D-Link's first Built on Thread-certified border router uses Silicon Labs’ wireless SoC and supports Thread, Zigbee, Bluetooth 5, Bluetooth mesh, among others, they said Monday.

The American Civil Liberties Union’s “flawed” methodology in criticizing Amazon’s Rekognition for racial bias was a setback for legitimate use of facial identification (see 1807270040), blogged Information Technology and Innovation Foundation Vice President Daniel Castro and Research Assistant Michael McLaughlin Monday. “It is unclear what error rate and level of bias groups such as the ACLU are willing to accept,” they wrote. “The standard should not be perfection, but rather better than the rates humans achieve today. And by that metric, facial recognition technology is clearly a positive step forward.” Amazon says ACLU’s results could be improved by following best practices on boosting confidence thresholds from 80 to 95 percent.

The EU has no intention of suspending the U.S.-EU Privacy Shield, despite a European Parliament committee’s recommendation, said British Conservative European Parliament Member Syed Kamall this week. The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, and the European Council, made up of EU heads of state, aren't on board with the Committee of Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs’ motion, Kamall said on a scheduled weekend telecast of C-SPAN’s The Communicators: “They’ve got too many tech companies in their own countries that want to continue those data flows.” Kamall also discussed tech “envy” in the EU, where U.S. tech dominance is drawing the attention of EU authorities. This attitude partly fuels government efforts to extract taxes from these companies, he said, suggesting European companies sell out to U.S. entities when they develop promising products. Kamall also discussed the evolution of social media, saying when Facebook started, people weren't as keen on data use and security: “We’re evolving from being initially very enthusiastic about some of these free services online. We’re now starting to ask the question: Now hold on a minute, what happens to my data? And I think that’s the same on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Amazon’s facial identification product Rekognition falsely matched 28 members of Congress with criminal mug shots, and lawmakers of color were disproportionately mismatched, said the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation Thursday. They included six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, which recently wrote CEO Jeff Bezos. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., was misidentified in a database of 25,000 public arrest photos. “Congress should press for a federal moratorium on the use of face surveillance until its harms, particularly to vulnerable communities, are fully considered,” said ACLU Legislative Counsel Neema Singh Guliani. An Amazon spokesperson emailed that the results could probably be improved by following best practices on setting the confidence thresholds used in the test, from 80 percent confidence to 95 percent. “In real world scenarios, Amazon Rekognition is almost exclusively used to help narrow the field and allow humans to expeditiously review and consider options using their judgement [sic] (and not to make fully autonomous decisions), where it can help find lost children, restrict human trafficking, or prevent crimes,” said the spokesperson. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Reps. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., and Mark DeSaulnier, D-Calif., wrote Bezos Thursday on “serious concerns … about the dangers facial recognition can pose to privacy and civil rights, especially when it is used as a tool of government surveillance.”

Free shipping, not entertainment, is the primary driver of Amazon Prime memberships, said a Wednesday Diffusion Group report, saying more than half of U.S. adult broadband users are Prime subscribers. Nearly four in five Amazon Prime users said free shipping topped reasons for subscribing to Prime, 11 percent citing Prime Video and 10 percent naming Prime Music, photos, reading, Twitch or other benefits. Folding digital media into Prime memberships has “sweetened the deal and brought many new subscribers into the mix,” but service value shifts from media to free shipping as members buy more merchandise, said TDG President Michael Greeson.

Research found evidence cybercriminals are targeting Oracle and SAP vulnerabilities in enterprise resource planning applications, noted the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, part of the Department of Homeland Security. "An attacker can exploit these vulnerabilities to obtain access to sensitive information," said US-CERT Wednesday. It linked to a report by Digital Shadows and Onapsis. Oracle and SAP didn't comment right away.

Ford is investing $4 billion in its autonomous vehicle business, including a $1 billion plug in Argo AI, through 2023, it said Tuesday, announcing a reorganization effective Aug. 1 (see the personals section of this issue). Citing computing power in cars and mobile devices, CEO Jim Hackett said, “We can now harness this technology to unlock a new world of vehicle personalization, supply chain choreography and inventory leanness.”

Sonos, whose board includes ex-FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, hopes to raise about $264 million in its initial public offering, said the wireless multiroom audio company in an SEC filing Monday. The company is offering 5.6 million shares, and selling stockholders are offering 8.4 million shares, with an offering price between $17 and $19 per share. It will trade on Nasdaq as SONO. The largest stakeholder is KKR, with 25.7 percent on June 30, followed by Index Ventures with 13 percent. Co-founder John MacFarlane owns 9.9 percent, Valdur Koha 7.4 percent, Redpoint Ventures 5.2 percent and CEO Patrick Spence 1.5 percent. Directors include Genachowski (106,422 shares), former Cisco executive and Index Ventures General Partner Mike Volpi (12.1 million shares) and former Microsoft executive Robert Bach (410,152 shares). In FY 2017, revenue rose 10 percent to $992.5 million.

Facebook will collaborate with Google, Microsoft and Twitter on finding ways for consumers to more easily transfer data among platforms, said Facebook Director-Privacy and Public Policy Steve Satterfield Friday. The Data Transfer Project will explore complications with transferring data between services that might have differing user-designated privacy controls and settings. “The Project is in its early stages, and we hope more organizations and experts will get involved,” said Satterfield.

The BBC’s iPlayer platform trials fielded more than 1.6 million requests for livestreamed Ultra HD coverage of World Cup and Wimbledon matches, “a scale never seen before in the UK,” blogged Phil Layton, BBC R&D head-broadcast and connected systems. The trials showed for the first time that Ultra HD and HDR can be delivered live and “free-to-air” over the internet, he said Thursday. “We have always felt that Ultra HD needed to be more than just extra pixels,” so the trials also demonstrated the ability to beam hybrid log-gamma HDR and wide-color-gamut images with the 4K resolution, he said. “This is essential to improving the visual experience irrespective of the viewer’s screen size.” Latency is the big “elephant in the room for live internet streaming,” and is “less of an issue for everyday viewing, but it comes in to sharp focus when we look at sport,” blogged Jim Simmons, senior product manager-BBC Design & Engineering, also Thursday. For the live World Cup and Wimbledon Ultra HD trials, “we got latency down to between 45 seconds and a few minutes but it was very variable,” depending on the device, he said. “When we asked viewers about latency in our survey, while they wanted it to be as low as possible, most said they wouldn’t trade it off against picture quality.”