Platforms

Apparently, Facebook has told the Federal Trade Commission it is willing to submit to greater oversight of its data-collection practices — from the launching of new services to the decisions of its top executives — in order to end a wide-ranging federal probe into a series of privacy abuses that came to light in 2018. The changes would accompany a record-breaking, multi-billion-dollar fine that the FTC has considered levying against Facebook. Under such a settlement, Facebook would have to complete a more rigorous privacy review of new products and services before launching them.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the progressive firebrand whose rebukes of the tech sector drew headlines on the 2018 campaign trail, supports the outlines of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) sweeping proposal to break up tech firms like Amazon and Facebook. “The idea itself is something that I am supportive of because taking an antitrust approach I believe is absolutely relevant and it’s appropriate to take,” said Rep Ocasio-Cortez. Amazon’s role as “both the marketplace, producer, seller … creates an antitrust issue,” she said. Rep.

As Mark Zuckerberg filled in the details of his new, privacy-oriented vision of Facebook at the F8 developers conference, he left out a key episode from the past: Long before Facebook's pivot to privacy, the company pivoted to make everything more public. There's a reason Facebook's new "digital living room" where you are "free to be your true self" sounds familiar. You've already been there, if you were one of the hundreds of millions of people who used Facebook before roughly 2010.

The US justice system is under attack as part of a long-term Russian effort to undermine the appeal of democracy and weaken the West. Via multi-platform disinformation opera­tions, Kremlin-backed operatives work to exacerbate existent divisions within populations and increase overall mistrust and paranoia against democratic institutions. In the process, justice systems are portrayed as corrupt, inept, and hypocritical. This report describes the nature of this threat and proposes measures for countering it.

As Congress and other relevant stakeholders debate how to protect Americans’ privacy, a key concern is making sure that new legislation doesn’t entrench the power of big tech incumbents. In this post, we argue that incorporating data interoperability into privacy legislation is essential to empowering consumers’ data rights and fostering a competitive marketplace. In a nutshell, interoperability means enabling different systems and organizations to communicate with each other and work together.

Facebook is banning personality quiz apps, which have for years been able to collect and store a great deal of information about their users. The ban comes a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it came out that the data firm had acquired information on up to 87 million people through the quiz app “thisisyourdigitallife.”

New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced an investigation into Facebook’s unauthorized collection of 1.5 million Facebook users’ email contact databases. While Facebook claims that 1.5 million contact databases were directly harvested by its email password verification process for new users, the total number of people whose information was improperly obtained may be hundreds of millions. Email verification is a standard practice for online services such as Facebook.

Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey phoned Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and stood by the company’s decision to permit a tweet from President Donald Trump that later resulted in a flood of death threats targeting the congresswoman.

The Federal Trade Commission’s coming resolution of its yearlong investigation of alleged privacy lapses at Facebook looms as a defining moment for US policy on consumer data, one with lasting ramifications for companies that collect it. A large penalty could serve as an important warning shot, particularly for tech firms that are already operating under FTC consent decrees from past missteps.