Julie Inman Grant | |
---|---|
eSafety Commissioner | |
In office January 2017–present | |
Preceded by | Alastair MacGibbon [1] |
Personal details | |
Born | 1968or1969(age 55–56) Seattle,Washington,United States [2] |
Citizenship | United States,Australia [explain status] |
Website | www |
Julie Inman Grant (born 1968 or 1969) is an American-born [2] [3] Australian public servant who is currently serving as the eSafety Commissioner,a role in which she leads Australia's regulator for online safety.
After graduating from university in the early 1990s,Grant was offered a position as a "case agent with the CIA",but declined the offer as it meant "I wouldn't be able to tell my friends and family what I was doing". Grant subsequently started working in the public sector as a policy adviser for United States Congressman John Miller in 1991 and 1992. [2]
From 1995 to 2000,Grant worked as a government affairs manager for Microsoft. In 2000,Grant moved to Australia, [2] and became head of corporate affairs at Microsoft until 2004. [4]
In 2005,Grant became the Asia-Pacific director of internet safety,privacy and security at Microsoft, [5] serving in that capacity until 2009 when she became global director for safety and privacy policy and outreach. [6] [4] [7]
In 2014,Grant became director of public policy in Australia and south-east Asia at Twitter. [2] [4] In 2016,Grant moved to the role of director of government relations in the Asia-Pacific region at Adobe. [6] [4]
In January 2017,Grant was appointed by the Australian government as the national eSafety Commissioner, [8] a position established in July 2015 by the government of former Prime Minister of Australia Tony Abbott,under the Enhancing Online Safety for Children Act 2015. [9] [10] In January 2022,Grant was reappointed in her Commissioner role for a further 5 years. [6]
On April 2024,Grant ordered X and Meta to remove footage of the stabbing of Mar Mari Emmanuel. [11] The order was met with resistance from Elon Musk and prompted a protracted debate about free speech,with Musk refusing to delete the videos although it had blocked the content in Australia. [12] [13] A two-day injunction to compel X to hide posts that include the footage of the attack was later extended to 10 May 2024. [14] She dropped the case on 6 June,but stated that she would continue to pursue legal action against X in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. She also stated that her role in the federal court case led to her and her family being doxed and harassed online. [15]
As a consequence of the standoff Grant became dubbed an "e-Safety Karen" or "e-Karen". [16]
Grant has three children and is married to Nick Grant,who is Australian. [2] She is an Australian citizen. [17]
Elon Reeve Musk is a businessman and investor known for his key roles in the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla,Inc. Other involvements include ownership of X Corp.,the company that operates the social media platform X (Twitter),and his role in the founding of The Boring Company,xAI,Neuralink,and OpenAI. He is one of the wealthiest individuals in the world;as of August 2024 Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$247 billion.
Tesla,Inc. is an American multinational automotive and clean energy company. Headquartered in Austin,Texas,it designs,manufactures and sells battery electric vehicles (BEVs),stationary battery energy storage devices from home to grid-scale,solar panels and solar shingles,and related products and services.
Internet safety,also known as online safety,cyber safety and electronic safety (e-safety),refers to the policies,practices and processes that reduce the harms to people that are enabled by the (mis)use of information technology.
The Streisand effect is an unintended consequence of attempts to hide,remove,or censor information,where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information. The effect is named for American singer and actress Barbra Streisand,whose attorney's attempt in 2003 to suppress the publication of a photograph showing her clifftop residence in Malibu,taken to document coastal erosion in California,inadvertently drew far greater attention to the previously obscure photograph. The effect exemplifies psychological reactance,a kind of 'reverse psychology' effect,in which the attempt to hide information instead makes it more interesting to seek out and propagate.
Julie Simone Brill is an American lawyer who serves as Chief Privacy Officer and Corporate Vice President for Global Privacy,Safety and Regulatory Affairs at Microsoft. Prior to her role at Microsoft,Brill was nominated by President Barack Obama on November 16,2009,and confirmed unanimously by the US Senate to serve as Commissioner of the US Federal Trade Commission on March 3,2010. Brill served as a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from 2010 to 2016.
OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco,California. Its mission is to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI),which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As a leading organization in the ongoing AI boom,OpenAI is known for the GPT family of large language models,the DALL-E series of text-to-image models,and a text-to-video model named Sora. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI.
Tesla Autopilot is an advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) developed by Tesla that amounts to partial vehicle automation. Tesla provides "Base Autopilot" on all vehicles,which includes lane centering and traffic-aware cruise control. Owners may purchase or subscribe to Full Self-Driving (FSD) which adds semi-autonomous navigation that responds to traffic lights and stop signs,lane change assistance,self-parking,and the ability to summon the car from a garage or parking spot.
Mastodon is free and open-source software for running self-hosted social networking services. It has microblogging features similar to Twitter,which are offered by a large number of independently run nodes,known as instances or servers,each with its own code of conduct,terms of service,privacy policy,privacy options,and content moderation policies.
The Boring Company (TBC) is an American infrastructure,tunnel construction services,and equipment company founded by Elon Musk. TBC was founded as a subsidiary of SpaceX in 2017,and was spun off as a separate corporation in 2018. TBC has completed one tunneling project that is open to the public,as well as multiple test tunnels.
TSLAQ is a loose,international collective of largely anonymous short-sellers,skeptics,and researchers who openly criticize Tesla,Inc. and its CEO Elon Musk. The group primarily organizes on social media,often using the $TSLAQ cashtag,and on Reddit to coordinate efforts and share news,opinions,and analysis about the company and its stock. Edward Niedermeyer,in his book Ludicrous:The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors (2019),pinpoints the July 2018 doxxing of Twitter user Lawrence Fossi,a Seeking Alpha writer and Tesla short seller operating under the pseudonym Montana Skeptic,as the catalyst for the formation of TSLAQ.
Elon Musk is the CEO or owner of multiple companies including Tesla,SpaceX,and X Corp,and has expressed many views on a wide variety of subjects,ranging from politics to science.
Tesla,Inc. has been criticized for its cars,workplace culture,business practices,and occupational safety. Many of the criticisms are also directed toward Elon Musk,the company's CEO and Product Architect. Critics have also accused Tesla of deceptive marketing,unfulfilled promises,and fraud. The company is currently facing criminal and civil investigations into its self-driving claims. Critics have highlighted Tesla's downplaying of issues,and Tesla's alleged retaliation against several whistleblowers.
Return to Space is an American documentary film made for Netflix and directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi. Its story follows Elon Musk's and SpaceX employees' two-decade mission to send NASA astronauts back to the International Space Station and revolutionize space travel. The film was released on April 7,2022.
Business magnate Elon Musk initiated an acquisition of American social media company Twitter,Inc. on April 14,2022,and concluded it on October 27,2022. Musk had begun buying shares of the company in January 2022,becoming its largest shareholder by April with a 9.1 percent ownership stake. Twitter invited Musk to join its board of directors,an offer he initially accepted before declining. On April 14,Musk made an unsolicited offer to purchase the company,to which Twitter's board responded with a "poison pill" strategy to resist a hostile takeover before unanimously accepting Musk's buyout offer of $44 billion on April 25. Musk stated that he planned to introduce new features to the platform,make its algorithms open-source,combat spambot accounts,and promote free speech,framing the acquisition as the cornerstone of X,an "everything app".
In February 2022,two days after Russia's full-scale invasion,Ukraine requested American aerospace company SpaceX to activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war. Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians,government and military. The satellite service has served for humanitarian purposes,as well as defense and attacks on Russian positions.
ElonJet is a service that uses social media accounts to track the real-time private airplane usage of Elon Musk. The service,created and provided by Jack Sweeney using public data,has accounts on Facebook,Instagram,Telegram,Truth Social,Mastodon,Threads,and formerly on Twitter,where the Twitter account once had about 530,000 followers,before being suspended. Several of the social media accounts use the handle @elonjet.
On December 15,2022,Twitter suspended the accounts of ten journalists who have covered the company and its owner,Elon Musk. They included reporters Keith Olbermann,Steven L. Herman,and Donie O'Sullivan,and journalists from The New York Times,The Washington Post,CNN,and The Intercept. Musk cited an incident between "a crazy stalker" and a car with his child as a justification for the suspensions. Posters on behalf of the owners of the accounts said that the suspensions were permanent. On December 16,2022,Musk stated that account access would only be restricted for seven days and on December 17,2022,some accounts were reportedly restored with Musk citing Twitter community polls as the reason for the reversal.
Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022;Musk acted as CEO of Twitter until June 2023 when he was succeeded by Linda Yaccarino. In a move that,despite Yaccarino's accession,was widely attributed to Musk,Twitter was rebranded to X on July 23,2023,and its domain name changed from twitter.com to x.com on May 17,2024.
On 15 April 2024,at approximately 7:15 pm local time,a knife attack took place at Christ The Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley,a suburb of Sydney,Australia. During a live-streamed sermon,the attacker walked up to the pulpit,first stabbing bishop Mari Emmanuel,resulting in permanent vision loss in Emmanuel's right eye,before stabbing a priest and injuring another churchgoer. While no one was killed,this attack was the second stabbing incident to have taken place in Sydney in three days,following the deadly mass stabbing at Bondi Junction.
The Support Academic Futures and Educators for Today's Youth Act,also known as the AB1955 bill,Safety Act or SAFETY Act,is an first-in-nation act signed and activated by California governor Gavin Newsom on July 15,2024. The state law allows educators discretion in informing parents of a child's LGBTQ+ identity,but bars disclosure being a requirement.
Seattle-born Inman Grant, 51, has worked at the intersection of cyber safety, public policy and technology since her early days in government relations for Microsoft.
I actually brought the concept of Safety by Design to Microsoft over 10 years ago when I was their head of global privacy and safety policy and outreach.