Week in Review

State antitrust actions

  • A group of states will launch antitrust investigations into both Google and Facebook Inc. this week, according to people familiar with the matter. Google’s investigation, which is expected to be announced on Monday, will be led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the people said, and New York Attorney General Letitia James announced she is organizing the probe into Facebook.

Cybersecurity and privacy

  • More than 419 million Facebook user identifiers and phone numbers — including 133 million records of U.S. users — were left exposed in several databases that were not password-protected. A Facebook spokesperson said the information appeared to have been scraped from the platform before the company “made changes last year to remove people’s ability to find others using their phone numbers” and that the data set has been removed.
  • Google will pay a record-breaking $170 million fine and make changes to YouTube’s data collection practices and how the video-streaming service labels children’s content to settle an investigation from the Federal Trade Commission and the New York attorney general’s office regarding alleged Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act violations. The regulators contend that YouTube knowingly gathered information from child users without parental consent and marketed itself to potential advertisers as a top destination for targeting young children.
  • Executives from Facebook and Google, along with representatives from Twitter Inc. and Microsoft Corp., met with officials Wednesday from the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to discuss coordinating election security efforts ahead of the 2020 presidential election, according to a person familiar with the talks, with Facebook’s cybersecurity head, Nathaniel Gleicher, leading the full-day meetings.
  • A Google lobbyist recently sent California lawmakers suggested language to exempt digital advertising from some of the rules in the California Consumer Privacy Act, according to documents and people familiar with the negotiations. The law, which goes into effect on Jan. 1, places limits on how companies can collect and profit from user data online, and Google and its allies are seeking the reported exemption, which could give advertisers the right to target users even if they opt out, in the final days of the state’s legislative session.
  • Twitter temporarily disabled the ability to send tweets via text message “to protect people’s accounts” after Chief Executive Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked through the feature. The tool allowed hackers to tweet from Dorsey’s account via access to his phone number, rather than having to log into his Twitter account, and Twitter said it decided to temporarily turn off the text to tweet feature because of “vulnerabilities that need to be addressed by mobile carriers.”

2020 presidential race and tech

  • President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign plans as part of its core strategy to focus on allegations of bias at social media companies via ads, speeches and other sustained attacks against Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., according to officials. One top Republican operative likened the attacks on social media platforms to the deteriorating trust in legacy media organizations, which Trump tackled in his 2016 campaign.

Social media

  • Benjamin Barr, a lawyer representing 8chan founder Jim Watkins, said the anonymous discussion board may come back online in “somewhere around a week,” with Watkins noting in prepared congressional testimony Thursday that the site was currently “offline voluntarily.” 8chan has been offline since early August, when security group Cloudflare and host Epik revoked their services to the site, but Barr said the owners are working on finding a “stable hosting solution where they can’t be deplatformed” or where it will be “more difficult to deplatform them.”
  • A Facebook spokesperson said the company plans to apply its rules against creating fake accounts to those set up by the Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement agencies, saying that “law enforcement authorities, like everyone else, are required to use their real names on Facebook,” and such accounts would be removed if discovered. U.S. Customs and Immigration Services has been creating fake social media accounts to investigate potential fraud and monitor those applying for green cards, citizenship and work visas.
  • YouTube said it removed more than 100,00 videos and 17,000 channels between April and June that were flagged as hate speech through the platform’s new policies against bigoted and supremacist content. The Google unit also said it removed more than 500 million comments for containing hate speech.

Huawei Technologies Co.

  • Huawei Technologies Co. in a press release Tuesday alleged that the United States government is “using every tool at its disposal” to target the company’s business, such as cyberattacks and “sending FBI agents to the homes of Huawei employees” to pressure them into spying on the company. Huawei did not provide specific evidence to support its claims.
  • Trump said that blacklisted Huawei “has not been a player that we want to discuss” during ongoing trade negotiations with Beijing, adding that “Huawei is a big concern of our military, of our intelligence agencies, and we are not doing business with Huawei.” It’s unclear if the comment indicates that Trump has changed his stance on being open to involving Huawei in trade talks.

What’s Ahead

  • The House and Senate are in session.
  • The Federal Communications Commission’s next open commission meeting is Sept. 26. Agenda items include a vote on 3.5 GHz auction procedures and the allocation of $950 million to expand and improve networks in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Events Calendar (All Times Local)

09/09/2019
Recode’s Code Commerce
09/10/2019
Recode’s Code Commerce
Forbes 2019 Cloud 100 Celebration Dinner
Georgetown Law’s Global Antitrust Enforcement Symposium 8:00 am
NTIA Spectrum Policy Symposium: Looking to America’s Spectrum Future 8:30 am
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s “How the United States Can Maintain Its Lead in the Global AI Race” event 9:30 am
Brookings Institution’s “New advances in transportation and service delivery” panel discussion 10:00 am
House Oversight Hearing on securing the nation’s internet architecture 2:00 pm
NYT tech reporter Mike Isaac’s discussion on his new book “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber” 5:30 pm
09/11/2019
Brookings Institution’s “Protecting information privacy: Challenges and opportunities in federal legislation” event 9:00 am
Senate Commerce Committee’s hearing on transportation security 10:00 am
House Energy & Commerce hearing on broadband mapping 10:30 am
Citizens Against Government Waste’s event on AVs, 5G and the 5.9 GHz band 12:00 pm
Senate Judiciary’s intellectual property subcommittee hearing on patents system 2:30 pm
TheBridge’s “Addressing the Future of Work with Labor and Industry” event focused on California’s Assembly Bill 5 focused on gig worker classifications 6:00 pm
View full calendar

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