Online privacy

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.”

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. 

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.

Facebook, Google, and Amazon all have business models that require them to scoop up large amounts of data about people to power their algorithms, and they derive their power from this information. Like the oil barons at the turn of the 20th century, the data barons are determined to extract as much as possible of a resource that’s central to the economy of their time. The more information they can get to feed the algorithms that power their ad-targeting machines and product-recommendation engines, the better. Their dominance is allowing them to play a dangerous and outsize role in our polit

Although consent orders sound good in theory, recent revelations about Facebook’s behavior have left consumers doubting that they work in practice. While consent orders remain an important tool in the Federal Trade Commission’s enforcement toolkit, the Commission lacks the resources to properly administer them. Further, even if consent orders were fully and consistently enforced, the FTC’s ex post facto enforcement can only address consumer privacy violations after they have occurred.

A company run by former officials at Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm brought down by a scandal over how it obtained Facebook users’ private data, has quietly been working for President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election effort. At least four former Cambridge Analytica employees are affiliated with Data Propria, a new company specializing in voter and consumer targeting work similar to Cambridge Analytica’s efforts before its collapse.

National Telecommunications & Information Administration administrator David Redl warned Congress that the "security and stability" or the internet are at risk due to pressure to comply with the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect May 25. That warning came June 13 in the Senate Commerce Committee's first oversight hearing of the NTIA under Redl, its new administrator.  Committee Chairman John Thune (R-SD) said the committee was also looking at the GDPR and would seek Redl's input.

The House Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection Subcommittee drilled down on targeted digital advertising. Subcommittee Chairman Bob Latta (R-OH) said the idea behind the hearing was to look at the benefits as well as the "emerging, high-profile challenges" of digital advertising, including the Russian election influence ads that have drawn calls, and some action, for better identifying who is placing those digital ads. The use of the word "challenges" was telling. Other legislators have labeled them "scandals" or "problems" in need of government fixes. Subcommittee