Amazon illegally charged parents for in-app purchases made by children without getting parents' informed consent, a federal judge ruled Tuesday, granting a summary judgment to the FTC, which filed a lawsuit against the company in July 2014. U.S. District Judge John Coughenour in Seattle rejected Amazon's arguments that its customers were familiar with the company's procedures to avoid in-app purchases -- which are charges made inside an app typically downloaded for free -- or they could have pursued refunds. FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez in a statement Tuesday announcing the judgment said that "we look forward to making a case for full refunds to consumers as a result of Amazon's actions." The commission had pursued similar cases against Apple and Google (see 1409050102). The judgment, which was redacted heavily in certain areas, didn't list FTC's calculated consumer damages, which Amazon said were "untimely and/or speculative," but Coughenour asked from both parties information about how much the company owes consumers in relief. He said customers "were never aware that they had made an in-app purchase" given the App Store's design and procedures for in-app purchases. He said it was "unreasonable to expect customers to be familiar with the potential to accrue in-app purchases while using apps labeled as 'FREE.'" Amazon said customers could have avoided charges through parental controls, said the judgment. But Coughenour wrote that Amazon's "stated policy" wasn't to provide refunds for in-app purchases "so many customers would have reasonably believed such recourse was not available to them." The time they spend trying to get a refund also "constitutes additional injury," he said. Amazon started charging customers beginning November 2011 but started receiving numerous complaints from parents, the judgment said. Amazon didn't comment. However, TechFreedom President Berin Szoka said in a statement that "if this decision stands, the web's going to get a lot less user-friendly and a lot more ugly." The decision gives the FTC "sweeping powers as a nanny-state censor of interface design decisions," he said. The court ceded responsibility to check commission discretion, he added.

IHS estimates the global display market for wearables could be worth $3.9 billion in 2020, the research firm said in a Tuesday infographic. It based the estimate on shipments of 150 million smartwatches and 13 million smart glasses, it said.

Revenue from using app- and Internet-driven shared-space providers such as Airbnb and WeWork is expected to grow globally from about $2.3 billion in 2015 to about $6.1 billion by 2019, Juniper Research said in a news release Tuesday. Those companies via cheaper rates are taking a proportion of reservation and booking fees, Juniper said. The research firm predicted ease of use and financial rewards for registered property owners will result in "a surge in both listings and bookings." Juniper also said app-driven ride sharing company Uber "has struggled to gain a significant foothold in China" due to competition from a dominant taxi service. But Uber is apparently spending $1 billion annually just to expand there, Juniper said.

Consumer IoT awaits its “iPod moment,” said Jonathan Gaw, IDC research manager-connected home, on a webcast on findings of a March consumer survey. Most consumer IoT devices add connectivity and apps to existing home devices that do “little more than save users the bother of a few steps to click a switch,” he said. IDC’s survey of 1,517 U.S. adults with broadband at home indicated a flattening of interest in smart home adoption. Consumers lack understanding of what networked technology can do, said Gaw. Three-quarters of U.S. broadband households have the devices and services in place that would enable video streaming from Internet to the TV, and 28 percent do it. Just over 30 percent of consumers said they were highly interested in streaming online videos to TV but weren’t doing it, even though a majority of those owned the devices and paid for subscriptions that would enable them to do so. Nine of 10 owned a home network -- what Gaw called the “critical part of home IoT readiness." Respondents expressed concerns about privacy and security, said Gaw, though respondents hadn’t done much to protect their data.

The Campaign for Accountability launched the Google Transparency Project aimed at exposing what it called the search company's "undue corporate influence on government," the group said in a Tuesday news release. "Google is the most prominent, yet under-explored case of a deep-pocketed corporation that has forged successful and lucrative bonds with government officials and federal agencies." Researchers are releasing two datasets compiled through public sources -- more are planned -- and the group is encouraging a crowd-sourced review of the documents. One dataset provides information about White House visitor logs to document meetings between employees of Google and "related" companies with executive branch officials. The second dataset lists former Google employees working for the government and former government employees hired by the company. The company didn't comment. A spokesman for the nonprofit group said it doesn't disclose donors.

The announcement Tuesday that Google has joined with Ford, Uber and others to form the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets to promote the deployment of autonomous cars drew a predictably negative reaction from the consumer group that recently accused Google of trying to skirt an "open and accountable process" on driverless cars with an expedited one "that will favor the tech giant's business and marketing plans at the expense of consumers” (see 1604070013). Consumer Watchdog finds it “absolutely outrageous that this group would purport to be for safer streets, when some of its members just aren’t releasing the basic details about their testing activities on public roads,” John Simpson, the group’s privacy project director, told us Tuesday. “That’s very problematic.” He called the coalition “just a lobbying group that’s going to push their self-interests, using a catchy name to try to claim that they’re really for safety,” Simpson said. “They could do some real things to show that they’re really for safety,” such as releasing publicly the “technical data” they have compiled on the safety of driverless cars, he said. On the appointment of David Strickland, the former top official of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as the coalition's counsel and spokesman, Simpson said: “I’m also really troubled by the fact that the guy who’s going to be their spokesman is a former administrator. That’s just an outrageous situation. Business as usual now seems to be the revolving door in Washington.” Coalition representatives didn’t comment. NHTSA Wednesday in California plans to hold the second of two public meetings to gather input for the development of operational guidelines on driverless cars the agency has said it hopes to release this summer (see 1604080037).

Global spending on IoT security will reach $348 million in 2016, a 24 percent increase from 2015, and is expected to reach $547 million in 2018, Gartner said in a Monday report. Though IoT security spending will be “moderate” at the outset, it will increase “at a faster rate after 2020, as improved skills, organizational change and more scalable service options improve execution,” said the research firm. “The market for IoT security products is currently small but it is growing as both consumers and businesses start using connected devices in ever greater numbers." The firm forecasts 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016, up 30 percent from 2015, and will reach 11.4 billion by 2018. “However, considerable variation exists among different industry sectors as a result of different levels of prioritization and security awareness," it said. Gartner predicts by 2020 more than 25 percent of identified attacks in enterprises will involve IoT, but IoT will be less than 10 percent of IT security budgets, it said. “Security vendors will be challenged to provide usable IoT security features because of the limited assigned budgets for IoT and the decentralized approach to early IoT implementations in organizations. Vendors will focus too much on spotting vulnerabilities and exploits, rather than segmentation and other long-term means that better protect IoT.”

More than a million people use Facebook over the Tor Internet anonymizing software since Facebook made the website directly available over the Tor network in 2014, wrote Alec Muffett, Facebook's software engineer for security infrastructure, in a Friday blog post. Last June, about 525,000 people accessed Facebook over Tor over a "typical 30 day period" by using the Tor browser to access the site directly, the Facebook Onion site built specifically for Tor users or through the Orbot app on Android devices, he said. "This number has grown -- roughly linearly -- and this month, for the first time, we saw this '30 day' figure exceed 1 million people." People use Tor generally to improve their privacy and security on the Internet.

ICANN released a final draft version of the nonprofit corporation’s revised bylaws Thursday for public comment. ICANN’s lawyers began revising the bylaws in March to comply with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition plan and a set of recommended changes to the nonprofit’s accountability mechanisms, both of which the ICANN board approved in March (see 1603100070). ICANN stakeholders told us this month an early draft of the revised bylaws largely track with provisions in both the IANA transition plan and the accountability recommendations from the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (see 1604060063). ICANN’s lawyers also said the draft bylaws “are consistent with the community proposals” on the IANA transition, ICANN said in a notice. Comments on the draft bylaws are due May 21, which “allows for comments to be analyzed and incorporated” in time for the ICANN board to vote on the revised bylaws May 27, ICANN said. “NTIA has stated that it needs to see that changes to [ICANN’s bylaws] have been adopted sufficient to implement the [IANA transition plan] before NTIA can complete its review” of those plans.

IDC sees worldwide shipments of virtual reality hardware skyrocketing in 2016, with total volume reaching 9.6 million units worth $2.3 billion, the research firm said in a Thursday report. In 2016, the first major “tethered” VR devices from Oculus, HTC and Sony "should drive combined shipments of over 2 million units," IDC said. "When you combine this with robust shipments of screenless viewers from Samsung and other vendors launching later this year, you start to see the beginning of a reasonable installed base for content creators to target." IDC expects augmented reality hardware “to take longer to bring to market,” it said. "While development kits from players such as Microsoft, Meta, and others point to a strong future in AR hardware, these devices are dramatically harder to produce than VR products."