Online privacy

Color Of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization, launched the “Black Tech Agenda." The agenda sets an affirmative vision for how to create tech policy that centers on racial justice and ensures bias and discrimination are rooted out of the digital lives of Black people and everyone. The agenda has 6 pillars that outline real policy solutions for Congress to advance racial equity in Tech:

The White House convened a listening session with experts and practitioners on the harms that tech platforms cause and the need for greater accountability. The Biden-Harris Administration announced the following core principles for reform:

The word "competition" has a different meaning in Washington (DC) and other centers of regulation around the globe than it does in Silicon Valley. Industry leaders view acquiring startups, keeping customers inside their existing ecosystems, and trying to dominate new platforms as part of the natural process of business competition.

Charter's Spectrum Mobile service only uses geolocation information to optimize its service and does not sell to or share it with third parties, including advertisers, the company told the Federal Communications Commission. Charter assured Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel that the company has been, and will continue to be, completely transparent about its privacy practices, and explicitly requests permission to collect customer geolocation data—which Charter limits to data that will "optimize service." 

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel shared the responses from the nation’s 15 top mobile carriers following a request for information about their data retention and data privacy policies and practices. Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said:

Meta Platforms signed a $37.5 million class settlement with Facebook users who say the platform continued tracking their locations after they turned off location services on their devices, according to a filing in San Francisco federal court. The settlement by the US District Court for the Northern District of California covered about 70 million US residents who used Facebook between Jan. 30, 2015 and April 18, 2018 and who turned off the location services setting for the Facebook application on their iOS or Android devices.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC)'s major move towards crafting data privacy rules is the latest signal of a potential end to Big Tech's expansive use of online data. As people grow warier of the online trails of digital data they leave behind, the lack of data privacy protections in the US has increasingly become a glaring source of concern for many. The FTC voted 3-2 along party lines to seek comment on the harms of "commercial surveillance" and whether privacy rules are needed.

The Federal Trade Commission will consider new federal rules to expand online privacy protections by targeting online surveillance and lax data-security practices by technology companies. The FTC will examine a range of concerns about the online environment, including the widespread use of algorithms to manipulate and leverage data, security practices that leave data vulnerable to hackers, and the growing evidence that some platforms might be “addictive to children and lead to a wide variety of mental health and social harms.” The FTC also will examine possible discrim

Apparently, the Federal Trade Commission is expected to begin writing federal rules to expand online privacy protections as soon as August 11. If adopted, the rules could impose significant new responsibilities on businesses that handle consumer data, including potentially barring certain kinds of data collection practices. The new FTC rules could take years to enact, and the commission could follow several different paths. One option would be to declare certain data collection practices unfair or deceptive, using its authority to police such conduct.

The Senate Commerce Committee approved two bipartisan bills to protect children online, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director nominee, Dr. Arati Prabhakar, the Transportation Security Administration Administrator nominee, David Pekoske, the Assistant Secretary of Commerce nominee, Susie Feliz, and Donald R. Cravins, the nominee to be Undersecretary of Commerce for Minority Business Development. Led by Sens.