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Mobile apps are the Trojan horses of our smartphones.
We think they’re free, or nearly free, and invite them in — without always knowing exactly what’s inside. Apps often collect all kinds of information from our smartphones, like our contact lists and data on our precise locations. Both Android and iPhone apps are supposed to ask users’ permission first. But many people probably don’t know that third parties, like ad networks, analytics companies and data brokers, may also gain access to that information, security experts say. Now, a new joint effort of the app industry and advocacy groups is working to give consumers more clarity on this issue. Last month, the coalition — it includes the Application Developers Alliance, the American Civil Liberties Union, Consumer Action and the World Privacy Forum — proposed that mobile apps voluntarily display standardized, short-form notices that would list the main types of data they collect and the entities with which that information is shared. The idea came in response to a federal effort to update consumer privacy rights for the digital era.
A Tumultuous Trip to Mobile App Transparency
“You are walking around naked on the Internet and you need some clothes,” says Michael Fertik. “I am going to sell you some.” Naked? Not exactly, but close. Fertik, 34, is the chief executive of Reputation.com, a company that helps people manage their online reputations. From his perch here in Silicon Valley, he views the digital screens in our lives, the smartphones and the tablets, the desktops and the laptops, as windows of a house. People go about their lives on the inside, he says, while dozens of marketing and analytics companies watch through the windows, sizing them up like peeping Toms. By now many Americans are learning that they are living in a surveillance economy. “Information resellers,” also known as “data brokers,” have collected hundreds to thousands of details — what we buy, our race or ethnicity, our finances and health concerns, our Web activities and social networks — on almost every American adult.
A Vault for Taking Charge of Your Online Life
[Commentary] In this postelection period, Congress is being asked to demonstrate renewed bipartisanship and fiscal responsibility. Managing our federal finances isn't the only opportunity to do that.
Washington can also choose to stand up for Main Street and help state and local governments strengthen their balance sheets by closing the Internet tax loophole. Local retailers—who create jobs for our families, friends and neighbors—have long been required to collect and remit state sales taxes. By contrast, online vendors that operate from out of state are under no such requirement, even though the taxes are still owed by the consumer in the 45 states that collect sales taxes. This disparity undermines the competitiveness of the retail marketplace and diverts $23 billion from state and local treasuries every year. It is time for Congress to seize the momentum and fix this gaping pothole on America's Main Street.
The Real-World Cost of 'Tax Free' Online Shopping
A federal court is currently considering a case that could determine how much power the Federal Communications Commission has over the primary communications tool of the 21st century: the Internet.
Liberals and consumer advocates fear that if the FCC loses, it will become a neutered and outdated agency, unable to protect consumers in the modern marketplace. But conservatives claim that if the FCC wins, the agency will be emboldened to adopt more invasive and burdensome regulations of the Internet. The case, which is before the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, is Verizon's challenge to the FCC's controversial net neutrality rules. The regulations, adopted by the commission in late 2010, prohibit Internet service providers from slowing down or speeding up access to websites. Cellphone carriers are barred from blocking apps that compete with their own services.
FCC's Internet authority in balance
Critical Pentagon programs to protect classified data from cyberattackers and state-sponsored spies hang in the balance as lawmakers begin to confer on competing House and Senate defense authorization bills.
The two chambers approved measures that make different cybersecurity requirements for companies that sell software to the government, and they set forth competing visions for how federal contractors should respond if their networks have been breached. In addition, the House and Senate specify different roles for the Defense Department to conduct clandestine operations in cyberspace. Lawmakers must untangle these thorny issues in a short time frame if they hope to finish work on the bill this year. On cybersecurity, the outcomes matter to tech companies and contractors with big bucks on the line, as well as to the Obama administration, which has raised red flags on how both bills approach the nation’s digital defenses.
Senate cybersecurity measure worries contractors
It was heartening and appropriate that the first Resolution to be approved during the landmark WCIT-12 was all about connecting those who are still not connected. The first Resolution that has been passed at WCIT-12 by ITU Member States comes from Ad Hoc Group 3 of the Plenary and refers to special measures for landlocked developing countries (LLDCs) and small island developing states (SIDSs) for access to international optical fiber networks.
Increased access to fiber optic networks plays a fundamental role in the exponential growth and rollout of broadband connectivity – essential for connection online and vital if we are to seriously advance towards real digital inclusion. The newly agreed Resolution reaffirms the right of access for landlocked countries to the sea and freedom of passage through the territory of transit countries by all means of transport, in accordance with applicable rules of international law. These transit countries, in the exercise of their full sovereignty over their territory, have the right to take all measures necessary to ensure that the rights and facilities provided for landlocked countries in no way infringe upon their legitimate interests and also recognize the importance of telecommunications and new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to the development of LLDCs and SIDSs.
[Brahima Sanou is Director of the ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau]
First WCIT-12 Resolution approved and applauded
[Commentary] African nations will win treaty language on the need for better Internet connectivity—but no funding mechanism to help get it done. Middle East representatives will argue pointlessly about Palestine. And as 193 national representatives in Dubai weigh whether the U.N. should regulate the Internet, Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure, who heads the International Telecommunications Union, will ask everyone to “be reasonable, consider the larger picture, and tell delegates that the world is watching.” Those are some of the tongue-in-cheek predictions from .Nxt, a group that monitors Internet governance and policy issues, at the conclusion of a helpful preview and summary of the obscure but potentially important Dubai gathering.
Eye on Dubai: Predictions on U.N. Internet Regulations
[Commentary] Andrew McLaughlin, a former deputy chief technology officer in the Obama administration who also worked at Google, urged President Barack Obama to "kneecap" the International Telecommunications Union, abolishing it rather than let it put the open Internet at risk.
"I hate to say this in such a stark way, but I will anyway: It strikes me that the Obama administration, coming from the left in the U.S., where I come from, has an opportunity to be the Nixon that goes to the China of trying to kneecap a useless, inimical, bloated, bureaucratic and corrupt international organization like the ITU. I hope they will take this challenge." A kneecapping sounds about right, and Mr. McLaughlin has given his former boss excellent talking points. He concluded: "There's also a symbolic importance to winding down a centralized, government-centric treaty organization in the context of a new communications network that doesn't need it, and in fact is harmed by it." A generation ago, President Ronald Reagan stymied similar efforts by another U.N. agency. Authoritarian governments had used Unesco to suppress free speech under the rubric of a "New Information World Order." The U.S., joined by Britain, delegitimized the effort by leaving Unesco. President Obama would be a hero if he took McLaughlin's advice to neutralize the ITU. Failing this, he could follow the Reagan precedent, minimizing the harm done by the ITU by having the U.S. leave.
Would-Be Internet Regulators Need Deleting
Labour is to maintain pressure on David Cameron to legislate on press standards by producing a simple draft bill that gives the Lord Chief Justice the key role of certifying the effectiveness of independent press regulation.
Cameron is resisting passing a press law, and has put the onus on the newspaper industry to come up with robust plans for an independent regulator along similar lines to those proposed in the Leveson report. Labour has come up with a draft six-clause bill to demonstrate that Lord Justice Leveson was right to suggest that a legal basis for the new regime was straightforward and practicable. Ed Miliband, Labour’s leader, has abandoned his support for Leveson’s proposal that Ofcom, the media regulator, should have a role in certifying whether the new regulator was doing its job properly. Instead, Labour’s bill suggests giving that job to a panel, led by the Lord Chief Justice and aided by advisers, which would determine every three years the effectiveness of a new Press Standards Trust.
Labour draws up bill on UK press regulation
For nearly a decade, financial analysts have expected a wave of mergers and acquisitions to sweep Europe’s fragmented telecommunications sector, consolidating the region’s 102 mobile operators and creating a more efficient market. But for years, the telecommunications landscape has remained largely unchanged, with three or four operators still fighting winnowing, zero-sum battles to steal customers from one another in saturated national markets.
This month, the European competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, is expected to approve a combination of two mobile carriers in Austria, 3Austria and Orange Austria, reducing the number of network operators in that country to three. But it could also set a precedent that makes other telecommunications takeovers easier, said Beranger Guille, an editor in London at Mergermarket, an information service covering mergers and acquisitions.
Telecoms Merger in Austria Could Open Door to Further Consolidation