America's favorite toothless watchdog FTC pleads with Congress to give it LESS power to tackle tech monopolies One thing you can't accuse people of in Washington DC is lacking an appetite for power. But not, it seems, if that power comes with responsibility. This morning, co-founder of Facebook, Chris Hughes, launched a blistering but well-reasoned attack on his former company and his friend CEO Mark Zuckerberg in which he outlined why …
US too needs something alike ICO and the many specific privacy authorities in Europe. Data protection and privacy are not 'trade' issues, they are more fundamental citizens' rights.
This way the FTC can then focus on antitrust issues and go back to understand prices are not the only metric - and after all there's different type of 'prices' citizen could end to pay
> Data protection and privacy are not 'trade' issues
They become trade issues when data and privacy become commercial ware, so from their point of view, it is indeed the FTC's job to regulate that.
Of course one could argue privacy and personal data shouldn't be traded in the first place, but that's madness! We already can't buy and sell the people, what will become of our proud economy if we can't even buy and sell at least their data!...
/s
Giving the FTC broad rulemaking authority without any guidelines or restrictions is a recipe for policies that shift with the wind every time a new party takes control of the White House. That's not going to help consumers, and it will be a pain in the ass for companies.
Congress shouldn't abdicate its responsibility - pass a law that provides a framework, and let the FTC fill in the blanks. But I guess most of them prefer to do nothing because that's what the guys giving them bags of cash want them to do. This way they can all talk about how they want to do it, but fail to anything because they can't agree on a vision.
Yeah, that's the point, and that is missed in the first paragraph and the headline. There is a legislative, and they are not part of it. And that is correct. And this is the way things are in other places as well...
They want to regulate and apply the rules, not make the laws. Two different things.
The biggest catch is the weasel wording being used by gov and FB and lets add Google and few others to that. There isn't a product in the traditional sense in that the users are the product. Lawmakers really don't seem to be able to get their heads around this (unless it's election time) then the users ... err... voters get all the BS tossed at them.
Is it really nine years ago since the then leader of a minor UK political party sold out both his own principles and that of his party for the blatant and opportunistic grab at power?
If the likes of Zuckerberg (60% majority vote) and Clegg really believe change is needed, why don't they just do it themselves? They've no need to wait until the Govt/FCT or others do it for them.
Social media megacorp Meta is the target of a class action suit which claims potentially thousands of medical details of hospital patients were shared with its Facebook brand.
The proposed class action [PDF], filed on Friday, centers on the use of Facebook Pixel, a tool for website marketing and analytics.
An anonymous hospital patient, named John Doe in court papers, is bringing the case — filed in the Northern District of California — alleging Facebook has received patient data from at least 664 hospital systems or medical providers, per the suit.
Democrat lawmakers want the FTC to investigate Apple and Google's online ad trackers, which they say amount to unfair and deceptive business practices and pose a privacy and security risk to people using the tech giants' mobile devices.
US Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) and House Representative Sara Jacobs (D-CA) requested on Friday that the watchdog launch a probe into Apple and Google, hours before the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, clearing the way for individual states to ban access to abortions.
In the days leading up to the court's action, some of these same lawmakers had also introduced data privacy bills, including a proposal that would make it illegal for data brokers to sell sensitive location and health information of individuals' medical treatment.
Opinion Consulting giant McKinsey & Company has been playing a round of MythBusters: Metaverse Edition.
Though its origins lie in the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash, the metaverse has been heavily talked about in business circles as if it's a real thing over the last year or so, peaking with Facebook's Earth-shattering rebrand to Meta in October 2021.
The metaverse, in all but name, is already here and has been for some time in the realm of online video games. However, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision of it is not.
Judges in the UK have dismissed the majority of an appeal made by Facebook parent Meta to overturn a watchdog's decision to order the social media giant to sell Giphy for antitrust reasons.
Facebook acquired GIF-sharing biz Giphy in May 2020. But Blighty's Competition Markets Authority (CMA) wasn't happy with the $400 million deal, arguing it gave Mark Zuckerberg's empire way too much control over the distribution of a lot of GIFs. After the CMA launched an official probe investigating the acquisition last June, it ordered Meta to sell Giphy to prevent Facebook from potentially monopolizing access to the animated images.
Meta appealed the decision to the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT), arguing six grounds. All but one of them – known as Ground 4 – were dismissed by the tribunal's judges this week. And even then only one part of Ground 4 was upheld: the second element.
The FTC is warning members of the LGBTQ+ community about online extortion via dating apps such as Grindr and Feeld.
According to the American watchdog, a common scam involves a fraudster posing as a potential romantic partner on one of the apps. The cybercriminal sends explicit of a stranger photos while posing as them, and asks for similar ones in return from the mark. If the victim sends photos, the extortionist demands a payment – usually in the form of gift cards – or threatens to share the photos on the chat to the victim's family members, friends, or employer.
Such sextortion scams have been going on for years in one form or another, even attempting to hit Reg hacks, and has led to suicides.
A group of senators wants to make it illegal for data brokers to sell sensitive location and health information of individuals' medical treatment.
A bill filed this week by five senators, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), comes in anticipation the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling that could overturn the 49-year-old Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing access to abortion for women in the US.
The worry is that if the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade – as is anticipated following the leak in May of a majority draft ruling authored by Justice Samuel Alito – such sensitive data can be used against women.
Facebook parent Meta has settled a complaint brought by the US government, which alleged the internet giant's machine-learning algorithms broke the law by blocking certain users from seeing online real-estate adverts based on their nationality, race, religion, sex, and marital status.
Specifically, Meta violated America's Fair Housing Act, which protects people looking to buy or rent properties from discrimination, it was claimed; it is illegal for homeowners to refuse to sell or rent their houses or advertise homes to specific demographics, and to evict tenants based on their demographics.
This week, prosecutors sued Meta in New York City, alleging the mega-corp's algorithms discriminated against users on Facebook by unfairly targeting people with housing ads based on their "race, color, religion, sex, disability, familial status, and national origin."
Facebook owner Meta's pivot to the metaverse is drawing significant amounts of resources: not just billions in case, but time. The tech giant has demonstrated some prototype virtual-reality headsets that aren't close to shipping and highlight some of the challenges that must be overcome.
The metaverse is CEO Mark Zuckerberg's grand idea of connected virtual worlds in which people can interact, play, shop, and work. For instance, inhabitants will be able to create avatars to represent themselves, wearing clothes bought using actual money – with designer gear going for five figures.
Apropos of nothing, Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg is leaving the biz.
An ongoing phishing campaign targeting Facebook users may have already netted hundreds of millions of credentials and a claimed $59 million, and it's only getting bigger.
Identified by security researchers at phishing prevention company Pixm in late 2021, the campaign has only been running since the final quarter of last year, but has already proven incredibly successful. Just one landing page - out of around 400 Pixm found - got 2.7 million visitors in 2021, and has already tricked 8.5 million viewers into visiting it in 2022.
The flow of this phishing campaign isn't unique: Like many others targeting users on social media, the attack comes as a link sent via DM from a compromised account. That link performs a series of redirects, often through malvertising pages to rack up views and clicks, ultimately landing on a fake Facebook login page. That page, in turn, takes the victim to advert landing pages that generate additional revenue for the campaign's organizers.
Cambridge Analytica is back to haunt Mark Zuckerberg: Washington DC's Attorney General filed a lawsuit today directly accusing the Meta CEO of personal involvement in the abuses that led to the data-slurping scandal.
DC AG Karl Racine filed [PDF] the civil suit on Monday morning, saying his office's investigations found ample evidence Zuck could be held responsible for that 2018 cluster-fsck. For those who've put it out of mind, UK-based Cambridge Analytica harvested tens of millions of people's info via a third-party Facebook app, revealing a – at best – somewhat slipshod handling of netizens' privacy by the US tech giant.
That year, Racine sued Facebook, claiming the social network was well aware of the analytics firm's antics yet failed to do anything meaningful until the data harvesting was covered by mainstream media. Facebook repeatedly stymied document production attempts, Racine claimed, and the paperwork it eventually handed over painted a trail he said led directly to Zuck.
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