Stories from Abroad

Privacy policies from companies including Facebook, Google and Amazon don’t fully meet the requirements of th European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), according to the pan-European consumer group BEUC. An analysis of policies from 14 of the largest internet companies shows they use unclear language, claim “potentially problematic” rights, and provide insufficient information for users to judge what they are agreeing to.

[Commentary] While opinions may differ on the soundness of the European approach, it is difficult to dispute that the European Union is currently leading the charge on protecting consumers’ personal information online. Its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect in May, is setting the standard for data protection. The US only has a small window to get back in the game and influence the shape of global digital privacy norms.

Facebook and Google introduced new privacy settings in order to comply with Europe’s sweeping new privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, but campaigners still aren’t satisfied. Some official complaints on the day the new law went into force, and now others have raised further concerns about how the companies manipulate people into exposing their data.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a letter to Google expressing concerns over the company’s partnership with the Chinese phone maker Huawei. The group of senators and congressmen said that the partnership poses national security concerns, in step with previous efforts to keep Chinese tech firms, including ZTE and Huawei, from doing business in the US.

Seven weeks after Iran's conservative-led judiciary banned the secure communications app Telegram inside the country, Iranians are still reeling from the change. Though Telegram has critics in the security community, it has become wildly popular in Iran over the last few years as a way of communicating, sharing photos and documents, and even doing business. The service is streamlined for mobile devices, and its end-to-end encryption stymies the Iranian government's digital surveillance and censorship regime.

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.

The White House restricted journalists’ access to parts of President Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un despite long-standing arrangements intended to ensure the public is kept fully abreast of key presidential moments. Under standard rules agreed to by the White House and the press corps, a full pool of reporters travels with the president at all times and is allowed at any meetings where press access in granted, even if space is limited.

In a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump, Republican Senate leaders set up a vote for the week of June 11 that would undo the White House deal to revive Chinese telecommunications company ZTE Corp. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was on Capitol Hill late June 11 to lobby against the move. But Democratic and Republican lawmakers said that an agreement had been reached to wrap into the National Defense Authorization Act an amendment that would ban ZTE from buying components from US suppliers.

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.