Taylor Sauer Died While Driving And Facebooking; Now Parents Want To Make It Illegal

Taylor Sauer Died While Driving And Facebooking; Now Parents Want To Make It Illegal - Taylor Sauer knew facebooking while driving was a bad idea.

The 18-year-old college student said so in her last status update: "I can't discuss this now. Driving and facebooking is not safe! Haha."

Taylor Sauer died january 14 after she ran into a tanker truck. Investigators discovered that she had been texting every 90 seconds. As a result, her parents are trying to get the Idaho State Legislature to ban texting while driving

At the time, Sauer was driving 80 mph from the Utah State University campus in Logan to visit her folks in Caldwell, Idaho, and was passing the time on the four-hour drive by messaging her friend about the Denver Broncos, according to MSNBC.com

Moments after her last update, she crashed her car into a tanker truck that was going 15 mph up a hill and was killed instantly.

Investigators weren't able to find signs that Sauer applied the brakes before her fatal crash, but, after checking cell phone records, they did discover she was posting about every 90 seconds during her drive, according to Idaho State Police Lt. Sheldon Kelley.

"The text messages were both incoming and outgoing during her trip between Logan, Utah [and the accident scene]," Kelley told the Salt Lake Tribune. "In addition to the texting, there were multiple Facebook communications to and from Taylor Sauer during the minutes immediately prior to the crash."

That was January 14 and her parents, Clay and Shauna Sauer, are trying to make sense of the crash and prevent future tragedies.

"I think she was probably (texting) to stay awake, she was probably tired," Taylor's dad, Clay Sauer, told Today Show host Ann Curry. "But that's not a reason to do it, and the kids think they're invincible. To them, (texting) is not distracting, they're so proficient at texting, that they don't feel it's distracted driving."

The Sauer family is now lobbying Idaho legislators to put a ban on texting while driving, according to the Daily Mail,.

Idaho is one of 13 states which hasn't made texting while driving illegal, but Shauna Sauer believes Taylor would approve of the new law.

"This is what she would want us to do," she told Curry.

The texting and driving ban has already passed through Idaho's state senate, and it could travel to the house as early as Tuesday.

Taylor's father, Clay Sauer, said he hopes such a ban would teach drivers that texting and driving is unsafe and unacceptable from a young age, "like the importance of wearing a seatbelt," reported KTVB.com.

"I think every state should have this law," he added. ( aol.com )

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If You Think Your Facebook “Friends” Don’t Like You, They Probably Don’t

If You Think Your Facebook “Friends” Don’t Like You, They Probably Don’t - Here’s some grist for your paranoia: The more you value Facebook as a social outlet, the more your Facebook friends probably just wish you’d shut up. A study on confidence, emotional expression, and Facebook curation found that people likely to see Zuckerberg’s virtual community as a haven are also more likely to annoy their contacts.

In the study designed by University of Waterloo graduate student Amanda Forest and her adviser, Joanne Wood, undergraduates were assessed with a standard self-esteem test and placed on a spectrum from more to less confident. When asked what they thought of Facebook, those with lower confidence were likelier to describe a safe space in which friendships were unencumbered by awkward face-to-face interactions. Forest and Wood then collected the students’ 10 most recent status updates. Less secure students tended to post negative updates ( “[Name] is upset b/c her phone got stolen :@”), while self-assured ones tended to gush ( “[Name] is lucky to have such terrific friends and is looking forward to a great day tomorrow!”)

Girls show their Facebook walls on their mobile devices in Jakarta on February 2, 2012.

Undergraduate volunteers read the batches of updates and rated how much they liked the strangers who wrote them. It turns out that, on Facebook, impatience for whining trounces sympathy: Raters said they liked students posting negative updates less. (I asked Forest about the possibility of volunteers reading cheerful posts ironically, or interpreting the phone update, for instance, not as a gripe but as a PSA that the posting student was unable to receive texts or calls. Since the raters also assigned each status a positive or negative score, Forest said, the researchers were able to correlate the perceived tone of an update to the favorability of its response.)

It’s not hard to imagine how the less confident students, despite moving in a forum that promised connections galore, might grow more isolated, revving the cycle all over again.

I find these results oddly heartbreaking. It seems an irony typical of the Internet that the people who feel safest expressing themselves online actually damage their social standing when they do so. Not because they’re somehow opting out of the real world, as Facebook critics like to insist, but because they are lulled into relaxing their facades. Cheery icons and a shiny, sanitized format make it easy to project the friendliness of a diary onto the Facebook community. Yet the site doesn’t “change” your audience so much as disguise it. Those with low self-esteem may treasure Facebook because it eliminates situations in which social feedback is inevitable (whereas you can’t help seeing your friend’s aggrieved expression when you slip up in person). But you need live feedback to teach you to navigate relationships with grace.

We’ve heard how Internet anonymity—or the illusion of it—can give people license to act like boors. Yet it seems we’re less attuned to the dangers of seeing other Internet users as anonymous or unreal. Social networking sites, with their endlessly personalized apps, can sometimes feel less like meeting places than giant mirrors (Facebook for me has always had the echoey effect of a mansion that a crowd of partiers has just vacated.) Amanda Forest’s study should remind us that when we’re online, for better or for worse, we’re not alone. ( slate.com )

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New Facebook App the 'Farmville' of Energy Conservation?

New Facebook App the 'Farmville' of Energy Conservation? - By harnessing the power of social gaming, a new coalition hopes to become the Farmville of home energy conservation.

The average American spends just six minutes a year thinking about their energy consumption, a statistic that Facebook, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and energy management firm Opower hope to change through a new social energy app.

“Social networking represents the next frontier in delivering consumer energy savings,” Dan Yates, co-founder and chief executive officer of Opower, said in a statement. The group is hoping to reach a broader segment of the population, one that may have had little interest in energy efficiency to date.

The app will combine the competitiveness of a game with real-world data. Facebookers can benchmark their home’s energy usage against a national average of similar homes, compare their energy use with friends, enter energy-saving competitions, and share tips on how to become more energy efficient.

According to NRDC, improvements in energy efficiency have the potential to deliver more than $700 billion in cost savings in the United States.

The key to the new app is Opower’s network of more than 60 utility partners who will make customer data available for use in the app. Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), the City of Palo Alto (in California), and Glendale Water & Power (GWP) will be the first U.S. utilities to participate, representing around 4 million customers when the app launches in early 2012.

The power of peer pressure

The app is built around the idea of competition. People will be able to invite friends to compare their energy use against their own and show how energy efficient they are. In the absence of a network of energy-conscious friends, the app will provide national data as a substitute. Players can also manually upload data from their monthly bill if their utility is not participating.

Communities of people will be able to form teams to help each other achieve collective goals, as well as compete against other groups. Teams will be rewarded and incentivized by their utility or other network partners.

The new app is being promoted by Facebook on its Facebook Green page, a resource for people interested in learning more about Facebook's commitment to environmental stewardship. Currently, Green has garnered more than 95,000 "likes" by users. ( foxnews.com )

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How to delete your Facebook profile in five minutes

How to delete your Facebook profile in five minutes. DoesDOES Facebook make it unnecessarily hard to delete your profile?

An article on The Punch today details how difficult it has been in the past to delete your profile from the social networking site.

“I set about looking for the Delete button. Ever seen that option? I’ll save you the hassle. There isn’t one,” wrote contributor Lachlan Hardy.

In the end, Hardy was forced to delete each bit of information – such as who his friends were, who he was in a relationship with and so on – individually.

That was about 18 months ago. Since then Facebook has copped more than a few criticisms over the way it handles user data – including a report by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada that found some of its practices may be illegal – and has announced some measures to address them.

So, I figured it was time for another test with a dummy account under the name “Andy Ramadge” – complete with silly photo.

The quick version

If you’re reading this article because you want a quick way to delete your account, log in to your Facebook profile and then follow this link. It should take you straight to the “Delete my account” form.

Read on for how to get to that page within Facebook.

Deleting your profile

The first place most people would look for a delete option is on the Account Settings page. And they’d be out of luck. From there you can only deactivate your profile.

Deactivating your profile is like putting it on ice. Facebook will keep all of your information, but won’t use it or display it to anyone else. This is so you can take a break for a while and come back to it later.

However, I want to delete my profile – so that all my data is removed from Facebook’s servers.

The next thing I did was search for a help page. There’s a button called About at the bottom of each page that will take you to Facebook’s profile, where you can read product announcements and so on.

On the left-hand side, there’s a link to the Help Center (sic). It’s not particularly prominent, but it is there.

The Help Center contains links to question and answer pieces on things to do with Facebook, grouped by topic. Except there’s no topic for either deleting or deactivating your profile.

Thankfully, there’s a list of the most popular search terms on the right. The third and fourth terms, when I checked, were about deleting your profile.

Clicking on one of the relevant search terms will, finally, take you the question and answer page titled “Deactivating, Deleting, and Memorializing Accounts”.

One of the questions is “How do I permanently delete my account?” The answer will try to talk you into deactivating your account instead of deleting it, before eventually offering a link to the page you want.

The last step, a form titled “Delete my account”, is pretty simple. It gives you a warning and asks you to provide your password and fill in one of those visual word tests to make sure you’re not a robot.

And that’s it, sort of. After filling in the form, Facebook will deactivate your account immediately and schedule it for deletion in 14 days, giving you a window of time to change your mind.

“Andy Ramadge” immediately disappeared from search and other people’s news feeds.

Conclusion

Facebook certainly doesn’t make it easy to delete your account. There is no obvious link to the right form, so you have to go searching for it.

Along the way you will be bombarded left and right with information about deactivating your account instead of deleting it.

However it still only took me five minutes to find the right form and fill it out, wiping poor old “Andy Ramadge” off the social networking site for good. / news.com.au

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Carla Bruni's website a victim of its own success

Carla Bruni's website a victim of its own success. French first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has launched a website that promises a glimpse of her life with President Nicolas Sarkozy, but its success knocked it off the web.

The former supermodel's site, www.carlabrunisarkozy.org, was unable to cope with initial demand and disappointed fans were met with a message requesting them to try again in a few hours.

The site, which was shown on some French news websites, aims to publicise Ms Bruni's charity work as well as giving the world a glimpse of her life in the Elysee Palace with Mr Sarkozy.

Glamour couple ... French President Nicolas Sarkozy and first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy / Reuters

Ms Bruni, who had a successful career as a pop star before marrying the twice-divorced Mr Sarkozy in 2008 after a whirlwind romance, already has a website dedicated to her musical career.

The new site covers three topics: her foundation to help the underprivileged in France, her work as ambassador for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and her life as France's first lady.

Ms Bruni's launch came just days after her husband took another big step onto the web by saying he would track his every move at a forthcoming climate summit in Denmark on Twitter.

Mr Sarkozy already has a page on the social networking website Facebook.

The president divorced his second wife Cecilia in October 2007, five months after he took France's highest office. He married Ms Bruni at a small ceremony at the Elysee Palace, his official residence, in February last year.

Mr Sarkozy is the first French president to divorce while in office and the first in over seven decades to marry while in office. / news.com.au

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Tobacco companies using social networking to target young

Tobacco companies using social networking to target young. Tobacco companies are using legal loopholes to market products on social networking sites including Facebook and MySpace targetting young smokers.

Advertising restrictions on cigarette giants are forcing companies to become savvier in the way they reach consumers.

Fan clubs and unofficial product pages endorsing Marlboro, Benson and Hedges and Lucky Strike are now appearing on social networks, and have the ability to redirect users to the product's website, The Daily Telegraph reports.

Fan clubs and unofficial product pages endorsing cigarettes are now appearing on social networks / Facebook

Cancer Council Australia has called on the Federal Government to intervene and ensure the sites are pulled down.

Tobacco companies have denied officially setting up Facebook and Myspace pages.

But experts said it was difficult controlling the stealth internet advertising with regulation a global problem.

"It needs to be brought to the Government's attention because they have been very good at restricting tobacco advertising," Professor Ian Olver from the Cancer Council said.

"Now we have this whole new media that can be used and needs to be looked at because it can get a huge number of people, particularly young people."

Marlboro has 5058 followers on Facebook while Benson and Hedges also uses the social
networking site.

University of Sydney researcher Becky Freeman has been studying the proliferation of tobacco companies using the internet as a marketing tool.

"One of the most innovative marketing strategies was by the Camel brand, which engaged the online community to help design a new packet," she said. / news.com.au

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