David Lazarus

Arlene Howard’s phone bill said she made a bunch of calls to Cuba, which she didn’t. Her service provider, Charter Communications, acknowledged that her office line must have been hacked. But it still demanded that she pay thousands of dollars to cover the cost of the bogus calls. To which all customers of Charter’s Spectrum service should rightly respond: Say what?! You probably didn’t know this — I didn’t — but buried deep within the fine print of Spectrum’s terms of service for business and residential landlines is a provision that the customer, not the company, is responsible for any fraudulent use of the phone service. I found similar provisions tucked away in AT&T’s and Frontier Communications’ terms. You get hacked, you pay.

[Commentary] President Donald Trump named Ajit Pai to take over as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Chairman Pai, a Republican, has served on the five-member commission since 2012, and no one questions his smarts or his grasp of complex telecom issues. Unlike some other Trump appointees, this one knows his stuff.

That said, Chairman Pai has a solid track record of favoring deregulation of phone, cable and broadband companies. It’s a sure bet he’ll adopt a more hands-off approach to overseeing the telecom industry than his Democratic predecessor, Tom Wheeler, who believed government regulators have an important role to play in consumer protection. “Pai is the anti-Wheeler,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president of Public Knowledge. “Anything Wheeler tried to do, Pai would be the first to say it went too far.” For consumers, Feld said, a key change will be Chairman Pai renouncing Wheeler’s position that phone rules apply to broadband services — a stance that gave the FCC sweeping authority over high-speed Internet providers. It may sound wonky, but it’s a very big deal.

[Commentary] If federal authorities play this correctly, the AT&T-Time Warner merger actually could be beneficial for consumers.

What they should do is press the case for skinny bundles and a la carte channels.

Despite all the political posturing, I expect the deal ultimately to be approved. There’s not a lot of overlap in AT&T’s and Time Warner’s operations, so the most troublesome element is creation of a corporate behemoth of Monster Island proportions. To address that, the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission almost certainly will impose a number of conditions to make the deal more palatable, including divestiture of some properties and commitments to play nice with other kids. Because a merged AT&T-Time Warner would cast such a long shadow over the telecom and media industries, a requirement that the company offer smaller, reasonably priced programming packages and break off popular channels on an a la carte basis could have a sweeping effect on other pay-TV players.

“It’s always the case that when one party does something that’s more pro-consumer, others will follow,” said John Bergmayer, senior counsel at the advocacy group Public Knowledge.

[Commentary] Time Warner Cable was patting itself on the back after saying it was willing to have a federal arbitrator step in to resolve its long-running dispute with other pay-TV companies over the cost of the new Dodgers channel.

Arbitration with Time Warner Cable over the Dodgers channel would only perpetuate this corrupt system. On the other hand, offering SportsNet LA only to those who want it -- as DirecTV and other pay-TV companies have proposed -- would almost certainly prompt demands for all sports channels to be offered a la carte. Then it would be just a matter of time before other programming tiers -- movies, news, religious and foreign-language shows -- are similarly unbundled. And before long, we'll arrive at the only reasonable destination: allowing consumers to pick their channels in the same way they decide all other purchases: based on their individual wants and not on the demands of some broadcasting executive in New York.

[Commentary] Federal regulators say companies that buy and sell consumer data operate largely in the shadows and should be reined in with new privacy laws. The marketing trade group that speaks for so-called data brokers says that no such laws are necessary and that these companies do a fine job of policing themselves.

As the Joker said in Tim Burton's "Batman," "Who do you trust? Hubba, hubba, hubba! Money, money, money! Who do you trust?" Left to their own device over the years, data brokers have consistently striven to keep consumers in the dark about the information they collect and what they do with it.

The Federal Trade Commission isn't trying to shut the industry down. It simply wants to give people more say over how their personal info is used.

Among the agency's recommendations is creation of a website that would allow consumers to see what various data brokers know about them and opt out of having their info used in the future. It also wants retailers and other businesses to notify consumers before sharing information with data brokers and, again, to allow people to opt out of such activities. If information is especially sensitive, such as medical info, people would have to be asked for their permission before it could be placed in the hands of data brokers.

These are excellent proposals. Will Congress act on them? I wouldn't hold my breath, considering Washington's lousy track record for privacy safeguards since the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

[Commentary] Your personal information is yours. Yet that simple idea, which should serve as the basis of all privacy-related laws and regulations in the United States, seems to have eluded those who profess to be the guardians of consumer data.

The White House reiterated its call for greater protection of people's personal info -- two years after proposing a "privacy bill of rights" that went nowhere in Congress.

A new report, written by a group led by White House counselor John Podesta, says that "big data" -- the various entities that benefit from knowing all there is to know about you -- is growing out of control. We're talking about sensors in our homes, cities, wearable devices, that collect and share information about our surroundings, our behavior, our health and our whereabouts.

His report suggests some modest legislative changes, along with "voluntary, enforceable codes of conduct" for businesses and government agencies to keep consumer data from being abused or getting into the wrong hands. I don't know. Seems to me that if sensors everywhere is the problem, voluntary codes of conduct aren't the solution.

Moreover, while the report addresses the ease with which people's information can be collected, crunched and put to use, it fails to adequately convey the sense of violation that comes with businesses and government officials knowing your habits, behavior and activities.

The report says that "we must ensure that effective consumer privacy protections are in place to protect individuals." But it stops short of doing anything about it, such as requiring that private companies disclose to consumers what they know about them. The report also recommends that US privacy safeguards be extended to non-US citizens "because privacy is a worldwide value." This is apparently a bone being thrown to European businesses and governments.

Europeans enjoy far more robust privacy protections than Americans and have long complained that their data are unfairly exploited by US companies. The White House wants Europeans to know that we feel their pain. But that's not good enough. The Europeans have it right: They begin any discussion of data use with an acknowledgment that all people have a right to privacy -- a right that's only implied, not spelled out, in US law.