YCLOAK

Momentum is gaining in Washington for a privacy law that could sharply rein in the ability of the largest technology companies to collect and distribute people’s personal data.

A national law, the first of its kind in the U.S., could allow people to see or prohibit the use of their data. Companies would need permission to release such information. If it takes effect, a law would also likely shrink Big Tech’s profits from its lucrative business of making personal data available to advertisers so they can pinpoint specific consumers to target.

Behind the drive for a law is rising concern over private data being compromised or distributed by Facebook, Google and other tech giants that have earned riches from collecting and distributing consumer information. The industry traditionally has been lightly regulated and has resisted closer oversight as a threat to its culture of free-wheeling innovation.

Support for a privacy law is part of a broader effort by regulators and lawmakers to lessen the domination of companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Some, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic presidential candidate, have called for the tech giants to be split up.

The Trump White House has said in the past that it could endorse a broad data privacy law.

The big tech companies have been nervously eyeing a tough privacy law taking effect next year in California. That measure will allow Californians to see the personal data being collected on them and where it’s being distributed and to forbid the sale of it. With some exceptions, consumers could also request that their personal information be deleted entirely.   

Whatever federal privacy law eventually emerges is expected to be less stringent than the California measure and to supersede it. As a result, the tech industry is trying to help shape any national restrictions.

“This is the first time ever that the industry wants legislation,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy advocacy group. “The industry is terrified.”

On Tuesday, a House committee will press Google and Facebook executives about another urgent concern involving Big Tech: Whether they’re doing enough to curb the spread of hate crimes and white nationalism through online platforms. The Judiciary Committee hearing follows a series of violent incidents fueled in part by online communication.

Zuckerberg: New rules needed

Facebook, used by 2-billion-plus people including over 200 million in the U.S., has been a particular lightning rod for industry critics. Having had its reputation tarnished over data privacy lapses, a tide of hate speech and a spread of disinformation that allowed Russian agents to target propaganda campaigns, Facebook appears ready to embrace a national privacy law.

Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, published a column last month in the Washington Post calling for tighter regulations to protect consumer data, control harmful content and ensure election integrity and data portability.

“The internet,” Zuckerberg wrote, “needs new rules.”

Amazon says it has built its business on protecting people’s information, “and we have been working with policymakers on how best to do that.”

“There is real momentum to develop baseline rules of the road for data protection,” Google’s chief privacy officer, Keith Enright, has said in a policy paper. “Google welcomes this and supports comprehensive, baseline privacy regulation.”

A sweeping “privacy shield” law in the European Union, covering how tech companies handle personal data in the 28-country bloc, should be a model, Zuckerberg wrote. EU regulators recently fined Google $1.7 billion for freezing out rivals in the online ad business — their third penalty against the search giant in two years. The EU watchdogs have also ordered Apple and Amazon to pay back taxes and fined Facebook for providing misleading information in its acquisition of WhatsApp.

Advertising revenue

On Monday, Britain unveiled plans to vastly increase government oversight of social media companies, with a watchdog that could fine executives or even ban companies that fail to block such content as terrorist propaganda and images of child abuse.

The entire debate cuts to the heart of Big Tech’s hugely profitable commerce in online users’ personal data. The companies gather vast data on what users read and like and leverage it to help advertisers target their messages to the individuals they want to reach. Facebook drew 99% of its revenue from advertising last year. For Google’s parent Alphabet, it was 85%, according to Scott Kessler of the research firm CFRA.

Amazon, too, doesn’t just sell products online; it provides ad space, too. The company doesn’t say how much but has said that the “other” revenue in its financial reports is mainly from ads. Its “other” revenue topped $10 billion last year, more than double what it was in 2017.

The tech giants’ problematic relationship with advertisers was spotlighted by action regulators took last month. The Department of Housing and Urban Development filed civil charges against Facebook, accusing it of allowing landlords and real estate brokers to exclude certain racial or ethnic groups from seeing ads for houses and apartments. Facebook could face penalties.

The company has separately agreed to overhaul its ad targeting system and end some of the practices noted by HUD to prevent discrimination in housing listings as well as credit and employment ads. That move was part of a settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union and other activists.

Besides crafting a bipartisan data-privacy measure in Congress, lawmakers are considering restoring Obama-era rules that formerly barred internet providers — like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast — from discriminating against certain technologies and services.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has proposed fines and jail time for executives of companies guilty of data breaches.

Allegations of bias

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, representing CEOs of major companies, have presented their own proposals to curb privacy abuses. At the same time, President Donald Trump has echoed complaints from some conservative lawmakers and commentators that the big tech platforms are politically tilted against them.

“Facebook, Twitter and Google are so biased toward the Dems it is ridiculous!” he has tweeted. And he told a rally crowd, “We’re not going to let them control what we can and cannot see, read and learn from.”

Tech executives and many Democrats have rejected those assertions as themselves politically biased. Still, Trump has threatened to push regulators to investigate whether Google has abused its role as an internet gateway to stifle competition. And referring to Amazon, Facebook and Google, Trump told Bloomberg News, “Many people think it is a very antitrust situation, the three of them.”

Among the tech giants that are trying to shape any final restrictions is the chipmaker Intel, which has developed its own legislative proposal.

“I think it’s likely we are going to pass a national privacy law by the end of 2020,” David Hoffman, Intel’s associate general counsel and global privacy officer, said in an interview.

By then, the privacy measure emerging in California will have taken effect.

“The California bill is responsible for 90% of the lobbying and political pressure to pass a national law,” said Robert Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, whose board includes tech executives.

Four senators — Republicans Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Jerry Moran of Kansas and Democrats Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Brian Schatz of Hawaii — are working on a national measure. They say it would protect consumers from the abuse of their data and provide legal certainty to ensure that tech companies continue to hire and innovate.

“It would be nice,” said Wicker, who leads the key Senate Commerce Committee, “to have it on the president’s desk this year.”
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Pinterest, among the gaggle of tech companies hoping to go public this year, set a conservative price range Monday for its initial public offering. It hopes to raise as much as $1.5 billion in its initial offering of shares.

The digital scrapbooking site said in a regulatory filing that it will put about 75 million shares up for sale at a price between $15 and $17 each.

That, at the higher end, could put the value of the company at around $9 billion. But it falls below the estimated $12 billion value from earlier sales of shares to private investors, according to reports two years ago.

Companies set their price range for an initial public offering with a tricky calculus set by investment banks and underwriters. They don’t want to set the bar too low, but going too high can lead to a sell-off.

And those tech companies still planning to go public this year may be treading more carefully following the debut of Lyft 11 days ago. After a much ballyhooed debut , the stock slumped for two days. While its shares bounced back from their lows last week, they remain far below the heights reached in the flurry of first-day trading, and they fell 3% Monday, again dipping under the initial offering price.

The Lyft drop was a “major gut check time for Lyft and the tech IPO world to see how this stock trades given it was the first one out of the box,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives after Lyft shares tumbled.

Other tech companies pushing to go public this year include Uber, Lyft’s rival, the messaging app Slack and the video conferencing company Zoom are expected to make their debut soon.

Pinterest claims more than 250 million active monthly users and more than 2 billion monthly searches.

The platform allows people to search for and “pin” images that interest them, whether it’s fashion, sports, pets or travel.

Pinterest has long shunned the label of being a social network. It doesn’t push users to add friends or build connections. That means it’s avoided the privacy tangles that have ensnared companies like Facebook. Pinterest makes advertising revenue when businesses promote pins in users’ feeds.

The San Francisco company had revenue of $756 million last year, a 60% bump from 2017. It had a loss of $63 million in 2018, compared with a loss of $130 million in 2017.

Pinterest was founded in 2010 by Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp, who are the company’s CEO and chief product officer, respectively.

The company has been working on developing its artificial intelligence search, which allows people to take a photo or upload a screenshot of an item and find similar products on Pinterest.

Pinterest’s stock will list on the New York Stock Exchange under the “PINS” ticker symbol.
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Companies working with artificial intelligence need to install accountability mechanisms to prevent its being misused, the European Commission said on Monday, under new ethical guidelines for a technology open to abuse.

AI projects should be transparent, have human oversight and secure and reliable algorithms, and they must be subject to privacy and data protection rules, the commission said, among other recommendations.

The European Union initiative taps in to a global debate about when or whether companies should put ethical concerns before business interests, and how tough a line regulators can afford to take on new projects without risking killing off innovation.

“The ethical dimension of AI is not a luxury feature or an add-on. It is only with trust that our society can fully benefit from technologies,” the Commission digital chief, Andrus Ansip, said in a statement.

AI can help detect fraud and cybersecurity threats, improve healthcare and financial risk management and cope with climate change. But it can also be used to support unscrupulous business practices and authoritarian governments.

The EU executive last year enlisted the help of 52 experts from academia, industry bodies and companies including Google , SAP, Santander and Bayer to help it draft the principles.

Companies and organizations can sign up to a pilot phase in June, after which the experts will review the results and the Commission decide on the next steps.

IBM Europe Chairman Martin Jetter, who was part of the group of experts, said guidelines “set a global standard for efforts to advance AI that is ethical and responsible.”

The guidelines should not hold Europe back, said Achim Berg, president of BITKOM, Germany’s Federal Association of Information Technology, Telecommunications, and New Media.

“We must ensure in Germany and Europe that we do not only discuss AI but also make AI,” he said.
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Three years ago, a Dutchman climbed into his electric car and set out on a journey. Sunday, a motorcade of electric vehicles escorted him and his converted Volkswagen across an iconic bridge in Australia as he finished his record-setting adventure. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi takes us for a ride.
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Ever since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818, the world has been fascinated with the idea of creating life in a lab. But it remained in the realm of fiction… until it became a bit closer to reality with genetic engineering work in a Swiss lab. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Emojis, those cute, vivid images that liven up emails and texts, seem to come in all shapes, colors and sizes.

After all, there are more than 2,800 to choose from. Among the favorites: the smiley face, the thumbs up, the birthday cake.

But it turns out, there is more people want to say with emojis than what is currently available, including showing two people with different skin tones, together.

Since 2015, it has been possible to pick skin tones for many of the people emojis, such as the mermaid, firefighter and baby.

But it began to frustrate some users that they couldn’t show two people of different races holding hands or families with different skin tones, says Jennifer Lee, co-founder of Emojination and vice chair of the Unicode Consortium’s emoji subcommittee. They could only use the default yellow image.

WATCH: Tailoring the Emoji to Match the Couple

​Frustration over lack of interracial couple emoji

“The interracial couple emoji was something we’ve have heard a lot of demand for in terms of people on Twitter,” she said. “People have gotten used to pressing and seeing all these skin tones whether or not it’s a thumbs up or it’s a woman who is a mermaid or a baby. They would long press on the multiple families and long press on the couples and be like, ‘Why is it only yellow?’ Because they were trained to expect skin tones.”

Turns out, the birth of a new emoji takes some work. Anyone can apply to the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit that is run by volunteers. They set the standards for text in all languages and oversees emojis.

“As our mission says, we want to make sure that every language makes it into the digital age,” said Greg Welch, a board member of the Unicode Consortium.

When it comes to emojis, Unicode’s goal is simple: To make sure that when a person sends a smiley face, no matter the age of the phone or the type of computer software, the receiver sees a smiley face. Unicode, which is working on bringing Rohingya and Mongolian to the Unicode standards, has overseen the tremendous growth in emojis since 2010.

​Emoji — a new language

“If you think about a language like English or Russian or Chinese, it’s evolved slowly over the course of centuries,” Welch said. “If you look at emoji, in the last five years, it’s exploded in use. It’s exploded in its vocabulary. This is almost like watching a new proto language emerge right before our eyes.”

With the help of Tinder, the dating site, Jennifer Lee pressed Unicode for an interracial emoji. There were technical complications as well as some tough choices, which of the many emojis that show love or families should be the first to be able to show different skin tones?

Unicode settled on two people holding hands after much discussion, Lee said.

“One of the reasons that that is the emoji of choice is that two people holding hands does not have to be a romantic kind of relationship,” she said. “It can be two friends, it can be a couple, it can represent family members. We felt it was the most versatile of the different emoji.”

The approved interracial couple emoji will allow users to pick one of five skin tones and the gender identity for each person in a couple who are holding hands.

Unicode gave the code for interracial couple to companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Google and others. They will come out with their own versions of the emoji, as well as 58 others, including a new menstruation emoji, a falafel emoji and a deaf emoji, later this year.
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Emojis, those cute vivid images that liven up emails and texts, seem to come in all shapes, colors and sizes. The smiley face, the thumbs up, the birthday cake. Add one more to the list — interracial couples. Michelle Quinn looked into the story behind this new emoji, expected to be released later this year.
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Researchers at the University of Texas at San Antonio are working on the next generation of batteries — a power supply that could theoretically almost never need to be recharged. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Xu Ning from VOA Mandarin and reporter Rob Garver contributed to this report.

STATE DEPARTMENT — The United States is acknowledging that many countries are not heeding warnings about the possible security risks in allowing Chinese tech giant Huawei to build the next generation of high-speech wireless networks known as 5G.

The trend is particularly clear in Southeast Asia, where even U.S. allies are racing ahead to partner with Huawei and launch 5G networks in the coming years.

In February, Thailand launched a Huawei 5G test network in Chonburi. Thai authorities indicated that the affordability of Huawei’s 5G services offset potential concerns over cybersecurity.

In the Philippines, its Globe Telecom is rolling out the nation’s 5G network in partnership with Huawei.

In Malaysia, the country’s leading communications and digital services company Maxis signed a memorandum of understanding with Huawei to cooperate and accelerate 5G development.

This week, six former top U.S. military officials, including two who were commanders for the U.S. Pacific Command, issued a blunt warning of a future where a Chinese-developed 5G network could be widely adopted among American allies.

“There is reason for concern that in the future the U.S. will not be able to use networks that rely on Chinese technology for military operations in the territories of traditional U.S. allies or emerging partners in Europe, Asia and beyond,” said the former military leaders in a statement.

“The immense bandwidth and access potential inherent in commercial 5G systems means effective military operations in the future could benefit from military data being pushed over these networks,” they added.

And U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday warned some European countries could soon find themselves cut off from U.S. intelligence and other critical information if they continue to cultivate relationships with Chinese technology firms.

“We’ve done our risk analysis,” Pompeo said, following a NATO ministerial meeting in Washington.  “We have now shared that with our NATO partners, with countries all around the world. We’ve made clear that if the risk exceeds the threshold for the United States, we simply won’t be able to share that information any longer.”

For U.S. officials, the threat posed by a Chinese-built communication network could not be clearer.

“Huawei is not a state-owned enterprise. But Huawei is a Chinese company and what we do know is several things. One, broadly speaking, Chinese companies will respond to requests for demands from the Chinese government. Telecommunications is a vital part of national backbones. It has military security implications. It has financial and economic implications,” said Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow of Washington-based Heritage Foundation.

​Cheap. Fast. Secure?

Huawei insists that it would not turn information over to Chinese authorities if they demanded it, but few outside analysts believe any Chinese company would stand up the country’s authoritarian government. U.S. officials are even more direct. 

“What we do is in our national interests, we see with companies like Huawei that are supported, if not directed, by central authorities in China. We see challenges and potential threats to the sanctity, the security of our systems in our networks, and the best we can do with our friends and partners and allies, is to share our information, share our experience,” Patrick Murphy, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, told VOA at a recent seminar at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

That message clearly has had a mixed reception, especially after years when the United States’ vast electronic eavesdropping capabilities have drawn criticism.

Richard Kramer, founder of Arete, a technology research firm based in London, said leaks from U.S. security agencies in recent years have revealed close cooperation between the federal government and U.S. telecoms and tech firms around intelligence gathering.

The U.S. position, he said, seems to be: “We don’t want China to spy on us, but we want to be able to spy on them.”

Will pressure backfire?

Even in countries where there are open political concerns over the growing power of Chinese influence, too much U.S. pressure could backfire, said Anthony Nelson, Director of the East Asia and Pacific practice at the Albright Stonebridge Group, a global business strategy firm.

“Southeast Asian countries that are looking to balance their military relationships with the U.S. and China are not motivated by Washington’s security concerns, with the notable exception of Vietnam,” Nelson said.

Vietnam has had tensions with China in recent years over disputed territory and trade issues.  Vietnamese Ambassador to the U.S., Ha Kim Ngoc, told VOA that all companies operating in the country need to respect Vietnam’s sovereignty.

“We have one principle: They need to respect our sovereignty, national sovereignty,” said the ambassador at the recent USIP event.
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