland/\">proposal for a moratorium\u003c/a> on data centers. As of publication, Fife had not responded to KQED’s request for comment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Developers have also set their sites on the cities of Pittsburg, Gilroy and San Jose for current or future data centers. Residents in those cities have similarly called for a moratorium and then a permanent ban on the facilities. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Aditi Varshneya, an organizer with PSL, said that hundreds of people came to a previous organizing meeting about the Behring project and almost 200 more showed up this weekend.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095475\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The location of Behring’s proposed data center at 415 20th St. in Oakland on Aug. 14, 2026. (Juan Carlos Lara/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It just goes to show how united the community is and how ready they are to organize and fight back,” Varshneya said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Opponents in Oakland have said they’re not opposed to technology. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“AI is not a technological advancement,” Buck said. “If it is damaging humans, the places we live and the ecosystem we survive on, what’s advanced about that?” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Organizers plan to show up at the next Oakland City Council meeting to continue calls for a data center ban.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Tesla and Prometheus, an AI startup cofounded by Jeff Bezos, signed leases at another site in the city, according to the \u003cem>San Francisco Business Times\u003c/em>. It’s not yet known what Tesla and Prometheus have planned for the projects or if they’ll end up being data centers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“I am against Oakland becoming a place where powerful technology companies can come into our community, consume enormous amounts of resources, and potentially leave Oakland residents to deal with the consequences,” Parker said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The AI industry as a whole has come under fire for concerns over environmental impacts — water and energy usage, along with noise pollution — that residents worry will disproportionately hurt lower-income or Black and Brown communities.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Xavier Buck, executive director of the Huey P. Newton Foundation and founding director of the Black Panther Party Museum in Oakland, said he thinks cities like Oakland are intentionally targeted to be “sacrifice zones for the AI boom.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“The power structure is not choosing these cities by accident; it is choosing them because these are cities where we built the most powerful organizing models,” Buck said. “[It’s] the most efficient way to destroy both the communities and the blueprint simultaneously.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Oakland City Councilmember Carroll Fife, whose district the Behring proposal falls in, said in a social media post that she had already reached out to the city attorney about what it would mean to regulate data centers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“I’ve not shared my perspective on data centers or my political perspective because I’m forming it,” Fife \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcC9M7GkgSa/\">said \u003c/a>in her social media video. “I know what I’ve seen in other places is unacceptable, completely.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>More recently, the Bay Area News Group reported that Fife had been working on a \u003ca href=\"https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/08/30/billionaire-backed-data-center-proposals-cause-rift-in-oakland/\">proposal for a moratorium\u003c/a> on data centers. As of publication, Fife had not responded to KQED’s request for comment.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Developers have also set their sites on the cities of Pittsburg, Gilroy and San Jose for current or future data centers. Residents in those cities have similarly called for a moratorium and then a permanent ban on the facilities. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Aditi Varshneya, an organizer with PSL, said that hundreds of people came to a previous organizing meeting about the Behring project and almost 200 more showed up this weekend.\u003c/p>\n",
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"srcset": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-1536x1024.jpg 1536w",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“It just goes to show how united the community is and how ready they are to organize and fight back,” Varshneya said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“AI is not a technological advancement,” Buck said. “If it is damaging humans, the places we live and the ecosystem we survive on, what’s advanced about that?” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Organizers plan to show up at the next Oakland City Council meeting to continue calls for a data center ban.\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>The Rev. Jeffrey Parker spoke almost sermon-like in front of more than a hundred people in his \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/news/tag/oakland\">Oakland \u003c/a>church this weekend, but it wasn’t the typical service the place was used to hearing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He had something else in mind: data centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Parker joined organizers from the Party for Socialism and Liberation on Saturday to call for city leaders to stop the possibility of data centers in the city. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00383_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097522\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00383_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00383_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00383_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Rev. Jeffrey Parker speaks at an anti-data center meeting hosted by Party for Socialism and Liberation at the Church of All Faiths in Oakland on Aug. 29, 2026. (Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>PSL and around 7,000 petition signers have urged a citywide ban on the facilities after a proposal by Behring Companies to bring a 20,000-square-foot data center to downtown drew backlash. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ire among opponents has recently grown. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Tesla and Prometheus, an AI startup cofounded by Jeff Bezos, signed leases at another site in the city, according to the \u003cem>San Francisco Business Times\u003c/em>. It’s not yet known what Tesla and Prometheus have planned for the projects or if they’ll end up being data centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I am against Oakland becoming a place where powerful technology companies can come into our community, consume enormous amounts of resources, and potentially leave Oakland residents to deal with the consequences,” Parker said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-gallery has-nested-images columns-default is-cropped wp-block-gallery-3 is-layout-flex wp-block-gallery-is-layout-flex\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" data-id=\"12097523\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00391_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097523\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00391_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00391_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00391_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Oakland residents attend an anti-data center meeting hosted by Party for Socialism and Liberation at the Church of All Faiths in Oakland on Aug. 29, 2026. (Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" data-id=\"12097520\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00386_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097520\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00386_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00386_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260829-oakdatacentermeeting-TV00386_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Oakland residents attend an anti-data center meeting hosted by Party for Socialism and Liberation at the Church of All Faiths in Oakland on Aug. 29, 2026. (Tâm Vũ/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The AI industry as a whole has come under fire for concerns over environmental impacts — water and energy usage, along with noise pollution — that residents worry will disproportionately hurt lower-income or Black and Brown communities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Xavier Buck, executive director of the Huey P. Newton Foundation and founding director of the Black Panther Party Museum in Oakland, said he thinks cities like Oakland are intentionally targeted to be “sacrifice zones for the AI boom.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“The power structure is not choosing these cities by accident; it is choosing them because these are cities where we built the most powerful organizing models,” Buck said. “[It’s] the most efficient way to destroy both the communities and the blueprint simultaneously.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Oakland City Councilmember Carroll Fife, whose district the Behring proposal falls in, said in a social media post that she had already reached out to the city attorney about what it would mean to regulate data centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I’ve not shared my perspective on data centers or my political perspective because I’m forming it,” Fife \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcC9M7GkgSa/\">said \u003c/a>in her social media video. “I know what I’ve seen in other places is unacceptable, completely.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>More recently, the Bay Area News Group reported that Fife had been working on a \u003ca href=\"https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/08/30/billionaire-backed-data-center-proposals-cause-rift-in-oakland/\">proposal for a moratorium\u003c/a> on data centers. As of publication, Fife had not responded to KQED’s request for comment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Developers have also set their sites on the cities of Pittsburg, Gilroy and San Jose for current or future data centers. Residents in those cities have similarly called for a moratorium and then a permanent ban on the facilities. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Aditi Varshneya, an organizer with PSL, said that hundreds of people came to a previous organizing meeting about the Behring project and almost 200 more showed up this weekend.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095475\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/OAK-Data-Center-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The location of Behring’s proposed data center at 415 20th St. in Oakland on Aug. 14, 2026. (Juan Carlos Lara/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It just goes to show how united the community is and how ready they are to organize and fight back,” Varshneya said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Opponents in Oakland have said they’re not opposed to technology. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“AI is not a technological advancement,” Buck said. “If it is damaging humans, the places we live and the ecosystem we survive on, what’s advanced about that?” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Organizers plan to show up at the next Oakland City Council meeting to continue calls for a data center ban.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "menlo-park-joins-growing-list-of-bay-area-cities-reining-in-flock-cameras",
"title": "Menlo Park Joins Growing List of Bay Area Cities Reining in Flock Cameras",
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"headTitle": "Menlo Park Joins Growing List of Bay Area Cities Reining in Flock Cameras | KQED",
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"content": "\n\u003cp>Menlo Park Police is tightening its \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/flock-safety\">license plate reader\u003c/a> data-sharing policies after finding that an outside organization misused its data for the second time since 2025. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The department announced that it would nullify all existing data-sharing agreements after a June audit — which found that a regional anti-crime organization coordinating between law enforcement agencies conducted hundreds of improper searches. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Since 2024, Menlo Park Police has contracted with surveillance technology company Flock Safety to operate 35 of its Automatic License Plate Reader cameras, crediting the technology for helping identify missing people, stolen and wanted vehicles and gathering active warrant and investigation information. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Flock’s technology has been widely integrated by law enforcement agencies across the country in recent years, credited with “revolutionizing” their methods for solving crimes, but several law enforcement agencies in the Bay Area and beyond have \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12072077/as-california-cities-grow-wary-of-flock-safety-cameras-mountain-views-shuts-its-off\">ended contracts\u003c/a> with Flock Safety following repeated reports that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12096106/anti-flock-organizers-ramp-up-bay-area-protests-urging-cities-to-cut-ties-with-company\">out-of-state agencies\u003c/a> have illegally accessed its customer agencies’ data. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/050726BERKELEY-FLOCK-RALLY_GH_010-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12082871\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/050726BERKELEY-FLOCK-RALLY_GH_010-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/050726BERKELEY-FLOCK-RALLY_GH_010-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/050726BERKELEY-FLOCK-RALLY_GH_010-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A protester holds a sign during a rally opposing Berkeley’s proposed contract expansion with surveillance company Flock Safety outside the Berkeley Unified School District boardroom in Berkeley on May 7, 2026. (Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Flock advertises that its data-sharing offerings allow customers to share camera data with other contracted agencies on either a national, state or one-to-one sharing level. In part, the tool is intended to increase coordination between neighboring departments, such as being able to track a suspect vehicle that travels from one jurisdiction to another.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But its data-sharing practices have come under scrutiny after several data-sharing scandals, with clients accusing Flock of altering their data-sharing settings without permission and allowing out-of-state agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to access their cameras’ information.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many Bay Area agencies say they do not participate in the “National Lookup,” in line with California state law, which prohibits agencies from sharing license plate reader data with federal and out-of-state agencies. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Menlo Park Police said it shares data with other agencies on a one-to-one basis. Since the June audit, it said it would nullify existing sharing agreements and require partner agencies to execute updated ones. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Menlo Park Police has also instituted regular internal and external audits of its Flock system, following an investigation by \u003ca href=\"https://www.almanacnews.com/investigative-story/2025/08/19/menlo-park-police-broke-state-law-shared-license-plate-data-out-of-state/\">\u003cem>The Almanac\u003c/em>\u003c/a> in 2025 that found its camera data was shared with police departments in Houston and Sauk Village in Illinois. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>According to Menlo Park Police’s most recent quarterly update, recent routine audits found no instances of noncompliance with its data-sharing permissions. But after the San Francisco Police Department found in June that a regional anti-crime organization had \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12088076/san-francisco-police-audit-shows-feds-accessed-license-plate-data-hundreds-of-times\">improperly accessed its cameras hundreds of times\u003c/a>, Menlo Park Police conducted a separate investigation. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Both San Francisco and Menlo Park police departments authorized the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, also known as NCRIC, to access their data at the time of the searches, but SFPD’s audit found that the organization gave access to analysts from a third-party group, the West States Information Network, “during night hours.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Although Menlo Park’s data-sharing relationship with NCRIC was authorized and consistent with Department policy and applicable law when established, the Department immediately revoked NCRIC’s access and conducted its own audit,” the quarterly report said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1406\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/SFFlockSafetyGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12069708\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/SFFlockSafetyGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/SFFlockSafetyGetty-160x112.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/SFFlockSafetyGetty-1536x1080.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">In an aerial view, an automated license plate reader is seen mounted on a pole on June 13, 2024, in San Francisco, California. The city of San Francisco has installed 100 automated license plate readers across the city and plans to install 300 more in the coming weeks as officials look to technology to help combat crime in the city. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Menlo Park Police found that the agency conducted about 700 searches deemed “out of compliance” with its policy between February 2025 and June 2026. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>None of the searches referenced Immigration and Customs Enforcement or immigration enforcement in their search justifications, the department said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>According to its \u003ca href=\"https://transparency.flocksafety.com/menlo-park-ca-pd\">transparency portal\u003c/a>, Menlo Park Police currently shares ALPR data with the East Palo Alto and South San Francisco police departments, the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office and San Mateo’s Police and County Sheriff’s Office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Earlier this month at a Police Advisory Committee meeting, the Redwood City Police Department revealed that its Flock cameras have also been improperly accessed multiple times since 2023, even before the department had signed a contract with the company.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The department said the improper searches were “all errors and inconsistencies [that] resulted from Flock Safety’s mismanagement.” According to the committee report, Flock had enabled its “National Lookup” feature without permission, allowing outside agencies, including the FBI, to conduct dozens of searches in 2023. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>According to Redwood City Police Chief Kristina Bell, those searches didn’t yield any results, since they occurred before the city’s cameras were installed. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In 2024 and 2025, Redwood City Police identified additional improper searches by Flock clients who were miscategorized by the company as California law enforcement agencies. Flock also conducted its own searches of Redwood City’s data without permission, Bell told the Police Advisory Committee. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12094101/stanford-cuts-ties-with-flock-safety-shifts-to-new-surveillance-vendor\">Stanford University\u003c/a> also quietly terminated its contract with Flock Safety and will replace its ALPR cameras with ones operated by a different company. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In January, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069705/santa-cruz-the-first-in-california-to-terminate-its-contract-with-flock-safety\">Santa Cruz\u003c/a> became the first city in California to cancel its contract with Flock. Other jurisdictions, including \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12072077/as-california-cities-grow-wary-of-flock-safety-cameras-mountain-views-shuts-its-off\">Mountain View \u003c/a>and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12074467/santa-clara-county-leaders-cut-out-flock-safety-in-new-surveillance-policy\">Santa Clara County\u003c/a>, have also distanced themselves from Flock in recent months.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Since 2024, Menlo Park Police has contracted with surveillance technology company Flock Safety to operate 35 of its Automatic License Plate Reader cameras, crediting the technology for helping identify missing people, stolen and wanted vehicles and gathering active warrant and investigation information. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Since 2024, Menlo Park Police has contracted with surveillance technology company Flock Safety to operate 35 of its Automatic License Plate Reader cameras, crediting the technology for helping identify missing people, stolen and wanted vehicles and gathering active warrant and investigation information. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Flock’s technology has been widely integrated by law enforcement agencies across the country in recent years, credited with “revolutionizing” their methods for solving crimes, but several law enforcement agencies in the Bay Area and beyond have \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12072077/as-california-cities-grow-wary-of-flock-safety-cameras-mountain-views-shuts-its-off\">ended contracts\u003c/a> with Flock Safety following repeated reports that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12096106/anti-flock-organizers-ramp-up-bay-area-protests-urging-cities-to-cut-ties-with-company\">out-of-state agencies\u003c/a> have illegally accessed its customer agencies’ data. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Flock’s technology has been widely integrated by law enforcement agencies across the country in recent years, credited with “revolutionizing” their methods for solving crimes, but several law enforcement agencies in the Bay Area and beyond have \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12072077/as-california-cities-grow-wary-of-flock-safety-cameras-mountain-views-shuts-its-off\">ended contracts\u003c/a> with Flock Safety following repeated reports that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12096106/anti-flock-organizers-ramp-up-bay-area-protests-urging-cities-to-cut-ties-with-company\">out-of-state agencies\u003c/a> have illegally accessed its customer agencies’ data. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/050726BERKELEY-FLOCK-RALLY_GH_010-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12082871\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/050726BERKELEY-FLOCK-RALLY_GH_010-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/050726BERKELEY-FLOCK-RALLY_GH_010-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/050726BERKELEY-FLOCK-RALLY_GH_010-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A protester holds a sign during a rally opposing Berkeley’s proposed contract expansion with surveillance company Flock Safety outside the Berkeley Unified School District boardroom in Berkeley on May 7, 2026.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Flock advertises that its data-sharing offerings allow customers to share camera data with other contracted agencies on either a national, state or one-to-one sharing level. In part, the tool is intended to increase coordination between neighboring departments, such as being able to track a suspect vehicle that travels from one jurisdiction to another.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Flock advertises that its data-sharing offerings allow customers to share camera data with other contracted agencies on either a national, state or one-to-one sharing level. In part, the tool is intended to increase coordination between neighboring departments, such as being able to track a suspect vehicle that travels from one jurisdiction to another.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But its data-sharing practices have come under scrutiny after several data-sharing scandals, with clients accusing Flock of altering their data-sharing settings without permission and allowing out-of-state agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to access their cameras’ information.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Many Bay Area agencies say they do not participate in the “National Lookup,” in line with California state law, which prohibits agencies from sharing license plate reader data with federal and out-of-state agencies. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Menlo Park Police said it shares data with other agencies on a one-to-one basis. Since the June audit, it said it would nullify existing sharing agreements and require partner agencies to execute updated ones. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Menlo Park Police said it shares data with other agencies on a one-to-one basis. Since the June audit, it said it would nullify existing sharing agreements and require partner agencies to execute updated ones. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Menlo Park Police has also instituted regular internal and external audits of its Flock system, following an investigation by \u003ca href=\"https://www.almanacnews.com/investigative-story/2025/08/19/menlo-park-police-broke-state-law-shared-license-plate-data-out-of-state/\">\u003cem>The Almanac\u003c/em>\u003c/a> in 2025 that found its camera data was shared with police departments in Houston and Sauk Village in Illinois. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Menlo Park Police has also instituted regular internal and external audits of its Flock system, following an investigation by \u003ca href=\"https://www.almanacnews.com/investigative-story/2025/08/19/menlo-park-police-broke-state-law-shared-license-plate-data-out-of-state/\">\u003cem>The Almanac\u003c/em>\u003c/a> in 2025 that found its camera data was shared with police departments in Houston and Sauk Village in Illinois. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>According to Menlo Park Police’s most recent quarterly update, recent routine audits found no instances of noncompliance with its data-sharing permissions. But after the San Francisco Police Department found in June that a regional anti-crime organization had \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12088076/san-francisco-police-audit-shows-feds-accessed-license-plate-data-hundreds-of-times\">improperly accessed its cameras hundreds of times\u003c/a>, Menlo Park Police conducted a separate investigation. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>According to Menlo Park Police’s most recent quarterly update, recent routine audits found no instances of noncompliance with its data-sharing permissions. But after the San Francisco Police Department found in June that a regional anti-crime organization had \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12088076/san-francisco-police-audit-shows-feds-accessed-license-plate-data-hundreds-of-times\">improperly accessed its cameras hundreds of times\u003c/a>, Menlo Park Police conducted a separate investigation. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Both San Francisco and Menlo Park police departments authorized the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, also known as NCRIC, to access their data at the time of the searches, but SFPD’s audit found that the organization gave access to analysts from a third-party group, the West States Information Network, “during night hours.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Both San Francisco and Menlo Park police departments authorized the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, also known as NCRIC, to access their data at the time of the searches, but SFPD’s audit found that the organization gave access to analysts from a third-party group, the West States Information Network, “during night hours.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Although Menlo Park’s data-sharing relationship with NCRIC was authorized and consistent with Department policy and applicable law when established, the Department immediately revoked NCRIC’s access and conducted its own audit,” the quarterly report said.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“Although Menlo Park’s data-sharing relationship with NCRIC was authorized and consistent with Department policy and applicable law when established, the Department immediately revoked NCRIC’s access and conducted its own audit,” the quarterly report said.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/SFFlockSafetyGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12069708\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/SFFlockSafetyGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/SFFlockSafetyGetty-160x112.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/SFFlockSafetyGetty-1536x1080.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">In an aerial view, an automated license plate reader is seen mounted on a pole on June 13, 2024, in San Francisco, California. The city of San Francisco has installed 100 automated license plate readers across the city and plans to install 300 more in the coming weeks as officials look to technology to help combat crime in the city. \u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Menlo Park Police found that the agency conducted about 700 searches deemed “out of compliance” with its policy between February 2025 and June 2026. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>None of the searches referenced Immigration and Customs Enforcement or immigration enforcement in their search justifications, the department said.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>According to its \u003ca href=\"https://transparency.flocksafety.com/menlo-park-ca-pd\">transparency portal\u003c/a>, Menlo Park Police currently shares ALPR data with the East Palo Alto and South San Francisco police departments, the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office and San Mateo’s Police and County Sheriff’s Office.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Earlier this month at a Police Advisory Committee meeting, the Redwood City Police Department revealed that its Flock cameras have also been improperly accessed multiple times since 2023, even before the department had signed a contract with the company.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Earlier this month at a Police Advisory Committee meeting, the Redwood City Police Department revealed that its Flock cameras have also been improperly accessed multiple times since 2023, even before the department had signed a contract with the company.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The department said the improper searches were “all errors and inconsistencies [that] resulted from Flock Safety’s mismanagement.” According to the committee report, Flock had enabled its “National Lookup” feature without permission, allowing outside agencies, including the FBI, to conduct dozens of searches in 2023. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The department said the improper searches were “all errors and inconsistencies [that] resulted from Flock Safety’s mismanagement.” According to the committee report, Flock had enabled its “National Lookup” feature without permission, allowing outside agencies, including the FBI, to conduct dozens of searches in 2023. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>According to Redwood City Police Chief Kristina Bell, those searches didn’t yield any results, since they occurred before the city’s cameras were installed. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In 2024 and 2025, Redwood City Police identified additional improper searches by Flock clients who were miscategorized by the company as California law enforcement agencies. Flock also conducted its own searches of Redwood City’s data without permission, Bell told the Police Advisory Committee. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In 2024 and 2025, Redwood City Police identified additional improper searches by Flock clients who were miscategorized by the company as California law enforcement agencies. Flock also conducted its own searches of Redwood City’s data without permission, Bell told the Police Advisory Committee. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12094101/stanford-cuts-ties-with-flock-safety-shifts-to-new-surveillance-vendor\">Stanford University\u003c/a> also quietly terminated its contract with Flock Safety and will replace its ALPR cameras with ones operated by a different company. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In January, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069705/santa-cruz-the-first-in-california-to-terminate-its-contract-with-flock-safety\">Santa Cruz\u003c/a> became the first city in California to cancel its contract with Flock. Other jurisdictions, including \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12072077/as-california-cities-grow-wary-of-flock-safety-cameras-mountain-views-shuts-its-off\">Mountain View \u003c/a>and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12074467/santa-clara-county-leaders-cut-out-flock-safety-in-new-surveillance-policy\">Santa Clara County\u003c/a>, have also distanced themselves from Flock in recent months.\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "The department found that a third-party agency conducted around 700 searches deemed “out of compliance” with its data-sharing policies.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>Menlo Park Police is tightening its \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/flock-safety\">license plate reader\u003c/a> data-sharing policies after finding that an outside organization misused its data for the second time since 2025. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The department announced that it would nullify all existing data-sharing agreements after a June audit — which found that a regional anti-crime organization coordinating between law enforcement agencies conducted hundreds of improper searches. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Since 2024, Menlo Park Police has contracted with surveillance technology company Flock Safety to operate 35 of its Automatic License Plate Reader cameras, crediting the technology for helping identify missing people, stolen and wanted vehicles and gathering active warrant and investigation information. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Flock’s technology has been widely integrated by law enforcement agencies across the country in recent years, credited with “revolutionizing” their methods for solving crimes, but several law enforcement agencies in the Bay Area and beyond have \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12072077/as-california-cities-grow-wary-of-flock-safety-cameras-mountain-views-shuts-its-off\">ended contracts\u003c/a> with Flock Safety following repeated reports that \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12096106/anti-flock-organizers-ramp-up-bay-area-protests-urging-cities-to-cut-ties-with-company\">out-of-state agencies\u003c/a> have illegally accessed its customer agencies’ data. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/050726BERKELEY-FLOCK-RALLY_GH_010-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12082871\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/050726BERKELEY-FLOCK-RALLY_GH_010-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/050726BERKELEY-FLOCK-RALLY_GH_010-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/050726BERKELEY-FLOCK-RALLY_GH_010-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A protester holds a sign during a rally opposing Berkeley’s proposed contract expansion with surveillance company Flock Safety outside the Berkeley Unified School District boardroom in Berkeley on May 7, 2026. (Gustavo Hernandez/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Flock advertises that its data-sharing offerings allow customers to share camera data with other contracted agencies on either a national, state or one-to-one sharing level. In part, the tool is intended to increase coordination between neighboring departments, such as being able to track a suspect vehicle that travels from one jurisdiction to another.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But its data-sharing practices have come under scrutiny after several data-sharing scandals, with clients accusing Flock of altering their data-sharing settings without permission and allowing out-of-state agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to access their cameras’ information.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many Bay Area agencies say they do not participate in the “National Lookup,” in line with California state law, which prohibits agencies from sharing license plate reader data with federal and out-of-state agencies. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Menlo Park Police said it shares data with other agencies on a one-to-one basis. Since the June audit, it said it would nullify existing sharing agreements and require partner agencies to execute updated ones. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Menlo Park Police has also instituted regular internal and external audits of its Flock system, following an investigation by \u003ca href=\"https://www.almanacnews.com/investigative-story/2025/08/19/menlo-park-police-broke-state-law-shared-license-plate-data-out-of-state/\">\u003cem>The Almanac\u003c/em>\u003c/a> in 2025 that found its camera data was shared with police departments in Houston and Sauk Village in Illinois. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>According to Menlo Park Police’s most recent quarterly update, recent routine audits found no instances of noncompliance with its data-sharing permissions. But after the San Francisco Police Department found in June that a regional anti-crime organization had \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12088076/san-francisco-police-audit-shows-feds-accessed-license-plate-data-hundreds-of-times\">improperly accessed its cameras hundreds of times\u003c/a>, Menlo Park Police conducted a separate investigation. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Both San Francisco and Menlo Park police departments authorized the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, also known as NCRIC, to access their data at the time of the searches, but SFPD’s audit found that the organization gave access to analysts from a third-party group, the West States Information Network, “during night hours.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Although Menlo Park’s data-sharing relationship with NCRIC was authorized and consistent with Department policy and applicable law when established, the Department immediately revoked NCRIC’s access and conducted its own audit,” the quarterly report said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1406\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/SFFlockSafetyGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12069708\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/SFFlockSafetyGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/SFFlockSafetyGetty-160x112.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/SFFlockSafetyGetty-1536x1080.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">In an aerial view, an automated license plate reader is seen mounted on a pole on June 13, 2024, in San Francisco, California. The city of San Francisco has installed 100 automated license plate readers across the city and plans to install 300 more in the coming weeks as officials look to technology to help combat crime in the city. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Menlo Park Police found that the agency conducted about 700 searches deemed “out of compliance” with its policy between February 2025 and June 2026. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>None of the searches referenced Immigration and Customs Enforcement or immigration enforcement in their search justifications, the department said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>According to its \u003ca href=\"https://transparency.flocksafety.com/menlo-park-ca-pd\">transparency portal\u003c/a>, Menlo Park Police currently shares ALPR data with the East Palo Alto and South San Francisco police departments, the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office and San Mateo’s Police and County Sheriff’s Office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Earlier this month at a Police Advisory Committee meeting, the Redwood City Police Department revealed that its Flock cameras have also been improperly accessed multiple times since 2023, even before the department had signed a contract with the company.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The department said the improper searches were “all errors and inconsistencies [that] resulted from Flock Safety’s mismanagement.” According to the committee report, Flock had enabled its “National Lookup” feature without permission, allowing outside agencies, including the FBI, to conduct dozens of searches in 2023. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>According to Redwood City Police Chief Kristina Bell, those searches didn’t yield any results, since they occurred before the city’s cameras were installed. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In 2024 and 2025, Redwood City Police identified additional improper searches by Flock clients who were miscategorized by the company as California law enforcement agencies. Flock also conducted its own searches of Redwood City’s data without permission, Bell told the Police Advisory Committee. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12094101/stanford-cuts-ties-with-flock-safety-shifts-to-new-surveillance-vendor\">Stanford University\u003c/a> also quietly terminated its contract with Flock Safety and will replace its ALPR cameras with ones operated by a different company. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In January, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069705/santa-cruz-the-first-in-california-to-terminate-its-contract-with-flock-safety\">Santa Cruz\u003c/a> became the first city in California to cancel its contract with Flock. Other jurisdictions, including \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12072077/as-california-cities-grow-wary-of-flock-safety-cameras-mountain-views-shuts-its-off\">Mountain View \u003c/a>and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12074467/santa-clara-county-leaders-cut-out-flock-safety-in-new-surveillance-policy\">Santa Clara County\u003c/a>, have also distanced themselves from Flock in recent months.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\n\u003cp>Days after Anthropic’s offices closed due to a “possible strike” by security workers, union representatives said they are ready to “take any action necessary” to secure a fair contract. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Though the union representing some security officers has not authorized any action at this time, Anthropic, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/san-francisco\">San Francisco\u003c/a>-based artificial intelligence giant, asked its employees to work from home earlier this week, after a heads-up about ongoing negotiations from Allied Universal, an international security firm that works with the tech company. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Clearly Anthropic understands how indispensable security workers are, even if the companies bargaining with them don’t,” David Huerta, president of Service Employees International Union — United Service Workers West, told KQED on Thursday. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The union’s current \u003ca href=\"https://www.seiu-usww.org/contract/san-francisco-bay-area-master-2022-26/\">contract\u003c/a> with Allied Universal, and seven other private firms, expired on June 30. They’ve been negotiating a new contract for months, but after 19 bargaining sessions, Huerta said that the company’s current offer — a 25-cent-an-hour raise with no raises for the next three years — is “shameful, wrong and deeply, deeply disrespectful.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>At an \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12080245/northern-california-security-officers-campaign-for-better-wages-training\">April\u003c/a> rally in San Francisco, union security workers described struggling with the cost of living in the Bay Area, needing better benefits and wanting more training. They also detailed the mental and physical toll it takes to be the first line of defense in crises. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are currently over 330,000 private security guards in California compared to 90,000 badged police officers, Huerta said in April. Security guards currently make significantly less than police officers — earning a \u003ca href=\"https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes339032.ht\">$21.61\u003c/a> annual mean wage compared to \u003ca href=\"https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes333051.htm\">$53.74\u003c/a> for police officers in 2023. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Allied Universal, which employs 770,000 people globally, told KQED that they could not comment on ongoing labor negotiations. The company’s website said that it partners with more than 400 Fortune 500 companies. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Security officers protect the people and property of some of the wealthiest and most powerful companies in the world,” Huerta said. “We invite workers at Anthropic and elsewhere to consider who will protect them if security officers can’t afford to live here.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/shossaini\">\u003cem>Sara Hossaini\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>Days after Anthropic’s offices closed due to a “possible strike” by security workers, union representatives said they are ready to “take any action necessary” to secure a fair contract. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Though the union representing some security officers has not authorized any action at this time, Anthropic, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/san-francisco\">San Francisco\u003c/a>-based artificial intelligence giant, asked its employees to work from home earlier this week, after a heads-up about ongoing negotiations from Allied Universal, an international security firm that works with the tech company. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Clearly Anthropic understands how indispensable security workers are, even if the companies bargaining with them don’t,” David Huerta, president of Service Employees International Union — United Service Workers West, told KQED on Thursday. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The union’s current \u003ca href=\"https://www.seiu-usww.org/contract/san-francisco-bay-area-master-2022-26/\">contract\u003c/a> with Allied Universal, and seven other private firms, expired on June 30. They’ve been negotiating a new contract for months, but after 19 bargaining sessions, Huerta said that the company’s current offer — a 25-cent-an-hour raise with no raises for the next three years — is “shameful, wrong and deeply, deeply disrespectful.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>At an \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12080245/northern-california-security-officers-campaign-for-better-wages-training\">April\u003c/a> rally in San Francisco, union security workers described struggling with the cost of living in the Bay Area, needing better benefits and wanting more training. They also detailed the mental and physical toll it takes to be the first line of defense in crises. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are currently over 330,000 private security guards in California compared to 90,000 badged police officers, Huerta said in April. Security guards currently make significantly less than police officers — earning a \u003ca href=\"https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes339032.ht\">$21.61\u003c/a> annual mean wage compared to \u003ca href=\"https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes333051.htm\">$53.74\u003c/a> for police officers in 2023. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Allied Universal, which employs 770,000 people globally, told KQED that they could not comment on ongoing labor negotiations. The company’s website said that it partners with more than 400 Fortune 500 companies. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Security officers protect the people and property of some of the wealthiest and most powerful companies in the world,” Huerta said. “We invite workers at Anthropic and elsewhere to consider who will protect them if security officers can’t afford to live here.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/shossaini\">\u003cem>Sara Hossaini\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed to this report.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "bay-area-nurses-protest-use-of-palantirs-ai-tech-at-hospitals",
"title": "Bay Area Nurses Protest Use of Palantir’s AI Tech at Hospitals",
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"content": "\n\u003cp>More than a hundred registered nurses in red union T-shirts blocked traffic and chanted outside \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101864924/a-deeper-look-into-palantir-technologies\">Palantir’s\u003c/a> former headquarters in Palo Alto on Thursday, calling on hospital executives and elected officials to cut ties with the artificial intelligence software and data analytics giant. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>National Nurses United, which held similar protests in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and four other cities, said the demonstrations were the union’s largest to date against Palantir, now based in the Miami area. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Nurses are worried that the company, which has won lucrative but controversial contracts with federal defense and immigration enforcement agencies, is expanding into healthcare.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hospital executives at HCA Healthcare, one of the largest for-profit hospital operators in the U.S., have introduced Palantir’s AI-powered tools for nurse staffing and scheduling. New York’s Mount Sinai Health System uses the company’s products to evaluate patient records and determine which ones are eligible for at-home care, according to Palantir’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.palantir.com/offerings/palantir-for-hospitals/\">website\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1500\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-03-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097137\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-03-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-03-KQED-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-03-KQED-1536x1152.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Nurses place Band-Aids over photos of notes written by children detained by U.S. immigration agents at a protest against intelligence giant Palantir in Palo Alto on Aug. 27, 2026. (Courtesy of National Nurses United)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Craig Cedotal, a pediatric nurse at Kaiser Oakland who previously worked at an HCA hospital in New Orleans, said nurses want more transparency and a greater say in the use of AI in hospitals, including Palantir’s platforms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s affecting staffing decisions and care decisions in ways that are not in line with what healthcare should be,” said Cedotal, one of the protesters in Palo Alto. “A machine should not make decisions about how we take care of each other. That is not good healthcare.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Palantir did not respond to a request for comment. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.palantir.com/q2-2026-letter/en/\">letter to\u003c/a> shareholders this month, CEO Alex Karp said the company’s business has nearly doubled in a span of 12 months. Palantir earned nearly \u003ca href=\"https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2026/Palantir-Reports-Q2-2026-U-S--Comm-Revenue-Growth-of-149-YY-and-Revenue-Growth-of-93-YY-Raises-FY-2026-Revenue-Guidance-to-82-YY-Growth-and-U-S--Comm-Revenue-Guidance-to-134-YY-Crushing-Consensus-Expectations/\">$2 billion\u003c/a> in net income, after expenses, during the first half of this year. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“The core of our business, in the United States, continues to expand at an unrelenting and breakneck pace,” Karp said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>On Thursday, California lawmakers approved a bill sponsored by the California Nurses Association that would establish some guardrails in the deployment of AI in patient care. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab1979\">bill\u003c/a>, by Assemblymember Mia Bonta, D-Oakland, would prohibit a health facility or doctor’s office from using an AI tool to perform any function that requires a professional license. Gov. Gavin Newsom is considering the proposed legislation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Cedotal said that nurses at HCA hospitals have found the new automated staffing platform disruptive, with scheduling not always matching the needs of the day. The union contends the technology is exacerbating an understaffing crisis in the healthcare industry.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“The major concern is that humans are not involved in the equation,” said Cedotal, who has worked as a nurse for 32 years. The software “recommendations usually end up being something unfavorable for staffing or the nurses or patient care in general, or all three together.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1500\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-04-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097138\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-04-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-04-KQED-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-04-KQED-1536x1152.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Nurses block the street in Palo Alto outside the headquarters of artificial intelligence giant Palantir on Aug. 27, 2026. The actions cited the “deadly costs” of Palantir’s products, including its development and operation of ELITE, an application used by federal agents that identifies people for arrest using, in part, Medicaid data. (Courtesy of National Nurses United)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.hcahealthcare.com/about\">HCA Healthcare\u003c/a>, which operates about 190 hospitals in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, did not respond to a request for comment. Good Samaritan Hospital in San José is affiliated with the company.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>National Nurses United, which represents more than 225,000 members nationwide with affiliates like the California Nurses Association, is getting ready to begin contract negotiations with HCA, Kaiser Permanente and other major employers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>At the protest Thursday, the union joined community groups in criticizing Palantir for profiting from the Trump administration’s push to arrest and deport thousands of immigrants, and working with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to support its war in Gaza.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Their technology has enabled the systematic destruction of hospitals, the killing of hundreds of healthcare workers, and the collapse of Gaza’s most vital infrastructure, how can we in good conscience place that same technology at the heart of U.S. healthcare facilities?” said Aisha Nizar with the Palestinian Youth Movement, in a statement. “Our message for the Bay Area is clear: Protect patients, stop fueling genocide, and cut ties with Palantir immediately.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Nurses are worried that the company, which has won lucrative but controversial contracts with federal defense and immigration enforcement agencies, is expanding into healthcare.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Hospital executives at HCA Healthcare, one of the largest for-profit hospital operators in the U.S., have introduced Palantir’s AI-powered tools for nurse staffing and scheduling. New York’s Mount Sinai Health System uses the company’s products to evaluate patient records and determine which ones are eligible for at-home care, according to Palantir’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.palantir.com/offerings/palantir-for-hospitals/\">website\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Hospital executives at HCA Healthcare, one of the largest for-profit hospital operators in the U.S., have introduced Palantir’s AI-powered tools for nurse staffing and scheduling. New York’s Mount Sinai Health System uses the company’s products to evaluate patient records and determine which ones are eligible for at-home care, according to Palantir’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.palantir.com/offerings/palantir-for-hospitals/\">website\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-03-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097137\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-03-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-03-KQED-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-03-KQED-1536x1152.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Nurses place Band-Aids over photos of notes written by children detained by U.S. immigration agents at a protest against intelligence giant Palantir in Palo Alto on Aug. 27, 2026.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Courtesy of National Nurses United)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-03-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097137\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Nurses place Band-Aids over photos of notes written by children detained by U.S. immigration agents at a protest against intelligence giant Palantir in Palo Alto on Aug. 27, 2026.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Courtesy of National Nurses United)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Craig Cedotal, a pediatric nurse at Kaiser Oakland who previously worked at an HCA hospital in New Orleans, said nurses want more transparency and a greater say in the use of AI in hospitals, including Palantir’s platforms.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“It’s affecting staffing decisions and care decisions in ways that are not in line with what healthcare should be,” said Cedotal, one of the protesters in Palo Alto. “A machine should not make decisions about how we take care of each other. That is not good healthcare.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“It’s affecting staffing decisions and care decisions in ways that are not in line with what healthcare should be,” said Cedotal, one of the protesters in Palo Alto. “A machine should not make decisions about how we take care of each other. That is not good healthcare.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Palantir did not respond to a request for comment. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.palantir.com/q2-2026-letter/en/\">letter to\u003c/a> shareholders this month, CEO Alex Karp said the company’s business has nearly doubled in a span of 12 months. Palantir earned nearly \u003ca href=\"https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2026/Palantir-Reports-Q2-2026-U-S--Comm-Revenue-Growth-of-149-YY-and-Revenue-Growth-of-93-YY-Raises-FY-2026-Revenue-Guidance-to-82-YY-Growth-and-U-S--Comm-Revenue-Guidance-to-134-YY-Crushing-Consensus-Expectations/\">$2 billion\u003c/a> in net income, after expenses, during the first half of this year. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.palantir.com/q2-2026-letter/en/\">letter to\u003c/a> shareholders this month, CEO Alex Karp said the company’s business has nearly doubled in a span of 12 months. Palantir earned nearly \u003ca href=\"https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2026/Palantir-Reports-Q2-2026-U-S--Comm-Revenue-Growth-of-149-YY-and-Revenue-Growth-of-93-YY-Raises-FY-2026-Revenue-Guidance-to-82-YY-Growth-and-U-S--Comm-Revenue-Guidance-to-134-YY-Crushing-Consensus-Expectations/\">$2 billion\u003c/a> in net income, after expenses, during the first half of this year. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“The core of our business, in the United States, continues to expand at an unrelenting and breakneck pace,” Karp said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>On Thursday, California lawmakers approved a bill sponsored by the California Nurses Association that would establish some guardrails in the deployment of AI in patient care. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab1979\">bill\u003c/a>, by Assemblymember Mia Bonta, D-Oakland, would prohibit a health facility or doctor’s office from using an AI tool to perform any function that requires a professional license. Gov. Gavin Newsom is considering the proposed legislation.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab1979\">bill\u003c/a>, by Assemblymember Mia Bonta, D-Oakland, would prohibit a health facility or doctor’s office from using an AI tool to perform any function that requires a professional license. Gov. Gavin Newsom is considering the proposed legislation.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Cedotal said that nurses at HCA hospitals have found the new automated staffing platform disruptive, with scheduling not always matching the needs of the day. The union contends the technology is exacerbating an understaffing crisis in the healthcare industry.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Cedotal said that nurses at HCA hospitals have found the new automated staffing platform disruptive, with scheduling not always matching the needs of the day. The union contends the technology is exacerbating an understaffing crisis in the healthcare industry.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“The major concern is that humans are not involved in the equation,” said Cedotal, who has worked as a nurse for 32 years. The software “recommendations usually end up being something unfavorable for staffing or the nurses or patient care in general, or all three together.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“The major concern is that humans are not involved in the equation,” said Cedotal, who has worked as a nurse for 32 years. The software “recommendations usually end up being something unfavorable for staffing or the nurses or patient care in general, or all three together.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-04-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097138\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-04-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-04-KQED-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-04-KQED-1536x1152.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Nurses block the street in Palo Alto outside the headquarters of artificial intelligence giant Palantir on Aug. 27, 2026. The actions cited the “deadly costs” of Palantir’s products, including its development and operation of ELITE, an application used by federal agents that identifies people for arrest using, in part, Medicaid data.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Courtesy of National Nurses United)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-04-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097138\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Nurses block the street in Palo Alto outside the headquarters of artificial intelligence giant Palantir on Aug. 27, 2026. The actions cited the “deadly costs” of Palantir’s products, including its development and operation of ELITE, an application used by federal agents that identifies people for arrest using, in part, Medicaid data.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Courtesy of National Nurses United)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.hcahealthcare.com/about\">HCA Healthcare\u003c/a>, which operates about 190 hospitals in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, did not respond to a request for comment. Good Samaritan Hospital in San José is affiliated with the company.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.hcahealthcare.com/about\">HCA Healthcare\u003c/a>, which operates about 190 hospitals in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, did not respond to a request for comment. Good Samaritan Hospital in San José is affiliated with the company.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>National Nurses United, which represents more than 225,000 members nationwide with affiliates like the California Nurses Association, is getting ready to begin contract negotiations with HCA, Kaiser Permanente and other major employers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>At the protest Thursday, the union joined community groups in criticizing Palantir for profiting from the Trump administration’s push to arrest and deport thousands of immigrants, and working with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to support its war in Gaza.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>At the protest Thursday, the union joined community groups in criticizing Palantir for profiting from the Trump administration’s push to arrest and deport thousands of immigrants, and working with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to support its war in Gaza.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Their technology has enabled the systematic destruction of hospitals, the killing of hundreds of healthcare workers, and the collapse of Gaza’s most vital infrastructure, how can we in good conscience place that same technology at the heart of U.S. healthcare facilities?” said Aisha Nizar with the Palestinian Youth Movement, in a statement. “Our message for the Bay Area is clear: Protect patients, stop fueling genocide, and cut ties with Palantir immediately.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“Their technology has enabled the systematic destruction of hospitals, the killing of hundreds of healthcare workers, and the collapse of Gaza’s most vital infrastructure, how can we in good conscience place that same technology at the heart of U.S. healthcare facilities?” said Aisha Nizar with the Palestinian Youth Movement, in a statement. “Our message for the Bay Area is clear: Protect patients, stop fueling genocide, and cut ties with Palantir immediately.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"excerpt": "Nurses held protests in Palo Alto, Los Angeles and six other cities, calling on hospitals and elected officials to cut ties with the AI software and data analytics company.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>More than a hundred registered nurses in red union T-shirts blocked traffic and chanted outside \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101864924/a-deeper-look-into-palantir-technologies\">Palantir’s\u003c/a> former headquarters in Palo Alto on Thursday, calling on hospital executives and elected officials to cut ties with the artificial intelligence software and data analytics giant. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>National Nurses United, which held similar protests in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and four other cities, said the demonstrations were the union’s largest to date against Palantir, now based in the Miami area. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Nurses are worried that the company, which has won lucrative but controversial contracts with federal defense and immigration enforcement agencies, is expanding into healthcare.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hospital executives at HCA Healthcare, one of the largest for-profit hospital operators in the U.S., have introduced Palantir’s AI-powered tools for nurse staffing and scheduling. New York’s Mount Sinai Health System uses the company’s products to evaluate patient records and determine which ones are eligible for at-home care, according to Palantir’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.palantir.com/offerings/palantir-for-hospitals/\">website\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1500\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-03-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097137\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-03-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-03-KQED-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-03-KQED-1536x1152.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Nurses place Band-Aids over photos of notes written by children detained by U.S. immigration agents at a protest against intelligence giant Palantir in Palo Alto on Aug. 27, 2026. (Courtesy of National Nurses United)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Craig Cedotal, a pediatric nurse at Kaiser Oakland who previously worked at an HCA hospital in New Orleans, said nurses want more transparency and a greater say in the use of AI in hospitals, including Palantir’s platforms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s affecting staffing decisions and care decisions in ways that are not in line with what healthcare should be,” said Cedotal, one of the protesters in Palo Alto. “A machine should not make decisions about how we take care of each other. That is not good healthcare.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Palantir did not respond to a request for comment. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://www.palantir.com/q2-2026-letter/en/\">letter to\u003c/a> shareholders this month, CEO Alex Karp said the company’s business has nearly doubled in a span of 12 months. Palantir earned nearly \u003ca href=\"https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2026/Palantir-Reports-Q2-2026-U-S--Comm-Revenue-Growth-of-149-YY-and-Revenue-Growth-of-93-YY-Raises-FY-2026-Revenue-Guidance-to-82-YY-Growth-and-U-S--Comm-Revenue-Guidance-to-134-YY-Crushing-Consensus-Expectations/\">$2 billion\u003c/a> in net income, after expenses, during the first half of this year. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“The core of our business, in the United States, continues to expand at an unrelenting and breakneck pace,” Karp said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>On Thursday, California lawmakers approved a bill sponsored by the California Nurses Association that would establish some guardrails in the deployment of AI in patient care. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/bills/ca_202520260ab1979\">bill\u003c/a>, by Assemblymember Mia Bonta, D-Oakland, would prohibit a health facility or doctor’s office from using an AI tool to perform any function that requires a professional license. Gov. Gavin Newsom is considering the proposed legislation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Cedotal said that nurses at HCA hospitals have found the new automated staffing platform disruptive, with scheduling not always matching the needs of the day. The union contends the technology is exacerbating an understaffing crisis in the healthcare industry.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“The major concern is that humans are not involved in the equation,” said Cedotal, who has worked as a nurse for 32 years. The software “recommendations usually end up being something unfavorable for staffing or the nurses or patient care in general, or all three together.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1500\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-04-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097138\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-04-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-04-KQED-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260827-Palantir-Nurses-04-KQED-1536x1152.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Nurses block the street in Palo Alto outside the headquarters of artificial intelligence giant Palantir on Aug. 27, 2026. The actions cited the “deadly costs” of Palantir’s products, including its development and operation of ELITE, an application used by federal agents that identifies people for arrest using, in part, Medicaid data. (Courtesy of National Nurses United)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.hcahealthcare.com/about\">HCA Healthcare\u003c/a>, which operates about 190 hospitals in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, did not respond to a request for comment. Good Samaritan Hospital in San José is affiliated with the company.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>National Nurses United, which represents more than 225,000 members nationwide with affiliates like the California Nurses Association, is getting ready to begin contract negotiations with HCA, Kaiser Permanente and other major employers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>At the protest Thursday, the union joined community groups in criticizing Palantir for profiting from the Trump administration’s push to arrest and deport thousands of immigrants, and working with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to support its war in Gaza.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Their technology has enabled the systematic destruction of hospitals, the killing of hundreds of healthcare workers, and the collapse of Gaza’s most vital infrastructure, how can we in good conscience place that same technology at the heart of U.S. healthcare facilities?” said Aisha Nizar with the Palestinian Youth Movement, in a statement. “Our message for the Bay Area is clear: Protect patients, stop fueling genocide, and cut ties with Palantir immediately.”\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "culture-and-ethics-meets-tech-ucla-debuts-countrys-first-bachelors-in-digital-humanities",
"title": "Culture and Ethics Meets Tech: UCLA Debuts Country’s First Bachelor’s in Digital Humanities",
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"headTitle": "Culture and Ethics Meets Tech: UCLA Debuts Country’s First Bachelor’s in Digital Humanities | KQED",
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"content": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was originally published by \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/\">CalMatters\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/subscribe-to-calmatters/\">Sign up\u003c/a> for their newsletters.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/ucla\">UCLA\u003c/a> is launching the nation’s first digital humanities department and bachelor’s degree this fall. The new discipline combines classical humanities with technical know-how to examine a digitized and increasingly AI-enhanced world.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The major fuses technological tools for statistical analysis, coding, 3D mapping and data visualization with traditional humanities subjects like history, literature and global cultures. It’s a multidisciplinary approach to education that capitalizes on employers’ growing desire for recent graduates to think critically while also being able to harness new technology. And the major requires a great deal of teamwork among students, another skill hiring managers seek. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Students will learn how new technologies shape culture and the human biases that enter into the use of these new tools. Top of mind is the rise of generative artificial intelligence and training students to use it ethically while also understanding how easily it can produce misleading content.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1337\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAAP.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12051530\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAAP.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAAP-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAAP-1536x1027.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students walk past Royce Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles, campus in Los Angeles, on Aug. 15, 2024. (Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Todd Presner is a UCLA professor of European languages and transcultural studies, and co-led the effort to create the digital humanities department. He said contemporary culture has witnessed a rift between computational subjects and the traditional humanities, and both are enhanced by merging the two. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s actually at our own peril when scientists are not speaking to folks in the humanities with historical knowledge, ethical knowledge, cultural knowledge, right?” he said. “And at the same time, I’d say when the humanities are not understanding the technologies in the world today, they also could be seen as irrelevant.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Presner has taught a course showing students how to get under the hood of large language models, which store the reading material generative AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT use to spit out answers. “Students can essentially upload their own training data to some of these smaller models and see how easily they can be manipulated,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">New major, old discipline\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>UCLA students will be able to declare digital humanities as a major this year, but campus professors have taught courses in the discipline for more than two decades. It’s the second most popular minor at UCLA, which was one reason the school decided to transform it into a major, said Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of the UCLA College Division of Humanities where digital humanities is based. Last academic year, 750 UCLA undergraduate students took a course in digital humanities. Stern expects 50 to 100 students to eventually declare the major, and would be thrilled if 40 signed up this year.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The department will launch with 23 faculty, including lecturers, plus four staff members. Stern eventually wants a few more faculty, but UCLA’s currently under a hiring freeze. No academic unit at the university was cut to make way for the new digital humanities. Faculty hail from multiple humanities fields as well as information studies and data science, so classes will occur across several campus buildings.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1319\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/GettyImages-2227778784-scaled-e1787859357158.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12051319\"/>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">People walk on the plaza outside Royce Hall on the UCLA campus on July 30, 2025, in Los Angeles, California. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She said at least one museum will provide internship opportunities. Based in the Los Angeles area, the Wende Museum specializes in collecting artifacts and oral histories of refugees as well as other dissident groups and digitizing them — a key aspect of digital humanities training. She aims to secure similar arrangements with other museums so students can further apply what they learn in professional settings. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The major’s introductory courses are \u003ca href=\"https://catalog.registrar.ucla.edu/major/2026/DigitalHumanitiesBA\">clustered around\u003c/a> data networks, such as statistical reasoning, and courses on culture, such as the symbolic history of Jerusalem or film depictions of antiquity. Upper division courses can center on how contemporary technology is shaped by political, cultural, and social forces or a class on social media data analysis.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">One student’s experience\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Kedaar Sridhar, 26, graduated from UCLA in 2022 with a computer science major and a minor in digital humanities. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The social media data analysis course was his favorite in the minor. For a class project, he and a team of students analyzed the hashtag “facemask” on social media while much of the world was still in the throes of COVID-19. He relied on the coding language Python as well as sentiment analysis tools to classify how different countries felt about face masks in public based on the social media posts featuring that hashtag. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If he could do college all over, he’d major in the new digital humanities program because it combines the application of contemporary data software with the probing analytical questions that the humanities embody.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1278\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12050663\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAGetty-160x102.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAGetty-1536x982.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">People walk on the UCLA campus on July 30, 2025, in Los Angeles. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I think computer science is the what, digital humanities is the how and the why, and how do you actually apply it, and why is it important to be applied,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sridhar credits the minor with landing him an internship at Microsoft. All the applicants knew computer science, but digital humanities distinguished him, he said. An interviewer asked what the minor entailed, and he said “it’s human-centered data storytelling, working with groups, working in projects, getting a tangible outcome.”\u003cbr>\u003cbr>The interviewer said that’s what they’re looking for.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In the past year he co-founded his own company, Grantlytics, an AI-based platform focused on helping nonprofits fundraise by writing proposals, finding funding opportunities and identifying promising donors. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As an employer, he’s looking for much of what the digital humanities major offers. Without it, Sridhar would prefer a candidate with a humanities and coding or math background. But digital humanities “automatically is that interdisciplinary nature because it combines those two worlds together.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What employers want\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sridhar’s preference for someone well-rounded appears to be backed by recent survey data.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hiring managers who recruit recent college graduates indicated this year that these workers are mostly employable, but with caveats. The \u003ca href=\"https://naceweb.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/2026/publication/research-report/2026-job-outlook-report-spring-update.pdf\">annual survey\u003c/a> by the National Association of Colleges and Employers shows that the skills recent graduates are most proficient in aren’t what employers prioritize most. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For example, 99% of hiring managers say oral and written communication and persuasion skills are important. But the same hiring managers indicated \u003ca href=\"https://naceweb.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/2026/publication/research-report/2026-job-outlook-report-spring-update.pdf#page=26\">that just 55%\u003c/a> of recent college graduates score well in communication skills. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The same goes for critical thinking: Around 94% of hiring managers rate \u003ca href=\"https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/career-readiness-defined#competencies\">this competency\u003c/a> highly, but they report that just half of recent graduates are able to gather data from diverse sources and draw conclusions or work well in a fast-paced setting. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Where recent graduates do better is in technology, but hiring managers care slightly less about those. About 75% of employers place high importance on adapting to new technology or using tech to achieve company goals; they say that about 65% of recent grads are competent in that skill set. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Stern, the dean, is careful not to overstate the promise of digital humanities to halt the freefall of the broader humanities as a major students want. The share of U.S. college students majoring in fields such as literature, history, philosophy and foreign languages is at a \u003ca href=\"https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/bachelors-degrees-humanities\">historic nadir\u003c/a> — just 8% of degrees conferred were in the humanities, down from nearly 15% nearly two decades ago. The trend at UCLA is similar.\u003cbr>\u003cbr>She knows things are tough for humanities departments, but “an art history grad is more likely to get a job these days than a computer science grad,” she said, \u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major\">citing data tracked\u003c/a> by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “There are ebbs and flows across time” in which degrees lead to jobs and that students gravitate toward.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This article was \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2026/08/ucla-digital-humanities/\">originally published on CalMatters\u003c/a> and was republished under the \u003ca href=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives\u003c/a> license.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/ucla\">UCLA\u003c/a> is launching the nation’s first digital humanities department and bachelor’s degree this fall. The new discipline combines classical humanities with technical know-how to examine a digitized and increasingly AI-enhanced world.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Students will learn how new technologies shape culture and the human biases that enter into the use of these new tools. Top of mind is the rise of generative artificial intelligence and training students to use it ethically while also understanding how easily it can produce misleading content.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Todd Presner is a UCLA professor of European languages and transcultural studies, and co-led the effort to create the digital humanities department. He said contemporary culture has witnessed a rift between computational subjects and the traditional humanities, and both are enhanced by merging the two. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Todd Presner is a UCLA professor of European languages and transcultural studies, and co-led the effort to create the digital humanities department. He said contemporary culture has witnessed a rift between computational subjects and the traditional humanities, and both are enhanced by merging the two. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“It’s actually at our own peril when scientists are not speaking to folks in the humanities with historical knowledge, ethical knowledge, cultural knowledge, right?” he said. “And at the same time, I’d say when the humanities are not understanding the technologies in the world today, they also could be seen as irrelevant.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“It’s actually at our own peril when scientists are not speaking to folks in the humanities with historical knowledge, ethical knowledge, cultural knowledge, right?” he said. “And at the same time, I’d say when the humanities are not understanding the technologies in the world today, they also could be seen as irrelevant.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Presner has taught a course showing students how to get under the hood of large language models, which store the reading material generative AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT use to spit out answers. “Students can essentially upload their own training data to some of these smaller models and see how easily they can be manipulated,” he said.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Presner has taught a course showing students how to get under the hood of large language models, which store the reading material generative AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT use to spit out answers. “Students can essentially upload their own training data to some of these smaller models and see how easily they can be manipulated,” he said.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>UCLA students will be able to declare digital humanities as a major this year, but campus professors have taught courses in the discipline for more than two decades. It’s the second most popular minor at UCLA, which was one reason the school decided to transform it into a major, said Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of the UCLA College Division of Humanities where digital humanities is based. Last academic year, 750 UCLA undergraduate students took a course in digital humanities. Stern expects 50 to 100 students to eventually declare the major, and would be thrilled if 40 signed up this year.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>UCLA students will be able to declare digital humanities as a major this year, but campus professors have taught courses in the discipline for more than two decades. It’s the second most popular minor at UCLA, which was one reason the school decided to transform it into a major, said Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of the UCLA College Division of Humanities where digital humanities is based. Last academic year, 750 UCLA undergraduate students took a course in digital humanities. Stern expects 50 to 100 students to eventually declare the major, and would be thrilled if 40 signed up this year.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The department will launch with 23 faculty, including lecturers, plus four staff members. Stern eventually wants a few more faculty, but UCLA’s currently under a hiring freeze. No academic unit at the university was cut to make way for the new digital humanities. Faculty hail from multiple humanities fields as well as information studies and data science, so classes will occur across several campus buildings.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The department will launch with 23 faculty, including lecturers, plus four staff members. Stern eventually wants a few more faculty, but UCLA’s currently under a hiring freeze. No academic unit at the university was cut to make way for the new digital humanities. Faculty hail from multiple humanities fields as well as information studies and data science, so classes will occur across several campus buildings.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The major’s introductory courses are \u003ca href=\"https://catalog.registrar.ucla.edu/major/2026/DigitalHumanitiesBA\">clustered around\u003c/a> data networks, such as statistical reasoning, and courses on culture, such as the symbolic history of Jerusalem or film depictions of antiquity. Upper division courses can center on how contemporary technology is shaped by political, cultural, and social forces or a class on social media data analysis.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Kedaar Sridhar, 26, graduated from UCLA in 2022 with a computer science major and a minor in digital humanities. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The social media data analysis course was his favorite in the minor. For a class project, he and a team of students analyzed the hashtag “facemask” on social media while much of the world was still in the throes of COVID-19. He relied on the coding language Python as well as sentiment analysis tools to classify how different countries felt about face masks in public based on the social media posts featuring that hashtag. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“I think computer science is the what, digital humanities is the how and the why, and how do you actually apply it, and why is it important to be applied,” he said.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Sridhar credits the minor with landing him an internship at Microsoft. All the applicants knew computer science, but digital humanities distinguished him, he said. An interviewer asked what the minor entailed, and he said “it’s human-centered data storytelling, working with groups, working in projects, getting a tangible outcome.”\u003cbr>\u003cbr>The interviewer said that’s what they’re looking for.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Sridhar’s preference for someone well-rounded appears to be backed by recent survey data.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Hiring managers who recruit recent college graduates indicated this year that these workers are mostly employable, but with caveats. The \u003ca href=\"https://naceweb.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/2026/publication/research-report/2026-job-outlook-report-spring-update.pdf\">annual survey\u003c/a> by the National Association of Colleges and Employers shows that the skills recent graduates are most proficient in aren’t what employers prioritize most. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The same goes for critical thinking: Around 94% of hiring managers rate \u003ca href=\"https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/career-readiness-defined#competencies\">this competency\u003c/a> highly, but they report that just half of recent graduates are able to gather data from diverse sources and draw conclusions or work well in a fast-paced setting. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Stern, the dean, is careful not to overstate the promise of digital humanities to halt the freefall of the broader humanities as a major students want. The share of U.S. college students majoring in fields such as literature, history, philosophy and foreign languages is at a \u003ca href=\"https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/bachelors-degrees-humanities\">historic nadir\u003c/a> — just 8% of degrees conferred were in the humanities, down from nearly 15% nearly two decades ago. The trend at UCLA is similar.\u003cbr>\u003cbr>She knows things are tough for humanities departments, but “an art history grad is more likely to get a job these days than a computer science grad,” she said, \u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major\">citing data tracked\u003c/a> by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “There are ebbs and flows across time” in which degrees lead to jobs and that students gravitate toward.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This article was \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2026/08/ucla-digital-humanities/\">originally published on CalMatters\u003c/a> and was republished under the \u003ca href=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives\u003c/a> license.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"title": "Culture and Ethics Meets Tech: UCLA Debuts Country’s First Bachelor’s in Digital Humanities | KQED",
"description": "This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters. UCLA is launching the nation’s first digital humanities department and bachelor’s degree this fall. The new discipline combines classical humanities with technical know-how to examine a digitized and increasingly AI-enhanced world. The major fuses technological tools for statistical analysis, coding, 3D mapping and data visualization with",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was originally published by \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/\">CalMatters\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/subscribe-to-calmatters/\">Sign up\u003c/a> for their newsletters.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/ucla\">UCLA\u003c/a> is launching the nation’s first digital humanities department and bachelor’s degree this fall. The new discipline combines classical humanities with technical know-how to examine a digitized and increasingly AI-enhanced world.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The major fuses technological tools for statistical analysis, coding, 3D mapping and data visualization with traditional humanities subjects like history, literature and global cultures. It’s a multidisciplinary approach to education that capitalizes on employers’ growing desire for recent graduates to think critically while also being able to harness new technology. And the major requires a great deal of teamwork among students, another skill hiring managers seek. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Students will learn how new technologies shape culture and the human biases that enter into the use of these new tools. Top of mind is the rise of generative artificial intelligence and training students to use it ethically while also understanding how easily it can produce misleading content.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1337\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAAP.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12051530\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAAP.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAAP-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAAP-1536x1027.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students walk past Royce Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles, campus in Los Angeles, on Aug. 15, 2024. (Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Todd Presner is a UCLA professor of European languages and transcultural studies, and co-led the effort to create the digital humanities department. He said contemporary culture has witnessed a rift between computational subjects and the traditional humanities, and both are enhanced by merging the two. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s actually at our own peril when scientists are not speaking to folks in the humanities with historical knowledge, ethical knowledge, cultural knowledge, right?” he said. “And at the same time, I’d say when the humanities are not understanding the technologies in the world today, they also could be seen as irrelevant.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Presner has taught a course showing students how to get under the hood of large language models, which store the reading material generative AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT use to spit out answers. “Students can essentially upload their own training data to some of these smaller models and see how easily they can be manipulated,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">New major, old discipline\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>UCLA students will be able to declare digital humanities as a major this year, but campus professors have taught courses in the discipline for more than two decades. It’s the second most popular minor at UCLA, which was one reason the school decided to transform it into a major, said Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of the UCLA College Division of Humanities where digital humanities is based. Last academic year, 750 UCLA undergraduate students took a course in digital humanities. Stern expects 50 to 100 students to eventually declare the major, and would be thrilled if 40 signed up this year.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The department will launch with 23 faculty, including lecturers, plus four staff members. Stern eventually wants a few more faculty, but UCLA’s currently under a hiring freeze. No academic unit at the university was cut to make way for the new digital humanities. Faculty hail from multiple humanities fields as well as information studies and data science, so classes will occur across several campus buildings.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1319\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/GettyImages-2227778784-scaled-e1787859357158.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12051319\"/>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">People walk on the plaza outside Royce Hall on the UCLA campus on July 30, 2025, in Los Angeles, California. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She said at least one museum will provide internship opportunities. Based in the Los Angeles area, the Wende Museum specializes in collecting artifacts and oral histories of refugees as well as other dissident groups and digitizing them — a key aspect of digital humanities training. She aims to secure similar arrangements with other museums so students can further apply what they learn in professional settings. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The major’s introductory courses are \u003ca href=\"https://catalog.registrar.ucla.edu/major/2026/DigitalHumanitiesBA\">clustered around\u003c/a> data networks, such as statistical reasoning, and courses on culture, such as the symbolic history of Jerusalem or film depictions of antiquity. Upper division courses can center on how contemporary technology is shaped by political, cultural, and social forces or a class on social media data analysis.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">One student’s experience\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Kedaar Sridhar, 26, graduated from UCLA in 2022 with a computer science major and a minor in digital humanities. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The social media data analysis course was his favorite in the minor. For a class project, he and a team of students analyzed the hashtag “facemask” on social media while much of the world was still in the throes of COVID-19. He relied on the coding language Python as well as sentiment analysis tools to classify how different countries felt about face masks in public based on the social media posts featuring that hashtag. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If he could do college all over, he’d major in the new digital humanities program because it combines the application of contemporary data software with the probing analytical questions that the humanities embody.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1278\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12050663\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAGetty-160x102.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/UCLAGetty-1536x982.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">People walk on the UCLA campus on July 30, 2025, in Los Angeles. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I think computer science is the what, digital humanities is the how and the why, and how do you actually apply it, and why is it important to be applied,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sridhar credits the minor with landing him an internship at Microsoft. All the applicants knew computer science, but digital humanities distinguished him, he said. An interviewer asked what the minor entailed, and he said “it’s human-centered data storytelling, working with groups, working in projects, getting a tangible outcome.”\u003cbr>\u003cbr>The interviewer said that’s what they’re looking for.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In the past year he co-founded his own company, Grantlytics, an AI-based platform focused on helping nonprofits fundraise by writing proposals, finding funding opportunities and identifying promising donors. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As an employer, he’s looking for much of what the digital humanities major offers. Without it, Sridhar would prefer a candidate with a humanities and coding or math background. But digital humanities “automatically is that interdisciplinary nature because it combines those two worlds together.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What employers want\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sridhar’s preference for someone well-rounded appears to be backed by recent survey data.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hiring managers who recruit recent college graduates indicated this year that these workers are mostly employable, but with caveats. The \u003ca href=\"https://naceweb.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/2026/publication/research-report/2026-job-outlook-report-spring-update.pdf\">annual survey\u003c/a> by the National Association of Colleges and Employers shows that the skills recent graduates are most proficient in aren’t what employers prioritize most. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For example, 99% of hiring managers say oral and written communication and persuasion skills are important. But the same hiring managers indicated \u003ca href=\"https://naceweb.org/docs/default-source/default-document-library/2026/publication/research-report/2026-job-outlook-report-spring-update.pdf#page=26\">that just 55%\u003c/a> of recent college graduates score well in communication skills. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The same goes for critical thinking: Around 94% of hiring managers rate \u003ca href=\"https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/career-readiness-defined#competencies\">this competency\u003c/a> highly, but they report that just half of recent graduates are able to gather data from diverse sources and draw conclusions or work well in a fast-paced setting. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Where recent graduates do better is in technology, but hiring managers care slightly less about those. About 75% of employers place high importance on adapting to new technology or using tech to achieve company goals; they say that about 65% of recent grads are competent in that skill set. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Stern, the dean, is careful not to overstate the promise of digital humanities to halt the freefall of the broader humanities as a major students want. The share of U.S. college students majoring in fields such as literature, history, philosophy and foreign languages is at a \u003ca href=\"https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/bachelors-degrees-humanities\">historic nadir\u003c/a> — just 8% of degrees conferred were in the humanities, down from nearly 15% nearly two decades ago. The trend at UCLA is similar.\u003cbr>\u003cbr>She knows things are tough for humanities departments, but “an art history grad is more likely to get a job these days than a computer science grad,” she said, \u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:explore:outcomes-by-major\">citing data tracked\u003c/a> by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. “There are ebbs and flows across time” in which degrees lead to jobs and that students gravitate toward.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This article was \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2026/08/ucla-digital-humanities/\">originally published on CalMatters\u003c/a> and was republished under the \u003ca href=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives\u003c/a> license.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "a-chromebook-in-the-hand-of-every-child-did-schools-go-too-far",
"title": "‘A Chromebook in the Hand of Every Child.’ Did Schools Go Too Far?",
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"headTitle": "‘A Chromebook in the Hand of Every Child.’ Did Schools Go Too Far? | KQED",
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"content": "\n\u003cp>Last year, Suki Reddy started to enter her third-grader’s bedroom to find him, face \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/66537/the-school-year-begins-in-la-with-one-big-change-limited-screen-time\">lit up behind the glow of a computer\u003c/a>, watching YouTube. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This didn’t seem possible, she thought; she had put controls on his iPad and closely monitored his screen time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But Reddy’s son didn’t have to use his personal tablet to watch videos in bed. He could open YouTube on his school-issued Chromebook. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“They had less controls on their school computer than families have,” Reddy said. “There’s families who don’t have any phones or iPads for their kids. The only access that their kids are getting is through the school computer.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Reddy’s two children are in the San Mateo–Foster City School District, which includes 21 elementary and middle schools across the two cities. For years, the district has issued each child a Chromebook and integrated them into students’ learning, using them for access to textbooks, class handouts and homework as early as transitional kindergarten.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1999\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-09-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095056\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-09-MC_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-09-MC_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-09-MC_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1999px) 100vw, 1999px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Bowditch Middle School on Wednesday, Aug.12, 2026, in Foster City. (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>Last year, as Reddy became concerned about the amount of screen time her children had through school, she started to speak with other parents who were also \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/66517/families-and-teachers-are-questioning-ed-tech-are-schools-and-districts-starting-to-listen\">growing worried\u003c/a>. They saw their kids getting distracted by entertainment apps, noticed their attention spans deteriorating and their mental health suffering from the effects of spending hours online. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While many parents already had their own rules for their kids’ use of social media and personal devices, educational technology had opened up a new front. Even when guardrails were put in place to limit the school devices’ usage, parents learned that children had found tricks to bypass protections.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>SMFCSD spokesperson Diego Perez said via email that the district has “a ton of restrictions” on its Chromebooks but did not respond to direct questions about whether YouTube was blocked on the devices.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It really made me realize it’s time to look at schools,” Reddy said. “That’s when I started asking questions directly to them.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1386\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/StudentsTabletsGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097071\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/StudentsTabletsGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/StudentsTabletsGetty-160x111.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/StudentsTabletsGetty-1536x1064.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students explore the possibilities with their new LAUSD-provided iPads on Aug. 27, 2013. (Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>Over the last 15 years, classroom technology use has increased rapidly in districts across the country. Most now have 1:1 device programs, sending children as young as 5 and 6 home with personal tablets or computers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But as more research emerges about the potential harms of screen use for children, while test scores in schools across the U.S. struggle to rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic, districts are at an inflection point. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California has mandated \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12094226/ousd-cellphone-ban-for-students-takes-effect-on-the-first-day-of-the-school-year\">school cellphone restrictions\u003c/a> across the state, and parents in the Bay Area are pushing their school boards and administrators to pass new policies that limit screen time and institute content guardrails for students — following in the footsteps of the Los Angeles Unified School District, whose board passed a landmark resolution this year. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We’re not anti-technology,” Reddy said. “We’re very much a group in the Bay Area. Many parents work in the tech industry and work for the very companies who produce these tech tools. But because of that, we have a very unique stance where we recognize that there’s not just an upside to this — there are actually a lot of potential problems.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The rise of ed tech\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One-to-one device programs are now in 88% of public schools across the U.S., according to \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/learn/press-release/more-half-public-school-leaders-say-cell-phones-hurt-academic-performance\">data from the National Center for Education Statistics\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They gained traction throughout the 2010s, according to neuroscientist and former teacher Jared Cooney Horvath, who said education technology companies pitched their products as an unrivaled opportunity to individualize learning and, later, as the great equalizer for students across demographic groups.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Put a Chromebook in the hand of every child, and that’s how you’re going to close the equity gap,” said Anya Meksin, the deputy director of parent organization Schools Beyond Screens, which advocated for the LAUSD policy. “This idea was sold to school districts without really any data to back it up. It was really a sales pitch.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-566010757.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097074\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-566010757.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-566010757-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-566010757-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students in Karen Finkel’s class at Broadacres Elementary School in Carson explore the possibilities with their new LAUSD-provided iPads on Aug. 27, 2013. (Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>While 1:1 device programs first jumped significantly in 2010, Horvath said, they became pervasive during the COVID-19 pandemic. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many school districts used federal grants to buy and distribute technology to their students at home, which allowed teachers to continue connecting with their classes and provide some instruction — if limited.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s a Band-Aid,” Horvath said. “The problem is, [districts] invested so much in the tech infrastructure that when COVID ended, rather than pulling the Band-Aid off and going back to what we know works, we just stuck with it.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Schools Beyond Screens\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In 2025, after California passed statewide legislation restricting students’ cellphone use in school, a group of Los Angeles parents founded Schools Beyond Screens, asking LAUSD to rethink its technology policies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“When I toured 10 local public elementary schools to decide where my kid was going to go, I was completely appalled to see kindergartners on almost every single school tour sitting on computers with headphones on in a darkened room,” Meksin said. They were “not looking at the teacher, not looking at each other. A lot of times, the kids were just scrolling on YouTube.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meksin and other parents spent months rallying supporters on dozens of district campuses, flooded the public comment period of school board meetings, lobbied district representatives and board members, and redlined draft legislation before passing a slate of historic policies in June. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1999\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-14-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095057\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-14-MC_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-14-MC_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-14-MC_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1999px) 100vw, 1999px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Audubon Elementary School on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026, in Foster City. (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>Beginning this fall, the country’s second-largest school district banned the use of student digital devices in early education through first-grade classrooms, and put strict minute caps on older students’ screen time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>LAUSD also rolled back its 1:1 device program, no longer making it the default for a student entering the district to be issued a personal tablet or laptop to use in the classroom and at home. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We have to acknowledge that we now know more,” said LAUSD board member Nick Melvoin, who put forward the district’s “Using Technology With Intention” resolution that passed in April. “Yes, we’ve seen some academic benefits, but we’ve also seen a lot of the harms with kids on screens and the addictive nature of things like YouTube algorithms and all that.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“When you know better, you need to do better,” he continued. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">‘A hard Pandora’s box to close’\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Parents in the Bay Area said they also started to question school device use after seeing declines in their children’s learning outcomes. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Nationally, standardized reading and math test scores were lower in 2025 than they were in 2015 in \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/upshot/test-scores-school-districts-us.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iFA.G_Ub.cXbz5_-EC4R3&smid=url-share\">83% and 70% of school districts\u003c/a>, respectively. School districts have cited the pandemic as one of the main causes for a dip in the early 2020s, but scores haven’t rebounded since then as education professionals had hoped. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>San Mateo–Foster City’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/upshot/look-up-district-test-scores.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iFA.zJm-.fi1gEuALEaT6&smid=url-share\">reading scores declined\u003c/a> by 1.2 grade levels over the 10-year period, with the sharpest drop coming between 2022 and 2025. Math scores followed a similar trend. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1999\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-02-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-02-MC_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-02-MC_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-02-MC_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1999px) 100vw, 1999px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Suki Reddy poses for a portrait in Leo J. Ryan Park on Aug. 12, 2026, in San Mateo. (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>“It made me look at their curriculum more closely, look at the materials they had and the distractions they were up against,” Reddy said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“There was no textbook where [students] could go back and forth between pages to see how to do something and where [they’re] getting things wrong,” she continued. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Despite growing anecdotal concern and research revealing the pitfalls of ed tech, Meksin said rolling it back “was a hard Pandora’s box to close.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>During the 2014-15 school year, California public school districts transitioned statewide standardized testing online with the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP), eliminating the need for Scantron forms and #2 pencils. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In some districts, digital testing software is also used to track student benchmarks throughout the year and determine which students are placed into advanced courses or receive extra support. Reading quizzes and other small assessments are often embedded in online learning management systems.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Parents said apps such as i-Ready, a digital program that provides diagnostic math and language arts testing and associated curriculum, are now too ingrained to remove — even if their merit is in question. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“There’s no evidence that it actually helps kids, and a lot of anecdotal evidence that what it does do is create a distance between the student and the teacher, create a lot of confusion and anxiety for the parent because they’re getting these scores and they don’t know what they mean,” Candace Wei, a parent in the Palo Alto Unified School District, said of i-Ready’s format. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She said despite this, when Mountain View’s school district tried to get rid of the software, “parents revolted.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“They said, ‘If our kids don’t do the i-Ready curriculum, how will they be prepared for the diagnostic [test]? How will they get into honors algebra?” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Mountain View Whisman School District spokesperson Shelly Hausman said the district is moving away from using i-Ready diagnostic assessments this year. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“MVWSD is moving toward teacher-created tests that are more closely aligned with California state standards and statewide tests,” she said via email. “This work, based on the district’s systems study, ensures our benchmark assessments align with the rigor of state SBAC assessments.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This year, fifth- through eighth-grade students will still take i-Ready math diagnostic exams three times. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For now, i-Ready Math is one of two measures used to determine their placement in math classes, she said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Using momentum\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>After Los Angeles’ historic resolution this spring, though, their tech-limiting movement has gained traction.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We saw a massive influx of interest from across the country, people signing up on our website and emailing and asking, ‘How do I start a chapter?’” Meksin said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are now more than 200 chapters in 38 states, and Schools Beyond Screens is \u003ca href=\"https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1k46VkFBIFgETIErq09JsqIASJzOCAnPe1JcODxOA-sg/edit?gid=1633699863#gid=1633699863\">tracking more than 70 districts\u003c/a> that have changed or are considering new tech policies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1998\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081726-SFUSDFirstDay-20-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095609\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081726-SFUSDFirstDay-20-MC_qed.jpg 1998w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081726-SFUSDFirstDay-20-MC_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081726-SFUSDFirstDay-20-MC_qed-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1998px) 100vw, 1998px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students arrive at Jose Ortega Elementary School for the first day of their school year on Aug. 17, 2026, in San Francisco. (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>The Bay Area has 11 chapters, including San Mateo’s “\u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/people/Intentional-Tech-in-SchoolsSMFCSD/61589993704088/\">Intentional Tech in Schools\u003c/a>.” More than 580 SMFCSD parents have signed a petition that the group circulated, urging the district to consider a slew of policies modeled after those in Los Angeles. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In a message to parents just a week before the school year began this month, Superintendent Diego Ochoa announced that the district would transition away from assigning devices to every student in transitional kindergarten through second grade, and said it’s implementing a new “print-first” math curriculum in elementary schools. SMFCSD is also establishing a technology task force and plans to move toward replacing its 1:1 device strategy with Chromebook carts. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Reddy said that at her child’s back-to-school night earlier this month, multiple teachers told parents that students wouldn’t be allowed to use Chromebooks during class downtime, and that the school planned to restrict use during passing periods, P.E. and lunch. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Some of the educators also said that they planned to give out handwritten assignments and project lessons on a single screen at the front of the classroom, instead of having students follow along on their own devices.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s something. However, it isn’t enough,” Reddy said. “Technology evolves way faster than policy, so we can’t keep sticking to these old-school ways of taking a long time with lengthy stakeholder processes for every decision.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Reddy and other SMFCSD parents plan to attend the district’s school board meeting on Thursday to push for their more robust requests. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, groups in Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, San Francisco and Oakland are also organizing as school resumes, circulating petitions and connecting parents to drum up support at school board meetings. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many said as they look toward the November election, they’ll also be considering school board candidates’ stance on technology reform at the ballot box. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I will absolutely be thinking about sensible screen policy platforms when it comes to voting for any school board member, now and in the future,” said Miranda Arly, who started a Schools Beyond Screens chapter for the Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Los Altos school districts in May. “I’m paying more attention than I ever would have before.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But Reddy’s son didn’t have to use his personal tablet to watch videos in bed. He could open YouTube on his school-issued Chromebook. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“They had less controls on their school computer than families have,” Reddy said. “There’s families who don’t have any phones or iPads for their kids. The only access that their kids are getting is through the school computer.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“They had less controls on their school computer than families have,” Reddy said. “There’s families who don’t have any phones or iPads for their kids. The only access that their kids are getting is through the school computer.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Reddy’s two children are in the San Mateo–Foster City School District, which includes 21 elementary and middle schools across the two cities. For years, the district has issued each child a Chromebook and integrated them into students’ learning, using them for access to textbooks, class handouts and homework as early as transitional kindergarten.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Reddy’s two children are in the San Mateo–Foster City School District, which includes 21 elementary and middle schools across the two cities. For years, the district has issued each child a Chromebook and integrated them into students’ learning, using them for access to textbooks, class handouts and homework as early as transitional kindergarten.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-09-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095056\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-09-MC_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-09-MC_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-09-MC_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Bowditch Middle School on Wednesday, Aug.12, 2026, in Foster City.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-09-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095056\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Bowditch Middle School on Wednesday, Aug.12, 2026, in Foster City.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Last year, as Reddy became concerned about the amount of screen time her children had through school, she started to speak with other parents who were also \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/66517/families-and-teachers-are-questioning-ed-tech-are-schools-and-districts-starting-to-listen\">growing worried\u003c/a>. They saw their kids getting distracted by entertainment apps, noticed their attention spans deteriorating and their mental health suffering from the effects of spending hours online. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Last year, as Reddy became concerned about the amount of screen time her children had through school, she started to speak with other parents who were also \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/66517/families-and-teachers-are-questioning-ed-tech-are-schools-and-districts-starting-to-listen\">growing worried\u003c/a>. They saw their kids getting distracted by entertainment apps, noticed their attention spans deteriorating and their mental health suffering from the effects of spending hours online. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>While many parents already had their own rules for their kids’ use of social media and personal devices, educational technology had opened up a new front. Even when guardrails were put in place to limit the school devices’ usage, parents learned that children had found tricks to bypass protections.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>While many parents already had their own rules for their kids’ use of social media and personal devices, educational technology had opened up a new front. Even when guardrails were put in place to limit the school devices’ usage, parents learned that children had found tricks to bypass protections.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>SMFCSD spokesperson Diego Perez said via email that the district has “a ton of restrictions” on its Chromebooks but did not respond to direct questions about whether YouTube was blocked on the devices.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“It really made me realize it’s time to look at schools,” Reddy said. “That’s when I started asking questions directly to them.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“It really made me realize it’s time to look at schools,” Reddy said. “That’s when I started asking questions directly to them.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"sizes": "(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/StudentsTabletsGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097071\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/StudentsTabletsGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/StudentsTabletsGetty-160x111.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/StudentsTabletsGetty-1536x1064.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students explore the possibilities with their new LAUSD-provided iPads on Aug. 27, 2013. \u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/StudentsTabletsGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097071\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students explore the possibilities with their new LAUSD-provided iPads on Aug. 27, 2013. \u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Over the last 15 years, classroom technology use has increased rapidly in districts across the country. Most now have 1:1 device programs, sending children as young as 5 and 6 home with personal tablets or computers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But as more research emerges about the potential harms of screen use for children, while test scores in schools across the U.S. struggle to rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic, districts are at an inflection point. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But as more research emerges about the potential harms of screen use for children, while test scores in schools across the U.S. struggle to rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic, districts are at an inflection point. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>California has mandated \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12094226/ousd-cellphone-ban-for-students-takes-effect-on-the-first-day-of-the-school-year\">school cellphone restrictions\u003c/a> across the state, and parents in the Bay Area are pushing their school boards and administrators to pass new policies that limit screen time and institute content guardrails for students — following in the footsteps of the Los Angeles Unified School District, whose board passed a landmark resolution this year. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>California has mandated \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12094226/ousd-cellphone-ban-for-students-takes-effect-on-the-first-day-of-the-school-year\">school cellphone restrictions\u003c/a> across the state, and parents in the Bay Area are pushing their school boards and administrators to pass new policies that limit screen time and institute content guardrails for students — following in the footsteps of the Los Angeles Unified School District, whose board passed a landmark resolution this year. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“We’re not anti-technology,” Reddy said. “We’re very much a group in the Bay Area. Many parents work in the tech industry and work for the very companies who produce these tech tools. But because of that, we have a very unique stance where we recognize that there’s not just an upside to this — there are actually a lot of potential problems.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“We’re not anti-technology,” Reddy said. “We’re very much a group in the Bay Area. Many parents work in the tech industry and work for the very companies who produce these tech tools. But because of that, we have a very unique stance where we recognize that there’s not just an upside to this — there are actually a lot of potential problems.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The rise of ed tech\u003c/h2>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>One-to-one device programs are now in 88% of public schools across the U.S., according to \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/learn/press-release/more-half-public-school-leaders-say-cell-phones-hurt-academic-performance\">data from the National Center for Education Statistics\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>One-to-one device programs are now in 88% of public schools across the U.S., according to \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/learn/press-release/more-half-public-school-leaders-say-cell-phones-hurt-academic-performance\">data from the National Center for Education Statistics\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They gained traction throughout the 2010s, according to neuroscientist and former teacher Jared Cooney Horvath, who said education technology companies pitched their products as an unrivaled opportunity to individualize learning and, later, as the great equalizer for students across demographic groups.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>They gained traction throughout the 2010s, according to neuroscientist and former teacher Jared Cooney Horvath, who said education technology companies pitched their products as an unrivaled opportunity to individualize learning and, later, as the great equalizer for students across demographic groups.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Put a Chromebook in the hand of every child, and that’s how you’re going to close the equity gap,” said Anya Meksin, the deputy director of parent organization Schools Beyond Screens, which advocated for the LAUSD policy. “This idea was sold to school districts without really any data to back it up. It was really a sales pitch.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“Put a Chromebook in the hand of every child, and that’s how you’re going to close the equity gap,” said Anya Meksin, the deputy director of parent organization Schools Beyond Screens, which advocated for the LAUSD policy. “This idea was sold to school districts without really any data to back it up. It was really a sales pitch.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"sizes": "(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-566010757.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097074\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-566010757.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-566010757-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-566010757-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students in Karen Finkel’s class at Broadacres Elementary School in Carson explore the possibilities with their new LAUSD-provided iPads on Aug. 27, 2013. \u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-566010757.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097074\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students in Karen Finkel’s class at Broadacres Elementary School in Carson explore the possibilities with their new LAUSD-provided iPads on Aug. 27, 2013. \u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>While 1:1 device programs first jumped significantly in 2010, Horvath said, they became pervasive during the COVID-19 pandemic. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Many school districts used federal grants to buy and distribute technology to their students at home, which allowed teachers to continue connecting with their classes and provide some instruction — if limited.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“It’s a Band-Aid,” Horvath said. “The problem is, [districts] invested so much in the tech infrastructure that when COVID ended, rather than pulling the Band-Aid off and going back to what we know works, we just stuck with it.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In 2025, after California passed statewide legislation restricting students’ cellphone use in school, a group of Los Angeles parents founded Schools Beyond Screens, asking LAUSD to rethink its technology policies.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“When I toured 10 local public elementary schools to decide where my kid was going to go, I was completely appalled to see kindergartners on almost every single school tour sitting on computers with headphones on in a darkened room,” Meksin said. They were “not looking at the teacher, not looking at each other. A lot of times, the kids were just scrolling on YouTube.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Meksin and other parents spent months rallying supporters on dozens of district campuses, flooded the public comment period of school board meetings, lobbied district representatives and board members, and redlined draft legislation before passing a slate of historic policies in June. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-14-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095057\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-14-MC_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-14-MC_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-14-MC_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Audubon Elementary School on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026, in Foster City.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-14-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095057\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Audubon Elementary School on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026, in Foster City.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Beginning this fall, the country’s second-largest school district banned the use of student digital devices in early education through first-grade classrooms, and put strict minute caps on older students’ screen time. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“We have to acknowledge that we now know more,” said LAUSD board member Nick Melvoin, who put forward the district’s “Using Technology With Intention” resolution that passed in April. “Yes, we’ve seen some academic benefits, but we’ve also seen a lot of the harms with kids on screens and the addictive nature of things like YouTube algorithms and all that.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Parents in the Bay Area said they also started to question school device use after seeing declines in their children’s learning outcomes. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Nationally, standardized reading and math test scores were lower in 2025 than they were in 2015 in \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/upshot/test-scores-school-districts-us.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iFA.G_Ub.cXbz5_-EC4R3&smid=url-share\">83% and 70% of school districts\u003c/a>, respectively. School districts have cited the pandemic as one of the main causes for a dip in the early 2020s, but scores haven’t rebounded since then as education professionals had hoped. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Nationally, standardized reading and math test scores were lower in 2025 than they were in 2015 in \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/upshot/test-scores-school-districts-us.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iFA.G_Ub.cXbz5_-EC4R3&smid=url-share\">83% and 70% of school districts\u003c/a>, respectively. School districts have cited the pandemic as one of the main causes for a dip in the early 2020s, but scores haven’t rebounded since then as education professionals had hoped. \u003c/p>\n"
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"\n\u003cp>San Mateo–Foster City’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/upshot/look-up-district-test-scores.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iFA.zJm-.fi1gEuALEaT6&smid=url-share\">reading scores declined\u003c/a> by 1.2 grade levels over the 10-year period, with the sharpest drop coming between 2022 and 2025. Math scores followed a similar trend. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-02-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-02-MC_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-02-MC_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-02-MC_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Suki Reddy poses for a portrait in Leo J. Ryan Park on Aug. 12, 2026, in San Mateo.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-02-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097080\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Suki Reddy poses for a portrait in Leo J. Ryan Park on Aug. 12, 2026, in San Mateo.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“It made me look at their curriculum more closely, look at the materials they had and the distractions they were up against,” Reddy said.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“There was no textbook where [students] could go back and forth between pages to see how to do something and where [they’re] getting things wrong,” she continued. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Despite growing anecdotal concern and research revealing the pitfalls of ed tech, Meksin said rolling it back “was a hard Pandora’s box to close.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>During the 2014-15 school year, California public school districts transitioned statewide standardized testing online with the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP), eliminating the need for Scantron forms and #2 pencils. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In some districts, digital testing software is also used to track student benchmarks throughout the year and determine which students are placed into advanced courses or receive extra support. Reading quizzes and other small assessments are often embedded in online learning management systems.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In some districts, digital testing software is also used to track student benchmarks throughout the year and determine which students are placed into advanced courses or receive extra support. Reading quizzes and other small assessments are often embedded in online learning management systems.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Parents said apps such as i-Ready, a digital program that provides diagnostic math and language arts testing and associated curriculum, are now too ingrained to remove — even if their merit is in question. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“There’s no evidence that it actually helps kids, and a lot of anecdotal evidence that what it does do is create a distance between the student and the teacher, create a lot of confusion and anxiety for the parent because they’re getting these scores and they don’t know what they mean,” Candace Wei, a parent in the Palo Alto Unified School District, said of i-Ready’s format. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>She said despite this, when Mountain View’s school district tried to get rid of the software, “parents revolted.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“They said, ‘If our kids don’t do the i-Ready curriculum, how will they be prepared for the diagnostic [test]? How will they get into honors algebra?” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Mountain View Whisman School District spokesperson Shelly Hausman said the district is moving away from using i-Ready diagnostic assessments this year. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“MVWSD is moving toward teacher-created tests that are more closely aligned with California state standards and statewide tests,” she said via email. “This work, based on the district’s systems study, ensures our benchmark assessments align with the rigor of state SBAC assessments.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This year, fifth- through eighth-grade students will still take i-Ready math diagnostic exams three times. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>For now, i-Ready Math is one of two measures used to determine their placement in math classes, she said.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>After Los Angeles’ historic resolution this spring, though, their tech-limiting movement has gained traction.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“We saw a massive influx of interest from across the country, people signing up on our website and emailing and asking, ‘How do I start a chapter?’” Meksin said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There are now more than 200 chapters in 38 states, and Schools Beyond Screens is \u003ca href=\"https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1k46VkFBIFgETIErq09JsqIASJzOCAnPe1JcODxOA-sg/edit?gid=1633699863#gid=1633699863\">tracking more than 70 districts\u003c/a> that have changed or are considering new tech policies.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081726-SFUSDFirstDay-20-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095609\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081726-SFUSDFirstDay-20-MC_qed.jpg 1998w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081726-SFUSDFirstDay-20-MC_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081726-SFUSDFirstDay-20-MC_qed-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students arrive at Jose Ortega Elementary School for the first day of their school year on Aug. 17, 2026, in San Francisco.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081726-SFUSDFirstDay-20-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095609\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students arrive at Jose Ortega Elementary School for the first day of their school year on Aug. 17, 2026, in San Francisco.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The Bay Area has 11 chapters, including San Mateo’s “\u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/people/Intentional-Tech-in-SchoolsSMFCSD/61589993704088/\">Intentional Tech in Schools\u003c/a>.” More than 580 SMFCSD parents have signed a petition that the group circulated, urging the district to consider a slew of policies modeled after those in Los Angeles. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The Bay Area has 11 chapters, including San Mateo’s “\u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/people/Intentional-Tech-in-SchoolsSMFCSD/61589993704088/\">Intentional Tech in Schools\u003c/a>.” More than 580 SMFCSD parents have signed a petition that the group circulated, urging the district to consider a slew of policies modeled after those in Los Angeles. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In a message to parents just a week before the school year began this month, Superintendent Diego Ochoa announced that the district would transition away from assigning devices to every student in transitional kindergarten through second grade, and said it’s implementing a new “print-first” math curriculum in elementary schools. SMFCSD is also establishing a technology task force and plans to move toward replacing its 1:1 device strategy with Chromebook carts. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In a message to parents just a week before the school year began this month, Superintendent Diego Ochoa announced that the district would transition away from assigning devices to every student in transitional kindergarten through second grade, and said it’s implementing a new “print-first” math curriculum in elementary schools. SMFCSD is also establishing a technology task force and plans to move toward replacing its 1:1 device strategy with Chromebook carts. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Reddy said that at her child’s back-to-school night earlier this month, multiple teachers told parents that students wouldn’t be allowed to use Chromebooks during class downtime, and that the school planned to restrict use during passing periods, P.E. and lunch. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Reddy said that at her child’s back-to-school night earlier this month, multiple teachers told parents that students wouldn’t be allowed to use Chromebooks during class downtime, and that the school planned to restrict use during passing periods, P.E. and lunch. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Some of the educators also said that they planned to give out handwritten assignments and project lessons on a single screen at the front of the classroom, instead of having students follow along on their own devices.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“It’s something. However, it isn’t enough,” Reddy said. “Technology evolves way faster than policy, so we can’t keep sticking to these old-school ways of taking a long time with lengthy stakeholder processes for every decision.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“It’s something. However, it isn’t enough,” Reddy said. “Technology evolves way faster than policy, so we can’t keep sticking to these old-school ways of taking a long time with lengthy stakeholder processes for every decision.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Reddy and other SMFCSD parents plan to attend the district’s school board meeting on Thursday to push for their more robust requests. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, groups in Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, San Francisco and Oakland are also organizing as school resumes, circulating petitions and connecting parents to drum up support at school board meetings. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Many said as they look toward the November election, they’ll also be considering school board candidates’ stance on technology reform at the ballot box. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“I will absolutely be thinking about sensible screen policy platforms when it comes to voting for any school board member, now and in the future,” said Miranda Arly, who started a Schools Beyond Screens chapter for the Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Los Altos school districts in May. “I’m paying more attention than I ever would have before.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“I will absolutely be thinking about sensible screen policy platforms when it comes to voting for any school board member, now and in the future,” said Miranda Arly, who started a Schools Beyond Screens chapter for the Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Los Altos school districts in May. “I’m paying more attention than I ever would have before.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"excerpt": "Classroom technology use has exploded in districts across the U.S., especially since the pandemic. Now, a growing movement of parents is asking schools to rethink their policies.",
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"title": "‘A Chromebook in the Hand of Every Child.’ Did Schools Go Too Far? | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>Last year, Suki Reddy started to enter her third-grader’s bedroom to find him, face \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/66537/the-school-year-begins-in-la-with-one-big-change-limited-screen-time\">lit up behind the glow of a computer\u003c/a>, watching YouTube. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This didn’t seem possible, she thought; she had put controls on his iPad and closely monitored his screen time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But Reddy’s son didn’t have to use his personal tablet to watch videos in bed. He could open YouTube on his school-issued Chromebook. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“They had less controls on their school computer than families have,” Reddy said. “There’s families who don’t have any phones or iPads for their kids. The only access that their kids are getting is through the school computer.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Reddy’s two children are in the San Mateo–Foster City School District, which includes 21 elementary and middle schools across the two cities. For years, the district has issued each child a Chromebook and integrated them into students’ learning, using them for access to textbooks, class handouts and homework as early as transitional kindergarten.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1999\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-09-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095056\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-09-MC_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-09-MC_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-09-MC_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1999px) 100vw, 1999px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Bowditch Middle School on Wednesday, Aug.12, 2026, in Foster City. (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>Last year, as Reddy became concerned about the amount of screen time her children had through school, she started to speak with other parents who were also \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/66517/families-and-teachers-are-questioning-ed-tech-are-schools-and-districts-starting-to-listen\">growing worried\u003c/a>. They saw their kids getting distracted by entertainment apps, noticed their attention spans deteriorating and their mental health suffering from the effects of spending hours online. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While many parents already had their own rules for their kids’ use of social media and personal devices, educational technology had opened up a new front. Even when guardrails were put in place to limit the school devices’ usage, parents learned that children had found tricks to bypass protections.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>SMFCSD spokesperson Diego Perez said via email that the district has “a ton of restrictions” on its Chromebooks but did not respond to direct questions about whether YouTube was blocked on the devices.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It really made me realize it’s time to look at schools,” Reddy said. “That’s when I started asking questions directly to them.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1386\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/StudentsTabletsGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097071\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/StudentsTabletsGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/StudentsTabletsGetty-160x111.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/StudentsTabletsGetty-1536x1064.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students explore the possibilities with their new LAUSD-provided iPads on Aug. 27, 2013. (Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>Over the last 15 years, classroom technology use has increased rapidly in districts across the country. Most now have 1:1 device programs, sending children as young as 5 and 6 home with personal tablets or computers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But as more research emerges about the potential harms of screen use for children, while test scores in schools across the U.S. struggle to rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic, districts are at an inflection point. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California has mandated \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12094226/ousd-cellphone-ban-for-students-takes-effect-on-the-first-day-of-the-school-year\">school cellphone restrictions\u003c/a> across the state, and parents in the Bay Area are pushing their school boards and administrators to pass new policies that limit screen time and institute content guardrails for students — following in the footsteps of the Los Angeles Unified School District, whose board passed a landmark resolution this year. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We’re not anti-technology,” Reddy said. “We’re very much a group in the Bay Area. Many parents work in the tech industry and work for the very companies who produce these tech tools. But because of that, we have a very unique stance where we recognize that there’s not just an upside to this — there are actually a lot of potential problems.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The rise of ed tech\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One-to-one device programs are now in 88% of public schools across the U.S., according to \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/learn/press-release/more-half-public-school-leaders-say-cell-phones-hurt-academic-performance\">data from the National Center for Education Statistics\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They gained traction throughout the 2010s, according to neuroscientist and former teacher Jared Cooney Horvath, who said education technology companies pitched their products as an unrivaled opportunity to individualize learning and, later, as the great equalizer for students across demographic groups.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Put a Chromebook in the hand of every child, and that’s how you’re going to close the equity gap,” said Anya Meksin, the deputy director of parent organization Schools Beyond Screens, which advocated for the LAUSD policy. “This idea was sold to school districts without really any data to back it up. It was really a sales pitch.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-566010757.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097074\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-566010757.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-566010757-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-566010757-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students in Karen Finkel’s class at Broadacres Elementary School in Carson explore the possibilities with their new LAUSD-provided iPads on Aug. 27, 2013. (Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>While 1:1 device programs first jumped significantly in 2010, Horvath said, they became pervasive during the COVID-19 pandemic. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many school districts used federal grants to buy and distribute technology to their students at home, which allowed teachers to continue connecting with their classes and provide some instruction — if limited.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s a Band-Aid,” Horvath said. “The problem is, [districts] invested so much in the tech infrastructure that when COVID ended, rather than pulling the Band-Aid off and going back to what we know works, we just stuck with it.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Schools Beyond Screens\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In 2025, after California passed statewide legislation restricting students’ cellphone use in school, a group of Los Angeles parents founded Schools Beyond Screens, asking LAUSD to rethink its technology policies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“When I toured 10 local public elementary schools to decide where my kid was going to go, I was completely appalled to see kindergartners on almost every single school tour sitting on computers with headphones on in a darkened room,” Meksin said. They were “not looking at the teacher, not looking at each other. A lot of times, the kids were just scrolling on YouTube.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meksin and other parents spent months rallying supporters on dozens of district campuses, flooded the public comment period of school board meetings, lobbied district representatives and board members, and redlined draft legislation before passing a slate of historic policies in June. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1999\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-14-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095057\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-14-MC_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-14-MC_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-14-MC_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1999px) 100vw, 1999px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Audubon Elementary School on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026, in Foster City. (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>Beginning this fall, the country’s second-largest school district banned the use of student digital devices in early education through first-grade classrooms, and put strict minute caps on older students’ screen time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>LAUSD also rolled back its 1:1 device program, no longer making it the default for a student entering the district to be issued a personal tablet or laptop to use in the classroom and at home. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We have to acknowledge that we now know more,” said LAUSD board member Nick Melvoin, who put forward the district’s “Using Technology With Intention” resolution that passed in April. “Yes, we’ve seen some academic benefits, but we’ve also seen a lot of the harms with kids on screens and the addictive nature of things like YouTube algorithms and all that.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“When you know better, you need to do better,” he continued. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">‘A hard Pandora’s box to close’\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Parents in the Bay Area said they also started to question school device use after seeing declines in their children’s learning outcomes. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Nationally, standardized reading and math test scores were lower in 2025 than they were in 2015 in \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/upshot/test-scores-school-districts-us.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iFA.G_Ub.cXbz5_-EC4R3&smid=url-share\">83% and 70% of school districts\u003c/a>, respectively. School districts have cited the pandemic as one of the main causes for a dip in the early 2020s, but scores haven’t rebounded since then as education professionals had hoped. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>San Mateo–Foster City’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/upshot/look-up-district-test-scores.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iFA.zJm-.fi1gEuALEaT6&smid=url-share\">reading scores declined\u003c/a> by 1.2 grade levels over the 10-year period, with the sharpest drop coming between 2022 and 2025. Math scores followed a similar trend. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1999\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-02-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12097080\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-02-MC_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-02-MC_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081226-SchoolTechBans-02-MC_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1999px) 100vw, 1999px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Suki Reddy poses for a portrait in Leo J. Ryan Park on Aug. 12, 2026, in San Mateo. (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>“It made me look at their curriculum more closely, look at the materials they had and the distractions they were up against,” Reddy said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“There was no textbook where [students] could go back and forth between pages to see how to do something and where [they’re] getting things wrong,” she continued. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Despite growing anecdotal concern and research revealing the pitfalls of ed tech, Meksin said rolling it back “was a hard Pandora’s box to close.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>During the 2014-15 school year, California public school districts transitioned statewide standardized testing online with the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP), eliminating the need for Scantron forms and #2 pencils. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In some districts, digital testing software is also used to track student benchmarks throughout the year and determine which students are placed into advanced courses or receive extra support. Reading quizzes and other small assessments are often embedded in online learning management systems.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Parents said apps such as i-Ready, a digital program that provides diagnostic math and language arts testing and associated curriculum, are now too ingrained to remove — even if their merit is in question. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“There’s no evidence that it actually helps kids, and a lot of anecdotal evidence that what it does do is create a distance between the student and the teacher, create a lot of confusion and anxiety for the parent because they’re getting these scores and they don’t know what they mean,” Candace Wei, a parent in the Palo Alto Unified School District, said of i-Ready’s format. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She said despite this, when Mountain View’s school district tried to get rid of the software, “parents revolted.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“They said, ‘If our kids don’t do the i-Ready curriculum, how will they be prepared for the diagnostic [test]? How will they get into honors algebra?” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Mountain View Whisman School District spokesperson Shelly Hausman said the district is moving away from using i-Ready diagnostic assessments this year. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“MVWSD is moving toward teacher-created tests that are more closely aligned with California state standards and statewide tests,” she said via email. “This work, based on the district’s systems study, ensures our benchmark assessments align with the rigor of state SBAC assessments.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This year, fifth- through eighth-grade students will still take i-Ready math diagnostic exams three times. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For now, i-Ready Math is one of two measures used to determine their placement in math classes, she said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Using momentum\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>After Los Angeles’ historic resolution this spring, though, their tech-limiting movement has gained traction.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We saw a massive influx of interest from across the country, people signing up on our website and emailing and asking, ‘How do I start a chapter?’” Meksin said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are now more than 200 chapters in 38 states, and Schools Beyond Screens is \u003ca href=\"https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1k46VkFBIFgETIErq09JsqIASJzOCAnPe1JcODxOA-sg/edit?gid=1633699863#gid=1633699863\">tracking more than 70 districts\u003c/a> that have changed or are considering new tech policies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1998\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081726-SFUSDFirstDay-20-MC_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095609\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081726-SFUSDFirstDay-20-MC_qed.jpg 1998w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081726-SFUSDFirstDay-20-MC_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/081726-SFUSDFirstDay-20-MC_qed-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1998px) 100vw, 1998px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Students arrive at Jose Ortega Elementary School for the first day of their school year on Aug. 17, 2026, in San Francisco. (Miles Cull/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>The Bay Area has 11 chapters, including San Mateo’s “\u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/people/Intentional-Tech-in-SchoolsSMFCSD/61589993704088/\">Intentional Tech in Schools\u003c/a>.” More than 580 SMFCSD parents have signed a petition that the group circulated, urging the district to consider a slew of policies modeled after those in Los Angeles. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In a message to parents just a week before the school year began this month, Superintendent Diego Ochoa announced that the district would transition away from assigning devices to every student in transitional kindergarten through second grade, and said it’s implementing a new “print-first” math curriculum in elementary schools. SMFCSD is also establishing a technology task force and plans to move toward replacing its 1:1 device strategy with Chromebook carts. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Reddy said that at her child’s back-to-school night earlier this month, multiple teachers told parents that students wouldn’t be allowed to use Chromebooks during class downtime, and that the school planned to restrict use during passing periods, P.E. and lunch. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Some of the educators also said that they planned to give out handwritten assignments and project lessons on a single screen at the front of the classroom, instead of having students follow along on their own devices.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s something. However, it isn’t enough,” Reddy said. “Technology evolves way faster than policy, so we can’t keep sticking to these old-school ways of taking a long time with lengthy stakeholder processes for every decision.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Reddy and other SMFCSD parents plan to attend the district’s school board meeting on Thursday to push for their more robust requests. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, groups in Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, San Francisco and Oakland are also organizing as school resumes, circulating petitions and connecting parents to drum up support at school board meetings. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many said as they look toward the November election, they’ll also be considering school board candidates’ stance on technology reform at the ballot box. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I will absolutely be thinking about sensible screen policy platforms when it comes to voting for any school board member, now and in the future,” said Miranda Arly, who started a Schools Beyond Screens chapter for the Sunnyvale, Mountain View and Los Altos school districts in May. “I’m paying more attention than I ever would have before.”\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "why-metas-landmark-settlement-could-be-social-medias-big-tobacco-moment",
"title": "Why Meta’s Landmark Settlement Could Be Social Media’s ‘Big Tobacco Moment’",
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"content": "\n\u003cp>Meta’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12096821/meta-states-agree-to-17-billion-settlement-in-child-safety-trial\">landmark child safety settlement\u003c/a> with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories on Wednesday could set a new industry standard for teen tech protections, potentially reshaping how young people interact with social media. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California Attorney General Rob Bonta warned other tech titans, including TikTok, Snap and YouTube, that the settlement creates what he called an “enforceable blueprint” for states.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We expect that other members of the industry … will adhere to essentially a similar set of remedies and protections for kids,” Bonta said during a press conference on Wednesday morning. “Whether we do that through litigation, through conversation and resolution, is really up to the other members of the industry.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The settlement agreement between Meta and the bipartisan coalition of states and territories was approved by federal district Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on Wednesday, halting the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12096121/she-died-by-design-meta-on-trial-over-child-safety\">ongoing child safety trial\u003c/a> led by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey. The states, on behalf of a larger coalition of 29, have accused the company of knowingly designing its products in ways that could harm children.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1440\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096038\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-2000x1125.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Chris Lewis, commissioner of consumer and senior protection of the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, cross-examines psychology professor Jean Twenge on Aug. 19, 2026, in an Oakland courtroom. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The settlement requires Meta to make significant changes to its Instagram and Facebook platforms and pay more than $17 billion in financial penalties to states over the next decade. It resolves a number of other pending state lawsuits against Meta, but \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095583/meta-hooked-kids-federal-trial-against-tech-giant-kicks-off-in-oakland\">thousands of other cases\u003c/a> filed by individuals and school districts will continue.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We have secured the changes we were after,” Bonta said of the settlement. “I don’t think we compromised on anything here.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Over the next six months, Meta will be required to institute a default daily time limit of two hours for users under 18, a nighttime block between midnight and 6 a.m. and a notification block overnight and during school hours. Those default settings can only be changed by a parent, and some would be expanded if other social media companies commit to similar terms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Their apps will also ban displaying the number of likes or reactions that users under 18 get on their posts, and ban image filters that imitate cosmetic procedures for those users. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta also committed to creating enhanced parent supervision tools, instituting more robust measures to detect users’ ages and bringing on an independent auditor “with expansive access to information and resources, regular reporting and the right to communicate concerns to the attorneys general.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This is a really strong down payment on protecting our kids,” Bonta said. “It is transformative. It is a watershed moment.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Marin resident Victoria Hinks, whose daughter Alexandra, nicknamed Owl, died by suicide at 16 after she said she was exposed to harmful content on social media, supported the settlement.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Outside the courthouse on Wednesday morning, she said that while the final dollar amount Meta will have to pay states doesn’t come close to the $1.4 trillion they initially sought, the $17.1 billion figure “is meaningful.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s not about the money — no amount of money is ever going to bring my daughter back,” she said. “But unfortunately, it’s the only language they understand, and it needs to hurt a little bit for them to make changes so that it doesn’t happen again.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California expects to receive upward of $2 billion in total, which Bonta said would be used for efforts addressing social media-related mental health issues, addictive tendencies and learning loss.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095836\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meta’s lead attorney Paul Schmidt delivers his opening statements for Meta on Aug. 18, 2026, in Oakland. Schmidt told the court that the company doesn’t deny that “some teens struggle to manage their time on social media,” and some people “post negative things.” (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In a statement, Meta’s chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the settlement would create a “new set of rules governing teens’ use of social media” — if other social media companies follow suit. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution,” Mahoney said. “We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Google, which operates YouTube, Snap and TikTok, did not immediately respond to requests for comment about whether they plan to consider making similar changes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California and 14 attorneys general have a \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-attorney-general-james-lead-coalition-suing-tiktok\">pending lawsuit\u003c/a> against TikTok over child safety dangers, and Bonta said his office is “very concerned” about YouTube. Pennsylvania’s attorney general on Tuesday \u003ca href=\"https://whyy.org/articles/snapchat-sued-pennsylvania-attorney-general/\">announced a similar lawsuit against Snap\u003c/a>, which operates Snapchat.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2290506003-1-scaled-e1787755545663.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096824\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">California Attorney General Rob Bonta speaks to reporters at a press conference after opening arguments took place in the Meta trial over a lawsuit brought by U.S. states about social media addiction at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Oakland, California, on Aug. 18, 2026. (Godofredo A. Vasquez/AFP via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We have a lawsuit against TikTok. We’re gonna be putting more time and attention and focus on that,” Bonta said. “With the momentum that we’ve built, the success that we have secured here, we will be focusing on the rest of the industry.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Wednesday’s deal followed days of what Bonta called “devastating” testimony for Meta from former employees, social media and mental health experts and, on Tuesday, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>On the stand, state lawyers showed Mosseri internal emails and documents that suggested Meta knowingly left information out of presentations and documents shared with him and other top executives at the request of company attorneys, who worried about exposing them to “litigation risk.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Mosseri defended the company’s decision to reduce the number of employees with access to internal research after the \u003cem>Wall Street Journal\u003c/em>’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039\">“Facebook Files”\u003c/a> exposed a bevy of Meta documents showing the platform had flaws that caused harm, but state attorneys questioned why lawyers, not product designers or researchers, would have had final say over what information was deemed important to bring to executives. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s telling that Meta settled midway through Instagram president Adam Mosseri’s testimony, and before CEO Mark Zuckerberg could take the stand,” Bonta said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jim Steyer, the founder of San Francisco-based research and advocacy nonprofit Common Sense Media, called the settlement “social media’s ‘Big Tobacco moment.’”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Still, he said, the work of state justice departments and advocates moving forward will be to “stay vigilant” about enforcement.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“These are major step forwards,” he said. “My guess is you will see additional legislation and potentially legal action to add further restrictions to the behavior of platforms like Facebook and Instagram, which have been the biggest offenders.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“But this is an ongoing battle,” he said.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“We expect that other members of the industry … will adhere to essentially a similar set of remedies and protections for kids,” Bonta said during a press conference on Wednesday morning. “Whether we do that through litigation, through conversation and resolution, is really up to the other members of the industry.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096038\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Chris Lewis, commissioner of consumer and senior protection of the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, cross-examines psychology professor Jean Twenge on Aug. 19, 2026, in an Oakland courtroom.\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The settlement requires Meta to make significant changes to its Instagram and Facebook platforms and pay more than $17 billion in financial penalties to states over the next decade. It resolves a number of other pending state lawsuits against Meta, but \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095583/meta-hooked-kids-federal-trial-against-tech-giant-kicks-off-in-oakland\">thousands of other cases\u003c/a> filed by individuals and school districts will continue.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The settlement requires Meta to make significant changes to its Instagram and Facebook platforms and pay more than $17 billion in financial penalties to states over the next decade. It resolves a number of other pending state lawsuits against Meta, but \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095583/meta-hooked-kids-federal-trial-against-tech-giant-kicks-off-in-oakland\">thousands of other cases\u003c/a> filed by individuals and school districts will continue.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“We have secured the changes we were after,” Bonta said of the settlement. “I don’t think we compromised on anything here.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Over the next six months, Meta will be required to institute a default daily time limit of two hours for users under 18, a nighttime block between midnight and 6 a.m. and a notification block overnight and during school hours. Those default settings can only be changed by a parent, and some would be expanded if other social media companies commit to similar terms.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Over the next six months, Meta will be required to institute a default daily time limit of two hours for users under 18, a nighttime block between midnight and 6 a.m. and a notification block overnight and during school hours. Those default settings can only be changed by a parent, and some would be expanded if other social media companies commit to similar terms.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Their apps will also ban displaying the number of likes or reactions that users under 18 get on their posts, and ban image filters that imitate cosmetic procedures for those users. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Meta also committed to creating enhanced parent supervision tools, instituting more robust measures to detect users’ ages and bringing on an independent auditor “with expansive access to information and resources, regular reporting and the right to communicate concerns to the attorneys general.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“This is a really strong down payment on protecting our kids,” Bonta said. “It is transformative. It is a watershed moment.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Marin resident Victoria Hinks, whose daughter Alexandra, nicknamed Owl, died by suicide at 16 after she said she was exposed to harmful content on social media, supported the settlement.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Outside the courthouse on Wednesday morning, she said that while the final dollar amount Meta will have to pay states doesn’t come close to the $1.4 trillion they initially sought, the $17.1 billion figure “is meaningful.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Outside the courthouse on Wednesday morning, she said that while the final dollar amount Meta will have to pay states doesn’t come close to the $1.4 trillion they initially sought, the $17.1 billion figure “is meaningful.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“It’s not about the money — no amount of money is ever going to bring my daughter back,” she said. “But unfortunately, it’s the only language they understand, and it needs to hurt a little bit for them to make changes so that it doesn’t happen again.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“It’s not about the money — no amount of money is ever going to bring my daughter back,” she said. “But unfortunately, it’s the only language they understand, and it needs to hurt a little bit for them to make changes so that it doesn’t happen again.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>California expects to receive upward of $2 billion in total, which Bonta said would be used for efforts addressing social media-related mental health issues, addictive tendencies and learning loss.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095836\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meta’s lead attorney Paul Schmidt delivers his opening statements for Meta on Aug. 18, 2026, in Oakland. Schmidt told the court that the company doesn’t deny that “some teens struggle to manage their time on social media,” and some people “post negative things.”\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095836\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meta’s lead attorney Paul Schmidt delivers his opening statements for Meta on Aug. 18, 2026, in Oakland. Schmidt told the court that the company doesn’t deny that “some teens struggle to manage their time on social media,” and some people “post negative things.”\u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In a statement, Meta’s chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the settlement would create a “new set of rules governing teens’ use of social media” — if other social media companies follow suit. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In a statement, Meta’s chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the settlement would create a “new set of rules governing teens’ use of social media” — if other social media companies follow suit. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution,” Mahoney said. “We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Google, which operates YouTube, Snap and TikTok, did not immediately respond to requests for comment about whether they plan to consider making similar changes.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>California and 14 attorneys general have a \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-attorney-general-james-lead-coalition-suing-tiktok\">pending lawsuit\u003c/a> against TikTok over child safety dangers, and Bonta said his office is “very concerned” about YouTube. Pennsylvania’s attorney general on Tuesday \u003ca href=\"https://whyy.org/articles/snapchat-sued-pennsylvania-attorney-general/\">announced a similar lawsuit against Snap\u003c/a>, which operates Snapchat.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2290506003-1-scaled-e1787755545663.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096824\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">California Attorney General Rob Bonta speaks to reporters at a press conference after opening arguments took place in the Meta trial over a lawsuit brought by U.S. states about social media addiction at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Oakland, California, on Aug. 18, 2026. \u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Godofredo A. Vasquez/AFP via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2290506003-1-scaled-e1787755545663.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096824\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">California Attorney General Rob Bonta speaks to reporters at a press conference after opening arguments took place in the Meta trial over a lawsuit brought by U.S. states about social media addiction at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Oakland, California, on Aug. 18, 2026. \u003ccite class=\"wp-inline-image-credit\"> (Godofredo A. Vasquez/AFP via Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“We have a lawsuit against TikTok. We’re gonna be putting more time and attention and focus on that,” Bonta said. “With the momentum that we’ve built, the success that we have secured here, we will be focusing on the rest of the industry.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Wednesday’s deal followed days of what Bonta called “devastating” testimony for Meta from former employees, social media and mental health experts and, on Tuesday, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Mosseri defended the company’s decision to reduce the number of employees with access to internal research after the \u003cem>Wall Street Journal\u003c/em>’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039\">“Facebook Files”\u003c/a> exposed a bevy of Meta documents showing the platform had flaws that caused harm, but state attorneys questioned why lawyers, not product designers or researchers, would have had final say over what information was deemed important to bring to executives. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“It’s telling that Meta settled midway through Instagram president Adam Mosseri’s testimony, and before CEO Mark Zuckerberg could take the stand,” Bonta said.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Jim Steyer, the founder of San Francisco-based research and advocacy nonprofit Common Sense Media, called the settlement “social media’s ‘Big Tobacco moment.’”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Still, he said, the work of state justice departments and advocates moving forward will be to “stay vigilant” about enforcement.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“These are major step forwards,” he said. “My guess is you will see additional legislation and potentially legal action to add further restrictions to the behavior of platforms like Facebook and Instagram, which have been the biggest offenders.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“These are major step forwards,” he said. “My guess is you will see additional legislation and potentially legal action to add further restrictions to the behavior of platforms like Facebook and Instagram, which have been the biggest offenders.\u003c/p>\n"
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"excerpt": "California Attorney General Rob Bonta warned other industry giants that states now have an “enforceable blueprint” for child social media protections.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>Meta’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12096821/meta-states-agree-to-17-billion-settlement-in-child-safety-trial\">landmark child safety settlement\u003c/a> with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories on Wednesday could set a new industry standard for teen tech protections, potentially reshaping how young people interact with social media. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California Attorney General Rob Bonta warned other tech titans, including TikTok, Snap and YouTube, that the settlement creates what he called an “enforceable blueprint” for states.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We expect that other members of the industry … will adhere to essentially a similar set of remedies and protections for kids,” Bonta said during a press conference on Wednesday morning. “Whether we do that through litigation, through conversation and resolution, is really up to the other members of the industry.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The settlement agreement between Meta and the bipartisan coalition of states and territories was approved by federal district Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on Wednesday, halting the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12096121/she-died-by-design-meta-on-trial-over-child-safety\">ongoing child safety trial\u003c/a> led by California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey. The states, on behalf of a larger coalition of 29, have accused the company of knowingly designing its products in ways that could harm children.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1440\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096038\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-2000x1125.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch3_VB-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Chris Lewis, commissioner of consumer and senior protection of the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, cross-examines psychology professor Jean Twenge on Aug. 19, 2026, in an Oakland courtroom. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The settlement requires Meta to make significant changes to its Instagram and Facebook platforms and pay more than $17 billion in financial penalties to states over the next decade. It resolves a number of other pending state lawsuits against Meta, but \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095583/meta-hooked-kids-federal-trial-against-tech-giant-kicks-off-in-oakland\">thousands of other cases\u003c/a> filed by individuals and school districts will continue.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We have secured the changes we were after,” Bonta said of the settlement. “I don’t think we compromised on anything here.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Over the next six months, Meta will be required to institute a default daily time limit of two hours for users under 18, a nighttime block between midnight and 6 a.m. and a notification block overnight and during school hours. Those default settings can only be changed by a parent, and some would be expanded if other social media companies commit to similar terms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Their apps will also ban displaying the number of likes or reactions that users under 18 get on their posts, and ban image filters that imitate cosmetic procedures for those users. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta also committed to creating enhanced parent supervision tools, instituting more robust measures to detect users’ ages and bringing on an independent auditor “with expansive access to information and resources, regular reporting and the right to communicate concerns to the attorneys general.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This is a really strong down payment on protecting our kids,” Bonta said. “It is transformative. It is a watershed moment.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Marin resident Victoria Hinks, whose daughter Alexandra, nicknamed Owl, died by suicide at 16 after she said she was exposed to harmful content on social media, supported the settlement.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Outside the courthouse on Wednesday morning, she said that while the final dollar amount Meta will have to pay states doesn’t come close to the $1.4 trillion they initially sought, the $17.1 billion figure “is meaningful.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s not about the money — no amount of money is ever going to bring my daughter back,” she said. “But unfortunately, it’s the only language they understand, and it needs to hurt a little bit for them to make changes so that it doesn’t happen again.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California expects to receive upward of $2 billion in total, which Bonta said would be used for efforts addressing social media-related mental health issues, addictive tendencies and learning loss.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095836\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch2_VB-KQED-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Meta’s lead attorney Paul Schmidt delivers his opening statements for Meta on Aug. 18, 2026, in Oakland. Schmidt told the court that the company doesn’t deny that “some teens struggle to manage their time on social media,” and some people “post negative things.” (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In a statement, Meta’s chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the settlement would create a “new set of rules governing teens’ use of social media” — if other social media companies follow suit. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution,” Mahoney said. “We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Google, which operates YouTube, Snap and TikTok, did not immediately respond to requests for comment about whether they plan to consider making similar changes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California and 14 attorneys general have a \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-attorney-general-james-lead-coalition-suing-tiktok\">pending lawsuit\u003c/a> against TikTok over child safety dangers, and Bonta said his office is “very concerned” about YouTube. Pennsylvania’s attorney general on Tuesday \u003ca href=\"https://whyy.org/articles/snapchat-sued-pennsylvania-attorney-general/\">announced a similar lawsuit against Snap\u003c/a>, which operates Snapchat.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/GettyImages-2290506003-1-scaled-e1787755545663.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096824\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">California Attorney General Rob Bonta speaks to reporters at a press conference after opening arguments took place in the Meta trial over a lawsuit brought by U.S. states about social media addiction at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Oakland, California, on Aug. 18, 2026. (Godofredo A. Vasquez/AFP via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We have a lawsuit against TikTok. We’re gonna be putting more time and attention and focus on that,” Bonta said. “With the momentum that we’ve built, the success that we have secured here, we will be focusing on the rest of the industry.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Wednesday’s deal followed days of what Bonta called “devastating” testimony for Meta from former employees, social media and mental health experts and, on Tuesday, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>On the stand, state lawyers showed Mosseri internal emails and documents that suggested Meta knowingly left information out of presentations and documents shared with him and other top executives at the request of company attorneys, who worried about exposing them to “litigation risk.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Mosseri defended the company’s decision to reduce the number of employees with access to internal research after the \u003cem>Wall Street Journal\u003c/em>’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039\">“Facebook Files”\u003c/a> exposed a bevy of Meta documents showing the platform had flaws that caused harm, but state attorneys questioned why lawyers, not product designers or researchers, would have had final say over what information was deemed important to bring to executives. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s telling that Meta settled midway through Instagram president Adam Mosseri’s testimony, and before CEO Mark Zuckerberg could take the stand,” Bonta said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Jim Steyer, the founder of San Francisco-based research and advocacy nonprofit Common Sense Media, called the settlement “social media’s ‘Big Tobacco moment.’”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Still, he said, the work of state justice departments and advocates moving forward will be to “stay vigilant” about enforcement.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“These are major step forwards,” he said. “My guess is you will see additional legislation and potentially legal action to add further restrictions to the behavior of platforms like Facebook and Instagram, which have been the biggest offenders.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“But this is an ongoing battle,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Meta, States Agree to $17 Billion Settlement in Child Safety Trial",
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"content": "\u003cp>The social media company Meta and states suing it have agreed to a proposed settlement that would resolve \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095583/meta-hooked-kids-federal-trial-against-tech-giant-kicks-off-in-oakland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a landmark federal child safety lawsuit\u003c/a> and could be a turning point for a wave of lawsuits against social media companies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey represented a larger consortium of states that alleged that Meta designed its apps — Facebook and Instagram — to be addictive to kids, knew about the risks those platforms posed, but hid that information from the public.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In addition to claims that Meta broke state consumer protection laws, the states accused Meta of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting data about children under the age of 13. Meta has a policy of not allowing kids under 13 on its platforms, but some skirt the rule by registering with false birth dates.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The proposed settlement would require Meta to pay $17 billion in penalties to the states over 10 years, and to make significant changes to how its platforms operate so that they are safer for minors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096040\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill delivered her opening statement in the state’s case against Meta on Aug. 18, 2026, in Oakland. O’Neill accused Meta of hiding its own research that showed children were being harmed by its platforms. Opening arguments began Tuesday in the federal suit brought by four attorneys general against Meta. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Today, we have secured a settlement with Meta that will make social media less dangerous for our kids and make a world of a difference for children and their families,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Meta has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms — and will do it within months,” he added.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta’s Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement the framework was groundbreaking and “will empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“But its success depends on all other social media platforms following Meta’s lead,” he said, making an explicit call for TikTok and YouTube to implement this same framework.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Tiktok and Google, which owns YouTube, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta has denied the allegations brought by the states.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Bonta’s office also said Meta had agreed to a default time limit of two hours for users under 18 and a nighttime block between midnight and 6am, both of which can only be lifted by a parent; default night and schooltime notification blocks; a ban on displaying the numbers of “likes” or reactions to posts made by minors; a ban on cosmetic surgery image filters for minors; and an option for young users to have a “non-personalized feed” that is not run by an algorithm targeting them with content.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta must also bring on an independent auditor with “expansive access to information and resources” and the right to communicate with the attorneys general, the announcement said, and would also be subject to an injunction “prohibiting it from making further false, misleading, or deceptive statements around its safety features.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I am proud to deliver this settlement that addresses the concerns at the core of our lawsuit and institutes real change, real transparency, and real enforceable protections for children on Facebook and Instagram — right now, no more waiting,” Bonta wrote.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/23-05448-ecf-572-1-exhibit-1-mdl-consent-judgment-final-settlment-agreement-fully-executed.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003cu>proposed settlement\u003c/u>\u003c/a> says a portion of the funds would go toward things like youth mental health programs, after school programs and crisis intervention services.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The trial started last week in federal court in Oakland, Calif., and was expected to run through early October. But the settlement announcement comes only midway through the trial’s second week.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1440\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch1_VB-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095995\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch1_VB-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch1_VB-2000x1125.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch1_VB-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch1_VB-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch1_VB-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch1_VB-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Arturo Béjar, a former Meta staffer and whistleblower, testified in court in Oakland, California, on Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Key testimony came from insiders who worked at Meta, including \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095886/former-meta-engineer-arturo-bejar-testifies-mark-zuckerberg-put-profits-over-child-safety\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003cu>whistleblower Arturo Béjar\u003c/u>\u003c/a>, who testified that the company culture was obsessed with increasing user numbers and that Meta’s internal studies showed that young users were exposed to harmful experiences at much higher rates than the company acknowledged publicly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yesterday, the states brought \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/08/25/nx-s1-5944266/adam-mosseri-instagram-meta-child-safety-trial\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003cu>Instagram head Adam Mosseri\u003c/u>\u003c/a> to the stand and questioned him about the effectiveness of some features added to Instagram to try to keep teens from using it too much. They accused Mosseri of publicly touting the use of one of those safety features — called “Take a Break,” a feature that nudged kids to close the app — when the reality was that it had very limited uptake by teens.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The proposed settlement must be approved by the judge in the case, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The case is part of a wave of lawsuits that has been compared to litigation against tobacco companies in the 1990s. Those suits led to record settlements, changes to the way the companies operate, and a shift in the public discourse about cigarettes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The case was consolidated from a series of lawsuits by attorneys general around the country against Meta, and the settlement resolves the cases and claims of 51 of those, according to the California Attorney General’s Office.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096040\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill delivered her opening statement in the state’s case against Meta on Aug. 18, 2026, in Oakland. O’Neill accused Meta of hiding its own research that showed children were being harmed by its platforms. Opening arguments began Tuesday in the federal suit brought by four attorneys general against Meta. \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Meta has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms — and will do it within months,” he added.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Meta’s Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement the framework was groundbreaking and “will empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Meta has denied the allegations brought by the states.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Bonta’s office also said Meta had agreed to a default time limit of two hours for users under 18 and a nighttime block between midnight and 6am, both of which can only be lifted by a parent; default night and schooltime notification blocks; a ban on displaying the numbers of “likes” or reactions to posts made by minors; a ban on cosmetic surgery image filters for minors; and an option for young users to have a “non-personalized feed” that is not run by an algorithm targeting them with content.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Meta must also bring on an independent auditor with “expansive access to information and resources” and the right to communicate with the attorneys general, the announcement said, and would also be subject to an injunction “prohibiting it from making further false, misleading, or deceptive statements around its safety features.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“I am proud to deliver this settlement that addresses the concerns at the core of our lawsuit and institutes real change, real transparency, and real enforceable protections for children on Facebook and Instagram — right now, no more waiting,” Bonta wrote.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“I am proud to deliver this settlement that addresses the concerns at the core of our lawsuit and institutes real change, real transparency, and real enforceable protections for children on Facebook and Instagram — right now, no more waiting,” Bonta wrote.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/23-05448-ecf-572-1-exhibit-1-mdl-consent-judgment-final-settlment-agreement-fully-executed.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003cu>proposed settlement\u003c/u>\u003c/a> says a portion of the funds would go toward things like youth mental health programs, after school programs and crisis intervention services.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The trial started last week in federal court in Oakland, Calif., and was expected to run through early October. But the settlement announcement comes only midway through the trial’s second week.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Key testimony came from insiders who worked at Meta, including \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095886/former-meta-engineer-arturo-bejar-testifies-mark-zuckerberg-put-profits-over-child-safety\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003cu>whistleblower Arturo Béjar\u003c/u>\u003c/a>, who testified that the company culture was obsessed with increasing user numbers and that Meta’s internal studies showed that young users were exposed to harmful experiences at much higher rates than the company acknowledged publicly.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Yesterday, the states brought \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/08/25/nx-s1-5944266/adam-mosseri-instagram-meta-child-safety-trial\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003cu>Instagram head Adam Mosseri\u003c/u>\u003c/a> to the stand and questioned him about the effectiveness of some features added to Instagram to try to keep teens from using it too much. They accused Mosseri of publicly touting the use of one of those safety features — called “Take a Break,” a feature that nudged kids to close the app — when the reality was that it had very limited uptake by teens.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The proposed settlement must be approved by the judge in the case, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The case was consolidated from a series of lawsuits by attorneys general around the country against Meta, and the settlement resolves the cases and claims of 51 of those, according to the California Attorney General’s Office.\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "The proposed settlement would require Meta to pay $17 billion in penalties over 10 years, and to make changes to make its platforms safer for minors.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The social media company Meta and states suing it have agreed to a proposed settlement that would resolve \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095583/meta-hooked-kids-federal-trial-against-tech-giant-kicks-off-in-oakland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">a landmark federal child safety lawsuit\u003c/a> and could be a turning point for a wave of lawsuits against social media companies.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey represented a larger consortium of states that alleged that Meta designed its apps — Facebook and Instagram — to be addictive to kids, knew about the risks those platforms posed, but hid that information from the public.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In addition to claims that Meta broke state consumer protection laws, the states accused Meta of violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting data about children under the age of 13. Meta has a policy of not allowing kids under 13 on its platforms, but some skirt the rule by registering with false birth dates.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The proposed settlement would require Meta to pay $17 billion in penalties to the states over 10 years, and to make significant changes to how its platforms operate so that they are safer for minors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1125\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12096040\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/MetaTrialSketch1_VB-KQED-1-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">California Deputy Attorney General Megan O’Neill delivered her opening statement in the state’s case against Meta on Aug. 18, 2026, in Oakland. O’Neill accused Meta of hiding its own research that showed children were being harmed by its platforms. Opening arguments began Tuesday in the federal suit brought by four attorneys general against Meta. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Today, we have secured a settlement with Meta that will make social media less dangerous for our kids and make a world of a difference for children and their families,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Meta has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms — and will do it within months,” he added.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta’s Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement the framework was groundbreaking and “will empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“But its success depends on all other social media platforms following Meta’s lead,” he said, making an explicit call for TikTok and YouTube to implement this same framework.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Tiktok and Google, which owns YouTube, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta has denied the allegations brought by the states.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Bonta’s office also said Meta had agreed to a default time limit of two hours for users under 18 and a nighttime block between midnight and 6am, both of which can only be lifted by a parent; default night and schooltime notification blocks; a ban on displaying the numbers of “likes” or reactions to posts made by minors; a ban on cosmetic surgery image filters for minors; and an option for young users to have a “non-personalized feed” that is not run by an algorithm targeting them with content.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meta must also bring on an independent auditor with “expansive access to information and resources” and the right to communicate with the attorneys general, the announcement said, and would also be subject to an injunction “prohibiting it from making further false, misleading, or deceptive statements around its safety features.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I am proud to deliver this settlement that addresses the concerns at the core of our lawsuit and institutes real change, real transparency, and real enforceable protections for children on Facebook and Instagram — right now, no more waiting,” Bonta wrote.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/23-05448-ecf-572-1-exhibit-1-mdl-consent-judgment-final-settlment-agreement-fully-executed.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003cu>proposed settlement\u003c/u>\u003c/a> says a portion of the funds would go toward things like youth mental health programs, after school programs and crisis intervention services.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The trial started last week in federal court in Oakland, Calif., and was expected to run through early October. But the settlement announcement comes only midway through the trial’s second week.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1440\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch1_VB-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12095995\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch1_VB-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch1_VB-2000x1125.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch1_VB-160x90.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch1_VB-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch1_VB-2048x1152.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/08/260819-MetaTrialSketch1_VB-1200x675.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Arturo Béjar, a former Meta staffer and whistleblower, testified in court in Oakland, California, on Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026. (Vicki Behringer for KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Key testimony came from insiders who worked at Meta, including \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12095886/former-meta-engineer-arturo-bejar-testifies-mark-zuckerberg-put-profits-over-child-safety\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003cu>whistleblower Arturo Béjar\u003c/u>\u003c/a>, who testified that the company culture was obsessed with increasing user numbers and that Meta’s internal studies showed that young users were exposed to harmful experiences at much higher rates than the company acknowledged publicly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yesterday, the states brought \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2026/08/25/nx-s1-5944266/adam-mosseri-instagram-meta-child-safety-trial\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u003cu>Instagram head Adam Mosseri\u003c/u>\u003c/a> to the stand and questioned him about the effectiveness of some features added to Instagram to try to keep teens from using it too much. They accused Mosseri of publicly touting the use of one of those safety features — called “Take a Break,” a feature that nudged kids to close the app — when the reality was that it had very limited uptake by teens.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The proposed settlement must be approved by the judge in the case, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The case is part of a wave of lawsuits that has been compared to litigation against tobacco companies in the 1990s. Those suits led to record settlements, changes to the way the companies operate, and a shift in the public discourse about cigarettes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The case was consolidated from a series of lawsuits by attorneys general around the country against Meta, and the settlement resolves the cases and claims of 51 of those, according to the California Attorney General’s Office.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"soldout": {
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