Roger Fingas
Representatives from a number of major tech firms will gather in San Francisco on Wednesday to address growing concerns over consumer privacy, driven to the forefront by new European regulations and public uproar over scandals like Cambridge Analytica.
The companies are a part of the Information Technology Industry Council, a Washington trade group, according to Axios. Members of the group include the likes of Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, and Samsung.
The ITI declined to say which specific companies are attending. Apple though is likely to participate given its industry clout, the stakes involved, and its vocal stance on privacy matters.
Wedenesday's meeting is slated to be an all-day affair, and may have added urgency because of looming U.S. regulations. California's legislature is trying to pass a privacy bill before one arrives on a November ballot, and at the federal level the Trump administration is considering possible frameworks for how businesses can use consumer data. The ITI claims its privacy push began before that of the Trump White House.
Apple is likely to be at odds with Facebook and Google, at least in some areas. While Apple has the luxury of making most of its revenue from hardware, Facebook and Google are dependent on advertising, which demands collecting enough customer data to attract marketers. Both companies have improved their privacy practices in recent years but are still often criticized for the amount of data they harvest and/or how they collect it.
In the past month Apple has even intensified its privacy efforts, for example stripping Facebook and Twitter integration from macOS Mojave, and blocking developers from building databases with contact info or sharing that info without additional permission.
CEO Tim Cook recently denied that Apple had requested users' personal data from Facebook. The comment came in response to a New York Times report that Apple had "relied on private access to Facebook data for features that enabled users to post photos to the social network without opening the Facebook app, among other things," only cutting off that access in Sept. 2017.
Cook insisted that Apple had "integrated the ability to share [on Facebook] in the operating system, make it simple to share a photo and that sort of thing," but nothing more.
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Charles Martin
Christine McKee
Wesley Hilliard
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4 Comments
"Facebook and Google are dependent on advertising, which demands collecting enough customer data to attract marketers." Please don't whitewash the grossly invasive vacuuming of the most intimate details of people's lives,
essentially without people's knowledge or meaningful consent, by Facebook and Google.
Indeed, I am having to block two of Google's trackers they are trying to install on me as I use this website. Google never asked for my permission, nor told me that it was going to install a tracker to collect information on what I click on, etc., and then follow me to other places on the web. Google doesn't truly inform people that they scan every gmail sent or received, that they scan every document uploaded, every photo opened or saved, everywhere you drive, every search made, every everything, and then tie it all together under what they euphemistically call a "universal identifier," which is nothing more than a dossier that they are trying to create on every person in the world eventually. They don't meaningfully tell people that the TOS gives Google the right to sell all of this information should they choose to do so. Or important little details such as for every photo you upload to Google photos is stored for "free" because you give them a WORLDWIDE, PERPETUAL (means forever:) ) license to use that photo.
Google gets over 90% of its revenue from advertisement. It is the Borg indeed. It wants to know everything about everyone on the planet to monetize human beings as things to be sold. It's why they do everything they do. They want to know everything that happens in your home, so they are almost giving away Google smart speakers (which are recording everything said that they can hear and sending it to their servers, again linked to your "universal identifier" and kept forever. They are developing self-driving systems because they want to hear everything you say and know everywhere you go, every thing you see, everyone you visit, which will require that they lure you into their Google equipped vehicle. You can see an early version of this with Android Auto, where unlike CarPlay, they are trying to suck personal data about your use of the car, from you. That's why Toyota still is holding out and not adopting Android Auto in their cars.
There are still a large number of US Sites that block anyone from the EU from accessing their site. This happened because of the GDPR coming fully into force at the end of last month. These include The LA Times, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News.
Perhaps this says something about how they are handing the data extracted from their visitors.
There really is no reason to block EU residents from merely visiting the site. These visitors don't have an ID etc so apart from the IP Address and browser string there is little data.
As these sites are aimed at people in N. America I fail to see why the data on these visitors would interest US based Advertisers.
The same goes for Google. Now I have to go through all sorts of hoops to use Google search directly. As a result, I've just stopped using it directly. FU Google. You don't have to do what you have done to be GDPR complaint but it is clear that you just want to slurp my data and sell it. Thank god for Duck-Duck-Go and Startpage.
I switched from Google to Bing, mainly for more relevant search results and less page clutter.