Worldwide spending on IoT will grow from $698 billion in 2015 to nearly $1.3 trillion in 2019, an IDC report said Thursday. The Asia/Pacific region leads in IoT spending, with 40 percent of the market, followed by North America and Western Europe, at a combined $250 billion this year, IDC said. In North America, the fastest growing IoT use case is retail marketing, it said. “In-store contextual marketing is growing rapidly as retailers try to capture continuous, real-time streams of data from mobile devices, online customer activity, in-store Wi-Fi routers/beacons, and video cameras in order to gain insight into customer behavior and desires.”

Certain legal aspects of algorithms and information collection and distribution aren't particularly well defined, and more transparency is needed to illuminate the data used by algorithms to make decisions for individuals, panelists said at a New America Foundation event Thursday. Algorithms normally put out information or conclusions that aren't "super surprising," University of Maryland College of Information Studies associate professor Jennifer Golbeck said, and shouldn't be relied on as the ultimate source for a decision. "The things we have to keep in mind with algorithms today is that they are going to tell us stuff, but we absolutely have to have intelligent humans taking that as one piece of input that they use to make decisions," Golbeck said. "[And] not just handing control over to the algorithms and [letting] them make decisions on their own because they are going to be wrong a lot of the time. They are not going to do things as well as a human can do." Ian Bogost, Georgia Institute of Technology professor of interactive computing, urged the media to delve deeper into the actual processes behind the operation of algorithms, rather than simply equating them to an all-knowing, mystical being. "The way we discuss algorithms in the media really does matter," he said. Laura Moy, New America's Open Technology Institute's senior policy counsel, said when thinking of the problematic outcomes of the innovative uses of algorithms, "a lot of times there aren't really clear legal 'don'ts,'" and pointed to consumer privacy as another issue presented by algorithms and data collection. Moy said algorithms have the potential to perpetuate human biases and could have "some sort of disparate impact" on users, also saying it's difficult to identify or correct the addition of human biases in algorithms. It would be worth thinking about building in ways we can check for bias and to identify it when using algorithms to produce a service or result, she said. "At a basic level, transparency about what information is going in and how it might be used to make decisions that could impact the individual, that level of transparency to the individual is important." Moy also said regulators are looking into correcting bias in algorithms in their design, and a few federal agencies have been thinking about it as a fairness issue and starting to address it. "From the regulators' perspective, full transparency, full insight into what all of the inputs [into algorithms] might possibly be and [in]to how it works is important," said Moy.

User numbers for infidelity app Ashley Madison are "bouncing back," and in Q3 hit where they were before the summer's high-profile data breach that resulted in millions of users being revealed (see 1507200017), said online security company AVG Technologies in a report Tuesday. "Perhaps in anticipation of a 'singleton' Christmas, dating and cheating apps, in general, saw an uptick in usage over the third quarter, with Ashley Madison competitor platforms MiuMeet and AnastasiaDate both joining the app in seeing a rise in numbers from the previous quarter," AVG said in a news release. The report highlights app usage trends, analyzing anonymous data from more than 1 million AVG Android app users.

After a torrid rate of holiday-season online and mobile shopping growth (see here, 1512030017 and 1512020033), Adobe said Monday that growth slowed on the Web to 7.7 percent. Average order values (AOV) for electronics, down year over year, reached a peak on Thanksgiving at $162, and fell since Cyber Monday, the company said. Consumers spent $149 on average for electronics so far this season, compared with $176 in 2014, it said. After a record-setting Black Friday ($2.74 billion) and Cyber Monday ($3.07 billion), Monday of this week and Dec. 14 are forecast to be the third- and fourth-highest online sales days of the holiday season, Adobe said. Online sales for Dec. 7 were forecast to have reached $1.92 billion, while online sales for Dec. 14 are expected to hit $1.95 billion, Adobe said. Mobile’s influence continues to be felt, at 27 percent of online sales revenue ($2.5 billion) during the first six days of December, Adobe said. That’s down from a record 32 percent over Thanksgiving weekend, it said. Findings are based on aggregated and anonymous data from 3.7 billion visits to 4,500 retail websites, and Adobe measures 80 percent of online transactions from the top 100 U.S. retailers.

Mozilla launched a free content blocker for Safari users on iOS 9, allowing users to control their flow of data "by blocking categories of trackers such as those used for ads, analytics and social media," wrote Denelle Dixon-Thayer, chief legal and business officer. The tool can also enhance mobile device performance by blocking Web fonts, she added. "Too many users have lost trust and lack meaningful controls over their digital lives. This loss of trust has impacted the ecosystem -- sometimes negatively. Content blockers offer a way to rebuild that trust by empowering users," she wrote Monday. Standards for what gets blocked by such tools aren't clear, she wrote, saying blockers don't provide ways for content providers "to improve and become unblocked. And some content blockers remove companies from a list in exchange for payment." Dixon-Thayer wrote that Mozilla has based a portion of its tool, Focus by Firefox, on a list provided by partner Disconnect under a general public license. Disconnect "bases its list on a public definition of tracking and publicly identifies any changes it makes to that list, so users and content providers can see and understand the standards it is applying," she wrote. It means content providers can improve their practices and become unblocked, "creating an important feedback loop between users and content providers," she added.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral argument Wednesday in Facebook v. Power Ventures. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has filed several amicus briefs supporting Power Ventures, said in a Monday news release that it will urge the 9th Circuit to dismiss Facebook's claim that Cayman Islands-based Power Ventures violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) when it created a Web-based tool permitting users to log into all of their social media accounts in one place and aggregate messages, friend lists and other data. Facebook sued Power Ventures in 2008 and claimed the company also violated the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (Can-Spam) Act, which prohibits sending unwanted emails with misleading information. In February 2012, U.S. District Judge James Ware in San Francisco granted Facebook’s motion for summary judgment (see 1202210105). In September 2013, Power Ventures was ordered to pay more than $3 million in damages to Facebook. Power Ventures CEO Steven Vachani appealed the ruling. EFF said Legal Fellow Jamie Williams will argue that the 9th Circuit "has already ruled that the CFAA must be interpreted narrowly to avoid transforming what was intended to be an anti-hacking statute into a law that could sweep up innocuous conduct. Criminalizing a routine process like switching IP addresses stifles innovation and harms consumers -- and it’s not what Congress had in mind." Facebook didn't comment Tuesday.

Apple users “can no longer be complacent about security,” as the number of infections and new threats against Mac OS X and iOS devices rises sharply, said Dick O'Brien, senior information developer at cybersecurity firm Symantec, in a Tuesday blog post. Symantec estimates the number of new Mac OS X threats rose by 15 percent in 2014, and the number of iOS threats discovered this year has more than doubled since 2014, O’Brien said. The range of threats affecting Apple devices also has “multiplied,” he said. “These threats span from ordinary cybercrime gangs branching out and porting their threats to Apple platforms, right up to high level attacker groups developing custom Mac OS X and iOS malware.” Attackers targeting iOS devices “need to find a way to install malware” on an iPhone or iPad, “which can represent a significant hurdle,” he said. Many threats are installed when victims connect their devices to a “compromised” desktop computer, he said. “Jailbroken” devices, meaning iPhones that have had their iOS software restrictions removed, “present more opportunities for compromise and many threats are designed to take advantage of jailbroken phones,” he said.

Amazon’s Streaming Partners program, launched Tuesday, allows Prime members to add Showtime, Starz and “dozens” more video subscriptions to their Prime membership at slight discounts and with “self-service cancellation of any subscription at any time.” Subscriptions to Showtime and Starz are $8.99 per month through Amazon. It's billing the program to video providers as a fast track to cord cutters, and to consumers as a way to streamline their video subscriptions. Content providers can “reach a new set of highly engaged viewers with Amazon responsible for driving subscriber acquisition,” it said. Amazon also handles billing with credit cards already on file. In addition to “special Prime member pricing,” subscribers get the latest episodes available simultaneously with broadcast, single-account billing, one watch list across all subscriptions and integration with IMDb X-Ray, Amazon said. “The way people watch TV is changing, and customers need an easier way to subscribe to and enjoy multiple streaming subscriptions,” said Michael Paull, Amazon vice president-digital video. The program makes it easy for video providers to reach “highly engaged Prime members, many of whom are already frequent streamers,” Paull said. Additional content launch partners are A+E Network (Lifetime Movie Club), AMC (Shudder and SundanceNow Doc Club), BroadbandTV (Hooplakidz Plus), Cinedigm (Dove Channel, Docurama, CONtv), CuriosityStream, Defy Media (ScreenJunkies Plus), DramaFever (DramaFever Instant), FlixFling (Cinefest, Nature Vision, Warriors and Gangsters, Dox, Monsters and Nightmares), Gaia, Gravitas (Film Forum, Daring Docs, Fear Factory), IndieFlix (IndieFlix Shorts), Qello, Ring TV Boxing, RLJ Entertainment (Acorn TV, Urban Movie Channel, Acacia TV), Smithsonian (Smithsonian Earth) and Tribeca Short List. Showtime also announced a similar deal with Hulu last summer.

Streaming video and audio account for more than 70 percent of North America's downstream Internet traffic in peak hours on fixed access networks, Sandvine said in a news release Monday. That's up from less than 35 percent five years ago, Sandvine said. The three top sources of video traffic on North American fixed access networks -- Netflix at 37.1 percent, Google's YouTube at 17.9 percent and Amazon Video at 3.1 percent -- all had an increase in traffic share over the course of the year, Sandvine said, and Netflix now has a bigger share of traffic than all streaming audio and video did five years ago. The growth in streaming video is driving down the share of fixed access bandwidth taken up by BitTorrent, from about 7 percent a year ago to 5 percent now, Sandvine said. The data comes from Sandvine's Global Internet Phenomena Report.

Three in every four millennials routinely delete content to free up storage space on their smartphones and later regret it, a survey for Western Digital found. The company commissioned research firm Vanson Bourne to canvass 5,000 consumers aged 16 to 24 in the U.K., France, Germany and the U.S. to analyze how people “create, consume, share and store digital content,” it said in a report. Though many described content on their smartphones as “priceless,” sacrificing a picture or video to free up storage space on the device “is a regular occurrence,” it said. Thirty-one percent said they run out of space on their smartphones on a weekly basis, while 17 percent say this is a daily problem, the company said. “Running out of storage space isn't the greatest challenge threatening mankind at the moment, but it's certainly an annoyance for a great many consumers," it said. "Our findings clearly show that consumers are sacrificing precious memories and valuable content to make more space on their devices." A big reason why deleting content is so prevalent is millenials’ preference for digital forms of media over physical content, it said. “Of the respondents, 48 percent prefer digital versions of music albums compared to 25 percent preferring the hard copy,” it said. “The same goes for films,” with 41 percent of respondents preferring a digital copy versus 29 percent for DVD or Blu-ray, it said. “With an average of five music albums, five feature films and five television shows being downloaded each week by the consumers in the study, it's clear a huge amount of digital media is being consumed.” The findings “support the notion that there is a disconnect among the majority of consumers over how much digital content they consume and create and how much storage they own and need,” the company said Thursday.