Online privacy

Apple has long positioned the iPhone as a secure device that only its owner can open. That has led to battles with law enforcement officials who want to get information off them, including a well-publicized showdown with the FBI in 2016 after Apple refused to help open the locked iPhone of a mass killer. The FBI eventually paid a third party to get into the phone, circumventing the need for Apple’s help. Since then, law enforcement agencies across the country have increasingly employed that strategy to get into locked iPhones they hope will hold the key to cracking cases.

In a speech to the Media Institute, USTelecom President Jonathan Spalter said it is time to establish "consistent safeguards" across the entire internet. The key to those consistent safeguards, he suggested, were their broad application, echoing the growing chorus of internet service providers and legislators from both parties that believe mammoth edge players like Facebook and others need minding. "[T]he reality today is the companies making headlines for privacy missteps or blocking content aren’t the ISPs," Spalter said.

Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) released the following statement after Facebook provided responses to questions posed by Sen Markey in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica privacy breach. In his questions, Sen Markey asked Facebook to commit to not include advertising in children’s offerings and to commit to not share children’s information for targeted advertisements, once young users turn 13.

The Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees rleased nearly 500 pages of information Facebook provided concerning more than 2,000 questions from lawmakers on topics including its policies on user data, privacy and security. Yet much of the information that Facebook included was not new and the social network sidestepped providing detailed answers, in a move that may embolden some of its critics.

The effects of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will spread beyond the EU. Since the requirements cover all data collected from EU citizens, American corporations that do business in the EU or with EU partners will have to comply with the GDPR. Changing data collection, sharing, and analysis processes places significant financial burdens on business. For example, businesses cannot transfer an individual’s data out of the EU unless they have obtained explicit consent and have put adequate safeguards in place to ensure the security of transfer.

Three hours into an interrogation by British lawmakers, Cambridge Analytica’s former chief executive Alexander Nix stood up and thrust a slide deck at Members of Parliament: “I’ve tried,” he said, “to take what is ostensibly quite a complex structure and simplify it.” His four slides told a straightforward story about the analytics company, which shot to prominence after it was found to have used data from millions of Facebook users in political campaigns.

[Commentary] Requiring the targeting data label on ads is just a simple way of bringing the shadowy business of data collection and ad targeting into the light of day. If Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are sure that there is nothing wrong with harvesting users’ personal data to place ads, they should have no problem with being completely open with consumers about the real costs of the “free” service their company provides. Internet advertisers may complain that ad targeting is a complicated business and that the targeting of one ad may rely on many pieces of user data. Well, so be it.

Facebook struck customized data-sharing deals with a select group of companies, some of which had special access to user records well after the point in 2015 that the social-media giant has said it cut off all developers from that information, according to court documents.  The unreported agreements, known internally as “whitelists,” also allowed certain companies to access additional information about a user’s Facebook friends.

The user agreement has become a potent symbol of our asymmetric relationship with technology firms. For most of us, it’s our first interaction with a given company. We sign up and are asked to read the dreaded user agreement — a process that we know signifies some complex and inconveniently detrimental implications of using the service, but one that we choose to ignore. Our privacy hangs in the balance, yet we skim to the end of those tedious terms and conditions just so we can share that photo, or send a group message, or update our operating system… It’s not our fault.