Quartz

[Commentary] A recent wave of cyberattacks—from WannaCry and Equifax to the alleged Russian influence on the US election—has demonstrated how hackers can wreak havoc on our largest institutions. But by focusing only on hackers’ efforts to extort money or mess with our political process, we may have been missing what is potentially an even scarier possibility: data manipulation. Imagine that a major Big Food company gets hacked.

President Donald Trump embarks on a nine-day trip to Asia this weekend. It is his longest foreign trip so far as US president, and will include two days in China—behind the country’s Great Firewall. Does that mean the world is in for an extended version of his recent 11-minute Twitter time out? Probably not. While China’s massive censorship machine technically blocks Chinese citizens from using Twitter, there are ways around it—especially for foreigners.

Lisbon-based telecommunications firm MEO has been rolling out packages that provide users with data plans limited to specific apps. Customers using apps outside the package will be charged more for data. “[That’s] a huge advantage for entrenched companies, but it totally ices out startups trying to get in front of people which stifles innovation,” wrote Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA). “This is what’s at stake and that’s why we have to save net neutrality.”

[Commentary] In an ever-connected world, the internet has taken on a fundamental role. While internet access is not quite as essential as clean drinking water, it is starting to get close. Low-quality access often creates a substantial economic and social disadvantage.

As Mozilla uncovered through recent research in Kenya, those with low-quality access more frequently fall prey to fake news and phishing than people with better access and more digital skills. They are limited to being content consumers, rather than creators. And, they are more likely to trade personal data for “free” products. Worse, the poorly-connected are already society’s most vulnerable: Low-income individuals with no higher education background. While big tech companies will continue to be a part of the access equation, continued community and government investment in better-quality access is essential. In fact, we should be growing investment in this area.

[Mark Surman is the executive director of Mozilla]

[Commentary] We may have a gut-instinct to protect our privacy, but we are increasingly are also willing to trade that data for either convenience or money. As a professor of IT, business analytics, and marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, I have collaborated with telecom providers, advertisers, and mobile-app developers to design massive real-world field experiments to understand just how quickly consumers are willing to give up their real-time location data to get personalized discounts.

[Anindya Ghose is Professor of IT, business analytics, and marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business]

Former White House ethics officials are accusing the State Department of violating ethics rules prohibiting “the use of public office for private gain” by publishing an article that promotes Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s private members-only club in Florida. The article, which tells the history of Mar-a-Lago and dubs it the “winter White House,” appeared on US embassy websites in the UK and Japan, among others. “This is a clear ethics violation—it should never have happened,” said Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under president George W. Bush and current vice president of ethics watchdog CREW, which is suing President Trump over alleged violations of the constitution. “This is the use of public office for private gain. You can’t be promoting Mar-a-Lago on state department websites—it’s a business; you pay to join it.”

Update: Hours after Painter and Eisen’s complaints, the State department took down the articles that had allegedly violated ethics rules. A State department official said, “The intention of the article was to inform the public about where the President has been hosting world leaders. We regret any misperception and have removed the post.”

Resistance begins at home. For Silicon Valley, that means transforming an unprecedented protest movement against US President Donald Trump’s young presidency into something more than signs and slogans. To do so, software engineers and executives in the Valley are writing a set of civic values they hope will become the minimum standard by which companies are judged as a place people want to work.

“It’s not about workplace rights as much as what are some shared values related to government that we want our companies to endorse,” says Sam Altman, president of the Y Combinator seed fund, who sponsored a Tech Workers’ Values meeting to launch the process. The April 9 meeting, held in a swank startup office in San Francisco’s SOMA district, was off-the-record, but the results are being shared as a Google document among attendees. When ready, it will be circulated in the larger tech community. Paralleling pledges such as Never.Again, Altman plans additional meetings to agree on shared values broad enough to unite software engineers—a disparate, libertarian-minded crew—and specific enough to extract real action from major technology companies.

Tens of thousands of people are signing up for automated alerts on what is usually a dull affair: the intricate mechanics of government. IFTTT—”If this then that”—is a platform that lets non-programmers create and customize internet services, for example, automatically tweeting “Happy New Year!” every Jan 1. Now, more than 40,000 of the platform’s users are using simple bot-like programs called “applets” to track the Trump administration.

Users can get an email every time President Trump signs a new bill into law, for example, or have bills that are scheduled for a vote automatically added to their calendars. The number of IFTTT users tracking the government has risen dramatically since Trump’s victory in November, to more than 40,000 from 30,000 ahead of the Nov. 8 election.