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Microsoft to Pay $20 Million to Settle U.S. Charges for Violating Children’s Privacy
Microsoft (MSFT.O) will pay $20 million to settle U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charges that the tech company illegally collected personal information from children without their parents’ consent, the FTC said on Monday.
The company had been charged with violating the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting personal information from children who signed up for its Xbox gaming system without notifying their parents or obtaining their parents’ consent, and by retaining children’s personal information, the FTC said in a statement.
The order requires Microsoft to take steps to improve privacy protections for child users of its Xbox system. It will extend COPPA protections to third-party gaming publishers with whom Microsoft shares children’s data, the FTC said.
Facebook Receipts Project Exposes the Company’s Efforts to Influence Government and Define Regulation
For years Facebook was the hottest platform on Earth and in the best of ways. Everyone wanted to be on Facebook. The company grew to 1.7 billion users by 2016 with relatively little money spent on ads or traditional methods of growth. When I moved to Silicon Valley to consult with Google in 2016 I spent my time with friends who worked at Facebook and were head over heels for the purpose it brought to their life.
Not shortly after, that narrative would change and the real Facebook would be exposed for the world to see. In a short period of time, we would come to realize that Facebook is not here to connect people, as it claims, it is here to connect data scientists to data that can systematically manipulate the world.
In December 2015 it was exposed that data was being shared with a company called Cambridge Analytica. It wouldn’t be until years later that the public would truly understand what this meant. But according to a recent report called The Facebook Receipts from The Citizens, a not-for-profit journalism organization with a focus on democracy, data rights, and disinformation, it was clear years before this public awareness that Facebook knew it was in for a major change to its reputation. Facebook knew that the public was about to realize what its real purpose was, and that it was not the friendly app about connecting people that everyone thought.
The Facebook Receipts is the first publicly available, open-source research tool that tracks Facebook court hearings, harms, money, and FOIA filings. From the lobbying dollars in congressional halls to the political donations on parliamentary floors, The Facebook Receipts project is the only comprehensive collection of original data and visualizations that pull back the curtain of Facebook’s influence operations worldwide.
U.S., Canada and France Express Full Support for WHO Pandemic Treaty
Since the start of the COVID pandemic, powerful institutions have been using it as an opportunity to usher in more surveillance and speech control.
One of these institutions, the WHO, an unelected global health agency, has spent more than a year pushing to expand its powers via two instruments — a pandemic treaty/accord and amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005).
These instruments will collectively give the WHO, an unelected health agency, new powers to target “misinformation,” grow its surveillance tools, and push a framework for global vaccine passports.
And last month, during a roundtable at the 76th World Health Assembly (WHA), the annual meeting of the WHO’s decision-making body, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Service Xavier Becerra (an unelected bureaucrat who was appointed by President Joe Biden with the consent of the U.S. Senate), Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam (an unelected bureaucrat who was appointed by former-Canadian Health Minister Jane Philpott), and others gave the instruments their full backing.
Big Tech Rolls Back Misinformation Measures Ahead of 2024
Ahead of the 2024 election cycle, the world’s largest tech companies are walking back policies meant to curb misinformation around COVID-19 and the 2020 election.
Why it matters: Social media platforms are arguing that the risk of harm no longer outweighs the benefits of political dialogue, drawing concerns from lawmakers and consumer advocacy leaders.
Driving the news: YouTube last week confirmed that it will reverse its election integrity policy to leave up content that says fraud, errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 presidential election.
The big picture: Since Musk bought Twitter and promised “free speech“-first policies, the service has become an attractive platform for politicians who feel disenfranchised by Big Tech.
States Haven’t Stopped Spying on Their Citizens, Post-Snowden — They’ve Just Got Sneakier
It’s been 10 years since Edward Snowden holed up in a Hong Kong hotel room and exposed Britain and America’s mass surveillance operations to a group of journalists. His bombshell revelations revealed how the U.S. and U.K. governments were spying on their citizens, intercepting, processing and storing their data, and sharing this information.
Since then, although neither state has lost its appetite for hoovering up huge amounts of personal data, new transparency and oversight constraints, together with the growth of encrypted technology, have tilted the balance towards privacy.
Snowden’s revelations sparked outrage and anger. Bulk interception was being done without a democratic mandate and with few real safeguards. When the scope of this surveillance came to light, officials claimed most of the information was not “read” and therefore its collection did not violate privacy. This was disingenuous; the data could reveal an intimate picture of someone’s life — a fact that was upheld in later legal challenges, which proved the surveillance violated privacy and human rights law.
The legacy of Snowden’s leaks is mixed. Bulk interception and surveillance haven’t stopped, despite there now being greater transparency and more oversight. “There are a few more safeguards, but mostly it continues,” Caroline Wilson Palow, the legal director at Privacy International (PI), told me.
The Police Surveillance Tool Too Dangerous to Ignore
In 2020 lawmakers in New York introduced legislation taking aim at one of the most chilling tools of modern government surveillance: geofence warrants. It would have been easy to see this as a New York phenomenon, unlikely replicated.
The state is often a legislative bastion for traditionally liberal causes, and at first glance, the fight against geofence warrants — a tool police officers use to, among other things, track protesters —might be slotted into that category. But somewhat surprisingly, New York’s proposal is being replicated across the country, including in traditionally conservative states like Missouri and Utah.
The unexpectedly bipartisan efforts against geofence warrants provide a rare glimmer of hope that perhaps the fight against invasive surveillance could be a more collaborative one. Conservatives and progressives alike both worry about the dangers of government overreach enabled by dragnet searches like those facilitated through geofence warrants.
And while protecting Americans from surveillance abuses has rarely been a legislative priority, geofence searches are so offensive to the Constitution that this campaign could provide a playbook for bringing both parties together on other privacy issues.
A similar threat is posed by keyword search warrants, a sort of sister to geofence warrants, which force search engines to identify every user who has made a search query. This can be a specific address, a phrase, or nearly anything else that a user might search for. The New York legislation would ban both geofence warrants and keyword search warrants.
Apple Rolls Out Mental Health Tracking, Vision Assessment as New Health App Features
Roughly half of American smartphone users with iPhones will notice new health and privacy features on their devices starting today.
In addition to iPhones being equipped with new health features, Apple’s update will give iPad and Apple Watch users access to new tools. All three platforms will gain features that encourage healthy behaviors, reduce the risk of myopia, or nearsightedness, and provide ways to assess and address depression, according to the company. The new features were announced as part of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2023 Monday.
The tech company finished the written announcement on its website by reiterating that the Health app never shares user data with third parties without explicit permission. When permission is granted, users maintain granular control of which data are shared with who and when, the company said.
Met Police Operation Secretly Monitors Children Online
Children as young as 13 have been secretly monitored online as part of a continuing surveillance operation run by the Metropolitan police, the Guardian has learned.
The project could also be gathering data on much younger children, as it is not compulsory for officers to document the ages of the individuals they are targeting.
Met police documents say it collects “children’s personal data” from social media sites.
The latest revelations have escalated concerns among human rights organizations about the Met potentially violating data laws and disproportionately targeting children from racial minorities.
