August 2015

danah boyd, named by Fortune magazine in 2010 as “the smartest academic in tech,” will deliver the 33rd annual Everett C. Parker Ethics in Telecommunications Lecture. Joseph Torres and Wally Bowen will be honored at the 2015 Parker Lecture and Breakfast. The event, organized by the United Church of Christ’s media justice ministry, the Office of Communication, Inc., will be held at 8 am ET on Tuesday, Oct. 20, at First Congregational United Church of Christ, 945 G St. NW, Washington, DC.

Torres will receive the Everett C. Parker Award, given in recognition of an individual whose work embodies the principles and values of the public interest in telecommunications and the media. Wally Bowen, a nationally-known advocate for local self-reliance via local ownership of media infrastructure, will receive the Donald H. McGannon Award. 2015's McGannon award is being given in recognition of Wally’s dedication to bringing modern telecommunications to low-income people in rural areas.

At Target, 40 million customers had their credit card information exposed to hackers. At JPMorgan Chase, personal details associated with 80 million accounts were leaked. In July, a hacker gained access to 4.5 million records from the University of California, Los Angeles, health system. Enormous numbers like these can make it feel as if we’re living through an epidemic of data breaches, in which no one’s bank account or credit card is safe. But the actual effect on consumers is quite different from what the headlines suggest. Only a tiny number of people exposed by leaks end up paying any costs, and for the rare victims who do, the average cost has actually been falling steadily. How could that be?

For starters, several laws protect consumers from bearing almost any financial losses related to hackers (though not the headaches of having to enter new credit card numbers into Amazon and elsewhere). Instead, banks and merchants, like Target, must bear the cost. But even their losses have been dropping in recent years, as data security experts have learned new strategies to prevent intrusions from turning into theft. It’s true that data breaches, particularly those in which Social Security numbers are compromised, can lead to a more devastating sort of identity theft, in which criminals open new financial accounts in a person’s name and do damage that can take years and a lot of work to clean up. But consumers are almost never on the hook for financial losses in these sorts of episodes, which, by the way, have also been on the decline.

Comcast is rolling out a few upgrades to its Internet program for low-income consumers, doubling download speeds and, for the first time, targeting senior citizens under a Florida-based pilot project. The $10-a-month program, Internet Essentials, will be getting a free speed bump from 5 megabits per second to 10 Mbps, which is fast enough to support multiple video streams simultaneously. That's good news for poorer Americans who increasingly rely on the Web to do homework, find jobs and use government services. Comcast is also expanding access to Internet Essentials.

Eligibility for Internet Essentials used to be dictated by whether households had a child who qualified for free or reduced-price school lunches, or who merely attended a school where 70 percent of the school qualified for meal subsidies. Now, Comcast is lowering that 70 percent threshold to 50 percent to make it easier for more families to qualify for Internet Essentials. And its pilot project in West Palm Beach (FL) will give older Americans -- who, according to the Pew Research Center, remain disproportionately unconnected from the Web -- access to Internet Essentials, too. So far Comcast hasn't laid out how it will evaluate this pilot project, over what time period, or even how it will determine eligibility for seniors. Proof of eligibility could be Medicaid or Medicare, for instance. Although some older Americans already likely benefit from Internet Essentials by living in the same household as those eligible school-aged children, the program expansion would give other seniors the ability to sign up for low-cost Internet. Roughly 500,000 households have signed up for Internet Essentials so far, up from 350,000 a year ago.

Sprint became the smallest of the four major US wireless carriers last quarter, as it gained 675,000 customers compared to more than two million customers for T-Mobile US. That left Sprint with 57.7 million subscribers, compared to 58.9 million subscribers for T-Mobile. Some thought the changeover would happen earlier in 2015, but strong prepaid gains helped keep Sprint narrowly ahead of T-Mobile in the first quarter. Still, there was a fair bit of good news in Sprint’s report.

The company raised its outlook for the fiscal year, saying it now expects earnings before income, taxes and other items to be between $7.2 billion and $7.6 billion, as compared to a prior forecast of $6.5 billion to $6.9 billion in such income. Sprint also neared its goal of turning positive in terms of core smartphone subscribers, losing just 12,000 such customers in the quarter, as compared to the several hundred thousand or millions that it had been ceding in prior quarters. The company said it gained postpaid smartphone customers in both May and June. The company also did better at holding on to existing customers, with a record low churn rate of 1.56 percent, compared to more than 2 percent a year earlier. Meanwhile, the company posted another quarterly loss, but the $20 million loss amounted to just a penny per share, far narrower than the eight-cent loss that analysts had been expecting. Its net operating revenue of $8 billion was down 9 percent from the prior year as more customers shifted to buying their smartphones in monthly installments.