TechFreedom and the International Center for Law & Economics (ICLE) filed joint comments Tuesday on the FTC’s upcoming workshop on the Sharing Economy, in which the groups urged the FTC to establish a permanent advocacy program to serve as a counterweight to “entrenched incumbents who typically seek local and state government policies that prevent their markets from being disrupted by ‘sharing economy’ services.” The FTC spends a tiny fraction of its budget on competition advocacy, TechFreedom President Berin Szoka said. "For years, Uber, Lyft, and other sharing-economy companies have been grappling with regulators doing the bidding of established industries,” Szoka said, while the FTC has “been asleep at the wheel -- too busy harassing tech companies over their use of customer data." The FTC needs to make advocacy an institutional priority and become more proactive, Szoka said. “The FTC should resist the tendency to regulate Uber, AirBnB and other sharing economy companies the same way it's regulated privacy and data security -- by bringing major players under consent decrees that force the companies to start vetting product innovations with the FTC,” ICLE Associate Director Ben Sperry said. “Forcing innovators to 'play it safe' will sap the disruptive spirit that has made these companies so successful,” he said. Free State Foundation President Randolph May, Senior Fellow Seth Cooper and Research Associate Michael Horney submitted comments to the FTC Tuesday, in which they encouraged the agency to focus on enhancing overall consumer welfare and consumer satisfaction. The success of the sharing economy is due to creative risk-taking, the comments said. “Sharing economy services and related applications must remain free to form and operate without the strictures of any new sector-specific regulations or older regulations designed for incumbent providers of legacy services,” they said. “The proper way to respond to ‘level the playing field’ between sharing economy entrants and incumbent service providers is to remove unnecessary regulations wherever they apply, not expand them in a competitive market environment.” Health, safety and consumer protection laws and regulations can be enforced so long as they are not formulated and implemented in a discriminatory fashion, they said. “Opponents of new sharing economy business models and disruptive new Internet applications should not be allowed to succeed in misusing laws and regulations in order to stifle the services merely because they perceive adverse impact on preexisting businesses.”
More than a quarter of tablet owners use their tablets less frequently than they thought they would after the initial purchase, an ecoATM survey found. Noting that tablet shipments “have been on a steady decline,” and that the volume of tablets traded in through ecoATM doubled in Q1 from the same quarter a year ago, the supplier of e-waste recycling kiosks set out to determine whether those trends reflected a diminishing consumer appetite for tablets, the company said in a Wednesday announcement. It commissioned a study in which 1,175 U.S. tablet owners were canvassed earlier this month on their tablet usage habits, it said. It found that about 26 percent said they use their tablets an average of less than three hours a week, and 8 percent said they no longer use them at all, it said. The findings suggested that lack of “utility” might well be the main reason why the novelty of tablet usage has waned, it said. For example, a clear majority (60 percent) of those canvassed indicated they prefer using a laptop instead of a tablet, while 26 percent said their smartphones gives them all the functionality they need, it said.
Consumer confidence toward the overall economy and technology spending both fell slightly in May, CEA said in a Tuesday announcement. CEA’s Index of Consumer Expectations, which measures consumer sentiment about the U.S. economy as a whole, decreased 2.4 points from April to 173.7, reflecting “mounting apprehension around the economy,” said Shawn DuBravac, CEA chief economist, in a statement. CEA’s Index of Consumer Technology Expectations, which measures consumer expectations about technology spending fell 2.1 points to 86.6.
Scams related to social media have increased “substantially” in the past five years, said the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center’s (IC3) Internet crime report for 2014. An average of 22,000 complaints were reported each month, with total losses costing victims $800.5 million, it said Friday. Men and women were targeted almost equally. Those aged 40-59 were the most targeted age group, followed by 20-39-year-olds. The U.S. was the No. 1 targeted country, followed by Canada and the U.K. California had the most victim complaints followed by Florida and Texas. The report found 12 percent of all complaints submitted in 2014 had a social media aspect. “In most cases, victim’s personal information was exploited through compromised accounts or social engineering,” said IC3. Social media scams included: doxing, publicly releasing a person’s identifying information about themselves, family and friends; click-jacking, concealing hyperlinks beneath legitimate clickable content that causes a user to unknowingly download malware or send personal information to a website; and pharming, redirecting users from legitimate websites to fraudulent ones to extract confidential data, the report said. The second popular trend IC3 found in 2014 was related to vulnerabilities of the digital currency systems. Criminals bilked millions of dollars from those who use cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin and Peercoin, the report said. Other frequently reported Internet crimes in 2014 included auto fraud, government impersonation email scams, intimidation and extortion scams, real estate fraud, confidence fraud and romance scams, and business email compromises, it said.
The Department of Justice issued agencywide policy guidance on the department's use of unmanned aircraft systems last week to set standards of use and management controls, a DOJ news release said Friday. Law enforcement agencies sometimes use UAS or drones as “cost-effective, efficient and potentially life-saving tools to support public safety efforts,” said Justice. The new DOJ policy “highlights protections of privacy, civil rights and liberties and makes clear that UAS use must be consistent with the protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution,” said the department. DOJ components can’t use UAS solely to monitor activities protected by the First Amendment and can use UAS only for properly authorized investigations and activities, it said. “The collection, retention and dissemination of information collected by UAS is also subject to Privacy Act protections.” Persons operating UAS must be appropriately trained and supervised according to the department’s policies and annual privacy reviews will be conducted, DOJ said. The guidance issued was the result of discussions and research. DOJ said it will continue holding meetings at least twice per year to “ensure the department strikes the appropriate balance between its law enforcement and national security missions and respect for civil rights and civil liberties.”
Ninety-three percent of adults say it’s important that they control who can get information about them, said a survey released Wednesday from the Pew Research Center. The Jan. 27-Feb. 16 survey of 461 adults on a GfK panel found that “Americans feel privacy is important in their daily lives in a number of essential ways” but “have a pervasive sense that they are under surveillance when in public and very few feel they have a great deal of control over the data that is collected about them and how it is used,” Pew said. Eighty-eight percent of Americans said it's important that someone isn’t watching or listening to them without their permission. Americans have “exceedingly low levels of confidence in the privacy and security of the records that are maintained by a variety of institutions in the digital age,” Pew said. Six percent of respondents were very confident telcos would be able to protect their data, while 9 percent were very confident credit card companies would be able to protect their data. “While some Americans have taken modest steps to stem the tide of data collection, few have adopted advanced privacy-enhancing measures,” Pew said. A majority of Americans expect organizations, including government surveillance programs, to limit the time they retain records of their activities and communications, Pew said. It said that Americans find it important to “preserve the ability to be anonymous for certain online activities.”
ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé said he plans to resign from the nonprofit corporation in March to pursue a private sector role outside the domain names industry. Chehadé will remain “available to work closely with ICANN after March 2016 to support the transition to a new leader, as well as to advise” ICANN on issues like the planned spinoff of NTIA’s oversight of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions after his departure, ICANN said in a news release. “During the remaining 10 months of my tenure, it's business-as-usual,” Chehadé said. “My priority remains to continue strengthening ICANN's operations and services to the global community.” A successful IANA transition “does not depend on the leadership of a single individual, but rather the engagement of the global multistakeholder community working collaboratively to ensure that the Internet remains open, secure, and resilient,” said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling in a statement. “I urge the community to remain focused on the important task of developing a transition proposal, including enhanced accountability mechanisms, that fully meets our conditions and can be implemented in a responsible and timely manner.” The Internet Society is also “deeply committed to seeing the transition through to completion,” said CEO Kathryn Brown in a news release. “Indeed, there is no turning back. We have a responsibility to the users of the global Internet to maintain the momentum for a timely, orderly transition” of the NTIA’s oversight of the IANA functions.
Though most consumers own a mobile device they can use to take notes, “60 to 65 percent of us still prefer pen and paper, and 20 percent type with a keyboard,” Gilles Bouchard, CEO of the paper-based computing platform Livescribe, told us in a London briefing. “So let’s not fight, let’s join them.” Bouchard was previewing a new app that lets owners of smartphones and tablets with Android 4.4.2 or newer use them with the latest Livescribe 3 capture pen. Previously, the pen worked only with iOS devices. The smart pen captures text as it is handwritten in a Livescribe paper notebook, while Livescribe’s Android app stores a synchronized sound recording of anything being said at the same time on the Android device. So students, for example, can jot lecture notes while recording the lecturer. The text is displayed on the device’s screen and tapping on a written word triggers playback of whatever was being said as the note was written. Unlike the original Livescribe Echo and Pulse pens, the Livescribe 3 smart pen has no on-board screen, mic or speaker for audio capture and play. That functionality is now handled by the Android device. The pen uses a Bluetooth Smart data link to connect to multiple devices, and can deliver up to 14 hours of continuous writing on one charge. Recognizable words are digitized in the Android device for searching and saving. Users can also share notes and recordings as PDFs that play on other mobile devices or computers. The Livescribe 3 smart pen has a USB socket for charging only, not data transfer as in the previous pens. Bouchard demonstrated the system with a Nexus 9 tablet and it worked well. We then tried the pen with a new upmarket Huawei P8 smartphone and also with the low-cost Hudl 2 tablet heavily promoted in the U.K. by Tesco. The system was easy to set up and use with the P8, but we couldn't get it to work with the Hudl. Livescribe said it’s investigating why.
The Center for Digital Democracy filed a cross-motion for partial summary judgment against the FTC Wednesday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, challenging the agency’s decision to “withhold certain information requested by CDD under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)” related to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the court filing said. The FTC asserted on March 23 in its motion for summary judgment that the information was properly withheld under FOIA Exemptions 3 and 4, the filing said. “CDD concedes that some of the information responsive to its request may be withheld from disclosure,” but “disputes the agency’s exemption claims with respect to a substantial amount of the withheld material,” the filing said. CDD and its predecessor the Center for Media Education, were “instrumental in pushing Congress to enact COPPA in 1998” and continue to be active in the law’s implementation by the FTC, the filing said. In July 2014, CDD submitted a FOIA request for all annual reports submitted by safe harbor programs as required by COPPA including those of Aristotle International, Children’s Advertising Review Unit, Entertainment Software Rating Board, the kidSAFE Seal Program, Privacy Vaults Online and TRUSTe, it said. On Feb. 12, the FTC “produced to CDD, in heavily redacted form, the annual reports,” the filing said. Two pages weren't redacted, 33 were partially redacted and 50 pages were withheld in full, it said. The FTC filed a summary motion March 23 asserting an adequate search for responsive records occurred and asked the court to ratify the withholdings under FOIA Exemptions 3 and 4. The FTC said it withheld information from eight categories of information that are exempt from disclosure: nonpublic interpretations and analysis of the COPPA Rule, self-regulatory assessments not required by COPPA, business development plans, compliance oversight tools and logistics, membership statistics and market shares, member correspondence regarding compliance issues, remediation and disciplinary rates, and the identity of members subject to discipline. CDD disputes the FTC’s ability to withhold information on interpretation and analyses of COPPA, membership statistics and market shares, and remediation and disciplinary rates, the filing said. “CDD does not seek information that would identify any particular safe harbor member, but rather seeks only the aggregated information safe harbor programs are required to submit to the FTC annually,” the filing said. The FTC had no immediate comment.
The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and Center for Digital Democracy filed an update to an FTC complaint against Google’s YouTube Kids app Tuesday for false and deceptive marketing, a joint news release said. In April, CCFC and CDD were part of a coalition of children’s and consumer groups that filed a complaint and urged the FTC to investigate whether Google’s YouTube Kids app was unfair and deceptive toward children and parents -- a violation of FTC Act Section 5 (see 1504070045). In subsequent research, CCFC and CDD said they found “even more widespread and pervasive” evidence supporting the original complaint, the groups wrote in a letter to the FTC. “Further review of YouTube Kids demonstrates that the app is rife with videos that would not meet anyone’s definition of ‘family friendly’,” the letter said. “YouTube Kids contains many videos that would not only be disturbing for young children to view, but potentially harmful.” A commission spokesman confirmed the agency received the letter and would review it. “As users of YouTube Kids search for material, the app begins to recommend similar videos,” said CCFC and CDD. When the groups conducted their review of the app, “YouTube Kids actually began recommending videos about wine tasting on its app for preschoolers,” it said. The more children search for inappropriate videos, the more inappropriate videos they will be shown, the letter said. Google had no immediate comment. “Federal law prevents companies from making deceptive claims that mislead consumers," said Aaron Mackey, the coalition’s attorney at Georgetown Law's Institute for Public Representation. Google promised YouTube Kids would deliver appropriate content for children, but it has failed to fulfill its promise, Mackey said. “Google gets an 'F' when it comes to protecting America’s youngest kids,” said CDD Executive Director Jeff Chester. The groups allege they found: explicit sexual language presented amid cartoon animation; a profanity-laced parody of the film Casino featuring Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie; graphic adult discussions about family violence, pornography and child suicide; jokes about pedophilia and drug use; unsafe behaviors such as playing with lit matches; and advertising alcohol products. As of May 11, at least 13 Budweiser commercials were available on YouTube Kids, the letter said. Given the “inadequacies of the screening process and the constant addition of new videos to YouTube Kids, it would be virtually impossible for anyone to catalog all of the inappropriate content that is accessible on the app,” it said. “In the rush to expand its advertising empire to preschoolers, Google has made promises about the content on YouTube Kids that it is incapable of keeping,” said CCFC Associate Director Josh Golin.