privacy

Bipartisan lawmakers on Sunday unveiled a discussion draft of a sweeping privacy bill that could restrict companies’ ability to serve targeted ads to consumers. The proposed American Privacy Rights Act of 2024, introduced by Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and House Energy And Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), would require companies to allow consumers to opt out of targeted advertising based on non-sensitive data that is linkable to individuals or devices.

FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday reaffirmed to lawmakers that TikTok poses a national security and privacy concern, potentially collecting and controlling the data of millions of Americans and swaying public opinion. Wray, who was testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on worldwide threats, agreed with lawmakers that TikTok, which is owned by Chinese-based company ByteDance, has the ability to collect information on American citizens if it wanted to.

Siding with Meta Platforms, a judge has dismissed claims that the social media platform violated the federal video privacy law by allegedly disclosing names of users who watched real-time streaming video. In a ruling issued late last week, U.S. District Court Judge Jon Tigar in the Northern District of California said the 35-year-old video privacy law applies to recorded broadcasts, not live streams.

Facebook will pay $37.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company collected users’ IP addresses, which offer general information about location, in violation of a prior privacy policy. The company, now named Meta Platforms, disclosed in June that it had agreed to settle the litigation, but the terms weren’t made public until Monday. The settlement agreement specifies that Facebook does not admit to doing anything wrong.

President Joe Biden plans to call for new privacy laws, including one that would prohibit companies from serving behaviorally targeted ads to children. “Children are … subject to the platforms’ intensive and excessive data collection vacuum, which they use to deliver sensational and harmful content and troves of paid advertising to our kids,” the White House stated in a fact sheet outlining Biden’s State of the Union address, scheduled for Tuesday evening.

The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), a group including the BBC, New York Times, Microsoft and Adobe, is working toward a common technical standard for media provenance to push back against the deluge of disinformation and deepfakes assaulting news. Their work on content authentication is swinging into high gear this winter.

A bill introduced Friday would boost the Federal Trade Commission’s authority by empowering the agency to fine companies the first time they commit an unfair or deceptive practice, and to more easily issue regulations. “For too long, the FTC has been hamstrung in its ability to promulgate effective rules of the road for consumers and penalize companies that harm our friends and neighbors,” Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Florida) said Friday when she announced the “21st Century FTC Act.”

Technology companies’ blithe disregard for consumer desires is an outgrowth of decades of permissive or nonexistent government oversight. Regulators ought to consider how Big Tech’s monopoly power further empowers the companies to ignore their own customers, in part by gobbling up competitors that offer more consumer-friendly services. Whatever the outcome of the Arizona case, if Google and others are willing to continue offering users choices, they should also be willing to respect them.

The next major update to the iPhone operating system, iOS 14.5, will be released “next week,” Apple said Tuesday. The detail was slipped into new product announcements Apple made Tuesday. IOS 14.5 has a lot of new features, but the one that’s being most closely watched is called ATT, or App Tracking Transparency. Companies that rely on online advertising, especially Facebook, have said that the privacy change will reduce the effectiveness and profitability of targeted ads and potentially roil the online advertising business.

Silicon Valley giants are drawing battle lines over personal data collection practices and targeted ads as the threat of regulation looms. As Apple presses ahead with plans to give users greater control over their privacy, companies like Facebook and Google have aligned themselves over the latter’s more measured approach to scaling back tracking features.

A federal judge has dismissed claims that YouTube, Hasbro, the Cartoon Network and other companies violated children’s privacy by allegedly tracking them in order to serve them with targeted ads. In a ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman in San Jose, Calif., said the children’s representatives couldn’t proceed with the case because the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act doesn’t allow for private lawsuits.

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday voted to issue orders to nine major internet platforms requiring information about how they handle data for a new study. The orders, which do not implicate any legal wrongdoing, were sent to Amazon, ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok), Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, WhatsApp and Youtube. The agency is requesting information about how the platforms collect, use, track or estimate personal and demographic information.

“Children will be protected from advertising based on any past online activities or any previously collected data in the subject app or anywhere else on the internet,” lawyers for parents of young children tell a federal judge.

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joseph Simons indicated on Monday that the agency was looking at privacy complaints regarding Zoom Video Communications Inc. In a teleconference with lawmakers, Simons made reference to concerns that Rep. Jerry McNerney of California had about Zoom. While not addressing the question of Zoom directly, Simons said the agency takes its complaints seriously.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday left in place a ruling that allows Illinois residents to proceed with a lawsuit accusing Facebook of violating a state biometric privacy law by compiling “faceprints.”

Apple made its first formal appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show since 1992 Tuesday. Apple’s senior director of privacy Jane Horvath joined a “Chief Privacy Officer Roundtable” discussion to talk the state of user privacy, Apple’s privacy standards, and more.

Next week’s CES in Las Vegas will once again take over the Strip with a sprawling, frenetic glimpse into tomorrow’s consumer technology. This time, NextGen TV will make its show floor debut, and hopes are high consumers will notice.

Greg Anderson is chosen to lead the company’s privacy and data protection programs.

Three U.S. lawmakers active in tech issues will introduce a bill requiring social networks like Facebook to allow users to pack up their data and go elsewhere, Sen. Mark Warner’s office said in a statement on Tuesday. The senators, Republican Josh Hawley and Democrats Warner and Richard Blumenthal, are introducing the bill at a time when there is growing concern that Facebook, along with Alphabet’s Google, have become so powerful that smaller rivals are unable to lure away their users.

Companies that sustain a data breach must be aware of applicable federal, state and foreign laws. Breaches generate a mélange of regulatory investigations, lawsuits, fines, reputational damage, drops in stock prices and business disruption. Whose information is taken determines the company’s obligations. Preparation is the key to staying out of the news.

The fine is the largest the Federal Trade Commission has levied on a tech company. As part of the settlement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will have to personally certify his company’s compliance with its privacy programs. The FTC said that false certifications could expose him to civil or criminal penalties.

Instead of just being the network that connects everyone, Facebook wants to encourage small numbers of individuals to carry on encrypted conversations that neither Facebook nor any other outsider can read. It also plans to let messages automatically disappear, a feature pioneered by its rival Snapchat that could limit the risks posed by a trail of social media posts that follow people throughout their lives.

A lawsuit could change the way we think about privacy in the digital age. Privacy is not quite dead. For egregious cases, there are remedies lying ready to hand in the civil law of torts, at least for the case that Bezos might want to bring against AMI.

The American Civil Liberties Union and its Northern California branch filed a lawsuit Thursday against seven government agencies. They allege that the agencies are “investing in technology and systems that enable the programmatic and sustained tracking of U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike,” raising concerns about privacy and free speech.

High-tech tools for immigration crackdowns. Fears of smartphone addiction. YouTube algorithms that steer youths into extremism. An experiment in gene-edited babies. Doorbells and concert venues that can pinpoint individual faces and alert police. Repurposing genealogy websites to hunt for crime suspects based on a relative’s DNA. Automated systems that keep tabs of workers’ movements and habits. Electric cars in Shanghai transmitting their every movement to the government. It’s been enough to exhaust even the most imaginative sci-fi visionaries.

A new round of Facebook data controversies has incensed lawmakers and added to the social network’s mounting problems. Lawmakers have roundly criticized Facebook and its executives but it is unclear if they are any closer to bridging the divisions over a federal privacy law.