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February 2016

Privacy Policies More Readable, But Still Hard to Understand

In 2012, researchers calculated it would take 25 days to read all the densely worded privacy policies an average Internet user had agreed to. Nearly four years later, some publishers of websites and apps are favoring plain English over legalese – with mixed results. Among others, Facebook, Fitbit, Pinterest, Reddit, Spotify, and Samsung have made efforts to present reader-friendly privacy policies. Some made the changes proactively, others under pressure.

The effort to simplify privacy policy language is a response to public suspicion of opaque policies and the collection of ever more data, said Fatemeh Khatibloo, a Forrester Research Inc. analyst who studies privacy. Some companies “are finally getting on board with the idea that privacy — and how they use our data — is closely tied to trustworthiness,” she said. In addition, they’re trying to write policies that will be viewed favorably in Europe, which has set a higher bar than the US for what counts as consent to use personal data.

Venture capital and other investment firms are surprise players in the government’s historic auction of airwaves

Apparently, venture capital and other investment firms have been positioning themselves to enter a major auction of wireless airwaves spring 2016 that is expected to reshape the nation's communications networks. At least one local firm, Alexandria (VA)-based Columbia Capital, intends to bid on the valuable frequencies used to carry mobile voice and data, apparently. The auction of airwaves has been described by federal regulators as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that could bolster an existing wireless network, equip a new entrant to compete with the likes of Verizon Wireless and AT&T, or enable a company to develop next generation wireless technologies.

Feb 8 marks the application deadline for those who want to bid in the auction. A number of investment companies have been conducting their own analyses on the value of these airwaves in recent months, trying to determine whether they should jump in and how much they should spend. The result could be a bidding war as financial firms jockey with wireless carriers, cable companies and perhaps even some in the tech industry in an intensely competitive land rush for high-value wireless real estate.

GCHQ Director: One Warrant Can Be Used to Hack a Whole Intelligence Agency

The United Kingdom’s intelligence agencies may soon get their hacking powers on a stronger legal footing. But a new report questions why certain warrants designed to hack multiple computers at once are even necessary, when their more targeted equivalents are arguably just as broad.

On Feb 9, the UK's Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament published its report on the draft Investigatory Powers Bill, a proposed piece of surveillance legislation. The Committee was told that so-called “targeted” hacking warrants were so broad, that they could be used to gather information on an entire foreign intelligence agency, raising concerns about what “bulk” warrants are designed for. If passed into law, the bill will force internet service providers to store the browsing history of their customers for 12 months. It will also update how some of the intelligence agencies' use of “equipment interference” (EI)—the UK government's term for hacking—is handled, and introduce the idea of “targeted” and “bulk” EI warrants.

What a world with 5G will look like

What will a world with 5G look like? Everyone in the wireless industry agrees that 5G is coming by the end of the decade. But what will it be used for? That's still up in the air. 5G will make cars safer to drive. It will make instant replay more instant. And doctors will be able to perform surgery using wirelessly controlled robots. And, yes, 5G will be much faster.

Nokia, aiming to be one of the world's biggest 5G players, claims that it has tested a 5G connection with download speeds of 30 gigabits per second. That's more than 1,000 times faster than your average 4G connection. In the real world, there's very little chance of your phone actually getting speeds that fast. Trees, buildings, your distance from a cell tower and those pesky other customers who are also trying to use the network are going to slow down speeds dramatically from what Nokia was able to achieve in a lab. Still, the wireless industry thinks 5G will be really fast: 10 to 100 times faster than 4G, according to Brian Daly, director of government standards at AT&T. Those faster speeds will also allow more customers to be connected at the same time, giving the network more capacity and making connections more reliable for mobile customers.

The '96 Act and the Internet: The Myth of the Consensus Light-Touch

[Commentary] Many hold the common but mistaken view that the successful Clintonera telecommunications/Internet policies reflected a bipartisan consensus that light-touch regulation was all that was necessary for the Internet to thrive. True, communications policy was more bipartisan in those days. That derived, however, not from a lack of controversy but from how that era’s great policy divide—between Local and the Long-Distance Phone Companies—had advocates on both sides of the aisle. The bigger error, however, lies in the myth that all the Internet needed was the benign neglect of the government.

A more accurate assessment is that the nascent Internet needed government assistance, just as did the nascent broadcast industry (with spectrum allocations and various protections for local broadcasters), the nascent cable industry (with mandated access to broadcast programming and pole attachment rights), and the nascent direct broadcast satellite industry (with spectrum and cable program access rights) all required in their early stages.

[Blair Levin is a nonresident senior fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution]

Women Had Just One Third of Speaking Roles in 2015 Movies, Study Shows

Women accounted for just one third of all speaking characters in films in 2015, a 3 percent increase from the previous year, a new study has found. 2016’s “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World” examined 2,500 female characters in the top 100 domestic grossing films, and the study revealed only 34 percent of major characters were female, representing a modest increase from 2014. However, they do also represent recent historical highs.

The study also uncovered that females comprised only 22 percent of protagonists in all of the films considered, which actually represents a 10 percent increase over 2014, an exceptionally bad year for women in film, according to the researchers. The figure is six percent higher than it was in 2002. Women accounted for just 18 percent of antagonists in the 100 films considered, and the percentage of male characters in their 50s is almost twice that of female characters in the same age range, coming in at 17 percent and 9 percent, respectively.

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