Online privacy

As the federal government shifts into an all-hands-on-deck fight to battle coronavirus, President Donald Trump and his White House have increasingly called on tech companies to lend a hand.

This report, the first in a two-part series, articulates the connection between surveillance-based business models and the health of democracy. Drawing from Ranking Digital Rights’s extensive research on corporate policies and digital rights, we examine two overarching types of algorithms, give examples of how these technologies are used both to propagate and prohibit different forms of online speech (including targeted ads), and show how they can cause or catalyze social harm, particularly in the context of the 2020 U.S. election.

Although 5G is mainly being deployed by industry, governments and other organizations will decide how to use public resources, such as spectrum, and what obligations network operators will have to their users. Among the questions they will face are the following:

Senate Consumer Protection Subcommittee Chairman Jerry Moran (R-KS) introduced the Consumer Data Privacy and Security Act to strengthen the laws that govern consumers’ personal data and create clear standards and regulations for American businesses that collect, process and use consumers’ personally identifiable data. The Consumer Data Privacy and Security Act would:

A new Knight Foundation and Gallup study confirms that, for Americans, the techlash is real, widespread, and bipartisan. From concerns about the spread of misinformation to election interference and data privacy, we’ve documented the deep pessimism of folks across the political spectrum who believe tech companies have too much power — and that they do more harm than good. Some findings:

Historically, privacy was about protecting aspects of your life from being shared with people in your life you didn’t want to know that information. The use of data to manipulate me into purchasing something I don’t need is a very different kind of harm than the old privacy concerns about unwanted disclosure. In the context of corporate data collection, a continued focus on unwanted disclosure is only a small piece of the puzzle.

A Q&A with Sen Mark Warner (D-VA). 

Government oversight of tech companies is one thing, but in the 2020 election year, Sen Warner is also thinking about the various ways technology is being used to threaten democracy itself. The interview covers election interference, misinformation, cybersecurity threats, and the government’s ability and willingness to deal with such problems.

In 2020, lawmakers have lots of ideas about how to regulate tech companies. New bills are introduced every day, creating a sea of regulatory threats that’s difficult to keep straight as time goes on. A majority of these measures will never make their way into a committee hearing, and even fewer will be signed into law. But taken as a whole, they give us a sense of what a major tech regulation bill might look like this Congress. And as the 2020 election season takes off, that picture is more urgent than ever.

If you use Firefox, your web browsing habits will become a bit more mysterious to your internet provider. Mozilla, the non-profit developer of the Firefox web browser, will make this happen by switching US desktop Firefox users to an encrypted form of the directory assistance behind all internet navigation. This change involves the Domain Name Service, which lets you get anywhere online by translating your request for a site into the numeric Internet Protocol, or IP, address matching the computer that will deliver the web page in question.

The Federal Communications Commission proposed fines against the nation’s four largest wireless carriers for apparently selling access to their customers’ location information without taking reasonable measures to protect against unauthorized access to that information. As a result, T-Mobile faces a proposed fine of more than $91 million; AT&T faces a proposed fine of more than $57 million; Verizon faces a proposed fine of more than $48 million; and Sprint faces a proposed fine of more than $12 million.