Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman | |
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Born | Taren Kate Stinebrickner-Kauffman 14 November 1981 Brisbane, Queensland, Australia |
Citizenship |
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Alma mater | Duke University |
Occupation | Activist |
Children | 2 |
Taren Kate Stinebrickner-Kauffman (born 14 November 1981) is an Australian-American activist. She is the founder of SumOfUs, and served as the executive director until 2016. In March 2012, she and her group were active critics of working conditions at Apple Inc. supplier Foxconn. [1] [2] From 2020 until 2022, Taren served as president of New Media Ventures, a non-profit venture capital firm focused on progressive organisations. [3] [4]
Taren Kate Stinebrickner-Kauffman [5] was born on 14 November 1981 in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, as the daughter of DePauw University professors, former Georgetown basketball player Bruce Stinebrickner and author Kelsey Kauffman, the granddaughter of Rear Admiral Draper Kauffman and great-granddaughter of Vice Admiral James L. Kauffman. [6] [7] She was raised in Greencastle, Indiana. [8]
She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in mathematics from Duke University in 2004. [9]
Stinebrickner-Kauffman has worked in social-impact technology, Democratic politics, consumer advocacy, corporate accountability, environmental advocacy, and the U.S. labor movement, including time with groups such as Avaaz.org, the Alliance for Climate Protection, MoveOn.org, and the AFL-CIO. [10] [11] She founded SumOfUs in 2011, serving as Executive Director and growing the organisation to 5 million members worldwide. She went on to serve as Senior Product Manager at Change.org, entrepreneur-in-residence at New Media Ventures, and then was the President of New Media Ventures starting in March 2022, [12] leading the organisation during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and prioritising work on voting rights and local media. [13] She also serves on the board of Consumer Reports. [14]
Stinebrickner-Kauffman was the partner of Aaron Swartz until his death. [15] In 2011, Swartz was prosecuted by U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz for violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and, facing the risk of up to 35 years imprisonment and $1 million in fines if he exercised his Sixth Amendment right to a public trial and was convicted, he died by suicide in 2013. She discovered his body. [16] She has two children via sperm donors. [17] [18]
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The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA) is a United States cybersecurity bill that was enacted in 1986 as an amendment to existing computer fraud law, which had been included in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Prior to computer-specific criminal laws, computer crimes were prosecuted as mail and wire fraud, but the applying law was often insufficient.
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Aaron Hillel Swartz, also known as AaronSw, was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. As a programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS; the technical architecture for Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to creating copyright licenses; the Python website framework web.py; and the lightweight markup language format Markdown. Swartz was involved in the development of the social news aggregation website Reddit until he departed from the company in 2007. He is often credited as a martyr and a prodigy, and his work focused on civic awareness and activism.
Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Ltd., trading as Hon Hai Technology Group in China and Taiwan, and as Foxconn internationally, is a Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturer established in 1974 with headquarters in Tucheng District, New Taipei City, Taiwan. In 2021, the company's annual revenue reached 6.83 trillion New Taiwan dollars and was ranked 20th in the 2023 Fortune Global 500. It is the world's largest contract manufacturer of electronics. While headquartered in Taiwan, the company earns the majority of its revenue from assets in China and is one of the largest employers worldwide. Terry Gou is the company founder and former chairman.
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SumOfUs is a global non-profit advocacy organization and online community that campaigns to hold corporations accountable on issues such as climate change, workers' rights, discrimination, human rights, animal rights, corruption, and corporate power grab. The organization renamed itself to Ekō in 2023.
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