Fifteen aspiring filmmakers have already caught the attention of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The academy has announced the winners of its Student Academy Awards, and says the student filmmakers will spend a week in Los Angeles as its guests before accepting their awards at a ceremony on Sept. 17 in Beverly Hills, California.
The winning entries were selected from 1,686 submissions. Past Student Academy Award winners include Pixar's Pete Docter and John Lasseter, Spike Lee, Trey Parker and Robert Zemeckis.
This year's winners:
– "Chiaroscuro," Daniel Drummond, Chapman University, California.
– "Zoe," ChiHyun Lee, The School of Visual Arts, New York.
-"An Object at Rest," Seth Boyden, California Institute of the Arts.
– "Soar," Alyce Tzue, Academy of Art University, California.
– "Taking the Plunge," Nicholas Manfredi and Elizabeth Ku-Herrero, The School of Visual Arts, New York.
-"Boxeadora," Meg Smaker, Stanford University, California.
– "I Married My Family's Killer," Emily Kassie, Brown University, Rhode Island.
– "Looking at the Stars," Alexandre Peralta, University of Southern California.
– "Day One," Henry Hughes, American Film Institute, California.
– "Stealth," Bennett Lasseter, American Film Institute, California.
– "This Way Up," Jeremy Cloe, American Film Institute, California.
– "Everything Will Be Okay.," Patrick Vollrath, Filmakademie Wien, Austria.
– "Fidelity," Ilker Catak, Hamburg Media School, Germany.
– "The Last Will," Dustin Loose, Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany.
South Korea fines Meta $15 million for illegally collecting information on Facebook users
South Korea's privacy watchdog on Tuesday fined social media company Meta 21.6 billion won ($15 million) for illegally collecting sensitive personal information from Facebook users, including data about their political views and sexual orientation, and sharing it with thousands of advertisers.
It was the latest in a series of penalties against Meta by South Korean authorities in recent years as they increase their scrutiny of how the company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, handles private information.
Following a four-year investigation, South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission concluded that Meta unlawfully collected sensitive information about around 980,000 Facebook users, including their religion, political views and whether they were in same-sex unions, from July 2018 to March 2022.
It said the company shared the data with around 4,000 advertisers.
South Korea's privacy law provides strict protection for information related to personal beliefs, political views and sexual behavior, and bars companies from processing or using such data without the specific consent of the person involved.
The commission said Meta amassed sensitive information by analyzing the pages the Facebook users liked or the advertisements they clicked on.
The company categorized ads to identify users interested in themes such as specific religions, same-sex and transgender issues, and issues related to North Korean escapees, said Lee Eun Jung, a director at the commission who led the investigation on Meta.
"While Meta collected this sensitive information and used it for individualized services, they made only vague mentions of this use in their data policy and did not obtain specific consent," Lee said.
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