The chairman of U.S. Federal Trade Commission said that the agency is "very interested" in learning more about the European Union’s record fine of Google. The comments by a top U.S. antitrust enforcer at a House subcommittee hearing came just hours after the EU levied a $5 billion (4.3 billion euro) fine on the Alphabet Inc. company, ordering it to change the way it puts search and web browser apps on Android devices.
Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, said in an interview published Wednesday that he would not automatically remove denials that the Holocaust took place from the site, a remark that caused an uproar online. Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments were made during an interview with the tech journalist Kara Swisher that was published on the site Recode. Hours later, Mr. Zuckerberg tried to clarify his comments in an email to Recode.
Google was hit with a $5.1 billion fine by European antitrust officials for abusing its power in the smartphone market, in the region’s latest move to rein in the clout of American tech companies. The penalty of 4.34 billion euros was a record, and far larger than the €2.4 billion, or about $2.8 billion, that the European Union levied on Google last year for unfairly favoring its own services in internet search results.
Facebook is under fire again for its content-moderation policies, after an undercover documentary found its contracted content moderators failed to remove disturbing content from its platforms. Facebook in a company blog post said the British Channel 4 television channel “raised important questions,” and what was captured undercover “does not reflect Facebook’s policies or values and falls short of the high standards we expect.”
US Rep. Keith Ellison raised concerns about "a staggering amount" of neo-Nazi and white nationalist books and e-books being sold on Amazon and asked the company to remove them. Citing a new study by the Partnership for Working Families and the Action Center on Race and the Economy, the Minnesota Democrat mentioned in a letter to CEO Jeff Bezos that Amazon also sells "baby onesies, toys, children's Halloween costumes, flags, clothing, and jewelry emblazoned with nazi, neo-nazi, white nationalist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and violent, racist imagery."
Google will have an 11th-hour conference call with the European Union’s Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager as it braces for what’s tipped to be the EU’s highest antitrust fine, according to people familiar with a probe into concerns over Android apps. Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai will speak with Vestager by phone for a so-called state of play meeting, according to one of the people, who asked not to be named because the discussion is private.
Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Twitter Inc. told a U.S. House panel that the social media companies are not discriminating against content for political reasons. Conservative Republicans in Congress have criticized social media companies for what they claim are politically motivated practices in removing some content, a charge the companies have rejected.
International Business Machines Corp. asked a U.S. jury to award it $167 million in a lawsuit accusing e-commerce marketplace operator Groupon Inc of using patented technology without authorization. IBM lawyer John Desmarais told a jury in federal court in Delaware that Groupon infringed patents describing foundational e-commerce technology that had already been licensed to Amazon Inc, Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google for between $20 million and $50 million per company.
Lawmakers in the House are trying to tackle the “digital divide” -- the disparity between internet access in highly connected urban areas and rural areas that lack fast broadband -- or broadband at all. The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Communication and Technology subcommittee will turn its attention towards the matter during a hearing.
A former Apple employee pleaded not guilty after federal prosecutors filed an indictment accusing him of stealing trade secrets. Federal officials on July 12 indicted Xiaolang Zhang on a single count of trade secret theft, alleging that Zhang had stolen a 25-page blueprint for a circuit board designed to be used in an autonomous vehicle, according to the indictment filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
An app promoting a conspiracy theory featuring Hillary Clinton and a child sex ring lingered at the top of Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store for months, with both tech giants receiving a cut of the revenue in the process. The app, called “QDrops,” sends alerts about a conspiracy theory called Qanon, an offshoot of the “pizzagate” fiction that claimed Clinton was running a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of a Washington pizza shop that didn’t even have a basement.
Microsoft is calling for government regulation on facial-recognition software, one of its key technologies, saying such artificial intelligence is too important and potentially dangerous for tech giants to police themselves. Company president Brad Smith urged lawmakers in a blog post to form a bipartisan and expert commission that could set standards and ward against abuses of face recognition, in which software can be used to identify a person from afar without their consent.
The U.S. House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing to take testimony from Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube unit and Twitter Inc. on whether social media companies are filtering content for political reasons, the committee chairman said. Conservative Republicans in Congress have criticized social media companies for what they claim are politically motivated practices in removing some content, a charge the companies have rejected.
Twitter has suspended two accounts allegedly used by Russian intelligence officers to spread information hacked from Democrats computers and email accounts during the 2016 US presidential election. The move comes a day after the Justice Department announced the indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers, accusing them of a "sustained effort" to penetrate the computers and email accounts of Democrats and the staged releases of documents to impact the election.
Two Democratic senators are pushing the Federal Trade Commission to probe smart TVs over concerns about data privacy. Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) expressed concern that the technology can be tracking user behavior without a consumer knowing, in a letter to FTC Chairman Joseph Simons.
EU digital chief Andrus Ansip called EU lawmakers to tone down their tough line on copyright reforms as Europe races to agree rules which will force tech giants to share revenues with publishers, broadcasters and artists. Ansip, who put forward the European Commission’s proposal two years ago, said the overhaul was necessary to protect Europe’s cultural heritage and create a level playing field between big online platforms.
Special counsel Robert Mueller has obtained a new indictment charging 12 Russian intelligence officers with hacking Democrats to intefere with the 2016 presidential election, and with stealing information of about 500,000 American voters, the Justice Department announced. The indictment lodged by a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., accuses the Russian spies of hacking into the Democratic National Committee and the presidential campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and of releasing emails obtained from that cybersnooping with a goal of influencing the election.
Russia's information attack against the United States during the 2016 election cycle sought to take advantage of the greater trust that Americans tend to place in local news. The information operatives who worked out of the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg did not stop at posing as American social media users or spreading false information from purported news sources, according to new details.
New research claims that a criminal hacker tried to sell files on the U.S. military’s MQ-9 Reaper drones on the dark web. The unidentified hacker harvested the documents from a U.S. Air Force captain’s computer by exploiting a widely known security vulnerability in Netgear routers, according to research by threat intelligence firm Recorded Future.
Securities regulators are investigating whether Facebook Inc. adequately warned investors that developers and other third parties may have obtained users’ data without their permission or in violation of Facebook policies, people familiar with the matter said. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s probe of the social-media company, first reported in early July, follows revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics firm that had ties to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, got access to information on millions of Facebook users.
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