Facebook is the poster-child for the techlash, the worst offender in the monopolistic bunch, and recent books like Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy by Siva Vaidhyanathan (previously) and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier present variations on the main critiques of Facebook with some prescriptions for what to do about it.

Executives from Google, Twitter, AT&T, Amazon, Apple, and other big tech companies told a U.S. Senate panel today they support updating federal law to protect data privacy, but they want Congress to block California's tough new privacy rules.

In the years during which the new EU Copyright Directive was being drafted, a variety of proposals were considered and rejected by the EU's own experts, and purged from the draft text, but two of these proposals were reintroduced, slipped back into the Directive on the day the GDPR came into effect, while everyone's attention was elsewhere.

The European Copyright Directive vote is in three days and it will be a doozy: what was once a largely uncontroversial grab bag of fixes to copyright is now a political firestorm, thanks to the actions of Axel Voss, the German MEP who changed the Directive at the last minute, sneaking in two widely rejected proposals on the same day the GDPR came into effect, forming a perfect distraction (you can contact your MEP about these at Save Your Internet).

The year is 2031, and I'm going to see Avengers 7 in 8K-vision. I hop in my Goober self-driving car and notice something strange – my location is displayed on the Goober Dashboard, even though I opted out of Google AlwaysTrack™! There's a complete disconnect between what the user interface is telling me and what actually happens without my knowledge or consent.

Last week, it was revealed by a sharp-eyed Redditor that the information kiosks at a mall in Calgary, Canada, were full of software designed to track the age and sex of anyone that stopped to use it. Pretty damn greasy. — Read the rest

Boing Boing favorite Steven Johnson (previously) has written at length about the emerging politics of "liberaltarianism" in Silicon Valley, which favors extensive government regulation (of all industries save tech), progressive taxation, universal basic income, universal free health care, free university, debt amnesty for students — but no unions and worker acceptance of "volatility, job loss, and replacement by technology."

A couple of years ago, online read-it-later darling Instapaper got sold to Pinterest. Then, in the lousiest possible way, nothing happened. No real updates, tweaks or refinements for Instapaper the service or the app. It was frozen in time! Currently, it's not even possible to use it in Europe as its not in compliance with the new GDPR rules put in place in May. — Read the rest

Ten days ago, the European Parliament dealt a major blow to a radical proposal that would force online services to deploy copyright bots to examine everything posted by users and block anything that might be a copyright infringement; the proposal would also ban linking to news articles without paid permission from the news sites.

The European Union is updating its 2001 Copyright Directive, with a key committee vote coming up on June 20 or 21; on GDPR day, a rogue MEP jammed a mass censorship proposal into the draft that is literally the worst idea anyone in Europe ever had about the internet, ever.

As anyone who has been following the sorry saga of the EU copyright reform, key elements -- Articles 3 on text and data mining, 11 on the link tax and 13 on the upload filter censorship machine -- are turning into the proverbial dog's breakfast, a complete and utter mess. The well-founded criticisms of the proposed law have piled up to an unprecedented extent, causing the politicians behind it to resort to iterative obfuscation. Successive arguments against each of the three articles mentioned above have led to the Commission's original text being mashed and murdered in an attempt to "address" the points by adding in new "clarifications" that just make things worse.

A security breach affected the MyHeritage website, and leaked the personal information of over 92 million users, the Israeli company said Tuesday. — Read the rest

Late last year, a pair of economists released an interesting paper that used mobile location data to estimate the likelihood that political polarization had shortened family Thanksgiving dinners in 2016.

Last April, the Kremlin ordered a ban on the private messaging app Telegram, blocking millions of IP addresses that formed Amazon and Google's clouds in order to prevent users from accessing the service; not only was it an ominous moment in the evolution of the internet as a system for oppressive control, it was also an object lesson in how internet concentration has made the internet more susceptible to censorship and control.

The looming deadline for the EU General Data Protection Plan means that companies have a duty to be extremely clear about what data they're collecting on you and what they're doing with it, and give you a chance to refuse — they've already had a duty to do this for a very long time under both EU law and California law, but the difference this time around is that the GDPR has large, terrifying teeth: companies that fail to comply can be fined 4% of their annual global turnover.

There is, at long last, a public appetite for Doing Something About Facebook (and, by extension, about all of Big Tech); I have been playing with the idea of regulating the outcome, rather than the method: we give Facebook a certain period of time to remedy the situation whereby people "can't afford to leave Facebook" and then, if that situation isn't remedied, impose some sanction and either break them up or give them another go, with more sanctions if they fail.

Mark Zuckerberg says it doesn't matter how creepy and terrible his company is, because you agreed to let him comprehensively fuck you over from asshole to appetite by clicking "I agree" to a tens of thousands of words' worth of "agreements" spread out across multiple webpages; when questioned about this in Congress, Zuck grudgingly admitted that "I don't think the average person likely reads that whole document." — Read the rest

Where is Facebook located? Well, if you're the taxman, Facebook's global HQ is a tiny shed somewhere in Ireland, where Facebook can escape virtually all taxation; but on the other hand, if you're the EU, Facebook is headquartered in America, where the General Data Protection Regulation doesn't apply.

Marketing companies frequently "anonymize" their dossiers on internet users using hashes of their email addresses — rather than the email addresses themselves — as identifiers in databases that are stored indefinitely, traded, sold, and leaked.

Facebook could give American users the same privacy enhancements that are coming to European users. But they won't, Mark Zuckerberg admits. Put simply, they aren't legally obliged to.

In a phone interview with Reuters yesterday Mark Zuckerberg declined to commit to universally implementing changes to the platform that are necessary to comply with the European Union's incoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).