Digital Content

When the biggest platforms seem to be flailing or punting on problems, it’s often because they’re trying to address broad social issues with market solutions. They’re rediscovering, at scale and at great expense to their users, the ways in which a society is more than a bazaar, and the pitfalls of allowing human attention to be sold and resold as a commodity. If a platform is addressing a collective problem in a maddeningly strange way, consider that it might see itself, or only know to govern itself, like an eBay.

Carriers get requests for their customers’ whereabouts from all sorts of places. How they handle them depends on who is asking. 1) Each carrier has a dedicated legal team that evaluates the requests of law-enforcement officers. 2) Emergency calls are routed to public-safety answering points, which can obtain the caller’s location without affirmative consent. 3) Middlemen like LocationSmart and Zumigo can access information on cellphone users’ whereabouts in situations where the company seeking the information might not know which carrier to ask.

The Supreme Court will decide whether iPhone users can sue Apple for locking down the iOS ecosystem, something the suit’s plaintiffs say is creating an anti-competitive monopoly. Apple v. Pepper could theoretically affect how tech companies can build walled gardens around their products. The Supreme Court isn’t going to make a call on that specific issue, but its decision could affect people’s relationship with all kinds of digital platforms. Here’s what’s at stake when the Supreme Court case starts, which should happen sometime in the next year. 

The Federal Trade Commission, the Trump administration’s privacy, competition and consumer protection cops, plans to embark on a cross-country listening tour to gauge how academics and average Web users believe the US government should address digital-age challenges, from the rise of artificial intelligence to the data-collection mishaps that have plagued companies like Facebook. The effort was announced by new FTC Chairman Joe Simons and includes 15 or more public sessions in a series of cities that have yet to be announced.

Aleksandr Kogan, the academic researcher who harvested personal data from Facebook for a political consultancy firm said that the idea the data was useful in swaying voters’ decisions was “science fiction.”

Facebook is sending a signal to Capitol Hill that it's taking the integrity of its social network seriously during the US primary election season. One of the main messages aimed to be delivered to Capitol Hill: Facebook is taking serious steps to protect its network, flush with 2.2 billion users, from misinformation and other political ploys on the platform.

Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who outed Cambridge Analytica for improperly accessing millions of Facebook users’ personal information, warned that unchecked data collection and targeting on social media threaten Web users’ privacy — and the healthy functioning of democracy. Wylie, who worked at the consultancy before it assisted President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, pointed to Facebook’s tools that allow political candidates, advertisers and others to reach discrete categories of Americans online. 

On June 20th, a committee of the European Parliament will vote on whether to proceed on a copyright proposal that some say will destroy the internet as we know it. That may sound fairly hyperbolic, but over 70 experts — including World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales — have criticized the proposal, saying it will turn the internet into “a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users.” The controversial provision in question is Article 13, which requires internet platforms to filter uploads for copyright infringement.

Sen Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said that he is preparing to introduce a privacy "bill of rights." That came at another hearing on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica third-party data sharing issue, this one in the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance, and Data Security. Sen Blumenthal said it was based at least in part on the European Union's tough new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) online privacy framework taking effect May 25.

In December 2014, John Rust wrote to the head of the legal department at the University of Cambridge, where he is a professor, warning them that a storm was brewing. Rust informed the university that one of the school’s psychology professors, Aleksandr Kogan, was using an app he created to collect data on millions of Facebook users without their knowledge. Not only did the app collect data on people who opted into it, it also collected data on those users’ Facebook friends.