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.”

Amazon raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour for all of its 350,000 employees last year “because it seemed like the right thing to do,” said CEO Jeff Bezos Thursday in his annual letter to shareholders. “Today I challenge our top retail competitors (you know who you are!) to match our employee benefits and our $15 minimum wage,” he said. “Do it! Better yet, go to $16 and throw the gauntlet back at us. It’s a kind of competition that will benefit everyone.” Best Buy, Walmart and Barnes & Noble didn’t comment. Best Buy pays $12 average hourly, Walmart $11.72, Barnes & Noble $10.63, according to the PayScale website.

An e-commerce company president pleaded guilty to “conspiring to fix prices for customized promotional products sold” to online U.S. customers, DOJ said Thursday. Gennex Media President Akil Kurji and co-conspirators agreed to fix prices as early as May 2014 until at least June 2016, Justice said. He faces 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine, and 11 defendants have been charged for illegal activity associated with products like wristbands, lanyards, temporary tattoos and buttons. “Kurji and his co-conspirators used social media platforms and encrypted messaging applications, such as Facebook, Skype, and Whats[A]pp, to reach and implement their illegal agreement,” Justice said.

Uber’s “continued success will come from stellar execution and the strength of the platform we have worked so hard to build,” said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in an initial-public-offering SEC filing Thursday to raise $1 billion. Uber’s engineering and product teams “are solving some of the most difficult problems at the intersection of the physical and digital worlds,” he said. Uber’s 2018 revenue jumped 42 percent from 2017 to $11.27 billion and was 193 percent higher than 2016's $3.8 billion, said the filing. It had a $3.03 billion operating loss in 2018, 26 percent lower than in 2017, it said. Ex-Facebook executive Matt Cohler, general partner in venture capital firm Benchmark, is Uber's largest individual shareholder with 11 percent of the stock, it said.

Rather than breaking up big digital platform companies as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., proposes (see 1903280045), requiring they share information might be more effective at resolving problems, wrote former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler Thursday. He nonetheless said the 2020 presidential candidate's plan deserved attention. "Physical breakup of dominant companies," he wrote for the Brookings Institution, "may not be the only path to competition in a world where the tools of dominance are virtual rather than physical." Splitting them into "smaller clones may reduce their size, but each new company will still possess the virtual assets that enabled their parents’ anticompetitive activities in the first place: the databases full of information about you and I," wrote Wheeler, a visiting fellow. "Break open that hoard of digital information, make it available to innovators and competitors," he advised. "Requiring competitive interconnection to databases would have the effect of an 'internal break up' by going after the source of its market control." AT&T, Comcast, Facebook and Google are donors to Brookings and didn't influence this blog, the post said. Warren's office referred us to her campaign, which didn't comment. The Internet Association declined to comment.