The Biden administration should prioritize addressing the threat of international discriminatory taxes against U.S. companies, the Computer & Communications Industry Association said Thursday. CCIA noted that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released reports in its Section 301 investigations into digital services taxes, concluding that DSTs in the U.K., Spain and Austria are “discriminatory against U.S. tech firms.” CCIA President Matt Schruers said: “Absent a proportionate response, U.S. exports will be unfairly singled out in other countries. Moreover, the proliferation of unilateral national taxes undermines the crucial work being done by the community of nations at the [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development], and risks the ability of negotiators to achieve consensus.”

The process for canceling Amazon Prime potentially constitutes unfair and deceptive practices under Section 5 of the FTC Act, Public Citizen wrote the agency Thursday. Users have to click through several pages to cancel memberships, and it’s a confusing process with numerous links in an effort to get the user to maintain the subscription, the organization wrote: “Amazon Prime’s subscription model is a ‘roach motel,’ where getting in is almost effortless, but escape is an ordeal. As a general rule, it should not be more difficult to unsubscribe than to subscribe from a digital service.” The agency received the letter, a spokesperson emailed. “Amazon makes it clear and easy for Prime members to cancel their subscription at any time, whether through a few clicks online, with a quick phone call, or by turning off auto renew in their membership options,” emailed a spokesperson. “Customer trust is at the heart of all of our products and services and we strongly disagree with any claim that our cancellation process creates uncertainty.”

Teladoc, claimed to be the oldest U.S. telemedicine platform, with roots dating to 2002, was “thrown a million curve balls” after the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, CEO Jason Gorevic told a prerecorded CES 2021 workshop. “Overnight, literally our volume doubled,” and the availability of telehealth services became ubiquitous, he said. “We always thought this was inevitable. This wasn’t a surprise to us. We just didn’t think it was going to happen overnight and that it was going to take a global pandemic to be the catalyst for that.” Gorevic estimated Teladoc did more than 10 million “virtual visits” in 2020. Consumers went from the “awareness-building phase” of telemedicine “straight through to the adoption phase, into the expectation phase" in just "a matter of months,” he said. “That almost never happens.” Gorevic predicts that a year from now, consumers will look to virtual-care visits as “the destination for all of their healthcare needs, not just for a slice of their healthcare needs, and we’re already seeing that.” He estimates 60% of Teladoc visits are for “noninfectious diseases.”

Flo Health, developer of a popular women’s fertility-tracking app, misled users and improperly shared users' sensitive health data with third-parties including Facebook and Google, the FTC alleged in a 5-0 settlement announced Wednesday. Despite promises to keep the data private, Flo “disclosed health data from millions of users of its Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker app to third parties that provided marketing and analytics services to the app, including Facebook’s analytics division, Google’s analytics division, Google’s Fabric service, AppsFlyer, and Flurry,” the FTC said. Commissioners Rohit Chopra and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter dissented in part, saying the agency should have charged the company with violating the Health Breach Notification Rule, for which the agency has never brought action. Commissioner Noah Phillips disagreed with the Democrats: “We have never applied the Rule to a health app such as Flo in the past, in part because the language of the Rule is not so plain. And I do not support announcing such a novel interpretation of the Rule here, in the context of an enforcement action.” The company faces civil penalties of up to $43,792 for any future violations. Flo didn’t share usernames, addresses or birthdays, a spokesperson emailed, noting the settlement included no admission of wrongdoing: “We do not currently, and will not, share any information about our users’ health with any company unless we get their permission. We have a comprehensive privacy framework with a robust set of policies and procedures to safeguard our users’ data.” The consent order includes a company compliance review, the spokesperson added.

The Russian government-sponsored hack of SolarWinds Orion software used for network management systems (see 2012170050) prompted Microsoft President Brad Smith to use his prerecorded CES 2021 keynote Wednesday to urge tech industry action to write new cybersecurity “rules of the road.” World governments “have spied on each other for centuries,” said Smith. “But we’ve long lived in a world where there were norms and rules that created expectations about what was appropriate and what was not, and what happened with SolarWinds was not.” The breach amounted to a “mass, indiscriminate global assault on the technology supply chain that all of us are responsible for protecting,” said Smith. The attack distributed 18,000 “packages” of malware on network infrastructures globally, he said. “It is a danger that the world cannot afford.” The tech industry needs to use “our collective voice to say to every government around the world that this kind of supply chain disruption is not something that any government or any company should be allowed to pursue,” he said. “I hope we’ll come out of this CES and move forward with this as one of our clarion calls for the future.”

The FTC’s order against Everalbum “reflects a change that has already taken place,” a company spokesperson emailed in response to Monday’s settlement (see 2101110027). The Ever app was shuttered in August, and the company “has no plans to run a consumer business moving forward,” the spokesperson wrote. “In September 2020, Paravision released its latest-generation face recognition model which does not use any Ever users’ data.”

Samsung is using artificial intelligence to make consumer content “better," said Sebastian Seung, head-Samsung Research. AI upscaling takes HD content on TV and coverts it to 8K quality via the Quantum AI processor, he said in a prerecorded CES media session Monday. Giving a glimpse of the “not-so-distant future,” he showed an extendable robot with “arms” for the home. Samsung is working on upcycling, where end-of-life products aren’t pulled apart and recycled but used as “building blocks” for new devices and services, said Sandeep Rana, European sustainability manager. A Samsung Galaxy upcycling program “reimagines phones into new roles.” The company created portable eye exam devices with used Galaxy phones. This year, Rana said, Samsung is updating software in used Galaxy phones and launching the Galaxy Upcycling at Home program.

Everalbum “deceived consumers” about face scanning technology and retention of user photos and videos, the FTC alleged in a 5-0 settlement with the photo app developer, which the agency called a first-of-its-kind enforcement action. The developer enabled face scanning by default for all mobile app users when it launched a 2017 feature and misled users from 2018-19 about consent, feature activation and turning it off, the FTC alleged. The company allegedly failed to delete photos and videos from deactivated accounts when it promised to remove the content. The company faces a $43,280 fine per future violation and is required to delete content from deactivated accounts. The agency should “take further steps to trigger penalties, damages, and other relief for facial recognition and data protection abuses,” said Commissioner Rohit Chopra. He suggested the commission could issue a rule under Section 18 of the FTC Act to better seek first-offense penalties. He noted users in Illinois, Texas and Washington were “treated with greater care, due to state protections on facial recognition.”

Equifax agreed to buy Kount, a supplier of artificial intelligence-based fraud prevention and digital identity solutions, for $640 million. “Businesses require new ways to establish digital identity trust in real time to fight the growing problem of online fraud while reducing customer friction,” said Equifax Friday. This will expand its global “footprint” in fraud prevention and “identity trust,” it said. The transaction is expected to close this quarter.

U.S. District Court in Washington will consolidate antitrust cases from DOJ and Colorado against Google for pretrial purposes (see 2012180047), Judge Amit Mehta ordered (in Pacer) Thursday: Future filings “shall be made exclusively on the DOJ Action docket.” Colorado can request consolidation for the trial after the “close of expert discovery and resolution of any motions for summary judgment.”