Federal privacy legislation should bar racial, gender and sexual orientation discrimination for employment, housing, credit and education, 26 civil society groups wrote Congress Friday. The groups argued for legislation that doesn’t pre-empt stronger state laws, provides enforcers with rulemaking authority and establishes a private right of action. The Center for Digital Democracy, Color of Change, Common Cause, National Hispanic Media Coalition, New America's Open Technology Institute, Public Citizen and Public Knowledge signed the letter to Senate and House Commerce Committee leaders.

Facebook “unintentionally” collected the email contacts of as many as 1.5 million users without consent, the company said Thursday, citing a design flaw from 2016. The issue stems from the platform verifying new accounts via user email passwords. When the verification process was altered in May 2016, language informing users of email contact collection was removed, though the uploading continued. The company ended email password verification for new users earlier this month, a spokesperson said. “These contacts were not shared with anyone and we're deleting them,” the company said, noting that affected users will be notified.

The EU’s potential one-hour requirement for platforms to remove terrorist content could result in the “over-removal of lawful content,” said the Computer and Communications Industry Association Wednesday. The requirement is included in a draft regulation to be the basis for the “European Parliament’s position in the final trilogue negotiations with the European Commission and the European Council,” CCIA said. Hopefully EU policymakers will “introduce a more workable content removal timeframe as the one hour deadline would not work for many, especially smaller, tech firms,” said CCIA Europe Senior Policy Manager Maud Sacquet.

The Internet Society’s Online Trust Alliance (OTA) gave its highest overall audit security and privacy scores to consumer-facing U.S. government websites and its lowest to healthcare sites, it said Tuesday in its ranking of seven industries. OTA said the healthcare industry ranked second in terms of privacy, but its last-place ranking was “largely due to sparse adoption of email authentication and always-encrypted sessions.” Overall, the audit found increased encryption, with 93 percent of sites encrypting all web sessions, compared with 52 percent in 2017, and more email authentication. “Almost every sector improved its security and privacy practices, and the record scores reflect that,” said Jeff Wilbur, OTA technical director. “The U.S. Government in particular made stunning improvements, from near last in 2017 to top of the class in 2018. Unfortunately, some sectors still have a long way to go to demonstrate acceptable security and privacy practices.”

Some Microsoft Outlook users potentially had their email accounts hacked between Jan. 1 and March 28, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed Tuesday. The company didn’t specify how many accounts. “Bad actors could have had unauthorized access to the content of their email accounts,” the spokesperson said, but most of those affected weren't at risk of email access. About 6 percent of the original subset of users could be at risk, the company said: “We addressed this scheme, which affected a limited subset of consumer accounts, by disabling the compromised credentials and blocking the perpetrators’ access.” The company also increased “detection and monitoring” for impacted accounts “out of an abundance of caution.”

The New York State Consumer Protection Division is polling New Yorkers about data privacy in a survey Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said is related to a state investigation “that Facebook is secretly accessing” users’ personal data (see 1902220058). The survey will provide “important insight into data privacy issues that will inform our efforts to create effective policy that prevents online companies from misusing or abusing personal data,” Cuomo said Tuesday. The survey asks about household smart devices, operating systems and whether consumers know how to access privacy settings. It also asks what data consumers think companies are collecting and what safeguards would be useful.

Netflix recorded 9.6 million net paid subscriber additions globally in Q1, 8 percent better than its January forecast, said a quarterly shareholder letter Tuesday. With Apple and Disney both recently unveiling details of their direct-to-consumer subscription video service offerings, “the clear beneficiaries will be content creators and consumers who will reap the rewards of many companies vying to provide a great video experience for audiences,” said Netflix. “We don’t anticipate that these new entrants will materially affect our growth because the transition from linear to on demand entertainment is so massive and because of the differing nature of our content offerings.” All three services will “continue to grow as we each invest more in content and improve our service and as consumers continue to migrate away from linear viewing (similar to how US cable networks collectively grew for years as viewing shifted from broadcast networks during the 1980s and 1990s).”

To address what it sees as Facebook’s threat to democracy, the FTC should unwind “bad mergers” like WhatsApp and Instagram and separate the platform from its ad-based business, Open Markets Institute said Monday. Congress and the FTC should also outlaw “all discriminatory delivery of prices and services to individual citizens,” the organization said. Facebook should be forced to abandon its business model, “which is to sell advertising based on the corporation’s ability to attract people’s attention, capture their secrets, and then use that information to manipulate thoughts and actions,” Open Markets Board Chair Zephyr Teachout said. The company and the agency didn’t comment.

BTIG Research upgraded its “sell rating” on Disney to “neutral” in a Monday note following the company’s Thursday investor day announcement of its Disney Plus streaming VOD service. Stopping short of rating it a “buy,” BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield said while Wall Street gave Disney a thumbs up Friday with a 12 percent share bump (see 1904120030), he remained “skeptical”: The wider array of popular library content at a lower price than expected "excited investors and shifted the Disney narrative (for now) away from its secularly challenged media network portfolio.” Greenfield referenced Disney management’s “ambitious” 60 million-90 million five-year subscriber target for the SVOD service, set to launch Nov. 12. Conceding the difficulty of disproving a five-year projection for a service that’s yet to launch, Greenfield called subscriber targets “overly aggressive” vs. the planned $2.4 billion original programming investment. Greenfield cited issues he believes Disney needs to address: a higher spend on original programming; the threat of Disney Plus cannibalizing home entertainment profits; the company’s streaming push possibly hurting its media network business; tech and marketing costs increasing; a challenging overseas launch; and a “confusing” multiple services model arising from separating Disney Plus from Hulu. He also called the "discount" $69 annual subscription “a mistake” and cited the challenge for ESPN Plus and Hulu to reach profitability. Disney didn't comment Monday. Moody’s called Disney’s SVOD strategies “credit positive” Monday but said they weren't expected to change its A2 credit ratings. Moody’s believes Disney is “on the correct path” for how viewers will use TV in the future “as the traditional ecosystem will continue to confront secular pressures,” particularly in North America and Australia where traditional pay TV is “most costly for the consumer" and "facing erosion.” In Moody’s view, the power over what and when people watch, on what device and how much they pay has been traditionally in the hands of production studios, network aggregators and pay-TV distributors, which have had "complete control." That power is "ceding to consumers as they now have many more information and entertainment options, can compare the value propositions of different platforms and content offerings, and are dictating their preferences with their wallets.”

Uber paid CEO Dara Khosrowshahi $45.3 million in total 2018 compensation, including $40 million in stock awards, $1 million in base salary, a $2 million cash bonus and $2.2 million in other pay, said Thursday’s initial public offering (see 1904110072) filing. Leadership under Khosrowshahi “has sought to reform our culture fundamentally,” said the company. It’s “creating and embracing new cultural norms, committing to diversity and inclusion, and rebuilding our relationships with employees, Drivers, consumers, cities, and regulators,” it said. The new Uber values “ideas over hierarchy.” Uber’s “category position” declined in “recent periods,” such as in 2017 when the company “was significantly impacted by adverse publicity events,” it said. Uber was rocked that year by sexual-harassment scandal and PR nightmares, including when former CEO Travis Kalanick was caught on camera yelling profanities at his own Uber driver, who had complained to his boss that Uber’s discount-pricing policies drove him into bankruptcy. An Advanced Technologies Group (ATG) within Uber is developing autonomous vehicles, delivery drones and “vertical takeoff Group and landing vehicles,” along with “other future innovations,” said the IPO document. Uber foresees “a long period of hybrid autonomy, in which autonomous vehicles will be deployed gradually against specific use cases while Drivers continue to serve most consumer demand,” said the filing. “Deciding which trip receives a vehicle driven by a Driver and which receives an autonomous vehicle, and deploying both in real time while maintaining liquidity in all situations, is a dynamic that we believe is imperative for the success of an autonomous vehicle future.”