ILI Student Blog

The House Judiciary Committee released their 449-page report on competition in digital markets, largely concluding (at least on the Democrat side) that Big Tech should be broken up.  Sue Halpern wrote an excellent piece in The New Yorker on the data collection practices of the Trump administration’s 2020 re-election campaign app, which offers thoughtful reflections on data collection and privacy generally.…

In California, a federal court started hearing arguments in the case between Epic Games, the company that created Fortnite, and Apple and Google. Briefly, Epic Games argues that the companies’ relative app stores broke antitrust laws buy levying high commission on in-app purchases.…

–       Amnesty International investigation reveals that three European tech companies based in France, Sweden and the Netherlands sold digital surveillance systems to China’s public security agencies with the risk of direct use in China’s mass surveillance programs. (Amnesty International) –       Facebook plans to permit people to claim ownership over images and moderate where those images appear across the Facebook Platform, including Instagram.…

PRG’s own Albert Fox Cahn (director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project) has co-founded a new podcast, Surveillance and the City. Check it out here.On September 22 at 11am Eastern, global experts (including many PRG members) will weigh in at a town hall titled “Contextual Integrity of Contact Tracing.”…

PRG 4/29 News Notes The Israeli High Court of Justice issued a ruling that the internal service’s contact tracing must be done through means set in law by the legislature. They had not disclosed their methods previously, so the ruling strikes down their current practice.…

France urged Google and Apple to ease their privacy protections because the current protocols wouldn’t permit the French contact tracing plan. (The Guardian)ILI Fellow Salome Viljoen wrote an op-ed with Jake Goldenfein and Ben Green about the discourse and narrative around protecting public health vs.…

On April 15, 2020, the PRG student fellows led a discussion about privacy and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Please see the slides here.…

Zoom continues to face backlash over its privacy and security practices. In particular, concerns have been raised regarding the lack of end-to-end encryption, the prevalence of “zoombombing” (when uninvited participants join an ongoing Zoom meeting), and the fact that the company was apparently sending user information to Facebook.…

The CDC is collecting data on citizens’ locations and movements from cell phones, social media, and airline passenger manifests — and doing so without judicial oversight. (Daily Beast; Surveillance Technology Oversight Project) Zoom for Windows software has a vulnerability that allows attackers to steal users’ operating system credentials.…

The Singaporean government introduced a contact-tracing app named TraceTogether that mainly uses Bluetooth to keep a 21-day log of who users have been in close contact with. Singapore placed many privacy protections in the app. For example, it does not automatically report users names or locations.…