ICYMI // July 26

(In Case You Missed It) Stuff happening in tech that is relevant to your kids, classrooms, and lives.

Emily Tavoulareas

Jul 27, 2026

Here’s what caught my attention recently…

🥳 📚 Internal bigtech company documents are publicly accessible and searchable. The lead law firm in the social media addiction MDL (against Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Snap) has published a publicly accessible archive of internal company documents from the litigation. A multidistrict litigation is basically a way of pooling together a large number of similar lawsuits into one court proceeding — in this case nearly 3,000 individual “actions” in the Northern District of California.

Apple and Google are profiting off of nudify apps, and the San Francisco’s City Attorney said no. The apps (marketed as harmless face-swapping tools) generate nonconsensual nude images… and some of these were rated appropriate for children. The interesting thing here is that the City Attorney is not arguing about content moderation or liability — he’s arguing that Apple and Google are profiting from apps that create non-consensual intimate imagery. The problem here is that these are reactive consequences, and for kids and parents… the damage is already done. So while hooray and thank you SF, the bigger question is: Why are apps like this legal, and why are they able to target kids?

Dr. Alison Yeung posted this week about how the volume and frequency of messages kids are receiving disrupts key social experiences. She talks about a child who got 42 messages during a two-hour ballgame, along with 1,452 Snapchat messages in a single day. She says “This is not socializing. Socializing has a start time and a finish time. This many messages in one day is deprivation.” She ends by suggesting that parents teach messaging etiquette before giving kids access to messaging apps. And yes, we can say who has time for this? but we can at least model it in our own lives.

Meta AI may already have access to your entire camera roll — every photo, every screenshot, including ones you never shared. ParentsTogether shared a quick tutorial on how to check and shut it off in under 60 seconds. Make sure your people know about this.
Surveillance is officially a luxury. Madison Square Garden (MSG) famously has a sprawling surveillance system that can monitor guests down to the second. But apparently that can be turned off if you’re fancy enough because some lucky few apparently deserve privacy, while the rest of us need to just shut up about it already. Basically MSG turned off its facial recognition system for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s rehearsal dinner, because of a “ privacy request.” For the record… this has never happened before, not even for events hosted by NBCUniversal or the NYPD. The question for us to consider here: should the wealthy get to opt out of surveillance systems the rest of us are subjected to by default?

Meta is testing an AI app that generates personalized bedtime stories for children. Parents upload a photo of a toy or person, choose a world, and select values like “kindness” or “courage.” Meta confirmed the pilot is available only to users over 18. This is the same company being sued in thousands of cases for knowingly addicting children to its platforms… and now they are building AI bedtime story apps for the kids jumping into their platform pipeline. I wish I could say I’m surprised, but … shrug. And while I don’t agree that it’s “reasonable” I enjoyed 9to5Mac’s take: “StoryKit sounds like a perfectly reasonable app that would be well-received if it were from almost anyone but Meta.”
A New York school district bought a humanoid robot teacher, and planned to deploy it in 11th and 12th grade classes this fall. I honestly don’t even know where to begin with this one. The pilot is paused while they “work through enhanced student data privacy agreements” but you have to hear this. So first: the robot will have access to student learning data, and will apparently identify students by number… Yes, apparently “personalized learning” involves students being treated as if they are literal objects… which is less surprising when you know the history of the company making the humanoids: Realbotix. This company is a mashup between two companies that were formerly working on a combination of crypto and sex dolls. I am not joking. Realbotix was formerly known as Tokens.com — a company that helped customers use cryptocurrency to rent “digital land” in the Metaverse. In April 2024, the company acquired Simulcra, the parent company behind RealDoll, known for hyperrealistic sex dolls and later sex robots. I just… WHAT. PS: this district is part of a native reservation, and immediately had me thinking about the brutal history of testing on native populations.
Sinéad Bovell crisply lays out what a post-literate society is (and warns it’s coming). She says it’s less about people not being able to read, and more about a world in which text is no longer the primary medium for knowledge and ideas. A world in which text is replaced by short-form video, audio, and AI-generated answers… a world in which cognitive friction and sustained attention whither away. And when you consider the changes happening with search, it’s not hard to imagine a very near-term future in which our entire world view is pre-packed and delivered to us by an algorithm that someone else has programmed.