The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released a Last Call Working Draft of Tracking Compliance and Scope, a blog post on the W3C site said Tuesday. “This specification defines a set of practices for compliance with a user’s Do Not Track (DNT) tracking preference to which a server may claim adherence.” Comments are accepted through Oct. 7, it said.

“Recently disclosed vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and Microsoft Windows may allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code with system privileges” by “convincing a user to visit a website or open a file” that could allow an attacker to combine Flash and Windows vulnerability to take “full control of an affected system,” said the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team in an alert Wednesday. US-CERT said that “since attackers continue to target and find new vulnerabilities in popular, Internet-facing software, updating is not sufficient, and it is important to use exploit mitigation and other defensive techniques.” Don't "run untrusted Flash content,” and “review the Bulletin and apply the necessary updates,” US-CERT said.

Google’s Web form to submit revenge porn removal requests is now available. The announcement of the form's availability came quietly last week in a one-sentence update added to the end of Google’s initial announcement last month that it would remove revenge porn from search results (see 1506190048). In addition to revenge porn, Google will remove other sensitive personal information, like bank account numbers or an image of a handwritten signature from search results, the form said. Federal legislation banning revenge porn may be introduced next week (see 1507140063).

The FTC Consumer Protection Bureau “confirmed the FTC is considering Consumer Watchdog’s complaint” last week (see 1507070023) that Google’s failure to honor right to be forgotten requests in the United States is an “unfair and deceptive practice,” Consumer Watchdog said in a news release Tuesday. Consumer Watchdog will be joined tomorrow in Santa Monica, California at an event advocating for right to be forgotten requests to be honored in the U.S.by Christos Catsouras, the father of an 18-year-old California woman whose name “remains linked in Internet search results to graphic leaked police photos of her fatal car crash,” CW said. "Since the leak my family has been forced to relive the shock every time the horrific images reappear simply because there are no tools in place to stop it,” Catsouras said. “‘The Right To Be Forgotten' is the only chance for my family to find closure, and to finally grieve." Google and the FTC had no immediate comment.

Adobe released a security update to address “critical vulnerabilities” in Shockwave Player for Macintosh and Windows Tuesday, said an alert from the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. U.S.-CERT said in a separate alert that Adobe also released security updates addressing vulnerabilities within the classes of Flash Player that could allow a “remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system." Affected versions of Adobe include Adobe Flash Player 9 through 18.0.0.204.

Match and OkCupid operator Match Group said Tuesday that it agreed to buy online dating service PlentyOfFish for $575 million cash. “As more people than ever use more dating apps than ever with more frequency than ever, PlentyOfFish's addition both brings new members into our family of products and deepens the lifetime relationship we have with our users across our portfolio,” Match Group CEO Sam Yagan said in a news release. Match Group’s purchase of PlentyOfFish would add an additional 3 million unique users for Match Group-owned products. Match Group parent company IAC’s brands get traffic from more than 370 million users across more than 150 brands, IAC said. The purchase is expected to close in Q4 subject to regulatory approval by Canada’s minister of industry, Match Group said.

The proposed FTC settlement with consumer analytics company Nomi Technologies (see 1504230036) “deserves attention not merely as an isolated instance of regulatory overreach, but as emblematic of an enforcement policy that has become unmoored from the concept of consumer harm,” wrote James Cooper, director-research and policy at the George Mason School of Law's Law and Economics Center, in an opinion piece on The Hill’s website Monday. Cooper, who was an adviser to then-FTC Commissioner William Kovacic and acting director of the Office of Policy Planning, wrote that by enforcing the FTC Act “against trivial misstatements in privacy policies that nobody reads, the Commission has been able to put an increasingly large number of firms in the digital economy under 20-year orders.” These orders “often mandate intrusive monitoring and reporting” and allow the FTC to “obtain substantial monetary penalties for order violations -- just ask Google, which was hit with a $22.5 million fine for a misstatement on its FAQ page about how to disable cookies in Safari (which by all indications impacted nobody),” Cooper wrote. “Not only do these actions threaten to chill innovation in the digital economy, they will -- to quote Commissioner Joshua Wright’s dissent -- deter firms from ‘engaging in voluntary practices that promote consumer choice and transparency -- the very principles that lie at the heart of the Commission’s consumer protection mission,’” Cooper said. Wright tweeted a link to the post.

The American Booksellers Association (ABA) and a trio of authors’ advocacy groups urged the DoJ Antitrust Division Monday to investigate Amazon on antitrust grounds, saying in separate letters that the online retailer is abusing its position within the industry. Authors United urged DoJ to launch an investigation of Amazon’s “abuse of its dominance in the world of books,” claiming that Amazon has negatively impacted the U.S. book industry. The ABA sent a separate letter to DoJ in support of the Authors United letter, and said in a news release that the antitrust investigation request also has support from the Authors Guild and the Association of Authors’ Representatives. The Authors Guild said it plans to also send a letter to the DoJ. Amazon didn’t comment.

A new Florida Bar professional ethics committee opinion would allow lawyers to take pre-emptive steps to avoid a client’s past social media posts, photos or videos from being dragged into litigation, chair of Bilzin Sumberg’s Litigation Group's Michael Kreitzer and associate Naomi Alzate wrote in an article for the National Law Review posted Saturday. The opinion comes after an unnamed bar member inquired about the ethical obligations an attorney has when advising clients to “clean up” social media accounts to “eliminate embarrassing information the attorney considers immaterial to the suit,” they said. The lawyer also asked if a client can change his or her social media settings from “public” to “private.” If asked directly, attorneys must “comply with The Florida Bar’s Rule 4-3.4(a), which sets prohibitions on obstructing, destroying, altering or concealing material information the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is relevant to a pending or reasonably foreseeable proceeding,” the article said. The Florida Bar's proposed rule is similar to the New York County Lawyers' Association’s conclusion that “a lawyer may advise his/her clients to use the highest level of privacy settings on their social media pages and may advise clients to remove information from social media pages unless the lawyer has a duty to preserve information under law and there is no violation of law relating to spoliation of evidence,” Kreitzer and Alzate said. The opinion will become final within the next 30 days absent further action by the Florida Bar Board of Governors, they said.

NTIA will convene the next meeting of the facial recognition multistakeholder process July 28 in the boardroom at the American Institute of Architects, 1735 New York Ave. NW, said John Verdi, NTIA director-privacy initiatives, in an email to stakeholders Friday. The meeting will be webcast and a dial-in number will be provided, he said. “The stakeholder working group is collaborating to make progress on issues discussed at the June meeting, including: user consent, anti-fraud uses of facial recognition technology, and perhaps a few related topics,” he said: “The working group’s goal is to generate a proposal (or proposals) for review by the full group prior to the July 28 meeting.”