TechNet and the Web Enabled Retailers Helping Expand Retail Employment (WE R HERE) Coalition said Tuesday they will work to increase opposition to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's proposed Marketplace Sales Tax, which would require “marketplace providers” to collect New York’s state and local sales taxes on any items shipped into the state from out-of-state sellers. Cuomo, a Democrat, included the online sales tax proposal in the FY 2018 executive budget he released in January. TechNet and WE R HERE cited a Mercury survey done on their behalf that found 69 percent of surveyed state citizens oppose the proposal. The Marketplace Sales Tax proposal “sends a clear signal to small and emerging online marketplaces: come to New York at your own peril,” said TechNet Executive Director-Northeast Region Matthew Mincieli in a news release. “We know the Governor and the Legislature want to help the tech industry thrive, but this proposal is not the way to do it. We urge our leaders in Albany to remove this proposal from the final adopted budget.”

Amazon turned over data collected through an Echo device owned by the defendant in an Arkansas murder case, confirmed Nathan Smith, Benton County, Arkansas, prosecuting attorney, in an email Tuesday. "I am pleased that we will have access to the data from the Defendant's Echo device since the Defendant consented to its release," he said, referring to James Bates, who was charged with the 2015 murder of Victor Collins (see 1701060025). "As with any case, our obligation is to investigate all of the available evidence, whether the evidence proves useful or not. Since this case is ongoing, I cannot comment on the specifics of the recording or whether it will be used in court," said Smith. The case drew the attention of privacy advocates, who say intelligent personal digital assistants may be involved in future court cases. Amazon didn't comment. Multiple news stories said the company handed over the data Friday.

Samsung representatives didn’t comment Tuesday on WikiLeaks’ disclosure that the CIA worked secretly with U.K. authorities in 2014 to hack Samsung smart TVs and turn them into covert microphones. The CIA also developed “numerous attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones,” WikiLeaks said of the 8,000-plus pages of CIA materials it released online Tuesday, the authenticity of which couldn’t be confirmed. “Infected phones can be instructed to send the CIA the user's geolocation, audio and text communications as well as covertly activate the phone's camera and microphone,” WikiLeaks said in a news release. In the case of the hacking of Samsung smart TVs, documents of “engineering notes” purported to be from a joint U.S.-U.K. “workshop” in June 2014 describe malware code-named “Weeping Angel” that can “suppress” the TV’s LED backlight to “improve the look” of a so-called “Fake-Off mode” that gives the owner the false impression the set is turned off when in fact it's listening to private conversations. A to-do list under the heading of “Future Work” expresses frustration that Samsung’s internet firmware updates may remove the Weeping Angel “implant” or “portions of the implant,” the documents say. CIA engineers also expressed concern that a blue LED on the back of the Samsung TV “remains powered when in Fake-Off mode” and thus threatened to tip off the unsuspecting owner, the documents say. Apple and Google representatives also didn’t comment Tuesday on the aspects of the leaked documents that describe how the CIA hacked iOS and Android smartphones from afar.

For the 11th consecutive year, internet-related fraud complaints led the list of consumer grievances lodged last year in New York, said the state attorney general's office in a Monday news release. The AG's office said there were 4,605 internet-related complaints -- about 23 percent of the total 19,746 fraud complaints recorded -- which included problems about internet services and providers, data privacy and security and consumer fraud. No. 2 on the list were automobile complaints followed by consumer-related services, which include security systems and tech repairs.

Some experts argue for more antitrust scrutiny of data-rich companies because they may gain an unfair market advantage and risk privacy, but an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation report released Monday said existing authority is enough to address any abuses. ITIF Senior Fellow Joe Kennedy, the report's author, said collection of vast amounts of data doesn't by itself threaten competition. Data use in specific circumstances might require regulatory intervention, he said, but large amounts of data are a "vital input" for digital assistants, medical diagnoses, online platforms and other innovations. In the 34-page report, Kennedy discounted concerns from some legal experts and policy activists that consumers' privacy will be hurt. He said consumers have a "lax attitude" toward privacy because they share a lot of personal information online even though they say they want more privacy. He said consumer protection agencies have sufficient power to ensure companies' promises to uphold their data policies and enforce data misuse.

President Donald Trump's anticipated cybersecurity executive order is "moving along and maybe within a week or so we could see something," said former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano during a Center for Strategic and International Studies event Monday. Palmisano, vice chairman of the federal Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity, said he would attend a White House meeting later Monday to provide feedback on the revised order. Palmisano said he has not received any official confirmation on the EO's timeline. The White House didn’t comment. The White House has continued to revise the anticipated order in the weeks since officials first delayed Trump's planned late January signing of it. Then, the order would have directed the Office of Management and Budget to assess all federal agencies' cybersecurity risks and required agencies to manage their risk using the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Cybersecurity Framework (see 1701310066). Recent drafts of the EO have included language that would direct the Department of Commerce to explore ways to encourage “core communications infrastructure” companies “to improve the resilience of such infrastructure and to encourage collaboration with the goal of dramatically reducing threats perpetrated by” botnets (see 1702280065). Likely requirements for agencies’ cybersecurity accountability will be “a very important piece of this” executive order, said former National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, who chairs CENC, during the CSIS event. “That is a contract, if you will, between the president and the people he hires to run the agencies and departments.”

The Audio Engineering Society’s Technical Council formed a group to “advance the science and application” of audio for virtual, augmented and mixed reality “environments,” AES said in a Thursday announcement. The group’s work will cover “a whole gamut of application areas” in film, games, music, communications, medicine, forensics, simulations, education and virtual tourism, it said. “The technical requirements for new realities cover obvious areas such as spatial audio and synthesis but extend beyond into audio networking, semantic audio, perception, broadcast and online delivery.” The group’s “core responsibility” will be to develop “a roadmap for the AES to address emergent applications in new realities,” AES said. Members will include “industry professionals working at the forefront of commercial technologies for virtual, augmented and mixed realities as well as key academics in the field whose audio research crosses new multidisciplinary boundaries,” it said.

More than 50 companies, including Amazon, Apple, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Lyft, Salesforce, Twitter and Yahoo, filed a brief with the Supreme Court supporting a transgender high school student's fight against a Virginia county school board over restricting bathroom access to individuals based on their biological sex. The companies said they're alarmed by the "stigmatizing and degrading effects" of the Gloucester County School Board's policy and similar ones that would "adversely" affect their businesses, customers and employees. "Having built inclusive workplaces for transgender employees and their loved ones, we have a vested interest in the legal landscape in which our employees and their dependents live, work and go to school," wrote Margenett Moore-Roberts, Yahoo head-inclusive diversity, in a blog post Thursday. A district court upheld the policy, but the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision last year. In October, the Supreme Court stayed the 4th Circuit decision and said it would review the case. Yahoo was also among companies that said it was disappointed over the Trump administration's withdrawal of guidance that required public schools to let transgender students use bathrooms based on their gender identity (see 1702230035).

If Congress passes the Email Privacy Act and sends it to President Donald Trump, it could be an "quick, easy bipartisan victory" for taxpayers and get the new administration and lawmakers off to a "positive" start, said Institute for Policy Innovation President Tom Giovanetti in an opinion piece in TechCrunch Wednesday. HR-387, which the House unanimously passed again in February, would close a loophole by requiring law enforcement to get a warrant to access a person's emails older than 180 days stored in a third-party server (see 1702070011). It would update the ​30-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which currently permits such access. Last year, the bill stalled in a Senate committee. "The major agenda items promised, like tax reform and healthcare overhaul, are bigger lifts and will take months to get done," said Giovanetti, but "Mr. Trump's emphasis on making deals may also indicate a bias toward including Democrats in the process -- getting buy-in from both sides rather than relying on single-party support for his agenda." Updating ECPA could be a "helpful opening" to form new bipartisan coalitions on critical legislation, he said.

Twitter will proactively find accounts that engage in abusive behavior, even those that haven't been reported, and curb their functionality for a certain period, wrote Ed Ho, vice president-engineering, in a Wednesday blog post. "This change could come into effect if an account is repeatedly Tweeting without solicitation at non-followers or engaging in patterns of abusive behavior that is in violation of the Twitter Rules." One type of action could be allowing only an account's followers to see its tweets. The company will single out accounts only when it's "confident" they are abusive, which is identified through algorithms, he added. The company is also providing more filtering options so users can control what they see for certain accounts like those without a profile photo or unverified email address or phone number. Ho said Twitter is also expanding a "mute" feature, introduced in November, which lets users remove keywords, phrases or entire conversations from their notifications indefinitely or for a certain period. The company will be more transparent and open about accounts or tweets that people have reported as being abusive. "You will be notified when we’ve received your report and informed if we take further action. This will all be visible in your notifications tab on our app," wrote Ho.