WhatsApp said it's working with EU regulators to respond to their concerns about changes to the messaging service's privacy policy and terms of service that will permit sharing of some user account information with parent Facebook (see 1608250027). Last week, the Article 29 Working Party, made up of EU's data protection commissioners, sent a letter to WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum seeking answers about what information is being collected and shared (see 1610280039). “We’re working with data protection authorities to address their questions," emailed a WhatsApp spokesman Friday. "We’ve had constructive conversations, including before our update, and we remain committed to respecting applicable law.”

The U.S. and other nations with high internet connectivity would lose at least 1.9 percent of their gross domestic product each day that internet services are disconnected, the Global Network Initiative reported Thursday. It was based on a Facebook-funded study conducted by Deloitte, GNI said. The Deloitte study said countries with medium-level connectivity would lose about 1 percent of their daily gross domestic product in an internet shutdown, and a low-connectivity country would lose 0.4 percent of its daily GDP, GNI said. The report noted an earlier Brookings Institution study saying that 81 government-led internet shutdowns between July 2015 and June 2016 cost the affected countries a total of about $2.4 billion. Countries affected in those shutdowns included Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, GNI said. “Shutting down the internet undermines economic activity and chills free expression,” said GNI Executive Director Judith Lichtenberg in a news release. “The economic and human rights harms of network shutdowns reinforce each other, and are of particular concern in developing countries, emerging and fragile democracies, and jurisdictions with weak rule of law.”

Sony will split out its digital imaging businesses into a separate subsidiary when the next fiscal year starts April 1, the company said in a Wednesday SEC filing. Sony Imaging Products & Solutions will handle the camera businesses for the consumer, broadcast and professional and medical markets and is expected to name Shigeki Ishizuka, the corporate executive officer currently in charge of those businesses, as president of the subsidiary, Sony said. The move is part of Sony’s long-term strategy to sequentially split out the business units within Sony to form new subsidiary companies to promote “clearly attributable accountability and responsibility” to shareholders and to speed “decision-making processes and reinforcement of business competitiveness,” Sony said.

NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling admonished critics of the recently completed Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition, in a speech Wednesday. ICANN implemented the move earlier this month after NTIA allowed its contract with the organization to administer the IANA functions to expire (see 1610030042). Strickling noted "some last-minute attempts to derail the transition" during an Internet Governance Project event. “You do not show respect for the multistakeholder process when you wait until the process is over and the community has reached consensus and then propose major changes in the plan without ever asking the community to consider such an option," Strickling said. "You do not show respect for the multistakeholder process when you do not participate for two years and then afterward say you object to the outcome.” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, led GOP congressional opposition to the transition, with some senators unsuccessfully attempting to delay its implementation via the short-term continuing resolution to fund the government through Dec. 9 (see 1609220067 and 1609270054). A coalition of four GOP state attorneys general unsuccessfully tried to delay the switch via a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Galveston, Texas (see 1609300065). Strickling said it's fortunate those attempts to scuttle the transition “did not succeed” and NTIA was able to fulfill its promise to spin off its oversight of the IANA functions to the ICANN community. “I believe without a doubt we were” correct to seek a multistakeholder process to plan for the switchover, as it turned into a "most compelling" demonstration of the strengths of multistakeholder internet governance, Strickling said.

Thirty mostly European civil society groups and individuals are urging EU officials to reject clauses in trade agreements, including the proposed Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), that the groups say would infringe on the "fundamental rights to data protection and privacy." In a letter released Monday and dated Friday, the groups, including Access Now, European Digital Rights and Privacy International and U.S.-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, said "trade negotiations are not suitable for shaping rules affecting fundamental rights and the rule of law in a democratic society." They said the rules will be interpreted by trade dispute settlement bodies whose aim is to liberalize trade, not protect human rights. But negotiating parties could use a "general exception clause" instead, the groups wrote. Such a clause could: ensure parties to the agreement "can condition the transfer and processing of personal data" on its protection; allow the EU or another party to suspend personal data flows if fundamental rights aren't respected; make sure privacy and data protection rights aren't subject to challenge in a trade agreement; and guarantee parties to the agreement shouldn't apply or adopt the "least restrictive privacy or data protection measures," the letter said. EFF blogged about the issue, calling TiSA a "secretive" trade agreement that uses many provisions of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement.

Smartwatch sales in Western Europe will pass 8.8 million units this year, growing to 41 million by 2021, said Parks Associates in a Tuesday news release. As the connected home market continues to grow, “consumers will seek out products that interact with their home,” including smartwatches, said President Stuart Sikes. “Currently, consumers are buying individual devices and testing them rather than purchasing entire systems."

The FCC sought comment on initial recommendations by its World Radiocommunication Conference Advisory Committee. The committee is helping develop a U.S. position headed into the next WRC in 2019. “Based upon an initial review of the draft recommendations forwarded to the Commission, the International Bureau, in coordination with other Commission Bureaus and Offices, tentatively concludes that we can generally support most of the attached WRC-19 Advisory Committee draft recommendations,” said a public notice. “The comments provided by interested parties will assist the FCC in its upcoming consultations with the U.S. Department of State and NTIA in the development of U.S. positions for WRC-19.” The FCC set a comment deadline of Nov. 8 in docket 16-185. The FCC WRC Advisory Committee's initial meeting was Aug. 2, but the real work is done in four informal working groups (see 1608020053). The first big deadline is the Inter-American Telecommunication Commission meeting starting in late November, at which the U.S. will present its preliminary views on the items for the WRC agenda.

Apple and Facebook provide strong encryption in their messaging and communications services, but Amnesty International said BlackBerry, Microsoft's Skype and Snapchat have weak privacy protection on their instant messaging services. Amnesty on Thursday issued rankings of 11 companies with the most popular messaging apps on their use of encryption to protect privacy. Sherif Elsayed-Ali, who heads the group's technology and human rights team, said "our communications are under constant threat from cybercriminals and spying by state authorities," with young people, who are the biggest users of such services, more at risk than others. Based on a scale of one to 100, Tencent scored zero in privacy protection, BlackBerry scored 20, Snapchat 26, and Skype 40. Facebook got a score of 73 for its Messenger and WhatsApp apps, and Apple scored 67 for iMessage and FaceTime apps. Amnesty said Snapchat, used by more than 100 million people daily, has a strong privacy policy commitment but doesn't provide end-to-end encryption, which, unlike Apple, few companies use. Amnesty said end-to-end encryption should be the default for all messaging apps. A Microsoft spokesman emailed that the company agreed with Amnesty about the importance of encryption but the group's report "does not accurately reflect" Skype's privacy and security protections. "Skype uses encryption and a range of other technical security measures, and we protect people’s privacy through legal challenges, advocacy, and strong policies to notify customers when we receive government requests for their data or detect attempted third party intrusions," he wrote. BlackBerry, Snapchat and Tencent didn't comment.

More than 500 companies are now listed as self-certified under the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield framework, as of Tuesday. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker tweeted about the milestone and said more than 1,000 applications are being processed. The trans-Atlantic data transfer agreement was signed earlier this year to better safeguard personal information of European citizens, replacing the safe harbor framework invalidated by the EU high court a year ago. But Privacy Shield is still expected to face legal challenges in Europe (see 1609150023). Self-certification began in August and some said sign-ups may slow now that an incentive -- giving companies extra time to ensure their third-party vendors get the same data protection level required in the framework -- has passed (see 1610030008).

DOJ asked the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to grant a panel rehearing or rehearing en banc in its effort to force Microsoft to turn over a customer's emails stored in Ireland (see 1610120014). In a filing Thursday, the department said the three-judge panel "erroneously concluded" that enforcing the warrant was an "impermissible extraterritorial application" (see 1607140071). DOJ said the panel noted that the focus of Section 2703 of the Stored Communications Act, which is part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, "was the privacy of stored communications, and not disclosure to the government." But the department said the "clear purpose" of the section "is to outline the circumstances in which a customer's privacy interest in the content of their emails must yield to the Government's interests in obtaining those emails through disclosure by the service provider." The department also said the 2nd Circuit's opinion has "created a regime where electronic communication service providers -- private, for-profit businesses answerable only to their shareholders -- can thwart legitimate and important criminal and national security investigations, while providing no offsetting, principled privacy protections."