Quartz

“Gathering and analyzing comments from the public is an important part of the Federal Communications Commission’s rulemaking process,” the American agency says on its website. But analyzing those comments increasingly means reading the thoughts of spambots. Automated comments are now part of political reality: During 2016’s US presidential race, a large proportion of tweets supporting both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton came from automated accounts. These bots send messages en masse, originating from one source and usually conveying a particular ideology. Some are easy to spot.

President Donald Trump’s new Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai promised last December to bring a “weed-wacker” to the agency that oversees the US’s media and telecommunications industries. He appears to be wielding a chain saw instead. “He’s such an interesting character in the Trump administration, because he is qualified for his job,” said president of Free Press Craig Aaron.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s strategy may be to use the repeal of network neutrality rules to force the hand of Congress. Those familiar with FCC deliberations say abdicating its net neutrality authority could pressure Democrats into cooperating with Republicans on passing a bill. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) has offered to hammer out net neutrality legislation with Democrats in the past. 

Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card? Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet. Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers—even when location services are disabled—and sending that data back to Google.

Google, Facebook, and Amazon are controlling Americans’ minds and wallets, and they need to be stopped before they destroy the US economy and democracy itself. That was the message from a dimly-lit, packed conference room in a nondescript Washington DC hotel near the train station last week. Nearly 200 tech executives, journalists, public relations people, and academics attended the event, organized by the Open Markets Institute, a tiny nonprofit that’s becoming a lightening rod for the growing anger and frustration with Big Tech in America. Here are their main points:

[Commentary] A recent wave of cyberattacks—from WannaCry and Equifax to the alleged Russian influence on the US election—has demonstrated how hackers can wreak havoc on our largest institutions. But by focusing only on hackers’ efforts to extort money or mess with our political process, we may have been missing what is potentially an even scarier possibility: data manipulation. Imagine that a major Big Food company gets hacked.