Author: Lisa Stiffler

Social media apps and others. (GeekWire Photo / Lisa Stiffler) The Washington state Senate on Wednesday passed a bill that aims to protect kids from the potentially harmful impacts of social media apps such as Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube. Senate Bill 5708 prevents social media companies from generating addictive feeds to minors based on data collected about the teens. It also forbids the platforms from delivering push notifications to kids during traditional school hours from September through May and from midnight to 6 a.m. The measure requires platforms to allow all users, of any age, to set time limits…

Umesh Shankar. (LinkedIn Photo) After nearly 19 years at Google, Umesh Shankar has joined Microsoft AI as a corporate vice president of engineering. Shankar, based in New York City, has focused his career on privacy and security. His last role at Google was chief technologist and distinguished engineer for Google Cloud Security. Shankar will lead a new privacy and security engineering effort focused on Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant, according to Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. “I believe that investing in a secure technical foundation will actually allow us to innovate with AI faster than we could in a world where…