Some experts argue for more antitrust scrutiny of data-rich companies because they may gain an unfair market advantage and risk privacy, but an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation report released Monday said existing authority is enough to address any abuses. ITIF Senior Fellow Joe Kennedy, the report's author, said collection of vast amounts of data doesn't by itself threaten competition. Data use in specific circumstances might require regulatory intervention, he said, but large amounts of data are a "vital input" for digital assistants, medical diagnoses, online platforms and other innovations. In the 34-page report, Kennedy discounted concerns from some legal experts and policy activists that consumers' privacy will be hurt. He said consumers have a "lax attitude" toward privacy because they share a lot of personal information online even though they say they want more privacy. He said consumer protection agencies have sufficient power to ensure companies' promises to uphold their data policies and enforce data misuse.

President Donald Trump's anticipated cybersecurity executive order is "moving along and maybe within a week or so we could see something," said former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano during a Center for Strategic and International Studies event Monday. Palmisano, vice chairman of the federal Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity, said he would attend a White House meeting later Monday to provide feedback on the revised order. Palmisano said he has not received any official confirmation on the EO's timeline. The White House didn’t comment. The White House has continued to revise the anticipated order in the weeks since officials first delayed Trump's planned late January signing of it. Then, the order would have directed the Office of Management and Budget to assess all federal agencies' cybersecurity risks and required agencies to manage their risk using the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Cybersecurity Framework (see 1701310066). Recent drafts of the EO have included language that would direct the Department of Commerce to explore ways to encourage “core communications infrastructure” companies “to improve the resilience of such infrastructure and to encourage collaboration with the goal of dramatically reducing threats perpetrated by” botnets (see 1702280065). Likely requirements for agencies’ cybersecurity accountability will be “a very important piece of this” executive order, said former National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, who chairs CENC, during the CSIS event. “That is a contract, if you will, between the president and the people he hires to run the agencies and departments.”

The Audio Engineering Society’s Technical Council formed a group to “advance the science and application” of audio for virtual, augmented and mixed reality “environments,” AES said in a Thursday announcement. The group’s work will cover “a whole gamut of application areas” in film, games, music, communications, medicine, forensics, simulations, education and virtual tourism, it said. “The technical requirements for new realities cover obvious areas such as spatial audio and synthesis but extend beyond into audio networking, semantic audio, perception, broadcast and online delivery.” The group’s “core responsibility” will be to develop “a roadmap for the AES to address emergent applications in new realities,” AES said. Members will include “industry professionals working at the forefront of commercial technologies for virtual, augmented and mixed realities as well as key academics in the field whose audio research crosses new multidisciplinary boundaries,” it said.

More than 50 companies, including Amazon, Apple, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Lyft, Salesforce, Twitter and Yahoo, filed a brief with the Supreme Court supporting a transgender high school student's fight against a Virginia county school board over restricting bathroom access to individuals based on their biological sex. The companies said they're alarmed by the "stigmatizing and degrading effects" of the Gloucester County School Board's policy and similar ones that would "adversely" affect their businesses, customers and employees. "Having built inclusive workplaces for transgender employees and their loved ones, we have a vested interest in the legal landscape in which our employees and their dependents live, work and go to school," wrote Margenett Moore-Roberts, Yahoo head-inclusive diversity, in a blog post Thursday. A district court upheld the policy, but the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision last year. In October, the Supreme Court stayed the 4th Circuit decision and said it would review the case. Yahoo was also among companies that said it was disappointed over the Trump administration's withdrawal of guidance that required public schools to let transgender students use bathrooms based on their gender identity (see 1702230035).

If Congress passes the Email Privacy Act and sends it to President Donald Trump, it could be an "quick, easy bipartisan victory" for taxpayers and get the new administration and lawmakers off to a "positive" start, said Institute for Policy Innovation President Tom Giovanetti in an opinion piece in TechCrunch Wednesday. HR-387, which the House unanimously passed again in February, would close a loophole by requiring law enforcement to get a warrant to access a person's emails older than 180 days stored in a third-party server (see 1702070011). It would update the ​30-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which currently permits such access. Last year, the bill stalled in a Senate committee. "The major agenda items promised, like tax reform and healthcare overhaul, are bigger lifts and will take months to get done," said Giovanetti, but "Mr. Trump's emphasis on making deals may also indicate a bias toward including Democrats in the process -- getting buy-in from both sides rather than relying on single-party support for his agenda." Updating ECPA could be a "helpful opening" to form new bipartisan coalitions on critical legislation, he said.

Twitter will proactively find accounts that engage in abusive behavior, even those that haven't been reported, and curb their functionality for a certain period, wrote Ed Ho, vice president-engineering, in a Wednesday blog post. "This change could come into effect if an account is repeatedly Tweeting without solicitation at non-followers or engaging in patterns of abusive behavior that is in violation of the Twitter Rules." One type of action could be allowing only an account's followers to see its tweets. The company will single out accounts only when it's "confident" they are abusive, which is identified through algorithms, he added. The company is also providing more filtering options so users can control what they see for certain accounts like those without a profile photo or unverified email address or phone number. Ho said Twitter is also expanding a "mute" feature, introduced in November, which lets users remove keywords, phrases or entire conversations from their notifications indefinitely or for a certain period. The company will be more transparent and open about accounts or tweets that people have reported as being abusive. "You will be notified when we’ve received your report and informed if we take further action. This will all be visible in your notifications tab on our app," wrote Ho.

Smart speaker shipments, reaching 5.9 million units globally in 2016, will grow 10 fold by 2022, with revenue rising to $5.5 billion, Strategy Analytics reported Monday. Amazon's Echo dominates, but competition will heat up this year as Google Home enters its first full year of sales and others begin to build mics and virtual assistant platform-compatibility into products, the researcher said. Conversational, hands-free interaction with the internet is “very compelling,” analyst David Watkins said. With Amazon’s $50 Dot an “impulse" buy, cost isn’t expected to be a barrier to entry, analyst Bill Ablondi said.

The FTC released the agenda for its March 9 FinTech Forum on how artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies will affect consumers. The AI panel will include World Privacy Forum Executive Director Pam Dixon; ACT|The App Association Executive Director Morgan Reed; and SEC Assistant Regional Director Ken Schneider, according to the agenda. Among blockchain session's panelists will be Chamber of Digital Commerce President Perianne Boring; Justin Slaughter, chief policy adviser to Commodity Futures Trading Commissioner Sharon Bowen; and Consumers Union Staff Attorney Christina Tetreault. The event, which will be webcast, will be at the University of California, Berkeley.

Data broker and analytics companies are being urged by a coalition of civil liberties and privacy organizations not to share people's personal information that they collect with the Trump administration because it refused to rule out creating a database of Muslims. The coalition said Sunday it sent a six-page letter to nearly 50 data brokers, saying they "must not be complicit" in President Donald Trump's deportation and detention immigration policies, which could be a "disaster for human rights." The letter noted Trump's executive order restricting travel to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority nations, which is being challenged in court. The administration is expected to unveil a revamped order this week (see 1702160059). The letter said some data brokers like Acxiom, CoreLogic and Recorded Future said they won't help build a registry. It said that even if a few companies agree to provide data or services identifying Muslims or immigrants and that data were misused, "the human rights consequences could be enormous." The letter asks the companies to disclose whether they have refused to share data with the government and also to make a pledge not to share data that could lead to such violations. Some signatories: Amnesty International, Center for Democracy & Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, New America's Open Technology Institute, World Privacy Forum and Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology. The White House didn't comment.

The Domain Name Association said it will “take additional time to consider the details” of controversial recommendations from its Healthy Domains Initiative Committee that proposed a Copyright Alternative Dispute Resolution Policy, as expected (see 1702240058). The Copyright ADRP proposal, modeled on ICANN's trademark-centric uniform dispute resolution policy, called for a voluntary third-party mechanism to address copyright infringement through the use of domain names (see 1702080085). DNA’s HDI recommendations also addressed practices for combating online abuse, child abuse imagery and “rogue” pharmaceutical companies, but the Copyright ADRP proposal received “a great deal of attention” and criticism, DNA said in a Friday blog post. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Internet Commerce Association and other domain name interests criticized DNA over the Copyright ADRP proposal (see 1702100054). “It should be pointed out that providers of online services, including domain name registration services, appropriately establish latitude in their acceptable use policies (AUPs) or terms of service to directly address illegal behavior -- including copyright infringement,” DNA said. “If DNA members are interested in the regulation of anything, it would be in ‘regulating’ clearly illegal behavior, not in deciding what the public can see on the Internet.” Critics mischaracterized the ADRP proposal but DNA’s “concern is that worries over these seven recommendations have overshadowed the value” of the other HDI Committee proposals, DNA said. “DNA will take keen interest in any registrar’s or registry’s design and implementation of a copyright ADR, and will monitor its implementation and efficacy before refining its recommendations further.”