A background screening company “falsely claimed” participation in the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, and now faces $42,000 fines for future violations, the FTC announced in a settlement Friday. Commissioners approved 5-0 the agreement with Florida-based SecurTest, which the agency said failed to complete its 2017 Privacy Shield application. The company is barred from misrepresenting itself again, but no monetary penalty was issued for the initial offense. The agency also sent “warning letters to 13 companies that falsely claimed they participate in the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor and the U.S.-Swiss Safe Harbor frameworks,” the FTC said.

Worldwide IoT spending is expected to reach $1.1 trillion in 2023, based on a 12.6 percent compound annual growth rate the next five years, said IDC Thursday. “Spending on IoT deployments continues with good momentum and is expected to be $726 billion worldwide this year." The consumer market will be the second largest source of IoT spending in 2019 behind manufacturing, with smart home and connected vehicle “use cases” the biggest growth drivers in the consumer sector, said IDC. It forecasts the consumer market to “overtake” manufacturing to become the largest source of IoT spending by 2023.

Europeans are relatively aware of the general data protection regulation (GDPR), their privacy rights and the existence of national data protection authorities (DPAs), the European Commission said Thursday. A survey of 27,000 people showed that, a year after the law became effective in May 2018, 73% have heard of at least one of the six rights it guarantees, particularly the rights to access their own data, object to receiving direct marketing and have their data deleted. Another key finding was that 62% of those surveyed said they worry about not having complete control cover the personal data they provide online. The EC launched an awareness-raising campaign to encourage people to read privacy statements and set privacy settings to ensure they only share data they're willing to share. GDPR is still "a baby that is growing fast and doing well" but that needs continued nurturing, EU Justice, Consumer and Gender Equality Commissioner Vera Jourova said at a Brussels event marking the first-year anniversary. Among other things, she tweeted, "We must avoid fragmentation and temptation for adding additional conditions or expansive interpretation," and avoid "the so-called 'gold plating.'" It's time to "roll up the sleeves," European Data Protection Supervisor Giovanni Buttarelli said via video For enforcement to be effective, the European Data Protection Board must be better resourced, DPAs must start to use the full range of their enforcement powers, and data controllers must better respect the spirit as well as the letter of the law. The GDPR won't significantly affect the current digital ecosystem unless companies have based their business model on excessive use of personal data for profiling and other activities, he said. Buttarelli plans to publish soon a "visionary manifesto" on what's needed to maintain GDPR enforcement, what national authorities can do to be more effective and how to set global principles for big data and artificial intelligence.

Reddit recorded a perfect score on an Electronic Frontier Foundation survey of the tech industry’s content moderation practices. Reddit scored credit in all six categories for practices on legal requests, platform policy requests, notice, appeals mechanisms, appeals transparency and Santa Clara Principles. Apple and GitHub scored five, failing to receive credit for appeals transparency. YouTube and the Google Play Store recorded four each; Twitter, three; Facebook, two; and Instagram one.

Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant “routinely records and voiceprints millions of children without their consent or the consent of their parents,” alleged a class action complaint (in Pacer) in U.S. District Court in Seattle Tuesday. It said the practice violates laws in Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington that prohibit recording oral communications without the consent of all parties to the communication. Representing Massachusetts 10-year-old plaintiff C.O. through her guardian, Alison Hall-O’Neil, the suit seeks redress for all minors in those states who have used Alexa in their home. Echo and Echo Dot users expect that a digital query is sent over the internet for processing, that a digital response is returned and that the device then converts the response into Alexa’s voice, it said: Users don’t expect that “Alexa is creating and storing a permanent recording of their voice.” The lawsuit alleges Amazon could process audio interactions locally on an Echo device “and send only a digital query, rather than a voice recording,” to Amazon servers, saying it wouldn't be as cost effective “or commercially advantageous” to the company. Apple records communications in a similar manner to Alexa with its Siri voice assistant, but it stores the recordings in an “identifiable form” for only a short period of time, “and then deletes the recordings entirely,” said the complaint. Amazon didn’t comment Wednesday. It referred us to a blog post outlining the company’s approach to privacy and safety.

A digital company's acquisitions of nascent competitors -- if seemingly solely to block that potential competition, protect a monopoly or hurt competition -- could raise Antitrust Division suspicions, DOJ antitrust head Makan Delrahim said Tuesday at the Antitrust New Frontiers Conference in Tel Aviv, per prepared remarks. He said exclusivity issues can be anticompetitive in digital markets, though it's not always easy to ascertain when exclusivity agreements are pro-competitive vs. substantially foreclosing competition. He said coordinated conduct in digital markets "also could trigger closer scrutiny" in some situations by DOJ. He said the Antitrust Division isn't so myopic in its view of competition that it doesn't see that competition has non-price dimensions and that price effects alone don't fully illuminate digital market dynamics where the profit-maximizing price is zero. Competition is lost when an unlawful acquisition stops a product from reaching market, he said.

Salesforce agreed to buy Tableau Software in a stock deal valued at $15.7 billion, said the companies Monday. Tableau helps companies see and understand data, and Salesforce helps companies engage and understand customers, said Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff. The combined company will help drive the “digital transformation,” they said, citing IDC projections of a worldwide spending on data-driven technologies and services reaching $1.8 trillion in 2022. The transaction is expected to close about Oct. 1.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo aren’t liable for hosting content posted by known scammers, a key appellate court ruled Friday. Citing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided (in Pacer) with the platforms over a group of 14 locksmiths. The group’s lawsuit claimed the platforms flood search engine results with listings from unlicensed locksmiths to incentivize legitimate locksmiths to pay for preferred listing placement. The platforms aren’t content providers because the information they’re hosting is provided entirely by third parties, the court said, and Section 230 protects computer services from liability. The court is incorrect that the platforms aren’t responsible for the content because they verify scammer locations, said Baldino's Lock & Key’s Mark Baldino. The platforms didn't comment.

Microsoft disingenuously told the FTC products that appear to impede self-repair are pro-consumer, emailed two right-to-repair advocates rebutting Microsoft’s filing (see 1906030020) posted May 31 in the “Nixing the Fix” docket. Microsoft “would like to avoid being told to stop using adhesives in their products despite the consequences of producing products that cannot be repaired,” said Repair Association Executive Director Gay Gordon-Byrne and CEO Kyle Wiens of iFixit, one of Byrne’s charter members. Using adhesives and “pouch batteries” in a device are “lower cost manufacturing techniques,” Byrne and Wiens emailed us last week. "These types of products cannot last longer than the least durable component, and batteries have known limitations on charge cycles.” Self-repair doesn't hurt innovation as the software maker claims, said the advocates. “If adhesives were to be banned, future IoT products would be assembled with the potential for repair on a level playing field at comparable costs to all OEMs." The company didn’t comment Friday. The FTC plans a July 16 workshop.

Google will buy Looker, a “unified platform for business intelligence, data applications and embedded analytics,” for $2.6 billion cash, it said Thursday. Google will incorporate Looker into Google Cloud when the transaction is complete later this year, it said. This will help "offer customers a more complete analytics solution from ingesting data to visualizing results and integrating data and insights into their daily workflows,” blogged Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.