Wednesday, November 27, 2019
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Sen Cantwell Unveils the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act
NDIA to FCC: Broadband affordability should be addressed in annual assessment
They're profiting off pain': the push to rein in the $1.2 billion prison phone industry
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Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-WA) led Sens Biran Schatz (D-HI), Ed Markey (D-MA), and Amy Klobuarch (D-MN) in unveiling the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act (COPRA), which proposes tough new punishments for Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley tech giants that mishandle their users’ personal data. The sweeping new online privacy bill aims to provide people their “Miranda rights” for the digital age. Rights consumers would gain from COPRA include:
- The right to be free from deceptive and harmful data practices; financial, physical, and reputational injury, and acts that a reasonable person would find intrusive, among others
- The right to access their data and greater transparency, which means consumers have detailed and clear information on how their data is used and shared
- The right to control the movement of their data, which gives consumers the ability to prevent data from being distributed to unknown third parties
- The right to delete or correct their data
- The right to take their data to a competing product or service
Essentially, COPRA would allow people to see the personal information that is amassed about them and block it from being sold. The effort marks a significant attempt by Congress to write the country’s first-ever national consumer-privacy law after years of false starts — and massive data scandals that illustrated the costs of the US government’s inaction.
Sen Cantwell’s bill shares some similarities with CA’s rules, which her proposal, if passed, would leave intact — while allowing other states to pass privacy laws of their own. To enforce the rules, bill sponsors have proposed granting new powers to the Federal Trade Commission to police against a wide array of practices that could cause consumers harm. Under a decades-old law, the watchdog agency already can probe tech giants, but it often can’t bring tough punishments, including fines, until a company commits its second offense. Sen Cantwell’s bill removes that obstacle for privacy investigations, while also setting aside financial penalties it obtains for a special consumer-relief fund. It does not create an entirely new federal privacy agency, however, as some public-interest advocates have sought, partly out of concern that the tech industry is “already so big that it’s going to outmaneuver a lot of bureaucratic responses,” she said.
The bill has long odds of advancing in Congress. But it's sure to spark fresh debate along partisan lines about how lawmakers should respond to tech companies' repeated mishandling of consumer data.
The National Digital Inclusion Alliance has once again urged the Federal Communications Commission to consider broadband adoption rates and affordability in the agency’s annual assessment of “whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion”. NDIA Executive Director Angela Siefer and Research and Policy Director Bill Callahan responded to the the FCC’s “Fifteenth Broadband Deployment Report Notice of Inquiry“, which asks for public comment on the latest version of the agency’s annual Broadband Deployment Report — released in May — and on its approach to determining whether US broadband deployment is happening in “a reasonable and timely fashion”, as required by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. They wrote:
There are many reasons for digital inclusion practitioners and advocates to be disappointed in the 2019 Broadband Deployment Report, but they all come down to this: The Commission reiterates its determination to reduce 'the digital divide' but continues to distort the common meaning of that phrase to refer only to gaps in physical high-speed network availability. The Commission is ignoring the degree to which Americans are 'digitally divided' by their ability or inability to pay the prices being demanded for access to the networks that are physically available. The Commission is not reviewing or considering the critical issues of broadband cost and affordability in its analysis…In line with that distortion, the Commission continues to define the unmet need for 'reasonable' broadband deployment as an exclusively rural problem, choosing not to consider the millions of unconnected and less-connected households in America’s urban centers, suburbs, and smaller cities and towns. The cost of home broadband service is a barrier for all residents of the US, regardless of geography.
A new movement toward public service digital media may be what we need to counter the excesses and failures of today’s internet. A public service Web invites us to imagine services that don’t exist now, because they are not commercially viable, but perhaps should exist for our benefit, for the benefit of citizens in a democracy. Digital public service media would fill a black hole of misinformation with educational material and legitimate news.
The question isn’t whether a public social media is viable. It is if we want it to be. The question is what we’d want to do with it. To start, we need to imagine digital social interactions that are good for society, rather than corrosive. We’ve grown so used to the idea that social media is damaging our democracies that we’ve thought very little about how we might build new networks to strengthen societies. We need a wave of innovation around imagining and building tools whose goal is not to capture our attention as consumers, but to connect and inform us as citizens.
[Ethan Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT and associate professor of the practice at the MIT Media Lab.]
Dept of Commerce Proposes Rule for Securing the Nation’s Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain
The US Department of Commerce issued a notice of proposed rulemaking and requested comment on the implementation of Executive Order 13873, Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services (ICTS) Supply Chain. The proposed rule sets out the procedures the Sec of Commerce plans to use to identify, assess, and address ICTS transactions that pose an undue risk to ICTS in the US, to the critical infrastructure or the digital economy in the US, or an unacceptable risk to national security or to the security and safety of US persons. The public will have a 30-day period to submit comments.
The President issued EO 13873 on May 15, 2019 pursuant to statutory authorities, including the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act, in light of the finding that foreign adversaries are increasingly exploiting ICTS to commit cyber actions, including economic and industrial espionage against the US. The EO gives the Sec of Commerce, in consultation with other relevant Federal agencies, authority to prohibit or mitigate transactions initiated, pending, or completed after May 15, 2019, that involve ICTS designed, developed, manufactured, or supplied by persons owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of a foreign adversary, if such transactions pose: an undue risk of sabotage or subversion of ICTS in the US; an undue risk of catastrophic effects on the security and resiliency of critical infrastructure or the digital economy in the US; or an unacceptable risk to national security or to the security and safety of US persons. The Sec has chosen to adopt a case-by-case, fact-specific approach to determine which transactions must be prohibited, or which can be mitigated, according to the requirements in the Executive Order.
Because 5G networks are interconnected, even a small amount of compromised equipment could be devastating to a country’s national security. 5G means that we must secure our networks from the “core” to the “edge.” At the Federal Communications Commission, we are in a position to do something about this threat. And we are. [On Nov. 22], my colleagues and I voted to prohibit carriers from using federal dollars to purchase any equipment or services from companies that pose a national security threat, including Huawei and ZTE.
Importantly, this discussion is not just about network security in some narrow, technical sense. It is also about what I have described as “5G values”—values that China very clearly does not share. We need to work together to ensure that the companies supplying the equipment and services integral to 5G networks are ones we can trust, and are ones that share our commitment to transparency, rule of law, freedom, and individual rights.
Two companies, Securus and GTL, control more than 70% of the market for prison calls. These companies have won contracts across the US by awarding kickbacks and commissions to jail and prison facilities, and boosted profits by adding consumer fees and including extra services into phone contracts. Prison reform advocates are now pushing for legislation to make phone calls free for prisoners or significantly lower and cap the high rates and fees charged by prison phone corporations. New York City and San Francisco made phone calls from local jails in 2019, the first major cities in the US to do so. Statewide bills to make phone calls in prisons and jails free have been proposed in CT and MA. But progress at the federal level to reduce prison phone call rates were rolled back under the Trump administration as the Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, directed FCC lawyers to stop defending caps on call rates approved by the agency in 2015 under President Barack Obama from a legal challenge filed by the prison phone industry.
America’s newsrooms are changing in important ways. Mergers, closures and layoffs have affected a variety of media organizations – especially newspapers – and these trends are reshaping the nation’s media landscape:
- Newsroom employment in the US dropped by 25% over the past decade.
- The greatest decline in newsroom employment has occurred at newspapers.
- Layoffs have pummeled US newspapers in recent years. Roughly a quarter of US newspapers with an average Sunday circulation of 50,000 or more (27%) experienced layoffs in 2018.
- The brunt of layoffs hit mid-market newspapers in 2018
- One-in-five newsroom employees live in New York, Los Angeles or Washington (DC)
- Newsroom employees are more likely than US workers overall to work in the Northeast.
- Newsroom employees are less demographically diverse than US workers overall.
- Newsroom employees with a college degree earn less than other college-educated workers.
- Newsroom employees are far more likely than college-educated workers overall to have a degree in the arts and humanities
Benton (www.benton.org) provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, while connecting communications, democracy, and public interest issues. Posted Monday through Friday, this service provides updates on important industry developments, policy issues, and other related news events. While the summaries are factually accurate, their sometimes informal tone may not always represent the tone of the original articles. Headlines are compiled by Kevin Taglang (headlines AT benton DOT org) and Robbie McBeath (rmcbeath AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.
© Benton Institute for Broadband & Society 2019. Redistribution of this email publication — both internally and externally — is encouraged if it includes this message. For subscribe/unsubscribe info email: headlines AT benton DOT org
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