"The Current"
Mobile devices have become ubiquitous in day-to-day life. The majority of Americans own a smart phone and use it not just for personal matters but for professional matters, too. It’s a technology that spans gender, location, profession and age – with 46% of senior Americans owning a smart phone. With smartphones this ubiquitous, it’s not a surprise that senior living residences are starting to leverage smart phones to streamline their operations.
As a social network, Facebook is inherently at odds with private, secure communications – its business model is built on harvesting people’s information. And it’s not just that Facebook’s business model is built around what are effectively privacy violations: recent articles have revealed that Facebook lacks transparency and accountability towards its users. In short, this is a company that should not be producing private, secure communications.
After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the Department of Energy (DoE) asked the National Petroleum Council (NPC) to provide specific actionable steps to better prepare the oil and natural gas industry’s response to natural disasters. In response, the NPC released “Enhancing Emergency Preparedness for Natural Disasters” in 2014, which included a series of recommendations for emergency preparedness, response and recovery in the oil and natural gas industry. A key finding? That effective communications during emergency response is a major challenge for the industry and that a standardized, rehearsed approach toward communications that addresses escalated and expanding responses as an event unfolds is critical.
It’s been forty years since the infamous Three Mile Island accident, an incident made famous bythe confusion and panic it spawned in its wake. But while the incident is remembered for the fear it stoked about nuclear energy, it also set the stage for the US nuclear industry to become the safest in the world. To this day, the Three Mile Island accident impacts the nuclear industry and provides valuable lessons about incident response and communication.
When Mark Zuckerberg announced at the beginning of the month that Facebook will shift its focus to privacy-focused communications, the announcement was rightly met with skepticism. Facebook’s business model, after all, is built around targeting advertisements to users based on their information. Compound this with the various privacy scandals that have plagued Facebook in the last few years—from Cambridge Analytica misusing up to 50 million users’ data to massive data breaches—and the company’s decision to shift its focus to privacy seems positively disingenuous.