Laura’s Lens

“The IAB is certainly seeking to deploy pro-privacy arguments to try to dilute Europeans’ privacy rights.

Despite its own claimed reservations about there being no technical fix to get consent for programmatic trading under GDPR, the IAB nonetheless went on to launch a technical mechanism for managing — and, it claimed — complying with GDPR consent requirements in April 2018, when it urged the industry to use its GDPR ‘Consent & Transparency Framework.’”

This is why an IAB membership badge is a big red flag for me when checking if a third-party service is a tracker.

Read ‘Even the IAB warned adtech risks EU privacy rules’.

“If your IoT device secretly contained a microphone, which was previously undocumented, would you be happy when the device maker announced an over-the-air update that can enable the microphone for virtual assistant voice functionality? That’s what happened with the security alarm system Nest Secure.”

Read ‘Nest Secure had a secret microphone, can now be a Google Assistant’.

“The biggest oversight… is in diagnosing disinformation as essentially a problem with Facebook, rather than a systemic issue emerging in part from the pollution of online spaces by the business model that Facebook shares with others: the surveillance and modification of human behaviour for profit.”

Read ‘Why a focus on “fake news” and Facebook misses the internet's real problems - and solutions’.

“Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report denouncing the company and its executives as ‘digital gangsters’.”

Read ‘Facebook labelled 'digital gangsters' by report on fake news’.

“‘While consumers are legally expected or presumed to read their contracts, businesses are not required to write readable ones. This asymmetry—and its potential consequences—puzzled us,’ wrote co-author Samuel Becher, a law professor at Victoria University of Wellington”

Read ‘Most Online ‘Terms of Service’ Are Incomprehensible to Adults, Study Finds’.

“How can we explain what is going on here? One possibility is that startup nation advocates pushed hard to ratify the plan as soon as possible, because of its contribution to innovation; these advocates view considerations of privacy as obstacles.”

Read ‘In healthcare, better data demands better privacy protections’.

“The EU’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, requires consent to be specific, informed and freely given. That standard supports challenges to Facebook’s (still fixed) entry ‘price’ to its social services. To play you still have to agree to hand over your personal data so it can sell your attention to advertisers. But legal experts contend that’s neither privacy by design nor default.”

“So there are now two lines of legal attack — antitrust and privacy law — threatening Facebook (and indeed other adtech companies’) surveillance-based business model across Europe.” “…the German FCO decision against Facebook hints at an alternative way forward for regulating the dominance of digital monopolies: Structural remedies that focus on controlling access to data which can be relatively swiftly configured and applied.”

Read ‘Is Europe closing in on an antitrust fix for surveillance technologists?’.

“Facebook will no longer be allowed to force its users to agree to the practically unrestricted collection and assigning of non-Facebook data to their Facebook user accounts…”

“If Facebook loses the appeal, then Germany will become a grand experiment in whether the surveillance economy is actually essential to the operation of social media. Other Europeans and Americans may demand they are given the same option.”

Read ‘German Regulators Just Outlawed Facebook's Whole Ad Business’.

Written by Kashmir Hill on Gizmodo.

“Almost every internet browser has an option in its privacy settings called “Do Not Track,” which, if you turn it on, sends an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them not to track you. It’s been around for years, but as Gizmodo recently reported, it doesn’t do anything because almost no websites actually honor the request not to be tracked because the government never forced them to comply with it.”

“For that story, we asked all the browser-providing companies why they still had the option, given that it could mislead users into thinking it was actually protecting their privacy.”

Read ‘Apple Is Removing 'Do Not Track' From Safari’ on the Gizmodo site.

“Data is powerful and can inform on us in unexpected ways. Companies learn all about you, but also all about your friends who haven’t signed up for these services.”

Read ‘How Silicon Valley Puts the ‘Con’ in Consent’.