Lauren Frayer

Pairs of Android apps installed on the same smartphone have ways of colluding to extract information about the phone’s user, which can be difficult to detect. Security researchers don’t have much trouble figuring out if a single app is gathering sensitive data and secretly sending it off to a server somewhere. But when two apps team up, neither may show definitive signs of thievery alone. And because of an enormous number of possible app combinations, testing for app collusions is a herculean task. A study released recently developed a new way to tackle this problem—and found more than 20,000 app pairings that leak data.

More than half a hundred Republican Reps signed onto a letter asking Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai to "continue ensuring" that consumer broadband privacy is maintained until the FCC "remedies" the Title II reclassification. Republicans are pushing the FCC to roll back Title II.

Lead signatories on the letter were House Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR), Communications Subcommittee Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection Subcommittee Chairman Bob Latta (R-OH). The letter was phrased to signal that they thought the FCC had been protecting privacy and just wanted to emphasize the need to continue to do so and to do so along the lines of the Federal Trade Commission's privacy by design approach to edge providers and, formerly, ISPs. "Until such time as the FCC rectifies the Title II reclassification that inappropriately removed ISPs from the FTC's jurisdiction, we urge the FCC to continue to hold ISPs to their privacy promises," the letter reads.

The legal battle between Twitter and the US government ended April 7, after the Department of Homeland Security withdrew its demand that the tech company release information to identify an account holder whose tweets are critical of President Donald Trump on Twitter. The lawsuit threatened to become a major battle over free speech between Silicon Valley and Washington. But it was over almost before it began. The tech company had filed a lawsuit April 6 to protest the order, saying that it violated the user's First Amendment right to free expression. But Twitter dropped its suit the next day, saying in a court filing that "[because] the summons has now been withdrawn, Twitter voluntary dismisses without prejudice all claims."

[Commentary] [J]ust conceptually, the idea that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai will get Comcast and AT&T and Verizon and every tiny little regional Internet service provider to put strong open internet provisions in their terms of service agreements is pure nonsense.

First, terms of service agreements change all the time. And people freak out about them, and nothing happens. Do you think the iTunes Terms and Conditions are there to protect you? Facebook’s? Verizon’s? Come on. So what’s to stop Comcast from making this deal today, and then changing its terms a year from now? (It’s certainly not the presence of meaningful access competition in the marketplace!) How will the FTC track every single ISP’s terms of service language, the differences between them, and enforce any sort of consistent, reasonable policy?

Second, let’s say Chairman Pai manages to thread the needle and gets every ISP in the country to agree on the exact same open internet language in their terms of service, and further secures a commitment that the language will remain in their terms in perpetuity. Isn’t that functionally identical to... a law? Shouldn’t we just have... a law? And don’t we already have that law? What specifically is Pai trying to accomplish if he agrees that open internet principles are important?

More than 56 million people in the United States are living with a disability, according to the US Census Bureau. But even as a growing share of these Americans report going online or owning a smartphone, the digital divide between those who have a disability and those who don’t remains large. Disabled Americans are about three times as likely as those without a disability to say they never go online (23% vs. 8%), according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in the fall of 2016. When compared with those who do not have a disability, disabled adults are roughly 20 percentage points less likely to say they subscribe to home broadband and own a traditional computer, a smartphone or a tablet. Adults who report having a disability are also less likely to have multiple devices that enable them to go online. One-in-four disabled adults say they have high-speed internet at home, a smartphone, a desktop or laptop computer and a tablet, compared with 42% of those who report not having a disability.

Internet access brings all sorts of benefits: Education, jobs, and connection to friends and family. But youth in the criminal justice and foster care systems often don't have access to it. That's why some lawmakers in California want to make it their right.

Earlier in 2017, CA Democrat Assembly member Mike Gipson introduced legislation that would mandate "reasonable access to computer technology and the internet" for kids in juvenile detention programs and foster care. Access to the internet would be listed on the bills of rights for youth in these state programs. Existing rights include a safe environment, health care, freedom of religion and access to a lawyer.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer, met on April 4 with broadband industry officials to discuss how best to dismantle the legal basis underpinning the FCC's 2015 Open Internet net neutrality policy. "If the FCC's Open Internet rules are directly jeopardized—either by the Trump administration and the FCC, or by Republicans and Democrats in Congress—we will work with our allies to mobilize on a mass scale," said Mark Stanley, a senior official at the progressive organizing group Demand Progress.

The inside-the-Beltway mechanics of how precisely Chairman Pai and his Republican allies on Capitol Hill plan to dismantle the FCC's net neutrality policy are already the subject of DC parlor games. But the procedural details should not obscure the core net neutrality principles at stake: Online innovation, civic empowerment, individual privacy, and free speech. It's these principles that net neutrality activists across the country are now mobilizing to defend. "It took a decade to win the fight for net neutrality, and people will not sit by silently when politicians threaten to take it away," said Craig Aaron, President and CEO of DC-based public interest group Free Press. "They will defend the open internet and the free expression, economic innovation and popular organizing it makes possible. The system may be rigged in favor of corporate giants, but Donald Trump is about to find out the hard way what happens when you mess with the internet."

It’s hard to defend legislation that undermines internet users’ essential privacy rights. But that hasn’t stopped the broadband industry and its many friends in Washington from trying.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and Federal Trade Commission Acting Chair Maureen Ohlhausen dismiss the public outpouring of anger as the work of a few professional lobbyists and lawyers. Their claim is insulting to the millions of people who are rightly outraged. And these two should know better than to blame “lobbyists,” especially since both are DC lawyers who once represented the interests of mammoth communications companies.

[Commentary] Five months after the US elections, fake news remains high on media, political, and public agendas, having sparked a wave of concern, responses, and counter-responses in countries around the world. The term has become a keyword for both media institutions and the political mobilizations who contest them. Driven by countless reports, position papers, analyses, columns, reflections, op-eds, startups, imitators, accusations, and parodies, and despite numerous attempts to declare the issue “dead,” “meaningless,” or itself “fake” — the issue endures, like a prolonged argument where no one’s able to have the last word.

Below are four ways of seeing fake news differently, drawing on our ongoing research collaborations around A Field Guide to Fake News with the Public Data Lab. The guide focuses not on findings or solutions, but on starting points for collective inquiry, debate, and deliberation around how we understand and respond to fake news — and the broader questions they raise about the future of the data society.

[Jonathan Gray of the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath, Liliana Bounegru of the University of Groningen and the University of Ghent, and Tommaso Venturini of the Institute of Complex Systems at the University of Lyon are collaborators in the Public Data Lab.]

Alphabet Inc’s Access division, which houses its broadband service Google Fiber, has removed two prominent executives from its ranks, the latest sign of the business pulling back from ambitious, expensive goals. Milo Medin, a vice president at Access, and Dennis Kish, a wireless infrastructure veteran who was president of Google Fiber, are leaving the division but staying at the Alphabet holding company. The Access division has continued to shrink. About 600 employees are currently being reassigned to the Google internet business and other Alphabet divisions, apparently.