No retreat from the media world

adminonNovember 24, 2021January 5, 2022Leave a Comment

Munich Cardinal Reinhard Marx has warned against drawing the wrong conclusions from the decision to separate the Catholic Church from the Weltbild publishing group. This was "not a signal that we want to withdraw from the public," emphasized Marx on Wednesday in Munich. He said that the Church would have no future if it did not keep initiating new communications. The German Bishops' Conference now wants to set up a media ethics working group.

Cardinal Marx spoke at the farewell ceremony for the long-time director of the St. Michael's Association, Erich Joob (65). It would be "short-sighted to rely only on electronic media" and neglect the book, Marx said. Books are central to church education work and the acquisition of reading skills. Joob expressed concern about the future of the Catholic Church in Germany in his farewell speech. The temptation to "stew in one's own juice" is currently very great in the company. In order to maintain its social power, it must above all remain in dialogue with artists and literary figures. He learned from priests that being Catholic also means being comprehensive, spiritually broad and inviting, without forgetting one's own origins.

Media ethics working group
Regarding the discussion about Weltbild, Joob said he understands the anger. At the same time, he pointed out that the company was a "mass mailer" where the books ordered would not be touched again. What is annoying in the debate is "the unquestioned equation of eroticism with pornography". Here the church must pay attention to differentiation, he said.

As a first reaction to the debate about Weltbild, the German Bishops' Conference wants to set up a media ethics working group. The committee is to be made up of journalists, academics and media lawyers, and will support the Bishops' Conference's Journalism Commission, according to the commission's chairman, Rottenburg-Stuttgart Bishop Gebhard Furst. He expressed himself in an interview with the association magazine "AKSB-Inform". The Bishops' Conference is also planning a conference on media ethics.

Weltbild management does not expect sale until 2013
The sale of Weltbild Verlag is not expected to take place until 2013, according to Carel Halff, Chairman of the Weltbild Management Board. "Experts expect the process to take no less than 18 to 24 months for companies of this size," Halff told the "Augsburger Allgemeine" newspaper. "With sales of 1.7 billion euros a year, a sale doesn't happen that quickly."

Halff emphasized that the 6.400 employees would have no reason to fear for their jobs. He did not give any details about possible investors or buyers. The Catholic Church had decided to sell the publishing house. The publishing group is criticized within the church because it also sells erotic and esoteric literature. Halff said he could understand the church's decision to sell. The book business, as it is run today, cannot be completely reconciled with their basic attitude. The plenary assembly of the Association of German Dioceses (VDD) dealt with Weltbild GmbH in Wurzburg on Monday. The VDD holds 24.2 percent of the shares in the publishing group. The Weltbild publishing group emerged from the Catholic magazine publisher Winfried-Werk GmbH, founded in 1948.

Google: Cookie replacement Floc for testing, for developers and ignorant users

The Federated Learning of Cohorts, FLOC called, goes to the start. Google makes his idea of replacement for third-party cookies as Developer Origin Trial in Chrome. It is blackmold Google from "and" the new web technology, because with FLOC, it is possible at the same time possible to protect the privacy of the users and to give advertisers a tool for existential business models. So far, however, the method does not rely on rough enthusiasm.

After tracking cookies are increasingly bad for users and also browser providers such as Apple and Mozilla they were banished, ordering Google, also to be borne by third-party cookies. First, however, a replacement had to come and this comes in the first test phase. Floc is part of the Privacy Sandbox, Google’s Map Sensing Bundle for better privacy and more security for continued prolonged advertising.

"Just" The ID is still out – to all

In a blog post, Google now explains how Floc is allowed to. Already known that, as the name implies, cohorts in the browser are formed and this matching advertisement is displayed instead of personalized advertising based on personal profiles. Cohorts defines Google About similarities in browsing history. If users miss the even more targeted advertising, you can still register on websites and share their data with the provider.

The browser history is not passed on to Google by FLOC, it will continue to be called. In the browser itself, the decision that cohort can be found. All side operators receive an ID of the cohort displayed to display it based on advertising. Chrome will not create groups of sensitive areas – to pay medical, political and religious topics – or otherwise deal with these. As the browser meets these decisions, can be read in a separately published paper. It’s about avoiding potential discrimination.

No tests in Europe

As subjects first serves a small percentage of users from Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines and the USA. Europe is therefore not yet – which is no coincidence. The local data protection and other laws make the approval of Floc at least insecure. Anyone who has blocked third-party cookies in Chrome in the participating countries has also excluded from the test. An explanation of why it requires the consent to third-party cookies, Google does not provide.

Especially the US NGO Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) criticizes the vorstob Google’s sharply. On the one hand, the activists Floc for a basic "terrible idea", Because she mainly helps Google. On the other hand, however, they also announce the test without the test persons be informed about them that is being tested at them. External tracking blockers are not aligned on Floc – Homes, these could block third-party cookies, but not Google’s tests. Who enabled chromes synchronization functions and thus releases your own browsing history, Google offers this velvet ID.

Katarina sorensen wants to raise awareness of the acts

Symbolic image of abuse, shadow of a cross © Taigi (shutterstock)

Katarina Sorensen was abused as a child by her pastor for almost ten years. Now she is fighting for her case and others in the Protestant church to be dealt with – at state and federal level.

It has been over 20 years since Katarina Sorensen was sexually harassed and abused by the pastor of her church congregation. Now the affected person, who wants to remain anonymous and therefore appears under this pseudonym, goes public. Together with the Protestant regional church of Hanover, on 6. July at a press conference in Seevetal, Lower Saxony, Katarina Sorensen reported on her case. Nearby, in a parish in Nenndorf in the district of Harburg, a former pastor allegedly abused her between 1988 and 1997. Sorensen was 15 years old when the attacks began; the cleric, who has since died, was in his mid-40s.

Committed to youth work

"The pastor was very well known for his committed youth work," reports Sorensen. In the context of excursions and camps, he had committed the sexual abuse. She was not his only victim: "There is another victim in our congregation and there are others with whom he at least tried."

Planned abuse

The clergyman had first approached the girls cautiously – for example by hugging or massaging them – and then crossed boundaries. Sorensen did not find this pleasant, but wanted to be "loved and seen" by the pastor. "I knew that if I said something against him, he could ostracize me from the group very quickly."In the meantime, she said, she was certain that he had planned from the beginning to commit sexual assaults on young girls.

Difficult reappraisal

The processing of the case has been going on for some time. In 2015, Sorensen turned for the first time to the regional church, after she had long been looking for a suitable contact person. The church paid her a year later a compensation payment of 35.000 euros. But Sorensen continued to make the case for a further reappraisal of her story and other abuse cases afterward.

Even though the person affected now appears together with the church, she evaluates the cooperation quite critically: "For me, the path of coming to terms in the church was rather stony." Without support from other places, she would not have gone through the process, she says. Only in the past two years, he said, has it become much easier within the church to talk about the ie.

Courage to go public

Sorensen also addressed the Independent Commission on Child Sexual Abuse, before which she reported her case in 2018. In 2019, she described her story in a guest article in "Die Zeit" – without naming the church congregation and pastor in question. The fact that she is now making the case completely public was a conscious decision and took a lot of courage. "I want there to be an awareness that it happened."

Cooperation in dealing with abuse

In the meantime, Sorensen also advises the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) on dealing with abuse. There, among other things, she helped establish an independent point of contact for those affected by abuse. According to her own information, she has applied to serve on the EKD's victim advisory board, which is scheduled to begin its work this summer. "I hope that this panel will get a reasonable mandate."
The church, she demands, must in particular improve the structures that make it possible for those affected to come forward. Contact persons must be clearly named and properly trained. Finally, he said, there are many more victims who have not yet found the courage to talk about their cases.

In Nenndorf, Sorensen's commitment has already led to another victim contacting the regional church some time ago. Two more alleged victims of the pastor came forward after the press conference was announced. Oberlandeskirchenrat Rainer Mainusch thanked Sorensen for her courage in making the case public and called on others affected to come forward. According to church information, there are indications that the clergyman at least molested women during his assignment in Wolfsburg, which lasted from 1972 to 1986.

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