Encryption Policy 101
The internet today sits at a crossroads. Data breaches and hacks occur everyday, stealing massive amounts of private information from American citizens. Engineers and researchers play whack-a-mole around the clock against exploits and malicious parties. For engineers, it is largely a role of damage control, as they lack the resources to continually test for bugs in their systems, and oftentimes are still cleaning up from the last zero-day attack when a new bug is revealed. One strong weapon for fighting [...]
Here’s to seven years, App Store!
The number seven has long held considerable significance. The Babylonians gave us the seven-day week based on the (then known) seven heavenly bodies. There are seven notes on the musical scale. Seven colors in the color spectrum. Seven-minute workouts. And Seven and Seven makes for a tasty beverage. But today we celebrate another significant seven – that is, the number of years since the App Store revolutionized the software industry and sparked the vibrant app economy. When Apple’s App Store opened in 2008, [...]
App makers press White House on encryption
We have aggressively pressed the administration to steer clear of measures to weaken data encryption standards.The success of our member companies relies on the trust of users. If the government forcibly weakens our ability to protect data, it threatens the trusted relationship with consumers we have worked so hard to earn. Moreover, it's also bad for business and vastly increases the likelihood of catastrophic breaches. But not everyone sees it that way. At an October 2014 speech at the Brookings Institute, FBI Director [...]
Amy Gleason: White House Champion of Change
Yesterday, the White House honored ACT | The App Association member Amy Gleason as a Precision Medicine “Champion of Change.” Amy is the Chief Operating Officer of Tampa-based CareSync, a mobile platform that organizes a patient’s health records across all health systems into a single, comprehensive Health Timeline™. The company’s user-friendly applications empower patients to take control of their healthcare data and experience. After facing frustrations accessing medical data for her sick child, Amy was inspired to start CareSync. Without [...]
Wearable of the Week: Misfit Shine
In my introductory post for We Wear It, I said that part of our goal for the 99 days is to help people learn about the wide variety of wearable devices that are available, their various capabilities, how they work for different lifestyles, and how all of this health and fitness data fits into the policy picture. In other words, it’s more than just steps. Like last week’s wearable, doing all of this can also look great. Enter the Misfit [...]
Wearable Tech 101: Accelerometers
The wearables we’ve been testing for We Wear It have been very diverse: they measure lots of different things about their wearer, and often do it in very different ways. The one thing they all do, though, is count steps. Step-counting has been around for a while and, like high-waisted shorts and Sanka, recently has returned to vogue. This time around, however, counting steps has gotten a little smarter, a little more fashionable, and a lot more fun. https://flic.kr/p/8xEsW4 Figure [...]