Facebook won’t ban or fact-check political marketing, and unlike Google, it won’t limit how political advertisements target specific groups, Product Management Director Rob Leathern announced Thursday. Democrats criticize Facebook for allowing politicians and candidates to lie in their ads. Leathern said Facebook doesn’t think companies should make decisions about political commercials. Facebook will allow users to block political ads from feeds. Google is limiting political ad targeting and Twitter banned political ads (see 1912020041). “This does not mean that politicians can say whatever they like in advertisements on Facebook,” Leathern wrote: Users face community standards, which “apply to hate speech, harmful content and content designed to intimidate voters.”
Congress failed to pass a privacy law in 2019, so consumers are facing a less-than-ideal patchwork of privacy laws from states like California, creating uncertainty for consumers and businesses, said a Washington Post editorial Tuesday evening. “Though its track record doesn't offer much reason for optimism, Congress should do in 2020 what it promised to do in 2019.”
The White House proposed 10 artificial intelligence regulatory principles to govern private sector AI, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios announced Tuesday. The principles focus on ensuring public engagement, limiting regulatory overreach and promoting trustworthy AI, Kratsios said.
More than 70 percent of U.S. broadband households own at least one streaming entertainment product and half own a smart TV, reported Parks Associates Monday. Seventy-seven percent of smart TVs are connected to the internet, it said, up from 62 percent in 2014. Kristen Hanich said ISPs and others increasingly look to extend into subscriptions and advertising-supported over-the-top video services. The analyst cited Samsung’s recently announced ad-supported video service, Samsung TV Plus, and said more announcements from TV makers are expected at CES here in Las Vegas.
A Utah technology company didn't implement “reasonable security safeguards, allowing a hacker to access” the personal data of more than a million consumers, the FTC alleged Monday in a 5-0 settlement. InfoTrax and CEO Mark Rawlins are barred from storing and sharing personal data unless they implement an information security program, the agency said. They must also obtain third-party assessments of their systems every two years. An attorney for the company didn’t comment.
ICANN and VeriSign agreed on a proposed amendment to the .com registry agreement, with comments due Feb. 14. Verisign is the registry operator of the .com top-level domain. Because of a growing domain name market, the Commerce Department concluded in an amended cooperative agreement that ICANN and Verisign would serve the public by allowing “an increase to the price for .COM registry services, up to a maximum of 7 percent in each of the final four years of each six-year period,” ICANN wrote Friday. The first six-year period began in October 2018. ICANN and Verisign also announced a proposed framework for collaborating on domain name system security, stability and resiliency, signing a binding letter of intent. These agreements fulfill 2016 commitments when the two sides previously amended the .com pact.
An Open Connectivity Forum cloud interface seeks to unify the IoT through cloud-to-cloud connectivity based on its work with open standards. The interface can help standardize connectivity between different manufacturers’ cloud servers, and between devices and the cloud, OCF said, which could help streamline partnerships and avoid implementing and maintaining numerous proprietary programming interfaces. As IoT devices and the need for seamless operation between different manufacturers’ systems grows, a proprietary approach doesn’t scale well, said the trade group. At CES, the Open Connectivity Foundation will demonstrate IoT products from BSC Computer, Commax, Haier, LG, Resideo, Samsung and Sure Universal at a Monday news-media event, it said Thursday. The products will complete OCF 2.1 certification this year. Many of the named and other member companies are expected to launch products based on the spec this year. OCF has detailed implementations for Bluetooth, EnOcean, Zigbee and Z-wave.
The NFL "uses [ultra-wideband] technology for a variety of services, including player safety and health, fan engagement, and broadcast enhancements,” said in a filing posted Friday on a meeting with Commissioner Mike O’Rielly and aides to the other commissioners on ultra-wideband in 6 GHz. NFL partner Zebra Technologies earlier filed (see 1912180063), in docket 18-295. The NFL considered "alternative technologies to meet their needs and that the level of accuracy and speed provided by UWB was unmatched." The league "urged the Commission to give close consideration to engineering solutions that can enable the Commission to expand spectrum for Wi-Fi services while also protecting current users.”
Facebook will remove misleading content related to the U.S. census, the platform said Thursday. This includes “information about when and how to participate in the census and the consequences of participating,” said Vice President-U.S. Public Policy Kevin Martin and Product Management Director-Civic Engagement Samidh Chakrabarti. The policy “prohibits ads that portray census participation as useless or meaningless or advise people not to participate in the census.” The update stems from the company’s ongoing civil rights audit. Martin ran the FCC under President George W. Bush.
Most facial recognition technology algorithms show evidence of “demographic differentials,” or racial bias, the National Institute of Standards and Technology reported Thursday. For one-to-one matching, a study found higher rates of false positives for Asian and African American faces “relative to images of Caucasians,” NIST said. “While it is usually incorrect to make statements across algorithms, we found empirical evidence for the existence of demographic differentials in the majority of the face recognition algorithms we studied,” said NIST computer scientist Patrick Grother. The study evaluated 189 software algorithms from 99 developers, “a majority of the industry.”