Online privacy

In London, Facebook’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, faced more than four hours of questions from a British parliamentary committee over the company’s data-collection techniques, oversight of app developers, fake accounts, political advertising and links to the voter-targeting firm Cambridge Analytica. If American politicians have been lampooned for being Luddites, the British Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee has built a reputation for thoroughness and detailed questioning.

Users of Facebook, Google and other popular technology platforms are likely to benefit from stricter privacy regulations that will require new disclosures, new forms of consent and new power to limit how personal data is stored and utilized. The changes are being announced in emails, blog posts and new on-screen messages that many consumers are already beginning to see from Apple, Twitter, Airbnb, GoDaddy and others. Don’t bother thanking Washington.

[Op-ed] There is considerable confusion about what’s really at stake in the congressional debates over net neutrality and online privacy regulation.

In response to the Cambridge Analytica story, Facebook has curbed outsiders’ access to its data, vowed to hire thousands of additional content reviewers, and offered users clearer privacy controls. “I don’t think they do anything that will cost them more than a dollar over the long term,” said New York University professor Scott Galloway. The changes Facebook announced to regain consumer trust were “a series of half measures — one part delay, one part obfuscation. They’ve effectively done nothing [and] it doesn’t look like anyone cares,” he said.

Democrats on the House Commerce Committee have an additional 600 questions for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg. Among the questions:

Facebook replaced its head of policy in the United States, Erin Egan, as the social network scrambles to respond to intense scrutiny from federal regulators and lawmakers. Egan, who is also Facebook’s chief privacy officer, was responsible for lobbying and government relations as head of policy for the last two years. She will be replaced by Kevin Martin on an interim basis. Martin has been Facebook’s vice president of mobile and global access policy and is a former Republican chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

[Commentary] When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before two committees earlier in April, even GOP lawmakers typically opposed to regulations said new rules to restrict the actions of Facebook and other internet companies may be necessary. That’s a bad idea. Restrictions may help establish better metes and bounds around privacy and security practices, but there will still be privacy lapses or security breaches due to, among other things, employee negligence, systems failure and the violations of agreements and those laws. 

Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told Congress under oath that by providing its users with greater and more transparent controls over the personal data they share and how it is used for targeted advertising, he insisted, Facebook could empower them to make their own call and decide how much privacy they were willing to put on the block. As he surely knows, providing a greater sense of control over their personal data won’t make Facebook users more cautious. It will instead encourage them to share more.

A member of the Justice Department's criminal division and a special agent with the FBI attended Rubicon Project's digital advertising conference, Executive Exchange to speak about the future of ad fraud and crime. FBI Special Agent Evelina Aslanyan spoke at the off-the-record event to high-level executives in the advertising industry about how ad fraud represents a whole new world of crime for publishers and consumers. Alexander Mindlin, an assistant U.S. Attorney General at the DOJ's criminal division, was also in attendance.

Facebook handed over data, with no strings attached, to the man it now blames for the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That was the testimony Aleksandr Kogan — the data scientist behind the app that harvested information from 87 million Facebook accounts — gave to a committee of lawmakers in Britain on April 24.