Guardian, The

[Commentary] The phone in your pocket gives you powers that were hard to imagine even five years ago. It can talk to you, listen, and give sensible answers to questions. It knows your fingerprint and recognises your face and those of all your friends. It can buy almost anything, sell almost anything, bring you all the news you want, as well as almost all the books, films and music you might want to look at. What’s more, it will even allow you to talk to your friends and to communicate with almost anyone. The problem is that these powers are not yours – at least they don’t belong to you alone. They belong to whoever controls the phone and can be used to serve their purposes as well as yours. Repressive governments and criminal gangs are all contending to break into phones today, and this kind of hacking will increasingly become the preferred route into all of the computer networks that we use – the ones we don’t call “phones”.

Beyond rogue nation states there is an unpleasant and insufficiently regulated market of legal firms that specialise in finding security vulnerabilities and selling them to the highest legal bidder, which normally means oppressive regimes; then there is a second tier of entirely illegal operators who sell tools to criminal gangs. Little of this is used for spying (though there is a market among jealous and abusive men for software that will enable to them to track their partners, one reason why some women’s shelters are reluctant to allow smartphones inside). Much more damage is done by “ransomware”, which encrypts and in effect steals all of a user’s data, to be released only on payment. Such assaults are becoming increasingly common. This is a global problem now. Since almost every country will want these powers for its own security services, if for no one else, what is developing is something like an international arms trade. International efforts to police it are urgently needed and the companies that sell us these powerful phones must also be pressed to live up to their responsibilities to keep them safe so that their power is not easily turned against their owners.

A consortium of activist groups has sent an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg asking him to implement an “anti-censorship policy” at Facebook in its dealings with law enforcement officials in the wake of the death of Baltimore woman Korryn Gaines. Gaines, killed just after her Facebook Live video stream of her confrontation with police officers was turned off, was being served an arrest warrant after failing to appear in court for a traffic violation.

She was shot dead by police and her five-year-old son, whom she was holding at the time, was wounded. The archived video from the stream was briefly unavailable as well, in what Facebook called “a technical glitch”. Police officers said they had asked Facebook to turn off Gaines’s video stream. The signatories of the letter say they don’t buy the “glitch” story. “If your company agrees to censor people’s accounts at the request of police – thereby allowing the police to control what the public sees on Facebook – then it is part of the problem,” they wrote.

Among the organizations represented in the letter are Color of Change, a political advocacy group that focuses on the rights of African Americans, Demand Progress, MoveOn.org, and Free Press.

The bulk collection of personal data by British spy agencies is vital in preventing terrorist attacks, an independent review of draft security legislation has found.

David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, concluded that laws giving MI5, MI6 and GCHQ the right to gather large volumes of data from members of the public had a “clear operational purpose”. The findings were welcomed by the prime minister, Theresa May, but will be criticised by human rights and privacy campaigners in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations.

[Commentary] Imagine if it would have more of an impact for Palestine to be recognised as a sovereign country by Google than by the UN. It’s a suggestion that’s caught fire – a five-month-old online petition demanding Palestine be labeled and bordered in Google Maps has gained more than 250,000 signatures just over the past few days. The issue is far more nuanced than the instantaneous outrage about Google “wiping Palestine from the map” would suggest. Google has never actually labeled the country, which isn’t officially recognised by the US or much of the west. The swiftness of the backlash, though, is not just about the wish for justice on behalf of an occupied people, but about the belief – now punctured – that our technology is neutral, that it presents an unbiased, infallible version of the world.

Countries that have popular, well-funded public service broadcasters encounter less rightwing extremism and corruption and have more press freedom, a report from the European Broadcasting Union has found.

For the first time, an analysis has been done of the contribution of public service media, such as the BBC, to democracy and society. The report shows the impact strong publicly funded television and radio has had on voter turnout, control of corruption and press freedom. The report says that in “countries where public service media funding … is higher there tends to be more press freedom” and where they have a higher market share “there also tends to be a higher voter turnout”. It also says there is a strong correlation between how much of a country’s market its public service broadcaster has and the “demand for rightwing extremism” and “control of corruption”. “These correlations are especially interesting given the current public debates about low participation in elections, corruption and the rise of far right politics across Europe,” said EBU head of media intelligence service Roberto Suárez Candel, who conducted the research.

San Francisco (CA) has voted against a proposal known as the “tech tax” which would have forced the area’s biggest technology firms to fund initiatives to provide affordable housing and tackle the city’s homeless problem. The tax, which would have been on the ballot in the city in November, would have imposed a 1.5% payroll levy on technology companies that generate more than $1 million in revenues a year, including Uber, Google, Twitter and Airbnb. It was proposed in June by supervisors Eric Mar, Aaron Peskin and David Campos. Supporters said the measure would have raised an estimated $140m every year, which would have been used to build affordable housing and shelters for homeless people. But it failed after it was rejected by the budget committee of the board of San Francisco’s supervisors.

“As a city, I don’t think we should subscribe to the politics of Donald Trump and the Republicans that they are saying certain people are not welcome here in San Francisco,” said Mark Farrell, one of two who voted to block the measure in the three-person committee, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Partly because of the technology boom, San Francisco has become one of the most unequal cities in the US, with its share of homes worth more than $1 million growing from 19.6% in 2012 to 57.4% in 2016. That has caused friction between the city’s richest residents and its poorest, as the city which is the locus of America’s most booming industry struggles to cope with the hundreds of people living in tented encampments on its streets.

Facebook has signed up almost half the countries in Africa – a combined population of 635 million – to its free Internet service in a controversial move to corner the market in one of the world’s biggest mobile data growth regions. Facebook’s co-founder and chairman, Mark Zuckerberg, has made it clear that he wants to connect the whole world to the Internet, describing access as a basic human right. His Free Basics initiative, in which mobile users are able to access the site free of data charges, is available in 42 countries, more than half of them in Africa.

But digital campaigners and Internet freedom advocates argue that Facebook’s expansion is a thinly veiled marketing ploy that could end up undermining, rather than enhancing, mass efforts to get millions more people connected. “Even if people are hungry, we shouldn’t be giving them half a loaf,” says Gbenga Sesan, whose organisation Paradigm Initiative Nigeria helps young people living in poverty get online. “It’s difficult for me to argue against free Internet,” he says. But he added that it is problematic to give people only part access to the Internet, especially if they believe what they have is full access.

Facebook must provide refunds for purchases made in apps and games by children should they or their parents request it, a California court has ruled.

The decision means that hundreds of thousands of people across the US could legally claim back money from the social network. It’s the culmination of a class action lawsuit brought against the social network in February 2012 by two children and their parents over purchases of the discontinued virtual currency Facebook Credits, now known as Facebook Payments, made using the parents’ credit cards. The currency was designed as a site-wide form of payment for virtual goods within games like Farmville and Bejeweled.

With smartphone use and web penetration soaring, Africa is set for a tech revolution – but only if its infrastructure can support it.

By 2020 there will be more than 700 million smartphone connections in Africa – more than twice the projected number in North America and not far from the total in Europe, according to GSMA, an association of mobile phone operators. In Nigeria alone 16 smartphones are sold every minute, while mobile data traffic across Africa is set to increase 15-fold by 2020. Twenty per cent of the continent already have access to a mobile broadband connection, a figure predicted to triple in the next five years. The mobile industry will account for 8% of GDP by 2020 – double what it will be in the rest of the world. And internet penetration is rising faster than anywhere else as costs of data and devices fall.

[This is the first of a two-week series supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation]

[Commentary] The next American electorate will be more nonwhite, more working-class, and more leftwing. And they’re likely to demand more democracy, not less – not only from the political system, but from the economic system as well. That sets them on a collision course with elites like Peter Thiel. Above all, Thiel is an innovator. He has made his fortune by recognizing the potential of an idea long before his peers. Silicon Valley, along with most of American business, may dislike Trump. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t someday embrace the kind of politics he represents. A Trumpist state could do much to soothe the crisis of capitalism: it could pour public dollars into discovering the next lucrative technology for the private sector while holding the line against the redistributive clamor of a rising millennial majority. Thiel has a history of making bets that pay off big. With Trump, he may have made another.