Reuters: Publishers rebuke Google’s interpretation of EU privacy law. “Google is forcing media firms that generate revenue from its advertising services to accept unreasonable responsibilities under a new European privacy law, four major publisher trade groups told the Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) unit late Sunday in a letter seen by Reuters.”
ERR: Searchable database of 215,000 leaked Estonian account passwords now online. “This data has been half-publicly making the rounds online for some time, however one activist has finally sorted the accounts by country and made them available on one website in order to draw internet users’ attention to the security of their passwords.”
New Jersey Law Journal: Increasingly, Courts Scrutinizing Lawyers’ Social Media Activity. “The recent New Jersey case of a lawyer whose excuse for missing a filing deadline was proved false by vacation photos she posted on Instagram is part of a growing body of cases in which lawyers and judges faced scrutiny over their social media postings. A federal judge in Newark ordered New York attorney Lina Franco to pay $10,000 in sanctions on April 26 after a sharp-eyed defense lawyer noticed that her personal Instagram page showed her vacationing in Miami on the week she was supposed to submit a motion in a wage-and-hour case. Franco told the court she missed the deadline because she was caring for her ailing mother.”
Pew (pew pew pew pew pew!): Declining Majority of Online Adults Say the Internet Has Been Good for Society. “…Americans have grown somewhat more ambivalent about the impact of digital connectivity on society as a whole. A sizable majority of online adults (70%) continue to believe the internet has been a good thing for society. Yet the share of online adults saying this has declined by a modest but still significant 6 percentage points since early 2014, when the Center first asked the question.” I can’t even imagine what the response is going to be to this question this time next year.
Los Angeles Times: Twitter sold public-data access to Cambridge Analytica-linked researcher. “Twitter Inc. sold data access to the Cambridge University academic who also obtained millions of Facebook Inc. users’ information that was later passed to a political consulting firm without the users’ consent. Aleksandr Kogan, who created a personality quiz on Facebook to harvest information later used by Cambridge Analytica, established his own commercial enterprise: Global Science Research, or GSR. That firm was granted access to large-scale public Twitter data, covering months of posts, for one day in 2015, according to Twitter.”
BuzzFeed: The Justice Department Deleted Language About Press Freedom And Racial Gerrymandering From Its Internal Manual. “Since the fall, the US Department of Justice has been overhauling its manual for federal prosecutors. In: Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ tough-on-crime policies. Out: A section titled ‘Need for Free Press and Public Trial.’ References to the department’s work on racial gerrymandering are gone. Language about limits on prosecutorial power has been edited down.”
University of California, Davis: Catalog: Now Once-a-Year and Online-Only. “Going forward, the UC Davis general catalog is out of print. Going backward, all 71 years’ worth of catalogs are available to see, thanks to Randall Larson-Maynard of the Office of the University Registrar, who, in 2006, embarked on a UC Davis Centennial project to track down all of the university’s catalogs and have them digitized for an online archive. Some of you might have helped him, in response to his appeal in a Dateline article… At the time, Larson-Maynord had all the catalogs from 1994-95 to 2004-06 — and he was still looking for 1993-94, 1965-66, 1964-65, 1962-63, 1960-61 and everything from 1957-58 and earlier. Well, he succeeded — collecting all catalogs back to the first one, 1946-47. They’ve all been scanned from cover to cover and are available here as PDFs.”
PRWeb: Publisher Offers Free Access to Gun Regulation and Legislation Research Collection (PRESS RELEASE). “William S. Hein & Co., Inc. has released the newest HeinOnline collection, Gun Regulation and Legislation in America. This collection has been in development since the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, which resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six staff members. The Hein Company is a for-profit corporation with fiscal responsibilities to its shareholders, but its mission statement contains a number of core values, one of which is Corporate Citizenship. This means that, as a company, Hein resolves to make a positive difference in the community. In the wake of several of the deadliest mass shootings in United States history, Hein is offering this new collection of materials free of charge to its core U.S. subscribers, academics, and other institutional libraries in order to provide a platform for research on the myriad […]
Bloomberg Quint: Google Privacy Settlement Gets Scrutiny From U.S. Supreme Court. “The U.S. Supreme Court will use a privacy case involving Google to consider making it harder for companies to settle class-action lawsuits without providing direct compensation to those affected. The justices agreed to hear arguments from two people who object to the Alphabet Inc. unit’s $8.5 million settlement of claims that it improperly disclosed users’ internet search terms to the owners of outside websites.”
Global Times: Geological data made public by new ministry for first time. “One of China’s newly formed ministries, the Ministry of Natural Resources, has uploaded to a public database a massive amount of previously classified Chinese geological information, including estimates of mineral reserves and hydrogeology. It is the first time the one-month-old ministry has released to the public geological information, indicating the government’s ongoing commitment to further opening up various sectors.”
Modern Diplomacy: A New Facebook Psychology: How to Account for Violating Public Trust. “Technology has become society’s answer for everything. The internet has virtually replaced brick-and-mortar libraries, has infiltrated most aspects of research, and has become the largest means by which people communicate and share information. However, information is not always accurate. Worse, information is often edited to purposefully alter perception. A lack of accountability further encourages erroneous internet content as there are few regulations and fewer methods for enforcement due to vague laws. Monopolies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft benefit from the current unregulated structure, as they profit off the consumers’ inability to hold them accountable for violations. This presents a conflict of interest to consumer privacy, as people allow access without understanding what they’ve allowed and how the information can be used.”
Wired: Data Protection Standards Need To Be Global . “WHETHER IT IS Cambridge Analytica gaining access to private information on up to 87 million Facebook users, or the large-scale data breaches at Equifax or Yahoo, alarmingly loose standards for the use and protection of customer data continue to fuel a backlash against large tech companies. More importantly, these events demonstrate the need for a global set of consumer data principles.”
China.org.cn: Alibaba to help Chinese courts go on cloud. “Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has said it will supply its artificial intelligence technology to help thousands of Chinese courts share live-broadcasting and cloud services. At Alibaba’s computing conference on Thursday in Nanjing, east China’s Jiangsu Province, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud service arm of Alibaba, said it would team up with Jiangsu Xinshiyun Technology Co., Ltd. to improve an online cloud service platform to link up 10,000 courts.”
USGS: USGS Tracks How Hurricane Floodwaters Spread Non-Native Freshwater Plants and Animals. “Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Nate may have spread non-native freshwater plants and animals into new water bodies, where some of them can disrupt living communities or change the landscape. To help land managers find and manage these flood-borne newcomers, scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey have created four online maps, one for each hurricane.”
TechCrunch: Facebook’s dark ads problem is systemic. “Kremlin-backed political disinformation scams are really just the tip of the iceberg here. But even in that narrow instance Facebook estimated there had been 80,000 pieces of fake content targeted at just one election. What’s clear is that without regulatory invention the burden of proactive policing of dark ads and fake content on Facebook will keep falling on users — who will now have to actively sift through Facebook Pages to see what ads they’re running and try to figure out if they look legit.”
