Guardian, The

Facebook has agreed to invest $20 million in affordable housing initiatives after facing intense criticism for failing to help low-income residents in Silicon Valley where the technology boom has exacerbated displacement and gentrification. The corporation, which is pushing forward with a massive campus expansion in northern California, announced a partnership with community organizations aimed at funding affordable housing construction and assisting tenants facing eviction. Housing activists who have long been critical of Facebook and its role in accelerating income inequality in the region said the investment marked an “unprecedented” collaboration between Silicon Valley corporations and advocacy groups and that the project could push neighboring tech companies to better address local poverty.

[Commentary] In the first decade after the Internet we use today was switched on, in January 1983, cyberspace was a brave new world – a glorious sandpit for geeks and computer science researchers. But from 1993 onwards, all that began to change. The main catalysts were the world wide web, the Mosaic browser and AOL. The web provided non-geeks with an answer to the question: what is this Internet thing for? Mosaic, the first modern browser, showed them what the web could do and, more importantly, what it could become. Demand for access to the Internet exploded. AOL met the demand by providing a reliable, easy-to-configure, dial-up service for millions of people, and so brought the “redneck hordes” – ie people unfamiliar with the mores and customs of the netizen era – on to the Internet.

Scenting profits, companies and pornographers scrambled for a piece of the action, closely followed by scammers and spammers and all kinds of other undesirables. The result was that the parallel universes gradually merged, and we wound up with the composite networked world we now inhabit – a world that has the affordances of both cyberspace and meatspace. Which helps to explain why we are having such trouble coming to terms with it.

[John Naughton is professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University. ]

President-elect Donald Trump brought up cybersecurity many times, often referring to it as “cyber”, very much emphasizing his priority of increasing the security of government systems. “To enhance the defense of the other agencies of government, including our law enforcement agencies, we will put together a team of the best military, civilian and private sector cybersecurity experts to comprehensively review all of our cybersecurity systems and technology,” he promised on Oct 3, speaking to veterans in Virginia. “This will include the various methods of internal monitoring, attack and penetration, investigation of suspected hackers or rogue employees, and identity protection for government employees.”

Civil rights organisations have been quick to seize on the potential impact of President-elect Trump’s policies on personal privacy. Neema Guliani, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, said President-elect Trump should “categorically reject proposals to mandate encryption backdoors and supports reforming surveillance programs that have violated the rights of millions of Americans”. That, however, is unlikely. Given that so many in the technology industry either publicly or privately backed Trump’s rival Hillary Clinton in the election, there is some concern that President-elect Trump might try to “punish” Silicon Valley. “He has a lot of people criticizing him and if he spent his whole time getting back at people, he wouldn’t get anything done,” said Atkinson. “Trump is going to need the tech sector. You can’t make America great again if you don’t have a great tech industry.

Controversial Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel will be a member of Donald Trump’s transition team, the campaign has confirmed. Thiel’s involvement in a Trump Administration has been the subject of frenzied speculation in Silicon Valley, where the businessman was the sole prominent advocate for the divisive Republican candidate. Thiel said that he would not move to Washington or seek a seat on the supreme court, but said: “I’ll try to help the president in any way I can.” It is not known what role Thiel will play in the transition team. It is likely that he will be expected to help the president-elect build bridges with Silicon Valley, a place where President Barack Obama is hugely popular and where many people regard President-elect Trump with either distrust or outright disdain.

Facebook has agreed to “pause” its plan to use data from UK users of messaging service WhatsApp for advertising and product improvement purposes across the rest of its business, after an intervention from the UK information commissioner.

Elizabeth Denham wrote to Facebook in September to express her concerns over a new plan to share more data between the social network and Whatsapp. When it announced its plans back in August, Whatsapp said it wanted to explore ways for users to “communicate with businesses that matter to you too, while still giving you an experience without third-party banner ads and spam”. The plans involved using the phone number associated with a WhatsApp account to aid Facebook in targeting adverts on the user’s main Facebook profile. But, Denham wrote, she had concerns that consumers weren’t being properly protected, and that “it’s fair to say the enquiries my team have made haven’t changed that view.

Hackers could use open data such as the information that powers transport apps to create chaos, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has said “If you disrupted traffic data for example, to tell everybody that all the roads south of the river are closed, so everybody would go north of the river, that would gridlock you [and] disable the city,” he said. Prof Sir Nigel Shadbolt, a co-founder, with Berners-Lee, of the Open Data Institute (ODI), described this as “the Italian Job scenario” and “the ultimate hack”.

The pair, who have both advised the British government, are leading campaigners for publicly accessible data. Berners-Lee points out as an example that reliable, detailed transport information “really makes London better”. But they warned that the potential for such datasets to be tampered with if not properly protected was largely overlooked. “When people are thinking about the security of their systems, they worry about people discovering what they are doing,” Berners-Lee said. “What they don’t think about is the possibility of things being changed.”

A coalition of more than 70 civil rights groups have written to Facebook demanding that the company clarifies its policies for removing content and alleging that it has repeatedly removed posts documenting human rights violations. In a letter addressed to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the rights groups – including the ACLU, Center for Media Justice, SumOfUs and Color of Change – express deep concern over the censorship, particularly when posts are removed at the request of police. When Facebook censors content that depicts police brutality, it sets a dangerous precedent for marginalized communities “Your company is taking on an increasingly central role in controlling media that circulates through the public sphere. News is not just getting shared on Facebook: it’s getting broken there,” the letter said. “We are deeply concerned with the recent cases of Facebook censoring human rights documentation, particularly content that depicts police violence.”

The campaign groups referenced the deactivation of Korryn Gaines’ account during a standoff with police, the suspension of live footage from the Dakota Access pipeline protests, the removal of historic photographs such as “napalm girl”, the disabling of Palestinian journalists’ accounts and reports of Black Lives Matter activists’ content being removed. “When the most vulnerable members of society turn to your platform to document and share experiences of injustice, Facebook is morally obligated to protect that speech,” said the letter.

Aside from limited connections at a handful of juvenile detention facilities, there’s no way for America’s 2.3 million inmates to access the internet. Worse, institutions may punish inmates when their families post online on their behalf. Prison authorities cite concerns that inmates will use the internet to harass victims or threaten witnesses, arrange for deliveries of contraband or commit new crimes online. But in a world increasingly defined by technology, denying internet access makes it harder for inmates to prepare for life on the outside, notes Dave Maass, investigative researcher for campaign group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). It makes it harder for inmates to report on conditions inside prisons or communicate with their families – and also contravenes the May 2011 declaration by the UN that internet access is now a fundamental human right.

[Commentary] Google and Facebook have conveyed nearly all of us to this page, and just about every other idea or expression we’ll encounter today. Yet we don’t know how to talk about these companies, nor digest their sheer power. We call them platforms, networks or gatekeepers. But these labels hardly fit. The appropriate metaphor eludes us; even if we describe them as vast empires, they are unlike any we’ve ever known. Far from being discrete points of departure, merely supporting the action or minding the gates, they have become something much more significant. They have become the medium through which we experience and understand the world.

Facebook is not merely a “network” for connection, like the old phone network or electrical grid, as if it had no agency, and did not take a piece of every last interaction (or false start) between friends. When and how much we interact, we rely on Facebook to say. These are not mere “edge providers”, peripheral to infrastructure, or mere “applications” that we can select or refuse. The metaphors that we use – empire, medium, undertow – allude to the power of the all-knowing digital companies. Speaking clearly about this power and its effects is critical. Ultimately, the public needs more voice, more choice, more power. In the near term, we should pursue algorithmic accountability, independent auditing and consumer protection scrutiny, before we lose our agency as a public that is something other than their “user base.”

[Ellen P. Goodman is a professor of law at Rutgers University and co-directs the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law, RIIPL. Julia Powles is a legal academic working on technology law and policy at the University of Cambridge]

The German data protection agency has ordered Facebook to stop collecting user data from its WhatsApp messenger app and delete any data it has already received. The social network announced in August that it would begin sharing data from its 1 billion-plus user base, including phone numbers, from WhatsApp users with Facebook for the purpose of targeted ads. It gave users the option of opting out of the data being used for advertising purposes, but did not allow them to opt out of the data sharing between WhatsApp and Facebook.

Hamburg’s Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information Johannes Caspar ruled that Facebook “neither has obtained an effective approval from the WhatsApp users, nor does a legal basis for the data reception exist”. “It has to be [the users’] decision whether they want to connect their account with Facebook. Facebook has to ask for their permission in advance.” Caspar also recalled that in the wake of Facebook’s 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp it had promised that they would not share user data.