Top Stories

  • Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said during an American Enterprise Institute event that the U.S. Army is starting a security assessment of TikTok, the China-owned mobile video app, after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) raised national security concerns about the risks of the military’s use of the app in a Nov. 7 letter. The moves comes as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States conducts its own national security review of TikTok parent ByteDance Technology Co.’s acquisition of Musical.ly. (Reuters)
  • Former President Barack Obama said during Saleforce.com Inc.’s Dreamforce conference that having “big disruptive internet tech” can create “a dangerous moment” because “people don’t know what’s true and what’s not.” Obama named the environment of disruptive technology as one of his top three concerns for the next generation, along with the rise of extreme inequality, which he says has been driven in part by social media and tech. (Fortune
  • An analysis of more than 130,000 reviews of six “random chat” apps on Apple Inc.’s App Store — Monkey, Yubo, ChatLive, Chat for Strangers, Skout and Holla — found that more than 1,500 detailed incidents of unwanted sexual approaches, many of which targeted children. An Apple spokesperson said the company reviews 100,000 apps a week through a mix of software and human-led processes, and while the company gives developers the opportunity to comply with the rules, “we don’t hesitate to remove them from the App Store if they don’t.” (The Washington Post)

Chart Review

Events Calendar (All Times Local)

11/22/2019
Dreamforce 2019
FCC’s November Open Commission Meeting 10:30 am
View full calendar

The Influencer Report: Engaging Gen Z and Millennials

Based on over 2,000 survey interviews with 13-38 year-olds, Morning Consult’s “The Influencer Report” explores the scale and nature of influencer engagement. We look at where young Americans follow influencers, who they like to follow, why they follow, how much trust they have in influencers, and how much interest they have in becoming influencers themselves.

Download the Free Influencer Report.

General

Tech Bends Its Knee to Trump
Eric Newcomer, Bloomberg

Why did Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook turn himself into a political prop in Texas this week? Why did Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg find himself eating dinner at the White House with a president many of his employees oppose with the very fiber of their beings?

Google Employees Plan A Rally To Protest The Administrative Leave Of Two Co-Workers
Jillian D’Onfro, Forbes

Google employees are holding a rally in San Francisco on Friday, November 22, to call for the reinstatement of two workers that the company placed on administrative leave for what those involved in the protest describe as retaliation for their organizing efforts.

Barack Obama tells Silicon Valley’s leading donors to “chill out” over differences between candidates
Theodore Schleifer, Recode

Barack Obama exhorted some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest Democratic donors to “chill” in their debate over the party’s candidates, seeking to ease the tensions among tech billionaires who have broken into separate camps backing Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and — most surprisingly — Elizabeth Warren. And even if the eventual nominee is not “your perfect candidate,” Obama said, “I don’t care.”

Democrats pound Facebook over Zuckerberg’s secret dinner with Trump
Cristiano Lima, Politico

Democrats on Thursday hammered Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for attending a previously undisclosed dinner with President Donald Trump, calling it the latest sign of the tech mogul cozying up to the administration just as regulators are scrutinizing its treatment of competitors.

Lawmakers introduce bill to ‘protect’ consumers from Facebook’s digital currency
Emily Birnbaum, The Hill

A pair of lawmakers on Thursday introduced legislation that would place stringent government oversight on Facebook’s incoming digital currency and similar projects. The bill from Reps. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) and Lance Gooden (R-Texas) would place the Libra digital coin squarely under the Securities and Exchange Commission’s jurisdiction, a move that would subject the cryptocurrency to a set of extensive and well-established regulations.

16-Year-Old Scooter Rider Killed by Tow Truck in New Jersey
Patrick McGeehan, The New York Times

A 16-year-old boy became the first person killed while riding a shared electric scooter in New Jersey when he collided with a tow truck in Elizabeth on Wednesday night. The boy, identified by a city official as Nelson Miranda Gomez, was riding one of 150 Lime scooters that were made available for public rental in Elizabeth just three weeks ago, according to the city’s mayor, J. Christian Bollwage.

AI software defines people as male or female. That’s a problem
Rachel Metz, CNN

Artificial intelligence doesn’t know what to make of Os Keyes. The 29-year-old graduate student is dark-haired, tattooed and openly transgender, using the pronouns “they” or “them.”

U.S. Equity Futures Edge Higher as Treasuries Gain: Markets Wrap
Constantine Courcoulas, Bloomberg

U.S. equity futures edged higher while European stocks advanced as investors digested the latest headlines on the trade dispute between America and China. Treasuries rose along with most benchmark bonds in Europe after some mixed economic data.

Intellectual Property and Antitrust

Vestager Gears Up for Tech Czar Role With Warning Over Data
Aoife White and Stephanie Bodoni, Bloomberg

Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s new tech czar, warned that privacy watchdogs must have resources to match their beefed-up powers and issued a fresh antitrust threat to companies abusing their control of data to crush competition. The Dane, who is due to start as the EU’s digital policy commissioner as soon as Dec. 1, warned that wide new privacy rights introduced last year have few teeth “if you cannot enforce them.”

Google runs into data fears over $2.1bn Fitbit deal
Hannah Kuchler, Financial Times

Privacy concerns over access to non-regulated health information on 27m users.

Telecom, Wireless and TV

Microsoft granted license to export ‘mass-market’ software to Huawei
Stephen Nellis and Alexandra Alper, Reuters

Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it had been granted a license from the U.S. government to export software to Huawei Technologies Co Ltd.

Robocall Scams Exist Because They Work—One Woman’s Story Shows How
Sarah Krouse, The Wall Street Journal

The FBI agent sounded official on the phone. He gave Nina Belis his badge number and a story about how her identity had been compromised. She gave him her life’s savings.

Verizon and Snap to Work Together on 5G-Enhanced Social Media
Scott Moritz, Bloomberg

Verizon Communications Inc. and Snap Inc. said they will collaborate on next-generation 5G wireless technology to develop features like augmented reality on mobile phones. The Snapchat creator will work at Verizon’s 5G labs to make new user experiences like visual enhancements to live events, the companies said Thursday.

Mobile Technology and Social Media

Twitter Says It Will Let All Users Hide Replies to Tweets
Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg

Twitter Inc. said it will start letting all users hide replies to the tweets they send, an effort to improve the health of discussions and interactions on the service. The company has been testing the feature since summer in different markets, including the U.S. and Japan, but is now rolling it out globally.

Campaigns Pressure Facebook to Stay Put on Political Ads
Mike Isaac, The New York Times

After Google announced restrictions on political advertising this week, campaign strategists in Washington quickly turned their attention to a different company: Facebook. Some strategists voiced concerns to Facebook about how Google’s decision would affect it, said two people who talked to the company.

White nationalists are openly operating on Facebook. The company won’t act
Julia Carrie Wong, The Guardian

On 7 November, Lana Lokteff, an American white nationalist, introduced a “thought criminal and political prisoner and friend” as a featured guest on her internet talk show, Red Ice TV. For about 90 minutes, Lokteff and her guest – Greg Johnson, a prominent white nationalist and editor-in-chief of the white nationalist publisher Counter-Currents – discussed Johnson’s recent arrest in Norway amid authorities’ concerns about his past expression of “respect” for the far-right mass murderer Anders Breivik.

YouTube Promised to Label State-Sponsored Videos But Doesn’t Always Do So
Ava Kofman, ProPublica

In a recent episode of “60 Minutes,” a political talk show broadcast on Russian television, the hosts discussed the case against Maria Butina, the Russian gun activist who was recently released from prison in the U.S. after pleading guilty to conspiracy to act as a foreign agent.

Cybersecurity and Privacy

Senior DHS cyber official to step down
Maggie Miller, The Hill

Jeanette Manfra, a top official within the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) cyber agency, announced Thursday that she will leave her position at the end of the year. Manfra, who serves as the assistant director for Cybersecurity and Communications within the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), tweeted that stepping down was “not an easy decision.”

Facebook agrees to provide additional documents in California AG data privacy probe
David Shepardson, Reuters

Facebook Inc has agreed to turn over additional documents after the California state attorney general’s office went to court this month to compel the social media firm to comply with requests for information in its privacy investigation. Under a joint stipulation filed in San Francisco Superior Court this week, the company agreed by Nov. 26 to respond to some of the document requests.

1.2 Billion Records Found Exposed Online in a Single Server
Lily Hay Newman, Wired

For well over a decade, identity thieves, phishers, and other online scammers have created a black market of stolen and aggregated consumer data that they used to break into people’s accounts, steal their money, or impersonate them. In October, dark web researcher Vinny Troia found one such trove sitting exposed and easily accessible on an unsecured server, comprising 4 terabytes of personal information—about 1.2 billion records in all.

T-Mobile customers’ personal information exposed in hack
Steven Musil, CNET

T-Mobile said Thursday that hackers gained access to the personal information of some prepaid wireless customers, including their names, phone numbers and account information. The wireless provider said no financial information was exposed and no passwords compromised.

Influencer marketing comes to cybersecurity
Joe Uchill, Axios

The cybersecurity community is reckoning with influencer culture for the first time after several popular figures ran paid advertisements on their social media accounts. The big picture: For years, the world of cybersecurity experts has operated more like a scientific community than a commercial one — and, until very recently, more like a counterculture than a service.

Opinions, Editorials and Perspectives

The Real Cost of Tweeting About My Kids
Agnes Callard, The New York Times

Here is an anecdote I was not allowed to post on Twitter. On a recent trip to Costco, the kids were fighting in the back of the car and I asked my husband, “Why do we have such bad children? Is it because we’re bad parents?”

‘Technology unions’ could be unions of conscience for Big Tech
Martin Skladany, The Hill

With employee uprisings at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in recent months over the ethical nature of corporate practices, some technology workers have begun to consider collective action. Yet only a few unions in the technology sector exist, and they are primarily concerned with obtaining better wages, not advancing public policy positions. 

Research Reports

A Clear Winner in the 2020 Election is … Consumer Skepticism of Technology
Melissa Kinch and Lisa Sullivan, Ketchum

The 2020 presidential election is just under a year away, and our divided populace is showing bipartisan support on one related topic: They’re worried about the role technology may play in altering or negatively impacting election results.

Morning Consult