A18 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, OCTOBER 25 , 2021
COMPANIES
S4 of Ashburn appointed Ron
Gibbs as vice president of
business development.
Abt Associates of Rockville
appointed Paul Faeth climate
and energy global technical
director.
Fairmont Washington of the
District appointed Nicole
Majorczyk director of
diplomatic and business travel
sales.
CC Pace of Fairfax appointed
Joe Fuqua leader of the financial
services division.ASSOCIATIONS AND
NONPROFITS
Opportunity@Work of
Alexandria appointed Bridgette
Gray chief customer officer.The Household and
Commercial Products
Association of the District
appointed Nicholas Georges
senior vice president of scientific
and international affairs, Molly
Blessing director of
sustainability and Carrie Brown
manager of regulatory affairs.REAL ESTATE
Ruppert Companies of
Laytonsville appointed Grant
McCarthy director of tax and
compliance.
Grunley Construction Co. of
Rockville appointed Sonya
Brown senior vice president of
marketing and business
development and Chris
Hightower vice president of field
operations.LAW AND LOBBYING
BakerHostetler of the District
appointed Daniel Kaufman
partner.
Wiley of the District
appointed Jacqueline “Lyn”
Brown special counsel.
Davis Wright Tremaine of the
District appointed Fredrick
Wilson counsel.
Kirkland & Ellis of the
District appointed Kyle
DeYoung partner.
Morgan, Lewis & Bockius of
the District appointed Andrew J.
Enschedé partner and Kimberly
Lacey Morning of counsel.Send information about promotions,
appointments and personnel moves
in the Washington region to
[email protected].capital business
APPOINTMENTSCompany Insider Title Date Action Shares Price Now holds
2U James Kenigsberg Chief technology officer Oct. 14 Sold 55,897 34.24 113,
Precigen Ares Trading S.A. Beneficial owner Oct. 8 to Oct. 13 Sold 260,000 4.60 to 4.69 20,647,
T homson FinancialTrading as reported by companies’ directors, presidents, chief financial officers, general counsel, chief executive
officers, chairmen and other officers, or by beneficial owners of more than 10 percent of a company’s stock.TRANSACTIONSBY HEATHER KELLYTech to detect falling: Is Apple
Watch with fall protection a safe
or reasonable replacement for
standard “I’ve fallen and can’t get
up” devices/services?
— Pat Belfer, Massachusetts
Millions of older adults fall
every year — more than 1 in 4
people over 65, according to the
Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. It sounds minor, but
as we age, a routine spill becomes
more complicated and can result
in traumatic brain injuries, frac-
tured hips and other serious inju-
ries. That created a market for
medical alert devices decades ago
that is still going strong, includ-
ing simple wearable buttons that
can contact an emergency dis-
patcher.
Ente r Apple. The company
makes the Apple Watch, a jam-
packed smartwatch that is part
entertainment, part communica-
tion — and increasingly part
health device. In 2018, the compa-
ny added a fall detection feature
that uses the built-in accelerome-
ter and gyroscope to detect when
the wearer falls down. It was
automatically activated for users
over 65, but the age was later
lowered to 55. It can be turned off.
So can it replace the old-fash-
ioned button systems? That de-
pends largely on your own com-
fort level, medical situation and
tech savviness. First and fore-
most, ask your doctor. How con-
cerned are they about your health
and falls? How often do they
happen? What does your doctor
recommend?
The Apple Watch has some
advantages, such as the ability to
automatically alert emergency
contacts in addition to 911. If
you’re already an Apple Watch
user, it’s o ne less thing to remem-
ber to put on, and you don’t need
to learn something new. It also
includes a number of extra health
tracking features. However, for
many older people, the Apple
Watch screen can be small and
difficult to navigate. And if you’ve
never used one before, it’s a l ot
more complicated to learn from
scratch than an alert button. It
will also need to be charged daily.
Another difference is that many
medical alert systems are moni-
tored by a 24/7 dispatch center,
while Apple Watches act as a way
to call 911 directly.
Apple will be the first to tell
you its smartwatch is not a medi-
cal device. That means it isn’t
approved by the Food and Drug
Administration and shouldn’t be
used to replace medical equip-ment or visits to the doctor. Two
of its features — notifications of
irregular heartbeats and the elec-
trocardiogram feature, which
rec ords the electrical signals
from your heart — do have FDA
clearance, which is a different
category.
Searching smarter: I prefer to
get search results from only the
past year. Is there a way to have
my browser, or any browser, de-
fault to results from the past year
rather than changing the option
each time? Thank you!
— Suzanne Kelly, Long Island
The Internet is vast, over-
whelming and filled with a lot of
useless clutter. Most search en-
gines give a few basic tools to try
to narrow the fire hose, including
searching during specific time
periods. On your computer in
Google, type in your search and
hit enter. Then select Tools and
click on the word “Any Time,”
which should appear with a small
arrow next to it. A drop-down
menu will show a range of op-
tions, including searching the
last week, last year or a custom
window of time. The se ttings are
nearly identical on DuckDuckGo,
which we recommend you add on
top of your browser to minimize
tracking.
To keep these settings, you can
first do a search the way you like
for something fun such as “dogs.”
Bookmark that URL and click on
it when you want to look some-thing up. You’ll just need to type
in your new terms and hit enter.
Ethics of destroying a drone:
A while back I was out on my deck
when a drone came right over my
head and paused there for several
seconds. I was quite annoyed by
this occurrence and swore that if
it ever happened again, I would
catch the thing in a butterfly net
and take it into my garage and
back my car over it.
My question for you: Would
that be legal since this was an
intrusion into my private proper-
ty? I know in some states it’s OK
to SHOOT PEOPLE who break
into one’s house...
— Mary L. Sullivan, London -
derry, N.H.
This question is an absolute
delight, so thank you for that. The
answer is a firm no. You should
not catch strange drones in but-
terfly nets and off them with your
car. But let’s unpack why, because
I absolutely understand the incli-
nation and would also feel a wave
of anger if an unknown drone was
in my personal space.
First, there is the practical
issue: Can you catch a drone with
a butterfly net? The drone itself
would have to be on the smaller
side, no more than eight t o nine
feet off the ground and hovering
in one place, but if that were the
case, it seems doable.
Now the legal issue. I reached
out to Jonathan Rupprecht, a
Florida-based lawyer specializingin drone issues who is also a
commercial pilot and flight in-
structor. He says your particular
question touches on a messy
number of laws, jurisdictions and
issues. For example, interfering
with an aircraft is technically a
federal crime, recording with a
drone touches on First Amend-
ment issues, being near your
home gets into property law, and
your local law enforcement offi-
cials may not have the power to
go after the drone’s owner but
could possibly arrest you for de-
struction of property.
He says tha t’s exactly the case
with a man who shot down a
stranger ’s drone that included
expensive sensor equipment. The
shooter is being charged with a
second-degree felony, Rupprecht
said.
Your best bet is to try to figure
out who owns the drone and
speak to them or ask local law
enforcement to speak to them
(which is probably the most they
can do). There should be a small
identifying number on the side of
the drone, but it’s probably too
small to see, so you could try
following the drone back to the
person who is flying it. Also,
contact your local Federal Avia-
tion Administration office,
though Rupprecht says the agen-
cy largely lacks the resources and
tools to enforce minor infrac-
tions. “Realistically, the FAA and
law enforcement aren’t going todo much,” he said.
Contacts gone wrong: Finally,
one reader wrote in to ask about
Apple contacts. After syncing
multiple devices to iCloud, she
noticed that all of her contacts
appeared three times.
Hundreds of duplicate entries
sounds like a nightmare problem
to try to solve manually, but
luckily there is an option for
automating it. You’ll need to do
this on your Mac since the fea-
tures do not appear to exist on
Apple mobile devices.
But before we start tinkering
with all your carefully collected
phone numbers and addresses,
let’s be extra paranoid and make a
backup. Open the Contacts app
on your Mac, go to File in the top
navigation bar, select Export and
export as Contacts Archive. Next,
make sure you’ve clicked on All
Contacts in your address book.
Go to Card in the top menu and
click Look For Duplicates. It will
warn you that it is going to merge
duplicate contacts, which means
it will try to combine all three
entries for Cousin Terry into one
entry without losing information.
Click the Merge button.
Go through and do a spot
check to make sure that it worked
and that you didn’t lose anything
important. Keep that backup file
you saved just in case you can’t
find something like an address in
an entry one day.
[email protected]Is catching a drone legal? Help Desk tackles tech issues.
Readers’ most pressing
questions o n Google
searches, Apple Watchesvideos that had been fact-
checked multiple times and that
had been uploaded natively to
the platform... were not being
found by this AI technology,” she
said.
[email protected]Gallagher said the findings
call into question how thorough
Facebook’s vetting of content,
which relies heavily on
automation and artificial
intelligence, truly is.
“What we found was that evenThe study found that the
“speed at which the content
spreads and the endless ways it
can be clipped, edited and
shared, make tracing all
instances of problematic content
a particular challenge.”Hungarian, Swedish or Italian,
despite there being thousands of
posts referencing the World
Doctors Alliance in those
languages.
The report concluded that
Facebook’s enforcement has
been ill-suited to meet the
challenge posed by the group
because purveyors of
misinformation “produce
content in such vast quantities
that debunking claims or posts
one by one presents an almost
impossible task for fact-
checkers.” It said it showed
there’s “significant gaps in
Facebook’s fact-checking
program in languages other than
English.”
“It's really just a continuation
of the same kind of the same
stories I suppose that we've been
hearing for the past couple of
weeks about Facebook's lack of
resources that they dedicate to
regions, into languages outside
of English,” Gallagher said.
Recent disclosures by
Facebook whistleblowers
Frances Haugen and Sophie
Zhang about how the company
prioritizes enforcement in major
markets, such as the United
States, have brought new
scrutiny to the platform’s role in
policing content around the
globe.
Not only are Facebook and its
fact-checking partners missing
rule-breaking and misleading
posts, researchers found, but
they’re also not hunting down
all instances of posts they have
already found to be false and
adding context to them.called the virus a scam or
likened it to the flu.
Researchers at ISD looked at
the 50 posts mentioning the
World Doctors Alliance and its
members that users engaged
with the most on Facebook
across four languages and found
that a vast majority contained
“false, misleading or
conspiratorial information” as
outlined in Facebook's policies
or that contradicted guidance
from top public health
authorities.
That included 74 percent of
those top 50 posts in English, 88
percent of those in Spanish,
82 percent of those in Arabic
and 48 percent of those in
German. Those “problematic
posts,” as researchers called
them, drew nearly a million
interactions and more than 23
million video views.
Facebook’s Simpson said the
company “will continue to
remove pages, groups or
accounts that repeatedly violate
our policies.”
Researchers also found that
while Facebook partners with
groups to add fact checks to
misleading medical posts, few
fact checks mentioning the
World Doctors Alliance exist
across major languages. (Since
2016, the company has
partnered with dozens of news
organizations and nonprofits to
add context to misleading
content on its sites.)
Researchers found only 61
fact checks mentioning the
group in English, and there
weren’t any in Romanian,Meet the
doctors’ group
spreading
baseless claims
about the
coronavirus in
plain sight on
Facebook. A group of health-care
professionals known for
spreading false accusations
about the coronavirus has
largely avoided restrictions on
Facebook, where its members
have reached millions of users
with their messages of
coronavirus denialism and
vaccine skepticism, according to
a report shared exclusively with
The Technology 202.
The s elf-styled World Doctors
Alliance, which describes itself
as a nonprofit “with a view to
ending all [covid-19] lockdowns,”
saw its members’ Facebook
followings grow by more than a
hundredfold since the beginning
of the pandemic, researchers at
the London-based think tank the
Institute for Strategic Dialogue
(ISD) found.
In that time, their posts —
which ISD researchers found
frequently contain falsehoods or
conspiratorial claims about
covid-19 and vaccines — have
drawn at least 5.7 million
interactions and their videos
have been viewed more than
21 million times on the platform.
The group and its members were
mentioned in nearly 90,
Facebook posts from January
2020 to June 2021.
Facebook spokesperson Aaron
Simpson said the platform
removed the group’s main page,
the World Freedom Alliance, in
July “for repeatedly violating our
COVID-19 policies.” But the
report shows that the group and
its individual members, many of
whom remain active on the site,
were able to gain significant
traction during the pandemic
before Facebook took down the
main account.
Aoife Gallagher, the case
study’s lead author, said the
report shows that Facebook’s
policies against coronavirus
misinformation are falling short
of protecting users against
frequent rule-breakers.
“Here is a group that seems to
be just disregarding all those
policies and getting away with it
pretty easily,” she said in an
interview l ast week.
Gallagher said the group’s
conspiratorial messaging is
particularly problematic because
its members’ medical
background grants them an air
of legitimacy online that users
might not question.
“The credentials that they
have [have] given this veneer of
credibility and kind of allow
them to manipulate people's
trust,” she said.
The World Doctors Alliance
did not return a request for
comment.
Not all of the members’ posts
are misleading or conspiratorial
— some are as harmless as
selfies. But the most popular
posts tied to the members often
touted unproven covid cures,
claimed masking is dangerous,
A doctors’ group gains traction with coronavirus misinformation on Facebook
The
Technology
202
CRISTIANO
LIMA
DREW ANGERER/POOL/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) listen as former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen testifies on Capitol Hill on Oct. 5.