February 2014

What’s this “mall tracking” I’ve been hearing about?

Consumers may not know it, but there are technologies out there that let retailers and others track their movements within and around stores and other attractions through their mobile devices. Businesses can use the information to identify trends in consumer behavior, plan sales and promotions, and more efficiently staff their stores and structure check-out (although no matter how sophisticated the technology, we always manage to choose the slow-moving line). But some people have raised concerns about the extent to which this goes on without consumers’ knowledge. Others have questions about how the technology might be used in the future. That’s why the FTC is kicking off its Spring Privacy Series on February 19, 2014, with a seminar on Mobile Device Tracking.

We’re bringing together technology companies, retailers, consumer advocates, and researchers to talk over topics like:

What kinds of mobile device tracking are companies using now? How do they work? How might they be used in the future?
Mobile device tracking vs. online tracking
What kinds of information are retailers getting from mobile device tracking? How are they using it?
What are the privacy and security risks? How anonymous is this kind of tracking? What choices do consumers have?
How can companies that want to design or use technologies like this implement the principles of privacy by design, simplified consumer choice, and increased transparency?

Entering the Era of Private and Semi-Anonymous Apps

Over the past couple of years, it has become clear that everything we do online is somehow being tracked and tied back to our offline identity. Each update, Fav, Like or comment we make lives on in perpetuity. It’s pretty hard to avoid this. But a slew of new apps -- including Wut, Secret, Confide, Popcorn and Telegram -- that have come out in recent months are offering hope to the world, too. They are intended to let users either talk secretly with people they know, or blurt out random comments to total strangers.

Five faulty premises, part 2: Broadband’s overstated need for speed in education and health care

[Commentary] The idea that high-speed broadband is necessary for education, healthcare, and other social and government services is problematic both because it is factually inaccurate, and also because it is often used as a scare tactic. It creates a sense that the only way to support high-quality education, provide access to health care and employment opportunities, and address concerns about the digital divide is to support a specific broadband policy -- namely one of extensive government subsidies for high-speed broadband.

The first, most important response to this faulty premise is that high-speed broadband connectivity isn’t typically needed for education, health care, or other social services. It is especially true that the bandwidth sufficient for high-quality video streaming services -- a critical benchmark for most broadband advocates -- isn’t necessary for these services. This reveals another often overlooked aspect of broadband policy debates: bandwidth isn’t the only, and often isn’t the most important, metric. Latency (the time it takes a packet of data to traverse the network) and packet loss (the percentage of packets of data that never make it across the network) are incredibly important metrics, especially for applications in education and health care -- applications where the user may need to interact in real time with a teacher, classmates, or health care professional. It is important to distinguish between consumer-oriented Internet service and Internet service used by institutions such as schools and hospitals. There is a much stronger case for institutional access to high-speed Internet service. But speed -- especially “high-speed” -- isn’t the only or most important metric to consider when provisioning these services.

[Hurwitz is a visiting fellow at AEI's Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy]

Verizon donated $100 million to schools. That’s just 7.5 hours of revenue.

[Commentary] Three of the nation's biggest telecom companies -- Verizon, Sprint and AT&T -- each announced a $100 million commitment to provide free wireless data or other in-kind donations for up to four years to US schools. But while the corporate charity will make a big difference to some students, policy experts say it won't be enough to fill the yawning gap between educators' needs and what the government can reasonably accomplish on its own.

There’s a dire need for cheaper service and infrastructure -- and it's going unmet, even as the Internet providers who can do the most to remedy the situation rake in billions of dollars in profit every year. Yes, they're businesses, and their duty is to shareholders. But what we now take for granted as an ironclad corporate norm favoring shareholder dividends is a fairly recent phenomenon; it was less than a century ago that communications companies like AT&T operated on a belief in public service. Today's broadband providers should aspire to that.

FISA Court Approves Obama’s Changes to NSA Phone Sweeps

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has approved President Barack Obama's changes to the National Security Agency program that collects records on virtually all US phone calls, the Administration announced.

In a bid to ease growing outrage over NSA surveillance, President Obama announced immediate changes in January 2014 to the controversial program. President Obama ordered the NSA to seek court approval every time it wants to access the vast database of phone records. NSA analysts were previously supposed to have a "reasonable, articulable suspicion" that a phone number was associated with terrorism before accessing its call records -- but it was up to the NSA and not any outside judge to make that determination. President Obama also reduced the degrees of separation that NSA analysts could stray from their initial target from three to two. According to the announcement by the director of national intelligence, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees the NSA programs, approved President Obama's new tougher privacy standards. The actual court ruling remains secret.

NSA Collects 20% or Less of US Call Data

The National Security Agency's phone-data program collects information from about 20 percent or less of all US calls -- much less than previously described by lawmakers.

The program had been described as collecting records on virtually every phone call placed in the US, but in fact, it doesn't cover records for most cellphones, the fastest growing sector in telephony and an area where the NSA has struggled to keep pace, according to several people familiar with the program. The dwindling coverage suggests the NSA's program is less pervasive than widely believed and also less useful. "Landlines are going away, and new providers are entering the field," said one person familiar with the program. "It's hard to keep up." NSA has been working to expand the coverage to cover more cellphone calls, but it has been stymied by how to remove location data -- which is isn't allowed to collect -- from cellphone records collected in bulk, said a US official. Moreover, the agency's legal orders to US phone companies don't cover most cellphone records, a gap the NSA has been trying to address for years. The effort has been repeatedly slowed by other, more pressing demands, such as responding to criticisms from the US court that oversees its operations, people familiar with the matter say.

Google can leverage municipalities to bring fiber to the masses

[Commentary] My wife and I run a small Internet service provider (ISP) here in Lawrence (KS). Customers who live near our fiber are already getting gigabit service and, in partnership with our city government, we are looking at installing a common carriage gigabit system in residential neighborhoods throughout Lawrence. Most of the rest of the country isn’t that lucky. A vast majority of US households have no ultra-high-speed providers (defined as ISPs that can deliver 1 gigabit per second), and even traditional broadband choices (which usually end up being less than 10 megabits per second) are limited to the incumbent phone or cable provider. But Google is changing that in Kansas City (KS); Austin (TX); and Provo (UT). By building fiber networks in these communities, Google is forcing incumbent carriers to innovate. They are giving customers choices. [Montgomery is the owner and operator of Wicked Broadband, a Lawrence, Kansas-based ISP]

FCC's Clyburn: Concerned Broadcast Auctions Could Affect Diversity

Federal Communications Commissioner Mignon Clyburn is concerned that diversity may be impacted by the incentive auctions if they encourage broadcasters now serving minority communities to give up their spectrum. But she also said the auctions need to be open to everyone and that the FCC needs to think "creatively" about how to incentivize the broadcasters still in business to do more.

Commissioner Clyburn pointed out that channel sharing could be one way for minority-targeted stations to benefit from the auction and remain in business, a point FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has been making a lot lately. Commissioner Clyburn was asked about the finding that there are no longer any African American owned TV stations in the country. As a former media entrepreneur, the commissioner said she thought the Internet and other platforms could augment minority ownership of media, but that it was not a substitute for broadcast ownership. "I will not be satisfied until there are pathways to parity," she said. Asked whether the FCC should start reviewing individual licenses to insure diversity, Commissioner Clyburn said that was something she was pondering and asked for input from the public.

Cable One Poised To Sell AWS Spectrum To AT&T

Cable One is looking to sell a swath of Advanced Wireless Spectrum (AWS) to AT&T as the wireless operator seeks more capacity to flesh out its growing 4G/LTE network.

Under the proposed deal, Cable One would sell a block of 20 MHz of AWS-1 spectrum to AT&T covering 119 counties in 24 cellular market areas in various states. Financial terms were not disclosed, but once the deal is sealed, AT&T would hold 63 MHz to 153 MHz of spectrum in the CMAs involved in the transaction, including 20 MHz to 50 MHz of AWS-1 spectrum.

UpCloud reckons Finnish privacy laws can protect data hosted in US

The Finnish infrastructure-as-a-service provider UpCloud is moving into the US with a slightly secretive new model that, it claims, will protect customers’ personal data from US authorities. Part of this involves carefully-constructed contracts, and part involves keeping all customers’ personal information in Finland -- in other words, the authorities in the US won’t have what they need to match any seized data to its owner.

Benton

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