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HORRIFIC.

A Manhattan financier accused of drugging and raping a 14-year-old girl had a young child frequently visiting his apartment, a neighbor has claimed.Michael Olson, 55, allegedly had the girl – who appeared to be just 11 or 12 – walking his dogs from his Battery Park apartment, the neighbor told The New York Post.The alleged attacker was said to be secluded but lived with a woman, while the teen was often spotted ‘always alone in the hallway’, neighbor Rocco Flammia, 44, said.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken released the 2023 Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP Report) on Thursday, June 15, at 11:00 a.m. ET in the Dean Acheson Auditorium at the U.S. Department of State and was joined by Cindy Dyer, Ambassador-at-Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

As mandated by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the TIP Report assesses government efforts around the world to combat human trafficking and highlights strategies to address this crime and protect the victims. This year’s report, the 23rd edition, includes narratives for 188 countries and territories, including the United States. The TIP Report introductory material is drafted in consultation with, and includes contributions from, the Department of State’s Human Trafficking Expert Consultant Network, which includes subject matter experts with lived experience of trafficking.

Read more here. 

A bipartisan group of senators urged chief executives at ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft to toughen protections against transporting human trafficking victims, in a pair of letters dated Monday.

The push comes after Uber recently launched a new option for teens ages 13-17, allowing them to ride alone for the first time, as well as use the food-delivery service, Uber Eats.

Previously, Uber guidelines prevented children under 18 from riding alone and encouraged drivers to report any suspected underage riders. The restrictions were not foolproof, however, and many teens still used the app.

While Uber’s new teen option aims to equip parents with tools for greater supervision, it still marks a departure from the long-held restrictions on rides for minors.

In separate letters to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and to Lyft CEO David Risher, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) acknowledged the steps both companies have previously taken to combat human trafficking but cited reports that ride-hailing apps have been used for human trafficking.

Read more here. 

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken will release the 2023 Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP Report) on Thursday, June 15, at 11:00 a.m. ET in the Dean Acheson Auditorium at the U.S. Department of State and will be joined by Cindy Dyer, Ambassador-at-Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

As mandated by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the TIP Report assesses government efforts around the world to combat human trafficking and highlights strategies to address this crime and protect the victims. This year’s report, the 23rd edition, includes narratives for 188 countries and territories, including the United States. The TIP Report introductory material is drafted in consultation with, and includes contributions from, the Department of State’s Human Trafficking Expert Consultant Network, which includes subject matter experts with lived experience of trafficking.

During the ceremony, Secretary Blinken and Ambassador Dyer will honor the 2023 TIP Report Heroes, individuals from diverse stakeholder communities around the world whose tireless efforts have made a lasting impact on the fight against trafficking. Following the ceremony, many of the Heroes will travel to Boston and Miami to engage with their American counterparts through the Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP).

Fake photos and videos featuring the likenesses of TikTok’s biggest female stars are circulating on Twitter, with some tweets amassing tens of thousands of views despite the platform’s rules against nonconsensual nudity.

An NBC News review Tuesday of Twitter search results for Addison Rae Easterling, Charli D’Amelio and Bella Poarch — the three most-followed women on TikTok — found multiple examples of sexually explicit and sexually suggestive deepfakes posted in a 24-hour period. Other searches turned up tweets with deepfakes that had been posted weeks ago and remained up despite Twitter’s policies banning them. A deepfake is an advanced form of manipulated media in which a person’s face or head is digitally inserted onto the body of another person.

Female TikTok stars have become prominent deepfake targets. Most deepfakes on the internet are pornographic in nature and depict celebrity women in  sexual situations, a synthethic media detection firm called Sensity said in a 2019 report. The amount of pornography and deepfakes in the search results for the three female TikTok stars was striking compared to even mainstream actresses who are popular deepfake targets, like Emma Watson.

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Over the last year, state legislators concerned about a mental health crisis among the nation’s young people have passed a raft of children’s online safety measures. A new Utah law would require social networks to obtain a parent’s consent before giving an account to a child younger than 18 while a new California law would require many sites to turn on the highest privacy settings for minors.

Now Louisiana lawmakers have passed an even broader bill that could affect access to large swaths of the internet for minors in the state. The Louisiana measure would prohibit online services — including social networks, multiplayer games and video-sharing apps — from allowing people under 18 to sign up for accounts without parental consent. It would also allow Louisiana parents to cancel the terms-of-service contracts that their children signed for existing accounts on popular services like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Fortnite and Roblox.

The Louisiana civil code already allows parents to rescind contracts signed by unemancipated minors. Laurie Schlegel, the Republican state legislator who spearheaded the new measure, said her bill simply made it clear that the state’s existing contracting rules also covered accounts on online content-sharing platforms.

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You knew it had to happen. Keeping kids safe online is THE priority in 2023. Our government needs to do much more. Big Tech does not do enough. It’s up to us. #CommunityCreatesChange The Warriors has partnered with GABB Wireless.

Why GABB? There is a growing problem among children with unlimited access to the internet and other online platforms. Kids are being exposed to harmful content and unhealthy interactions. These dangers come in all shapes and sizes. Learn why Gabb is here, and what we are protecting our children from.Excessive screen time can cause setbacks in children’s health and their social and emotional development. This can hinder their ability to engage in the typical everyday activities that enable them to learn about the world and themselves. Social media is the most common place where kids are exposed to mature content, bad language, extreme ideas, and damaging interactions. Kids can even fall victim to perpetrators, cyberbullies, and sex crimes. Explicit content is media that portrays provocative, sexual, or inappropriate content. This may be constituted as bad language, sexualized or pornographic images/videos, or acts of violence. Cyberbullying is the use of technology to harass, threaten, or embarrass a person. This abuse includes sending compromising message, hacking, rumors, posting embarrassing photos, and this list goes on and on.

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In December, Apple announced that it was killing a controversial iCloud photo-scanning tool the company had devised to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in what it said was a privacy-preserving way. Apple then said that its anti-CSAM efforts would instead center around its “Communication Safety” features for children, initially announced in August 2021. And at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino today, Apple debuted expansions to the mechanism, including an additional feature tailored to adults.

Communication Safety scans messages locally on young users’ devices to flag content that children are receiving or sending in messages on iOS that contain nudity. Apple announced today that the feature is also expanding to FaceTime video messages, Contact Posters in the Phone app, the Photos picker tool where users choose photos or videos to send, and AirDrop. The feature’s on-device processing means that Apple never sees the content being flagged, but beginning this fall, Communication Safety will be turned on by default for all child accounts—kids under 13—in a Family Sharing plan. Parents can elect to disable the feature if they choose.

“Communication Safety is a feature where we really want to give the child a moment to pause and hopefully get disrupted out of what is effectively a grooming conversation, or at least might be,” says Apple’s head of user privacy, Erik Neuenschwander. “So it’s meant to be high-friction. It’s meant to be that there is an answer which we think is likely right in that child’s situation, which is not to move forward, and we really want to make sure they’re educated.”

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