The Obama administration hosted its second White House LGBTQ Tech & Innovation Summit bringing together over 170 LGBT members of the tech community including our very own Executive Director, Chris Wood. U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith represented the White House and addressed the Summit.
Tech Republic weighs in with their take on eight LGBT tech leaders that you should be following on Twitter. Worth a look since not all are obvious choices or well known outside tech circles.
Windows 10 has a new feature that could endanger LGBT kids. Windows 10 sends a weekly “activity update” report to parents that details the child’s complete browsing and Internet history. This feature is enabled by default and parents and children have been caught off guard by the reports. Clearly, this could endanger LGBT kids by outing them to their parents and preventing access to support systems that they might need.
What’s next for tech companies and gay rights? The Equality Act. Congressional Democrats have introduced a bill aiming to outlaw discrimination of LGBT people in education, employment, federal funding, housing, credit and even jury service. The biggest names in technology are supporting the legislation including Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon.
Speaking of a federal anti-discrimination law, the linked video where John Oliver brilliantly argues for a federal anti-discrimination law is a must see.
Gay escort website Rentboys.com was raided by law enforcement officials, including officials from Homeland Security, this week. Rentboy connected escorts and clients and federal officials raided its headquarters calling it an “Internet brothel”. Some in the gay community are concerned that the raid is a result of anti-gay animus and further stigmatizes the LGBT community.