Ownership

Google parent Alphabet posted surging profits as advertisers kept swarming to the search giant amid a global debate about internet privacy that threatens to affect its main revenue generator. Alphabet’s earnings also got a multibillion-dollar boost from the company’s stakes in startups including Uber but were tempered by the costliest spending spree in its 14-year history as a public company. Net profit jumped 73% to $9.4 billion in the first quarter, up from $5.4 billion in the same period in 2017, a performance that highlights the firm’s huge lead in the global market for online ads.

[Commentary] Americans should have rights to and control over their data. If we don’t like a service, we should be free to move our data to another. The same network effect that creates value for people on Facebook can also lock them into Facebook’s walled garden by creating barriers to competition. People who may want to leave Facebook are less likely to do so if they aren’t able to seamlessly rebuild their network of contacts, photos, and other social graph data on a competing service or communicate across services.

Facebook for the first time published its 27 page of guidelines it calls Community Standards which gives to its workforce of thousands of human censors. It encompasses dozens of topics including hate speech, violent imagery, misrepresentation, terrorist propaganda and disinformation. Facebook said it would offer users the opportunity to appeal Facebook's decisions.  Facebook’s vice president of global policy management, Monika Bickert, explained that the company decided to make the standards public for two reasons.

[Commentary] One phrase that keeps being tossed around: "Facebook should be treated like a utility." The idea is that the use of Facebook has become effectively essential to modern life, and therefore it should be regulated just like water or electricity. Let's get this right: Facebook is not a utility. It is an app. It may be a dominant app. It may even be exercising monopoly power unfairly. But it is not a utility, and muddying the definitional waters this way will only help the real utilities—like Comcast, Spectrum, AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink—avoid genuine oversight.

In Europe and the United States, the conventional wisdom is that regulation is needed to force Silicon Valley’s digital giants to respect people’s online privacy. But new rules may instead serve to strengthen Facebook’s and Google’s hegemony and extend their lead on the internet. That’s because wary consumers are more prone to trust recognized names with their information than unfamiliar newcomers.

An advocacy group is suing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for records on Facebook’s privacy practices, arguing that there’s a “clear public interest” in learning details about the social media giant’s policies following revelations of a data scandal.  The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act to push for the unredacted release of biennial privacy assessments that Facebook agreed to submit under a 2011 consent agreement with the FTC.

Aleksandr Kogan, the academic who was hired by Cambridge Analytica to harvest information from tens of millions of Facebook profiles, defended his role in the data collection, saying he was upfront about how the information would be used and that he “never heard a word” of objection from Facebook. Yet Kogan, 28, a psychology professor who has found himself cast as the villain by both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, expressed regret for his role in the data mining, which took place in 2014. “Back then, we thought it was fine. Right now my opinion has really been changed,” he said.

Facebook spent more money lobbying the US government in the first quarter of 2018 than it ever has before, according to a new filing. The social media company forked over $3.3 million to steer lawmakers on privacy, security, online advertising and transparency efforts, among other issues.

The Justice Department is investigating whether AT&T and Verizon may have colluded to thwart a technology that could allow wireless customers to switch network providers more easily.

In 2016, Google changed its terms of service, allowing it to merge its trove of tracking and advertising data with the personally identifiable information from our Google accounts. Google uses, among other things, our browsing and search history, apps we’ve installed, demographics such as age and gender and, from its own analytics and other sources, where we’ve shopped in the real world. Google says it doesn’t use information from “sensitive categories” such as race, religion, sexual orientation or health.