Stories from Abroad

Consumers have long wondered just what Google and Facebook know about them, and who else can access their personal data. But internet giants have little incentive to give straight answers.  On May 25, however, the power balance will shift towards consumers, thanks to a European privacy law that restricts how personal data is collected and handled. The rule, called General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR, focuses on ensuring that users know, understand, and consent to the data collected about them. Under GDPR, pages of fine print won’t suffice.

“Desigend by Apple in California. Assembled in China”. For the past decade the words embossed on the back of iPhones have served as shorthand for the technological bargain between the world’s two biggest economies: America supplies the brains and China the brawn. Not any more. China’s world-class tech giants, Alibaba and Tencent, have market values of around $500 billion, rivalling Facebook’s. China has the largest online-payments market. Its equipment is being exported across the world. It has the fastest supercomputer.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the global body that oversees internet domain names, is preparing a significant tightening of its privacy standards in response to new European Union policies. The US government and some major American tech businesses warn the move, which is expected to be adopted within the next couple of months, will threaten their ability to track down bad actors on the internet. Investigators have long used the online tracking information to determine where malevolent activity on the internet originates.

The European Commission is for the first time preparing to regulate how search engines such as Google operate, under draft proposals designed to bolster the rights of businesses and app makers that rely on big internet giants to sell their services. The European Commission has expanded its plans to regulate the relationship online platforms such as Amazon and Apple have with vendors to also include the practices of search engines such as Google. Under the plans, the tech platforms would be required to provide companies with more information about how their ranking algorithms work.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the United Kingdom’s data protection watchdog, has concluded that WhatsApp’s sharing of user data with its parent company Facebook would have been illegal. The messaging app was forced to pause sharing of personal data with Facebook in November 2016, after the ICO said it had cause for concern. The ICO opened a full investigation into the matter in August that year.

Comments from experts and tech leaders at 2018's South by Southwest festival were a reminder that Europe's aggressive competition enforcement policies are viewed very differently on either side of the Atlantic. "The Europeans go after big successful companies... using very ambiguous anti-competitive laws," said Consumer Technology Association chief Gary Shapiro during a panel. "There’s nothing wrong with being large," said Julie Brill, Microsoft deputy general counsel and former Commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission, during a different panel.

China is to abolish the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) and is expected to set up a new media body answerable to the Cabinet, further tightening the Communist government’s control of media and entertainment. SAPPRFT, the regulatory body which currently oversees the media and entertainment sector, would be replaced by a new state radio and television administration attached to the State Council, or Cabinet. The proposal is being put to China’s ongoing national legislative session for deliberation.

Ofcom has launched an investigation into whether Three and Vodafone, the UK telecoms operators, are “throttling” certain services on their networks in contravention of European Union rules on net neutrality. The investigation could have a profound impact on how telecoms groups across Europe manage traffic, and whether they continue to offer customers unlimited access to certain types of content — such as social media apps or music streaming services — on top of normal data usage restrictions.

Weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, Russia-backed online “trolls” flooded social media to try to block Mitt Romney from securing a top job in the incoming administration, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows. The operatives called the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, then a contender for secretary of state, a “two headed snake” and a “globalist puppet,” promoted a rally outside Trump Tower and spread a petition to block Romney’s appointment to the top diplomatic job, according to a review of now-deleted social-media posts.

[Commentary] In a new study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we look at how often, and in what context, Twitter accounts from the Internet Research Agency—a St. Petersburg-based organization directed by individuals with close ties to Vladimir Putin, and subject to Mueller’s scrutiny—successfully made their way from social media into respected journalistic media. We searched the content of 33 major American news outlets for references to the 100 most-retweeted accounts among those Twitter identified as controlled by the IRA, from the beginning of 2015 through September 2017.