Techblog: Legal en Techblog - NZ’s Domain Name Commission wins appeal in lawsuit against US company Industry News Legal

New Zealand's Domain Name Commission has had its court order upheld by a higher Court in its US lawsuit against the company DomainTools.

The US Court's decision prevents DomainTools from breaching .nz domain names owners privacy and publishing their personal details for anyone to see.

It is the second US Court to side with the Domain Name Commission. The first decision in favour of .nz domain names owners privacy was made in September 2018, but DomainTools immediately appealed it and lost again in the US Court of Appeals on 17 July 2019.

In 2018, the Domain Name Commission mandated that a privacy option be offered for all .nz domain name holders that are not in trade. It means people can withhold their address and phone number from publicly appearing in the online registration data search. More than 63,000 domain names have already taken up the privacy option, and the number is growing.

DomainTools is a digital intelligence-gathering company in the US. It has been scraping registration data from New Zealand's Domain Name Commission for many years. This mass collection of data breaches the Commission's terms of use and exposes details of domain name holders who choose to have their details kept private. This is because DomainTools makes available historic records which show the now withheld information.

"The decision strengthens our commitment to protect the privacy rights of .nz registrants. It sends a message to all companies dealing with registrants' personal information online to be compliant with privacy requirements", says the Domain Name Commissioner, Brent Carey.

This win is important not only to .nz domain name holders and their privacy but also for managers of other countries domain name systems who might consider starting legal action against DomainTools and other similar companies where terms of use are breached.

"We are doing our bit to balance privacy and security online by taking legal action, but the domain name industry needs to pay attention to privacy and change with the times," says Carey.

]]> Mon, 22 Jul 2019 06:36:24 +1200
Looking for common ground on facial recognition vs the right to privacy Innovation Legal Security & Privacy Back in May this year, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to ban the use of facial recognition software by city agencies. 

At the same time, across the globe, cities with a long-term history of violence had started embracing the readily available ID technologies. Finally, these city agencies were able to find answers that had been eluding them for decades, answers to questions such as, "How can we be sure that the person the Police arrested is the same person that appeared in Court?"

What are the San Francisco legislators thinking? Perhaps it hasn't occurred to the good people of San Fran that crims might actively want to avoid being identified, and probably carry several forms of non-matching "official" ID documents that can be pulled out depending who is asking to see them.

Fingerprints are good and reliable, but it is difficult to recognise somebody walking past you by their fingerprints. The tech is in place to recognise passers by from their iris scans, but fingerprints are still illusive.

Facial recognition software won't be 100% reliable and there needs to be good governance in place to ensure that cases of mistaken identity are treated graciously and with decorum.  And I suspect that the governance piece was missing in San Francisco. You see it's rarely the case that technology is very good or very bad.  Technology is neutral (in the main) - it's what we do with it that determines how we and others feel about it. 

Do you remember when we all loved social media because it provided a wonderfully easy and straight forward mechanism for re-connecting with old school friends, university pals and those people that influenced our lives but didn't stay in them long enough for us to collect their contact details. Now there is a rising swell of distaste towards social media and we don't want to be associated with platforms that promote election obfuscation or the Xist behaviours (terrorists, racists etc.)  

So back to facial recognition - here's an opportunity to use tech for good and keep our streets safe and secure. But for this to be an acceptable solution, it is essential to have good governance and policy in place so that all stakeholders, users, managers, agency leads, directors etc. understand the sensible operating conditions for the technology. It isn't going to be infallible, but rather than throw it out, why not demand a second ID point to increase the reliability, or determine that decisions based on facial recognition can only be tentative?

If we've learnt anything from the vaccination - anti-vaccination debate, it's this:

  • We forget how bad things were (for example people dying or being physically and mentally impaired by measles, whooping cough etc.)
  • We take note of unsubstantiated comment as if it was Gospel truth
  • We let the "bad" continue until we reach a tipping point and by then society is ready for drastic measures (such as banning non-vaccinated children from school or University)

And before we go back to the days of Jack the Ripper when Police did not have the tools they needed to do their job, let's take a moment to reflect and work out what would need to be in place for us to trust the street tech and its use. Let's invite the Police (and other City Agencies) and Public to co-develop an acceptable governance framework and operating model.  

Surely, we can work together to balance the sum of the rights of individuals for privacy with the rights of the herd for safety and protection?

Alison Holt is a board member of ITP as well as e-judiciary advisor to the Chief Justice of Papua New Guinea, principal consultant at Statistics New Zealand and the New Zealand head of delegation at SC7 Software and Systems Engineering.

]]> Mon, 15 Jul 2019 07:34:35 +1200
Brislen on Tech Telecommunications Legal Security & Privacy
Plus, privacy is important, which is why British Airways will have to cough up $NZ357 million by way of apology. And gee but it's warm in here. What do the *real* experts think about 5G?]]>
The block party

It's time for a quick recap on what Facebook has done to make sure we never see the live broadcast of a murder again: nothing.

But the social media giant that likes extremists content (that's a pun but it's also a thing) has found time to fight for truth justice and the Facebook way on another front. Anyone posting content about Facebook which Facebook thinks isn't true gets a quick Facebook debunking to explain that various hoaxes and rumours aren't true.

They've even given the program they use a fancy name - Stormchaser.

But wait a gosh darned minute! If they can do this for nasty old memes criticising Facebook surely the social media giant could do it for other things, like fascism, far-right hate speech, neo-Nazi organisations and much, much more.

As the kids say: Lol.

Facebook also has other programmes of work including the ever popular "let's get a PR company to monitor our customers' perception" and other things but it's Stormchaser I particularly like because it's so blatantly able to be used for exactly the kind of work Facebook says would be impossible.

Facebook isn't alone in treating this whole "people hate us" as a PR exercise. It's spawn offspring Instagram has instituted a new system that checks out what you're typing and pops up to say "are you sure you want to post that?" when you're writing "Paul is an egg and should shut up and stop annoying me in school". Basically it's Clippy but instead of helping you write your CV it helps you avoid being a bully.

Nice first step but really? Is that all you got?

And Twitter, dear sweet Twitter. Even Twitter has a thing. It's cracking down on "dehumanising language".

"Our primary focus is on addressing the risks of offline harm, and research shows that dehumanising language increases that risk."


This hasn't done much to move the dial on whether Twitter is doing enough to stop, for example, actual neo-Nazis from abusing people, fake news from being circulated ever faster or the coordination of white supremacy groups using Twitter as an organising force.

But I'm sure once these companies have sorted out their own image problems they'll get right on that.

Bloomberg - How Facebook Fought Fake News About Facebook

RNZ - New features to tackle cyberbullying on Instagram

Stuff - Twitter bans dehumanising posts about religious groups

Gizmodo - Civil Rights Groups Mostly Unimpressed By New Twitter Policy Against 'Dehumanising' Language



Private! No Access

So the EU's privacy law (the General Data Protection Regulation) has its first serious scalp - British Airways managed to (whoops!) that managed to compromise half a million users' data including credit card details, names and addresses and so now faces a penalty of £183.39 million as a result.

A similar incident in New Zealand would result in a fine of slightly less than the lawyers in the case would all get paid. (I'm being facetious - I don't actually know, but the fines are tiny).

The GDPR has made for an interesting game of "spot the useful GDPR statement" on various websites. Basically if you click on a website that's based in or around the EU you're likely to get a thing (typically a banner) that requires to you to click on it before you can proceed - an active, explicit action. This is required because the site will be gathering information on you and if you're in the EU or an EU citizen, and as such you should know what the site is up to, how it will handle your information and why it gathers said data.

The second part of that is proving to be interesting… any website that gathers data around EU citizens should, by EU law, have a similar process. That includes non-EU-based sites.

Having a quick scroll around the New Zealand sites I use regularly I find very few that have an explicit GDPR action. Most have an implicit statement (such as ASB's "If you are located in the EU, you may have rights under the EU General Data Protection Regulation.") and frankly as a sometime EU citizen (the passport's still valid, you know) I'm not sure that quite cuts the mustard.

But it'll be a while before the EU comes calling. They've got much more interesting fish to fry, like Google and Facebook who are of course based in the EU (Ireland, if I'm not mistaken) when it suits them.

Ideally of course our own laws would be strong enough to ensure that we have good cyber-protection in place so no company here ever needs fear the Kiwi equivalent of the GDPR. But as it stands not only are cyber-incidents on the rise, our select committee review of the current act came back with some fairly limited changes.

Here's hoping they re-review it before it's too late.

TechBlog - GDPR and cyber security in action

Bank Info Security - Marriott Faces $125 Million GDPR Fine Over Mega-Breach

Office of the Privacy Commissioner - Privacy law reform

CERTNZ - Quarterly Reports Q1 2019


Gee, where to from here?

I've got a splitting headache and it's probably from all the radiation I've been exposed to.

Actually, it's more likely to be from having to deal with people who think phones will give them cancer unless they buy special bracelets that block the "harmful" radiation but let through the "good" radiation so they can both oppose cellphone network deployment AND continue to use their cellphones without any sense of irony whatsoever.

I've been arguing with these folks for some time and I know you know this because I tell you about it on a regular basis. You're like my safety blanket, my escape valve, my trusted counsellor to whom I can divulge my inner most secrets. Thanks for that.

But thankfully I'm not on my own. The Science Media Centre has a lovely Q&A about the potential issues with 5G network deployment that is tremendous to see and I'll be using it on a regular basis for the next few months.

The Centre interviewed a handful of scientists who work in and around the issues raised by 5G opponents who can talk to some of the key points. Scientists who have studied the problems or who are familiar with how science works.

One in particular, Keith Petrie who is Professor of Health Psychology at the University of Auckland, talks to the issue of electromagnetic sensitivity and says when sufferers are tested they can't tell whether an EMF field is on or off. He calls this the "nocebo" effect:

"The symptoms that people report are a result of the nocebo effect" that is, the opposite of the "placebo effect" and by which he means the more you read about possible side effects, the more likely you are to think you're experiencing them. A hyperactive hypochondria, if you will.

"There is also some evidence that media stories about sensitivity to electromagnetic fields can increase symptoms being attributed to such exposure."


Only one scientist raises a real concern about 5G deployment - Bruce Hartley Systems Engineering Manager for Metservice is concerned about possible impacts 5G might have on weather forecasting.

This isn't as strange as it sounds and is something the radio spectrum team at MBIE will have to consider before issuing any licences.

Initially, 5G will be deployed in the 3.5GHz band. That's not too far removed from current 4G licences and won't pose any problems.

Hartley says any issues will arise in future 5G deployments both here and overseas that are proposed for the 28GHz band.

This much higher frequency is very close to the 23.8GHz water vapour channel that the weather satellites look at to see how much water there is in the atmosphere.

"It is normal for transmitter equipment to produce leakage, but this needs to be controlled by manufacturers and managed by regulators to minimise disruption. The leakage from one transmitter is not normally an issue. The problem occurs when many devices are transmitting at the same time and within the view of the weather satellite receiver."

We've seen what happens when one network leaks into the bands operated by other companies - Telecom's first attempts at a GSM network did this, swamping both Vodafone and 2Degrees' networks in and around Auckland. It took a court case to get Telecom to put rate limiters on its towers and stop the interference and something like that will be necessary to avoid bleeding into the 23.8GHz range needed by meteorologists.

As Hartley says, "weather satellite receivers are passive and the signals being monitored are coming from water molecules in the atmosphere. This channel cannot be changed and there is no way to amplify the monitored signal above the accumulated leakage."

But that aside, if it's health impacts you're looking for, you'll be sorely out of luck. Despite the thousands of research papers, the millions of words of concern written about the issue and the incredible number of users of mobile devices, there simply isn't any sign of any link between mobile phone networks, their devices and users' health.

Feel free to let everyone know.

Science Media Centre - 5G: hype vs reality - Expert Q&A

]]> Fri, 12 Jul 2019 13:30:22 +1200
GDPR and cyber security in action Legal Security & Privacy The UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has announced that it intends to fine British Airways £183.39m for breaching the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

British Airways' breaches of the GDPR relate to a cyber security incident, which British Airways self-reported to the ICO in September 2018.  As part of the incident, users of the British Airways' website were directed to a fraudulent site that then harvested customer data (including payment card details, travel booking details, names and addresses). It is estimated that 500,000 customers' details were compromised. 

As part of its review into the incident, the ICO identified that British Airways had poor security arrangements in place to protect customers' data.  British Airways will now have an opportunity to make representations to the ICO regarding the findings and proposed sanction (and it is expected that British Airways will appeal the fine). 

This is a timely reminder for New Zealand businesses. As we have commented before, the extra-territorial provisions in the GDPR mean that it can apply to those operating from New Zealand.  As the ICO's announcement regarding the British Airways' incident demonstrates, the potential consequences of breaching the GDPR can be significant. 

In respect of cyber security more generally, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has recently released a Cyber Security Strategy 2019, which, amongst other matters, identifies the importance of the awareness of cyber security risks and building a strong and capable cyber security workforce. 

Re-posted with kind permission from Buddle Findlay. Authors: Allan YeomanAmy RyburnPhilip WoodRenee StilesAlex ChapmanDamien Steel-BakerKeri Johansson

]]> Wed, 10 Jul 2019 07:26:14 +1200
Digital disappearing acts Legal ICT Trends The concept of ownership in a digital world is once again under the spotlight following Microsoft's move this month to close its books category. Those who had purchased ebooks will get a refund, having been forewarned about the closure in April.

As commentators have pointed out, Microsoft is able to close its digital bookstore - which was launched in 2017 - because of a tool called Digital Rights Management. DRM was designed to enable the sale of digital goods in way that reduced copyright infringement, but it also means that tech companies can use DRM to exercise complete control over their ecosystems. This makes it harder for people to switch to different services and also, it seems, to hold onto the stuff they legally purchased.

The writer Cory Doctorow, who was the keynote speaker at Internet NZ's Nethui on Copyright last year is particularly vocal about Microsoft's move and DRM itself (which he is fervently opposed to).

"This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast. I have bought a lot of MP3s over the years, thousands of them, and many of the retailers I purchased from are long gone, but I still have the MP3s. Likewise, I have bought many books from long-defunct booksellers and even defunct publishers, but I still own those books," he writes.

"When I was a bookseller, nothing I could do would result in your losing the book that I sold you. If I regretted selling you a book, I didn't get to break into your house and steal it, even if I left you a cash refund for the price you paid."

As Wired points out, at least Microsoft can afford to pay people for refund (maybe a sign that there weren't that many buyers), but what if that isn't the case?

"The next time a platform folds-and takes its ecosystem with it-those affected might not be so lucky. Which is maybe the real lesson of Microsoft obliterating its ebooks: This has all happened before, and not nearly enough is being done to stop it from happening again."

Microsoft's ability to disappear their customer's ebooks is another reminder of the strange conundrum of the web which renders everything permanent and impermanent at the same time. While some fight for the right to be forgotten in Google search engines, others mourn the loss of the creative output they had entrusted to online platforms.

In March MySpace, the forerunner to today's social media sites (which still exists BTW), announced that it had effectively lost music files uploaded to the platform before 2015. Apparently, the files - which amounted to about 53 million songs from 14.2 million artists over 12 years - were corrupted beyond repair during a server migration. While professional artists may not have been phased, amateur musicians found that the work they had once entrusted in My Space's guardianship has now disappeared forever.


]]> Tue, 09 Jul 2019 13:43:59 +1200
Little and Large: the justice minister and the search engine Legal Security & Privacy The Minister of Justice, Andrew Little, has welcomed Google's apparent change of heart over the leaking of details identifying the killer of British backpacker Grace Millane.

A man was arrested and charged with her murder in December, but granted name suppression. The details of his identity are suppressed and the reason for the suppression itself is suppressed - however, Google managed to include his name in an email sent out to subscribers to Google Trends, a service which lets readers find out about the most searched terms in the country.

Google was asked in to the Minister's office for a "please explain" meeting in December and representatives said the company would review its processes to see what could be done to prevent similar actions in future, but last week Google apparently told the minister that no changes would be made.

Little shot back, claiming Google was giving New Zealand "the finger" and writing an opinion piece in which he said Google was big enough to "do better". 

"I would be failing in my duty if, as a minister of justice in a small country, I threw in the towel and decided nothing could be done in the face of a giant international corporation thinking it could ride roughshod over one of the most important principles of criminal justice."

Late on Friday Google responded by apologising for a "miscommunication" and saying the company would, in the short term, switch off the Google Trends service for New Zealand while working on an actual fix, to be released at a later date.

Name suppression is always a tricky issue in an era where news and information can be communicated widely at the push of a button. Newspapers and journalists of bygone eras were predominantly the main form of communication around such matters but today the lines have blurred significantly and courts struggle at times to keep up.

This instance, however, seems much more clearly defined than Google would have liked. Typically Google and the other social media giants claim they aren't publishers in the traditional sense but rather a platform for others to publish on. That provides a certain level of security in such matters, however in this case Google published the email directly itself, leaving it little room to manoeuvre. 

Whether Google actually does build a system that allows it to identify court suppression information or not remains to be seen but for now the score stands at Andrew Little 1, Google 0.

]]> Mon, 08 Jul 2019 08:13:52 +1200
Brislen on Tech Government Legal Security & Privacy
Google says it won't make any changes following its court suppression order breach.

And the government's new cyber-security strategy is out - so let's be careful out there.]]>
Hear no evil










There's a chocolate fish in it for you.

EMF Explained - 5G EMF and health





Speak no evil









Google was equal parts mortified and eye rolling.















Do No Evil

Do no evil




It's all rather exciting.



Stay safe out there.

Techblog - Govt cyber-securty strategy unveiled



]]> Fri, 05 Jul 2019 13:00:00 +1200
Advertising tech may be breaking the law: UK report Industry News Legal Security & Privacy Social media advertising is coming under threat from EU and UK regulators following a report that suggests much of their data gathering is illegal.

The UK's data protection regulator has released a report outlining major concerns with a key component of social media advertising.

Real-time bidding is widely used in advertising circles and requires Facebook and Google among others to profile web users via a series of tracking technologies, such as cookies. According to the UK regulator, that's a breach of EU's General Data Protection Rules (GDPR).

Tech Crunch suggests there have been multiple complaints filed with both EU and UK regulators about the practice, which forms the core of social media advertising. By tracking users' movements around the web, both on and off social media sites, these companies gain valuable insights into a user's viewing habits - something many find invasive and which are difficult to avoid.

"The adtech industry appears immature in its understanding of data protection requirements," says the report.

"Whilst the automated delivery of ad impressions is here to stay, we have general, systemic concerns around the level of compliance of RTB."

The report says explicit consent is not being gathered for each tracking unit and there is a lack of transparency around what is tracked, how it's stored, how it's used and how long it is retained.

The report suggests other companies are more than able to comply with the rules but for some reasons the advertising technology and social media industry does not.

The EU introduced its GDPR regulation last year, following a period of bedding in, and a number of companies have already been fined for failing to comply. Calls in New Zealand for increased privacy regulation along similar lines went unheard during the government's review of the Privacy Act - following the Christchurch shootings, however, calls are increasing for the select committee to revisit its decisions.

]]> Mon, 24 Jun 2019 07:02:02 +1200
The taxman cometh, albeit slowly Procurement Legal Finance ministers from the G20 nations have agreed to press ahead with plans to reform the global tax regime to limit the amount of tax avoidance currently carried out by some of our largest tech companies.

A draft communique prepared for the G20 meeting has been shown to Reuters news agency and says the group of the world's largest economies will work to produce a final report into the issue by 2020.

This dovetails with the New Zealand government's discussion document on tax issues that says if significant progress isn't made by 2020 towards a global (or at least wide spread) solution, New Zealand would introduce its own tax on digital transactions of around 2-3%.

Anything that requires multiple countries to work together is likely to be fraught and tedious and this issue is unlikely to be any different. While Britain and France have been most vocal in calling for a new tax model, the US (home to most of the tech giants often quoted in this debate) is troubled by the suggestion.

The amount of tax paid by tech giants like Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook is coming under increasing pressure as these companies move profits around the world to minimise tax paid in each jurisdiction. Google, for example, recently announced it had made a small loss in the New Zealand market and paid just $398,341in tax for the previous year.

Meanwhile in the UK, it appears that Amazon Web Services paid only £1.7m in corporation tax on profits of £72.4m for the 2017 period, despite the UK government spending £660m with AWS in the past four years.

The G20 meeting will release its official communique at a full meeting in Osaka later in the month. From there, assuming agreement is reached, the matter is handed on to the OECD to develop into actual legislation. That's not expected to be available before 2025 at the earliest.

]]> Wed, 12 Jun 2019 07:03:53 +1200
Brislen on Tech Legal ICT Trends Security & Privacy
First of all, a user of YouTube (owned by Google) in Brazil discovered that her video of her daughter playing in the backyard was being viewed hundreds of thousands of times. The video, of the ten-year-old child playing by the pool with a friend, was being suggested as content that viewers might like but (as you can guess) the YouTube algorithm had decided to recommend the video to those who had watched sexually explicit content.

YouTube was pushing her video to paedophiles.

PLUS: Facebook doesn't bother trying at all... And the New Zealand Government considers how best to tax the digital behemoths of the world with a new Digital Services Tax (DST).]]>
The YouTube algorithm blues

Well, that went well.


YouTube was pushing her video to paedophiles.

It wasn't just one video either. The algorithm had curated a number of videos of prepubescent children in various states of dress and was suggesting them to anyone who had watched a more adult set of content.

YouTube immediately banned kids from live streaming content with no clear adult supervision being shown, which raises a couple of questions: firstly, would that have stopped the algorithm from sharing the content (presumably not) and secondly, if you can move this quickly when it's videos of kids how about when it's a mass killing by a terrorist?

But things went from really awful to, well, even worse if that was possible. YouTube has now begun removing videos that are about things that are demonstrably true  but which are being described as fake. Videos from Holocaust deniers, those who believe a number of different US mass shootings were fake, and presumably also the moon landing hoaxers, although that's still probably being treated as entertainment (I haven't checked).

So far so… well, very late to the party. But as part of it all, YouTube began banning those extreme right wing, neo-Nazi and white supremacy videographers who were deemed to be breaching YouTubes community standards.

Not banning them from the site, however, just banning them from revenue sharing for any money that they might make.

The videos are still there, but they can't make money from the sharing arrangement YouTube has in place.

For some, making money clearly isn't the driving force. For others, they make money from other sources, such as Patreon accounts rather than specifically from YouTube. Others still sell merchandise, and it's one of these who has become a poster child for YouTube's unwillingness to do the right thing.

Canadian-based hate blogger Stephen Crowder was told he could no longer make money from his YouTube stream because of "egregious actions".

"We have suspended this channel's monetization. We came to this decision because a pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community and is against our YouTube Partner Program policies," says YouTube.

But, if he agrees to remove a particularly awful t-shirt that he sells (no, I'm not telling you what it says but there's a link to a BoingBoing story that details his attack content linked below ) then he's welcome to come back into the fold and carry on peddling his hate speech.

Initially the company had said it wouldn't ban him but after a backlash the decision was overturned. Now it seems it was all about the t-shirt all along.

YouTube clearly didn't read the room terribly well here. On the one hand it has allowed these extremists to build a following and to monetise it on the YouTube platform, but won't act to block content that clearly is a breach of its own terms and conditions, and then when it does it doesn't remove the content, just stops sharing the cash, and so will make even more money off it than it did before.

New York Times - On YouTube's Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles

BoingBoing - YouTube bans kids from live-streaming video without adult supervision

Reuters - YouTube reversal bans Holocaust hoaxers, stops pay for borderline creators

BoingBoing - YouTube totally blows it on response to Steven Crowder's hate channel

The Hill - YouTube blocks controversial conservative from making money off ads

YouTube Blog - Our ongoing work to tackle hate

BoingBoing - YouTube carves policy exception allowing "hurtful" homophobic slurs


Facebook lives up to expectation

But at least YouTube is trying to do the right thing, albeit very slowly and clumsily. The company has major competition from Facebook in terms of video content and over the past four years, Facebook has made huge inroads into YouTube's dominance of the video space. The overlap continues, and YouTube really wants to make sure its algorithm serves up content that will keep users clicking instead of sailing off to Facebook's walled garden where the revenue passes on to someone else.

So what is Facebook doing since the Christchurch atrocities and what changes have the company made to its algorithms to make sure we don't see the sharing of live video footage that is obscene?

Well, that's easy. Nothing. Not a thing.

Facebook hasn't bothered doing the bare minimum and shows no signs of changing its business model, its terms and conditions for operating or its algorithm at all.

The problem lies with Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Not only does he hold the position of CEO but he's also chair of the board, and holds 60% of the stock, making him a very wealthy man.

The problem is, he doesn't have to listen to anyone on his board, or on his management team or indeed anyone at all. If he wants to stay up late, he can, and nobody can send him to bed.

A group of Facebook shareholders have begun something of a revolt, calling for him to step down as chair. Of course, when you own 60% of the company stock, any vote you disagree with is going to be voted down, but this group managed to get 68% of the votes of ordinary investors in favour of ousting Zuckerberg as chair and to bring in an independent to take over the board.

The shareholders are angry at the way Zuckerberg has refused to act over Facebook's role in election interference, the way it handles privacy matters and the way it has done nothing to stop a repeat of the live screening of murders and suicides on Facebook Live.

Yet they're powerless to make a change because Zuckerberg owns so much of the company. They're along purely for the ride and can have no role in the direction of the company.

For some, that will be enough - reaping the rewards of shareholder dividends and increasing stock value is all they care about. But for a growing crowd that's not good enough, and concerns over the future viability of a company that is a social media giant are growing on a daily basis.

Stuff - Facebook shareholder revolt gets bloody: Powerless investors vote overwhelmingly to oust Mark Zuckerberg as chairman

AdAge - Facebook's strategy to take on YouTube comes into view (from 2014)



Digital Services Tax

So what's a poor government at the far end of the world to do with these social media giants and their ilk who come in here, gut the advertising market for mainstream media, take all the money out of the business and then somehow manage to claim they're making a loss in market and can't possibly pay any tax?

Well, it's baby steps for New Zealand but along with the Christchurch Call meeting of minds in France we are steaming ahead with plans to tax digital companies for earnings that are clearly made in New Zealand.

There's a discussion paper and lots to discuss ranging from should we charge such a tax at all, shouldn't we wait for the rest of the world to have a look, didn't the Australians decide not to do this, and is 3% really the right number to land on?

For local providers, it's long since time that these companies are actually held to the same consideration as local companies that presumably actually do pay tax on their earnings here in New Zealand. We don't seem to have a plethora of companies opting to base themselves in Bermuda (cough cough Southern Cross as counter-example) nor are we seeing our companies become "resident" in Ireland or Luxembourg or (heaven forbid) the UK with its lack of transparency around business ownership (I'm sure that's got nothing to do with the urge to exit the EU before EU laws are enforced, no no, not at all) but for the Apples, Googles, Facebooks and all the rest who do operate here, do make money in New Zealand and yet somehow pay less tax than is seemly, it's an issue they'll no doubt want to fight tooth and nail.

But at least we're having this discussion and at least we're starting to see online, digital companies treated as the money-making ventures they actually are, with all that entails. Tax, local legislation, requirements to comply with our laws when operating in our country.

Long may it last.

Techblog - Digital giants to face DST

Newshub - Government releases digital service tax options

The Spin Off - The Bulletin: Digital services tax takes shape

]]> Thu, 06 Jun 2019 06:00:00 +1200
Section 252 Government Innovation Legal Security & Privacy After a lot of excitement and visions of Tom Cruise abseiling in to Treasury to steal the NOC list, I mean Budget 2019 documents, it seems instead that someone was trying out search terms in the website's search bar.

And so we can probably stand down the spy satellites and roving vans with the dishes on their roofs and look instead at whether our Crimes Act is really up to the task of identifying what is and isn't unauthorised access of a computer system.

Treasury says it built a clone website as part of its preparations for Budget Day. This gave it an exact copy of its real website to work on and to test without exposing the real website to the rigours of the world.

Budget websites typically contain a huge amount of information and so not only will the site itself get very busy on the day of launch, the search function will come under intense pressure as people try to find their particular areas of interest. As someone who has battled through previous websites looking for key phrases, I can attest to how important this feature is.

"As part of the search function on the website, content is indexed to make the search faster. Search results can be presented with the text in the document that surrounds the search phrase," says the statement from Treasury, which meant anyone searching on the clone site would return a few lines of text to provide context for the search result.

"This would return a few sentences - that included the headlines for each Vote paper - but the search would not return the whole document."

So no sign of anyone having access to the actual documents, just to the line or two of information you typically get when searching for something.

Not hacking, says the police, although both Treasury and GCSB are continuing to review the case because they've identified three IP addresses used to perform more than 2000 searches. One IP address came from within Parliamentary Services, one from 2Degrees and one from Vocus.

Does this suggest someone inside Parliamentary Services was having a look, realised they could see what looks like part of a Budget document and then they tried again from a mobile device and then from home? That seems plausible, so investigations will continue.

But is "noodling around a website looking for information" actually legal?

Section 252 of the Crimes Act makes specific mention of this:

Accessing computer system without authorisation


So, you're committing a crime if you access a computer system without authorisation, or if you know you're not allowed access or you're being reckless as to whether you're authorised or not.

It would make sense that this applies to the 2Degrees and Vocus IP addressees because I'm fairly sure users of the Treasury IT system will be required to sign up to a contract that says you can't take your work home with you or something similar.

But what about the Parliamentary Services IP user?

They may also not have authorisation, but the next section of the Act could well come into play here:


So if you've got permission to use the system and then use it for something other than the purpose you were given access for, you're not hacking.

This was most visibly brought into play in 2012 when Keith Ng discovered he could access a lot of Ministry of Social Development (MSD) material through the kiosks thoughtfully provided by the Ministry in some of its branches. By providing the kiosks, MSD gave Ng access to the system - what he chose to do with it is within the the law. 

Of course none of this has been tested in the courts, and I am not a lawyer, and as Keith himself freely pointed out more recently, "DO NOT BE MORE LIKE KEITH WITHOUT SEEKING LEGAL ADVICE FIRST".

Treasury's investigation is continuing and the question of who at Parliamentary Services accessed the information, whether they were authorised to do so and whether they're the same person as the one who accessed the clone site via 2Degrees and Vocus will no doubt feature largely, but for now, it's on with the show as Budget Day looms large.

]]> Thu, 30 May 2019 06:51:53 +1200
Govt use of algorithms under scrutiny Government Legal ]]> A new independent agency that oversees the use of algorithms in government decision-making is required to counter unintended bias. That's the recommendation from researchers at the University of Otago's Artificial Intelligence and Law in New Zealand Project (AILNZP).

They have this week released a report, funded by the NZ Law Foundation, entitled 'Government Use of Artificial Intelligence in New Zealand.' According to its authors Associate Professor Colin Gavaghan, Associate Professor Ali Knott and Profession James Maclaurin, New Zealand is a world leader in this area, but "measures are needed to guard against their (algorithms) dangers."

"On the plus side, AI can enhance the accuracy, efficiency and fairness of decisions affecting New Zealanders, but there are also worries about things like accuracy, transparency, control and bias," says Maclaurin.

Knott says that while computer programs are not inherently prejudiced, the data that is fed into a system can be, and that means the outcomes could be "tainted by historic human biases."

"You can't check or correct a decision if you can't see how it was made," says Knott. "But in some overseas cases, that's been impossible, because the companies who design the algorithms won't reveal how they work."

New Zealand has a better track record than some countries because, according to the authors, the government has mostly built its "AI tools in-house, which means we know how they work. That's a practice we strongly recommend our government continues," Knott says.

A local example of how prejudice can be unwittingly baked into an algorithm is cited in the report. Although not strictly an algorithm, the authors discuss the use of the Youth Offending Risk Screening Tool (YORST), which has been used by the New Zealand police since 2007. It came under scrutiny following the National Party proposal in 2017 to use YORST to identify young offenders for "boot camps". Here's are the relevant extract from the report:

The YORST is not a "predictive model", as we define the term, because it isn't trained on data using automated means. And it certainly seems unlikely that anybody would count it as a form of artificial intelligence. Yet some of the ethical issues it raises are similar to those associated with bona fide predictive models that provide much more sophisticated automated support for decisions in government… One issue was that while the YORST does not use ethnicity as a variable, many of the variables it employs, while predictively accurate, are also proxies for ethnicity. Māori youth are more likely to come from families that have been subject to Child Youth and Family notifications. They are also more likely to live in poor neighbourhoods. So while the YORST follows accepted practice by focusing on the causes of criminal behaviour rather than on ethnicity, the proposed policy seemed likely to result in boot camps disproportionately populated by Māori youth. And while the stated aims of the policy were to turn the lives of young people away from crime, in the short term it seemed likely to exacerbate rather than alleviate existing racial inequality in New Zealand.

This reminded me of the recent Law Commission's study in the use of DNA in criminal investigations and its conclusion that "the collection and retention of DNA samples and profiles has a disproportionate impact on Māori… the data shows that Māori are already disproportionately represented on the DPD (DNA Profile Databank). This is particularly the case for rangatahi Māori."

The authors of that report also concluded an independent agency was required to ensure oversight of a very powerful application of new technology. Is there an opportunity for a cross-functional agency that ensures that we can, as much as possible, guard against the prejudices of the old analogue world infecting the ways of the new digital world?

You can check out more about the 'Artificial Intelligence and Law in New Zealand' research here

]]> Tue, 28 May 2019 18:50:58 +1200
Brislen on Tech Industry News Legal Conferences
The company faces a bleak future after Donald Trump placed them on a blacklist of companies that cannot receive US products or services without express approval from the government.

Almost immediately, Google announced it would suspend Huawei's licence to use the Android operating system and that Huawei would no longer be able to market and sell new Android devices. Existing ones are OK, sort of, but even they won't get Android OS updates.

[PLUS: Some bouquets for the industry (but also a brickbat)]]]>

Whether Chinese telco-equipment maker Huawei is a puppet of a Communist regime or a pawn in the international machinations of two super powers is pretty much immaterial at the moment. The company faces a bleak future after Donald Trump placed them on a blacklist of companies that cannot receive US products or services without express approval from the government.


Given Huawei is Google's number two best selling mobile device vendor and was growing so quickly it would hit number one before Christmas this year, that's a blow for both companies.

But for Huawei it's the icing on the cake of a very bad year and we're not at the halfway mark yet. Will the company be allowed to build any 5G networks in New Zealand? While the UK seems keen to mitigate concerns around Huawei's involvement in future networks (and given what else is going on over there it's not getting a huge amount of air time at the moment) our security services are looking at Huawei's involvement in 5G in quite a different way.

In a 12-page briefing paper released to Stuff under the Official Information Act, advice from the GCSB to the minister responsible, Andrew Little, puts the nail in Huawei's ambitions. This quote is from Tom Pullar-Strecker's article, linked below:

"The paper said Hampton had determined that Spark's proposal would raise a "significant network security risk" and noted that 5G networks were different from mobile networks that preceded them in that many of the sensitive functions of 5G networks would be distributed across those networks rather than residing in a central core."

This is the crux of the matter - it's going to be very difficult for Huawei to convince the GCSB that it will be OK to build any of the network given the distributed nature of those functions and this also explains the main difference between 5G and those networks that came before. If Huawei was asking to build a 4G network and offered to stay out of the core, that would be one thing - but 5G is a different beast in this regard.

Even if we assume there's no actual security problem there (and given the lack of submarine cable operators noticing a dramatic increase in the amount of data being delivered to Beijing, that's certainly a possibility), the political reality is that the current US regime will turn like a rabid dog on countries that don't side with it over this trade war.

Queen to H4, I believe.

However, there is another issue here - how much of 5G capability is built on Huawei's intellectual property? The long and short of it is: quite a bit, and without Huawei's buy-in and involvement, everyone else is going to find it rather difficult to build a true 5G network.

And if the Chinese government decides to play tit for tat, we could see Apple being blocked in the People's Republic, Qualcomm and Intel and others come under the gun for all their sales and access to Chinese tech and resources and that won't end well all round.

That's before we even get to what it means for local network operators if they can't use Huawei equipment at all. Spark and 2Degrees are both heavily reliant on the company and going with an alternate provider at this point opens up no end of complexity.

Maybe it's not quite checkmate just yet.

Stuff - Spark gave GCSB heads up it would go public on Huawei block

TechBlog - Huawei vs the US Govt: is this a knock-out blow?

YouTube - How to achieve checkmate in only two moves

Stuff - What Google's breakup with Huawei means


Bouquets this week (and a brickbat)

It's been Techweek 2019 and the annual week long festival of techno-goodness has been extremely well attended by all accounts.

Events have taken place throughout the country and with a number of different approaches to the same theme: "innovation that's good for the world", something I think we can all get behind at the moment.

Through poor planning and a dicky knee, I ended up MCing a panel event hosted by Spark all about 5G and the future potential. We saw a demonstration of a 5G handset, plenty of discussion about use cases and had a good conversation with the crowd about real world applications and uses for mobile speeds of around the gigabit level.

One clear issue shone through - the rural: urban split. Will any 5G network be deployed in central city areas where there's already plenty of connectivity and choice or in rural areas where the individual need is greater but the lack of density makes for a difficult time economically speaking.

The answer appears to be a bit of both. Regional New Zealand is likely to be included in the first wave - especially places like Matamata where cellsites are already maxing out and where the extra capacity of 5G service will serve more people at higher speeds.

There's also a view that fixed wireless services are likely to be popular, something which will put more pressure on Chorus in particular.

And of course we had the usual question about health impacts - something that was handled with more aplomb than I would have used. Recently I'm discovering a wave of Twitter accounts (such as @1776_TheWatcher) dedicated to repeatedly having a go at telling everyone that 5G is evil. That account in particular appears to have tweeted about nothing else (other than the odd anti-vaccine comment) which would suggest either a pathological need to focus on one issue or someone being paid to push a line. Since joining Twitter in March it has followed mobile network companies and other anti-5G accounts, all of which are dedicated to pumping out suspiciously similar content. Content such as "fewer apps means less radiation!" and "hairdryers are among the most dangerous sources of magnetic fields" to name but a couple of choice examples.

But in a more appealing vein, the New Zealand Technology Sector Investor's Guide was released by the Technology Investment Network (TIN) in conjunction with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and it makes for great reading.


Investment in New Zealand tech companies is up markedly year on year and the sector is now the third largest export sector for the country, having cracked the billion dollars' worth of growth mark. Overall, $11 billion in revenue was generated last year, with just shy of $8 billion in revenue coming from export sales. There are 21,411 companies in the "tech" sector here, employing over 120,000 workers.

So, that would tend to put the lie to the Productivity Commission report that came out earlier in the year which said don't bother trying to build a tech sector in New Zealand because it can't be done. There are a number of areas where we can excel (growth in fintech was the largest year on year: up by 33.2%) and we have both a strong physical infrastructure and a healthy human resource sector to work with.

Although not all is plain sailing, and accounting software giant MYOB has released a survey which suggests in one area at least we have a long way to go.

That is, of course, the area of gender bias.

Only 25% of New Zealand tech companies report a gender balance in their leadership teams and nearly half of all women surveyed reported experiencing gender bias in the workplace.

Only 48% of companies in the tech sector pay men and women the same amount for the same job.

If there's one area we can and should do more in, it is this.

Techweek - A festival of innovation that's good for the world

Techblog - Techweek 19 - 500 events over seven days

Stuff - Expats give NZ high marks for digital life but 'mediocre' broadband score puzzles

Techblog - Survey highlights gender bias in tech

TIN - The investor's guide to the New Zealand tech sector

]]> Mon, 27 May 2019 08:00:00 +1200
Caution urged on introducing new laws to combat 'deepfakes' Government Innovation Legal It can take less than 30 mins for a skilled person using consumer-level tech to create a realistic video and audio recording of the Prime Minister that is completely untrue. But that is not a reason to leap too fast into drafting new legislation.

That's according to the Tom Barraclough, co-author of a Law Foundation study released today, 'Perception Inception: preparing for deepfakes and the synthetic media of tomorrow'.

While artificial intelligence techniques can create massive volumes of fake audio, images and video that is near-impossible to detect, the Government should be cautious about moving to new law for "deepfake" audio and video, he says.

Barraclough, who together with co-author Curtis Barnes, spent nine months researching the topic, "predicts that deepfake and other synthetic media will be the next wave of content causing concern to government and tech companies following the Christchurch Call".

"Even if we can all agree something must be done, the next step is agreeing on specifics. That can't be done without close analysis of the status quo," he says.

"Calling for a kind of social media regulator is fine, but these suggestions need substance. What standards will the regulator apply? Would existing agencies do a better job? What does it mean specifically to say a company has a duty of care? The law has to give any Court or regulator some guidance."

"Further, we must ask what private companies can do that governments can't. We have to consider access to justice: often a quick solution is more important than a perfect one. Social media companies can restrict content in ways that Governments can't: is that something we should encourage or restrict?"

The authors reviewed existing legislation, including the Privacy Act, New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, Human Rights Act, the Harmful Digital Communications Act and the Harrassment Act. They concluded that, for now, existing legislation may be all that's required to police the criminal use of deepfakes.

"At least 16 current acts and formal guidelines touch on the potential harms of synthetic media," Tom says. "Before calling for new law or new regulators, let's work out what we've already got, and why existing law is or isn't working."


Not all fake video is bad, and the researchers point out that synthetic media is a huge strength of New Zealand's creative industries. However, they also note there are "many harmful uses that do need to be curtailed, including the creation of non-consensual pornography and using synthetic speech to produce false recordings of public figures."

You can read the full report here.



]]> Tue, 21 May 2019 15:04:57 +1200
Huawei vs the US Govt: is this a knock-out blow? Industry News Telecommunications Legal Huawei's problems with the US administration have turned from bad to worse following the US President's decision to sign an executive order banning the use of telecommunications equipment from Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE Corporation in the US.

Google has immediately suspended Huawei from accessing the Google Play store and suspended its licence to use the Android operating system for all future devices. Current devices will continue to work but will no longer receive operating system or security updates.

Huawei will have access to Google's open source version of Android, but the US-based company has been reducing the feature set available as open source over the past few months.

Huawei was Google's second largest seller of mobile devices, but was expected to overtake Samsung as number one some time this year. With nearly half a billion Huawei devices running Android the future for both companies hinges on how long the ban will last and whether Huawei will return to the fold in future or move to a new platform entirely.

This move may also have ramifications for both the wider 5G network rollout globally and also the fortunes of US-based tech companies in China - Apple in particular. If the Chinese government retaliates in kind it could spell trouble for the US handset maker which not only sells large numbers of iDevices into the Chinese market but also makes the vast bulk of its hardware fleet in Chinese factories.

Huawei invested US$15 billion in research and development in the 5G space last year alone, according to online market intelligence platform IPlytics, and leads the race in the number of 5G standard technical contributions by a company. Huawei holds the largest portfolio of patents in this area: 11,423 patents registered in 2018, followed by the other two big networks equipment makers, Ericsson with 10,351 and Nokia with 6,878.

]]> Tue, 21 May 2019 07:06:21 +1200
Regulating social media: lessons from Britain’s first highway code Legal ICT Trends Can we use an equivalent code to encourage internet users to see when their actions harm others? asks Alison Holt. Republished with kind permission

There is much discussion currently regarding the regulation of the internet and, in particular, the taming of social media. Technology is causing problems to the extent that society is troubled, but this is not a new problem. There is a common pattern of technology emerging to address a problem, followed by the discovery that the technology itself can be the cause of a different set of, often more severe, problems. Nuclear power stations addressed the need for bulk electricity without the need to burn fossil fuels and damage the environment. But then, when nuclear power stations themselves had problems (for example the Chernobyl disaster of April 1986), the local issue of air pollution from fossil fuels transformed to a global issue of radiation from released nuclear fuel (World Nuclear Association, 2018). New technology often enables us to go faster or do more at reduced cost. It should not be a surprise then that the problems arising from new technology happen more quickly and with a more significant impact than the problems that arose from the old technology it replaced.

A month ago, shootings at two mosques in Christchurch resulted in an irreversible change to New Zealand society. Our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, handled the situation with amazing gentleness and diplomacy and diverted a desperate situation into an opportunity to support our immigrants and celebrate our diversity as a nation. The gunman filmed his attack and uploaded it to social media. What would have been a traumatic experience for the passers-by who witnessed the attack turned into a traumatic experience for the millions of Facebook users who could download the video, or have the downloaded video exposed to them.

Jacinda Ardern has openly criticised the social media networks and has called for a global approach to block harm on social platforms. In response, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook chief operations officer, revealed that Facebook would, "restrict those who could use Facebook Live and build better technology to quickly identify versions of violent videos and images and prevent them being shared" (Wong, 2019). Is this enough, though? History shows that industries that fail to self-regulate in a way that's deemed acceptable to society risk having regulation thrust upon them.

Before we consider ways of regulating the internet, and in particular, social media companies, let's look at an example from the past. The first gasoline powered motor car appeared in Britain in 1895. The early cars didn't have much of an advantage over travelling by horse, but the addition of gasoline opened new possibilities for travelling at speed. Pre-social media I could distribute a message by emailing a group or putting it up on a web site for all to see, but firstly I'd need valid email addresses for those I was sharing with, and anybody wanting to see content on my web site, would need the address of the site. It was less easy to come across content by chance or to be exposed to anything inadvertently. Of course, intelligent search engines made it easy to connect people with content (for good and bad purposes). Social media takes this exposure, accessibility and availability one step further and suddenly obnoxious content seen by tens of people can be open to millions to freely view.

Let's return to the car analogy. By 1931, there were 2.3 million cars (up from 1 million in 1921) on the roads of Great Britain (Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency, 2019). Frighteningly the number of people killed in road traffic accidents every year at that time was over 7000. (To put this in perspective, the New Zealand road toll for 2015 was 319 and the number of vehicles on the road was approximately 3.85 million (Ministry of Transport, 2018)). In 1931 the first highway code was introduced, in 1935 the first driving licence was issued and in 1960 the Ministry of Transport test was launched to inspect motor vehicles for safety (Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency, 2019). Over the years, the number of cars on the roads has grown, but so has public awareness of the need to be considerate of other road users. Car manufacturers continue to add safety features, and an increasing number of well-placed road signs prepare road users for hazards before they encounter them.

So how do we apply this to safety around the internet and social media? Is there an equivalent of a highway code and road signs that we can use to encourage internet users to be more aware of actions that could be harmful? According to the history of the highway code on the UK Government website, "the very first edition of The highway code urged all road users to be careful and considerate towards others, putting safety first" (Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency, 2019). Now if we count emotional safety alongside physical safety, this is exactly what we want to achieve for the internet and social media sites. But just how much regulation is required? Given that most governments around the world are investing heavily in moving their citizens to using services online and discontinuing the paper equivalents, making every internet user pass a "driving test" could have a detrimental effect. Also, in setting up an internet driving license test, we would encounter the ethics issue that is currently rolling around the governance of data and governance of artificial intelligence communities. My ethical framework is unlikely to be the same as your ethical framework. By the time we've reached consensus on what society can agree on as international good practice it is likely that many years will have passed.

But how about an internet highway code? It would have to be an international publication. The internet crosses national borders with impunity despite desperate and repeated cries for data sovereignty. We will find it easier to agree on general good guidance than personal responsibilities of individuals. We could develop accompanying "road signs" to alert users approaching hazards.

Of course, we also need to encourage the equivalent of our car manufacturers - the social media companies - to continue to introduce safety features. We do not want, though, or need to be in a position where our only safety features come from the social media companies.

Alison Holt is a fellow of both the Institute of IT Professionals in New Zealand and the British Computer Society, a member of the New Zealand Institute of Directors and a Chartered IT Professional. 

]]> Thu, 09 May 2019 06:54:20 +1200
Brislen on Tech Industry News Telecommunications Legal Security & Privacy
Part of Network for Learning (N4L), Pond was supposed to be a leading-edge social network where teachers could house and make available content they had put together for various projects. New teachers, or teachers looking for new resources, would be able to log in and access work already developed by other teachers and adapt it for their own use.

[PLUS: Huawei may have a sudden reprieve, and Facebook - two weeks of lunacy from the social media giant]]]>

It looks like it's the end of the line for Pond, the government's resource sharing service for teachers.


So, if you're due to teach a module on World War I and want to target it at a class of 12-year-olds, why not have a look and see what someone else has already done in that area.

Ultimately Pond would be opened up to students and whānau who would use it as a central location to store and share work, making it a tool that would add value to the entire teaching process.

It was a bold idea and one that was welcomed by teachers and technologists alike but five years after launch, enthusiasm seems to have dried up. A decision on its future is expected next month.

It's a real shame although not totally surprising to see Pond evaporate like this. It's hard work building a social network and without constant upgrading, care and attention to the interface and to the usability of the service, similar social networks have gone to the wall in years gone by. User willingness is only part of the battle but I have heard from a number of educators that the searchability just wasn't there and the interface was clumsy and non-intuitive.

Schools all still have the same issues and a need to figure out how best to tackle the digital collation and sharing of student work as well as how best to coordinate activity between professionals. I'd hope they won't turn to a closed solution (like Facebook) but would rather embrace the learnings from Pond, figure out a way to build an open platform for all educators to use and take it from there.

Stuff - Axe hangs over what was the 'icing-on-the-cake' of school UFB initiative

Reseller News - N4L's education social network Pond dries up


'Cautious optimism' over Huawei

Good news for Huawei - the beleaguered telco network equipment maker has been given a cautious green light for its role in building 5G networks for the UK market.

Britain will still ban Huawei from building the core of the 5G network but will allow it to bid for tenders for the rest of the network deployment.

What this means for the New Zealand market remains to be seen. Spark and 2Degrees both use Huawei for mobile network deployments and had planned to do the same with the next generation rollout but these days such deployments need government approval in the form of sign-off from the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). Spark's plan was rejected but details are scant in the public forum. However, Huawei New Zealand has said it will opt out of building the core network here if that helps and now that the UK has said it does, time will tell as to how the GCSB responds to any re-submitted plan.

Questions still remain about whether there are actual concerns or whether this is just the US using security as a lever in its ongoing commercial stoush with China. The US has said it won't share intelligence materials with countries that do use Huawei equipment - presumably that's only those that have Huawei in the core and not just any country using Huawei kit because frankly, that ship has sailed.

Of course it wouldn't be a story involving government spy agencies without a leak and the UK is waking to news that the report hasn't been released but rather leaked and so tables are being thumped and demands for inquiries of the highest order are being made and it's all highly entertaining given the other problems the UK has at the moment, but it seems entirely fitting in this case.

CNN - UK could give Huawei a limited role in building its 5G networks

Newsroom - Spark and Huawei show cautious optimism as UK allows Huawei into 5G build

ZDNet - UK allows Huawei for 5G: Report

BBC - Huawei leak row: Government 'cannot exclude' criminal investigation




In our regular section (which should probably just be called "What did Facebook screw up this time") it seems the social media giant has accidentally gathered more than 1.5 million users' email address books (as you do), now faces an investigation into the same by the New York State attorney general's office, faces a US$5 billion fine for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, refuses to fix weak privacy protection for Canadian users, said the British Columbia privacy commissioner has no jurisdiction over it about the same issue, has said it won't be doing anything differently with Facebook Live following the Christchurch shootings despite saying it would review the service, wants to launch a new online shopping experience that will be far more lucrative for the company and wants to set up a new privacy-first social media platform that won't upset anyone.

All this in a short week to boot.

And yet, through all of this, with investigations swirling around the company, with the D7 nations discussing how best to regulate the company and its ilk, with fines being levied by formerly friendly regulators not to mention the more aggressively hostile ones (such as in the EU), and with potential presidential candidates saying it needs to be broken up, Facebook's share price has increased, its attracted more users and it continues to dominate the advertising world.

This says as much about the insanity of the allegedly logic-driven market dynamic far more than it does about Facebook in particular but honestly, it's all a bit odd.

The whole thing should be turned off and back on again… or perhaps just left to cool down for a while.

It's not just Facebook - Twitter is proving to be equally as unwilling to do the right thing (see linked story below) because it might upset people (as opposed to today where it upsets hardly anyone, right?) but honestly, is there any way out of this mess?

One thing we have to be very careful about is the way we decide to manage social media giants because the rules that we apply to them in this situation will apply in all others and the risk of unintended consequences is quite high. It's important we get it right because the impact reaches deep into our electoral system, into our private lives and into our basic fundamental rights as citizens.

Techblog - NZ and France seek to end use of social media for acts of terrorism

Stuff - The devil will be in the detail of the 'Christchurch Call'

The Spin Off - How to stop the 'Christchurch Call' on social media and terrorism falling flat

Globe and Mail - Watchdogs say Facebook broke Canadian privacy laws, urge Ottawa for power to enforce findings

New York Times - Canada Says Facebook Broke Privacy Laws With 'Superficial' Safeguards

CBS - Facebook expects to pay up to US$5 billion over Cambridge Analytica scandal

Facebook - Mark Zuckerberg's blog

CNN - Facebook investigated in Ireland over mishandled passwords

New York Times - New York Attorney General to Investigate Facebook Email Collection

E&E News - Facebook fact-checker has ties to climate doubt

Motherboard - Why Won't Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too

]]> Fri, 26 Apr 2019 15:00:00 +1200
NZ and France seek to end use of social media for acts of terrorism Government Legal Security & Privacy
The meeting is to be held in May as part of the G7 Digital Ministers' meeting and will bring together world leaders and CEOs of tech companies.]]>
Media statement republished from the Beehive, released this morning.




The meeting aims to see world leaders and CEOs of tech companies agree to a pledge called the 'Christchurch Call' to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.

The meeting will be held alongside the "Tech for Humanity" meeting of G7 Digital Ministers, of which France is the Chair, and France's separate "Tech for Good" summit, both on 15 May. Jacinda Ardern will also meet with civil society leaders on 14 May to discuss the content of the Call.

"The March 15 terrorist attacks saw social media used in an unprecedented way as a tool to promote an act of terrorism and hate. We are asking for a show of leadership to ensure social media cannot be used again the way it was in the March 15 terrorist attack," Jacinda Ardern said.

"We're calling on the leaders of tech companies to join with us and help achieve our goal of eliminating violent extremism online at the Christchurch Summit in Paris.

"We all need to act, and that includes social media providers taking more responsibility for the content that is on their platforms, and taking action so that violent extremist content cannot be published and shared.


 "In the wake of the March 15 attacks New Zealanders united in common purpose to ensure such attacks never occur again. If we want to prevent violent extremist content online we need to take a global approach that involves other governments, tech companies and civil society leaders

"Social media platforms can connect people in many very positive ways, and we all want this to continue.


]]> Wed, 24 Apr 2019 08:35:25 +1200
Brislen on Tech Industry News Government Legal ICT Trends
If his spiritual home Callaghan Innovation's latest report is anything to go by, we're getting on with it, albeit in a relatively stately manner.

Callaghan Innovation's Growing the Pie report looks at the number of tech companies that exist today and their impact on the economy and says we have nine billion dollar companies (unicorns, in the parlance) in the broadly-defined tech sector.

[ALSO: Getting Copyright right, and Facebook doubles down]]]>
The national animal of Scotland

Sir Paul Callaghan said we need to build an environment where talent wants to live, where we have 100 companies at the $1 billion mark that aren't farms, and that we absolutely can build this second string to our economic bow.



Sure, A2 Milk is in there, along with Fisher and Paykel which are tech companies only if you stretch your arms out really wide, but we'll take them as a win. They sit along side the more obvious players - Xero and TradeMe - and the ones that make me smile, like Rocket Lab.

But for me the real fun is the next layer, the half-unicorns, and the one below that (donkeys?) because they are full of potential and promise.

The real problem they face is finding the talent to help drive these companies, so I'd like to see more effort put into the education sector (although apparently degrees are old hat now) and into marketing ICT as the career path of choice.

Because it's the next nine I'm really interested in, and then the nine after that.

Techblog - Nine unicorns down, many more to come

Callaghan Innovation - NZ 'unicorns' create more than $34 billion in value

Stuff - University degrees no longer needed in tech industry?

NZ Herald - Govt demands higher standard from incubators in new funding programme


Getting copyright right

While we're busy re-doing the 4G wars (and the 3G wars, and does anyone else remember GSM vs CDMA?), and unbundling, and even now I see the laying of a submarine cable called Southern Cross, it's time to revisit another perennial favourite.

Yes, hasta la vista baby, it's back. The Copyright Act is under review and the old creaky beast needs to hear from you.

Fortunately, InternetNZ has put together a submission that can be used as a template should you decide you want to have your say as well.

Our current act has had some brushing up and dusting off over the years but is, in essence, very old. While we all had fun laughing as politicians discussed the crazy new world of the internet at the last review (and if you watched the "debate" you'll never ever forget it, no matter how hard you try) the bare bones of the act's origin story in 1994 remain and that's too long given what's changed in the meantime.

The issues aren't too dissimilar either, but at least this time when Gareth Hughes stands up in the House and asks if the new act will take into account Netflix and online streaming, the minister is much less likely to say "I don't know what Netflix is".

Seriously now.

We still have to find a way to protect content creators from having their work stolen and passed off as someone else's. We have to find a way to encourage creative types to use the power of their brains to build something from nothing and to share it with the world and to make money from it.

But we also have to avoid criminalising customers who have always been the scapegoat for problems inherent in the business models that were built off the back of a different era of technology.

And speaking of tech, we have to avoid breaking things like the internet, or the ability to cast a TV show from one device to another, or to buy a product in one place and have it play in another.

So there's a lot to do and a lot of pressure to get it right. The EU has just introduced two new directives that have been described as fantastic wins for copyright and the death of content sharing (don't ask - we've written about it before) all of which would suggest the need for a bit of thought and contemplation on the appropriateness of our footwear before we rush in.

Which is where InternetNZ comes in. The link is below - have a read and get involved if you dare.

MBIE - Copyright Act Review

Techblog - Copyright updating, please wait


Facebook doubles down

Facebook has had a jolly hard look at itself and decided to implement some changes. First, it'll be putting in a delay for live video streaming and training up a new squad of moderators to be better trained at stopping objectionable material from being broadcast. It's introducing new reporting tools that allow users to alert moderators to questionable content and seek immediate action. It's working on the algorithm to ensure extremist material doesn't get promoted above and beyond the legitimate stuff and it's hiring a team of reviewers who will sift through all groups looking for hate speech, extremism and anything that might set alarm bells ringing.

Sorry, no, that's all fake news. Facebook has had a jolly hard look at itself and decided to do nothing. Nothing at all. Facebook Live will continue with its current unmoderated, real-time approach to streaming atrocities for all to see and the algorithm remains sacrosanct. Thou Shalt Not Question The Algorithm.

It's quite pathetic but not unexpected, although it did lead to one well-known privacy commissioner to call Facebook "morally bankrupt pathological liars" which probably means he's off the Christmas card list.

But the more we look at Facebook, at its business model, at its past promises and at its future direction, the worse it all looks.

The Christchurch shootings weren't the first time Facebook has failed to act on its live video streaming platform, but that's really only one aspect of the problem. A much bigger failing is the way it has monetised extremism and cares not a jot whether users become enraged pathologically damaged killers or not.

The New York Times piece (link below) paints a grim picture, but one passage stands out for me:


One thing stuck out. Towns where Facebook use was higher than average, like Altena, reliably experienced more attacks on refugees. That held true in virtually any sort of community - big city or small town; affluent or struggling; liberal haven or far-right stronghold - suggesting that the link applies universally.


That sound you can hear is alarm bells ringing in every corner of society. How can civil society function with that level of animosity being encouraged in order to make a buck? How can we continue to allow such a provably dystopian model to post propaganda and call it news?

It's not just extremist white supremacy Nazis we have to worry about, it's the anti-vaccination brigade who are literally killing children with half-baked, under-informed views created to attract attention and clicks and a dribble of revenue from this publishing house that calls itself a platform.

This influence goes beyond cat videos and the disruption of mainstream media. We're now talking about derailing public health initiatives that should be making our lives collectively better, about influencing elections and about encouraging genocide, all in the name of better engagement scores.

The danger we face is that we either do nothing, and Facebook and its ilk press on, or we do too much, and we end up over-regulating the net and free speech and discourse and we all become subject to excess surveillance and random acts of State Control. And then there's the question of whether any regulation we might impose would help other social media companies come into the market or hinder them - leaving the status quo with Facebook at the top of the dog pile.

Treading a fine line is going to take some very delicate footwork.

New York Times - Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests

Newsroom - How the world is tackling social media regulation

The Register - You were warned and you didn't do enough: UK preps Big Internet content laws

NZ Herald - Comment: Three things PM Jacinda Ardern needs to do about Google, Facebook

Gizmodo - Here's 40 Pages of Facebook Trying to Figure Out What to Do About White Nationalism

NZ Herald - Most Kiwis want govt to take harder line on social media: UMR Research

Frontier Myanmar - The hate speech threat to the 2020 election

NZ Herald - Top Kiwi police officer targeted by US anti-gun control group

NZ Herald - Facebook are 'morally bankrupt, pathological liars' - NZ Privacy Commissioner

NZ Herald - Chris Keall: The glaring flaw in Zuckerberg's Facebook Live defence

Stuff - Christchurch shooting: Facebook reportedly told US Congress livestream didn't have 'enough gore' for system to catch

The Spin Off - This is not the internet you promised us

]]> Fri, 12 Apr 2019 17:02:04 +1200
Copyright updating, please wait Government Innovation Legal
The long, long version is in InternetNZ's 58 page submission, which you can read if you really want to. If you want to read the Goldilocks version then stick to this blog post.

So what are the issues and why do they matter?]]>
InternetNZ's Policy Team has just written a huge submission on the Government's review of copyright. So what are the issues and why do they matter? 

Here's the really short version: our 25-year-old copyright law is out of date and badly needs an update to meet the needs of New Zealanders in the Internet era. The long, long version is in our 58 page submission, which you can read if you really want to. If you want to read the Goldilocks version then stick to this blog post! We think it's just right, and will pair well with a hot bowl of porridge to welcome colder weather and the end of daylight savings.

Copyright law from cassette tapes to Spotify

Once upon a time, Parliament created New Zealand's current copyright law. That time was 1994, when phones had cords, the Internet was mostly for academics, and I was listening to the cassette single of Supergroove's "Can't Get Enough" on my Sony Walkman. In the 25 years since, we have seen big, rapid shifts in technology, which have changed the ways New Zealanders access and share information and entertainment. Like in music, where analogue cassette tapes were replaced by digital CDs in the 1990s. Then in the 2000s, you could buy songs as digital downloads, and an iPod could hold "1000 songs in your pocket". In 2012, Spotify launched in New Zealand, offering 16 million songs on your smartphone, supported by advertising or a fee of $7.49 per month. In 20 years, we went from ten songs in your pocket to tens of millions, and music streaming went from nothing to earning $74.2 million in New Zealand revenues last year. These shifts for music reflect bigger and broader shifts, as the Internet has become vital to the ways New Zealanders learn, work, and play.

We think copyright needs an update for the Internet era

Copyright serves a very important goal, aiming to benefit New Zealanders by encouraging people to make and share original works. To serve this goal, it creates legal rules that regulate copying in a very broad way. How broad are these rules? Well, they apply automatically to cover basically anything that expresses information or ideas in a fixed form. That includes anything written or drawn, recordings of sound or images, and things like sculpture crafted in other ways. And they require permission to copy or share those things.

Because it is so broad, copyright law impacts the Internet in a few different ways. At a technical level, Internet connections work by digital copying and sharing of information. Beyond that, many of the ways New Zealanders use and benefit from the Internet are regulated by copyright rules. Our current rules restrict activities that seem pretty normal and widely accepted by New Zealanders, like forwarding email attachments to share information at work, making online backups, or using an animated GIF in online conversations. We think that those uses are often reasonable, and our law should recognise that. Beyond those specific uses, there are broader challenges for our copyright law. The biggest challenge is the way our law is updated over time, as the needs and expectations of New Zealanders shift with new technologies and distribution models.

So what did our submission say?

InternetNZ supports the goals of copyright, but thinks our framework needs a refresh and rethink to work well in the Internet era. Some of the key points in our long submission are:

Copyright is about people and culture, not just business

Copyright affects all sharing of works, whether it's for economic reasons or not. We think copyright should consider personal, social, and noncommercial aspects of New Zealanders' wellbeing, recognising that copyright has a range of impacts on cultural participation particularly on the Internet. We also think copyright should explicitly consider New Zealanders' human rights.

Our law needs better ways to handle change over time

New Zealand's historic approach to updating copyright law does not work for the digital era. Updates for specific technologies have been quickly outpaced by continuing change. For example, reforms in 2008 allowed music from a CD to be shifted onto an iPod, but arrived in the smartphone era. New provisions in 2011 focused on infringement through file-sharing software, but were little used, and are now largely out of date thanks to music streaming services. In other words, our law is too specific to old technologies, and getting it just right means being a bit more flexible.

We think the best way to make copyright law more flexible, so it can respond better to change, is through rethinking the copyright exceptions that balance the monopoly rights owners get from copyright. Those exceptions are meant to allow for reasonable activities, where it would not be efficient or fair to require an owner's permission. The current exceptions are a bit narrow and tech-specific, and don't allow for things like online backups of things New Zealanders have bought legitimately. There are lots of ways our law could be more flexible. New Zealanders are already familiar with open-ended rules in privacy law, which gives a set of privacy principles that can be applied in context, and in consumer law, which says products have to be fit for purpose, regardless of what their purpose is. We think that drawing lessons from these local laws, and from experience with more open-ended exceptions in the USA, Israel, and Singapore, can help guide the development of copyright law that navigates change better. We also think New Zealanders need much better guidance on the responsible use of copyright protections and exceptions, regardless of how our framework develops.

Online enforcement needs to work with the Internet in New Zealand

Our copyright law recognises that it is not always fair to blame Internet service providers for what their users do online. We support careful consideration of when and how user actions should be the responsibility of service providers, and of how to treat copyright as a private economic right. Based on that consideration, InternetNZ does not support content blocking as part of the copyright enforcement toolkit in New Zealand. Content blocking measures would involve financial costs, technical compromises, and would fail to ensure that New Zealanders have the protections and benefits of their basic human rights. Without both robust evidence that they shift user behaviour in the market, which we believe is lacking, and rigorous processes to assess and mitigate their harm to New Zealanders, we do not think content blocking measures can be justified in copyright law, and strongly oppose them.

Update downloading… please wait

The Government has kicked off a review, to hear about issues with copyright, and think up ways to address them. We've just sent in our submission on the Issues Paper, which is the first bit of a process that will take months, maybe years. We think our law really needs an update, but it's also important to be careful and allow time to consider the people, issues, and concerns properly. Not too fast, not too slow, but just right.

For the next few weeks, the team at MBIE will have a busy time reading long, detailed, and diverse submissions. We wrote almost 60 pages, and there will be others who care as much as we do, and who also had a lot to say. Those submissions will raise issues, which MBIE will gather up and think about. Once they have the issues sorted, MBIE's team will be thinking about policy options.

At some point, with enough time for careful consideration, but hopefully not too far into the future, MBIE's team will put out an options paper. The options paper will set out different policy options which could help with better copyright law. There will be a chance for New Zealanders to comment on those options.

We'll be watching and engaging in that process. In the meantime, our team is keen to to keep talking with officials, and with other people who care about updating this law so it serves New Zealanders for another 25 years if need be.

Here's where to find our submission:

As a PDF: InternetNZ Submission on the Copyright Issues Paper (58-page PDF)

As a webpage with all the content, but less pretty formatting: InternetNZ submission - HTML

James Ting-Edwards's blog


James is a senior policy advisor at InternetNZ. Reproduced with kind permission.

]]> Thu, 11 Apr 2019 05:00:00 +1200
Brislen on Tech Industry News Telecommunications Legal End of an era for Telecom

Simon Moutter will leave the CEO role at Spark by the end of June and can do so relatively content with his lot.

It's never a good time to say "enough". There's always more to do and at a company like Spark that's never going to change.

Spark needs to sort out how it will build its 5G network given the GCSB says "thou shalt not use Huawei". They need to make sure the Rugby World Cup is beamed into all the rural and remote homes in New Zealand who are only now waking up to the need for faster broadband services. The company will need to figure out a way to expand its relationships with high-value customers and squeeze them for a bit more each month. It'll have to figure out when to cut off those legacy assets that still hang around, what to do about unbundling of fibre and whether to even bother and reform its relationship with Chorus which has taken something of a battering of late.

But look at how far Spark has come since Simon came back seven years ago. Back then it was still Telecom, a former government-owned monopoly that was widely disliked by the bulk of its own customer base. It was still figuring out how to respond to the separation from Chorus and the new operating environment it found itself in.

Back then, fibre was barely getting started and the company hadn't quite worked out how to drive forward. Vodafone still overshadowed the company in terms of the mobile market and the company couldn't even define what it was all about.

But Simon could.

He arrived with a vision and a plan and began immediately to undo the old world order. He started with roaming rates for mobile travellers. Bill shock for mobile roamers was a huge problem with customers coming home (in this user's own experience) with bills of $1800 or more. It was a problem that many high-end Telecom customers had run into and it left a sour taste in everyone's mouth. Simon introduced a flat rate fee and bam, the problem  fell away.

I spoke to Simon at the time and to paraphrase him, he said the company had been "walking backwards fending off regulation" for far too long and he would turn around and embrace the customer instead. From there, Telecom renamed itself, refocused on customer service, started arguing with Chorus about costs, introduced its own fixed wireless service as an alternative for low-spend landline customers, and then started in on the other side of the coin - content itself.

Between the rugby, Lightbox and Spark's willingness to try new things, the pay TV market in New Zealand was grabbed by the scruff of the neck and given a good shaking till it dropped the stick.

It's not all been plain sailing of course, and the future of the telco space is anything but assured. The dumb pipe model beckons and Spark will have to figure out whether it continues to spend money on content in the hopes that it keeps customers happy when Disney launches its own content channels and the sports industry finally works out that hey, maybe it can make a go of this broadcasting thing itself.

And finally a word for the Telecom exec team of old. Theresa Gattung put together a senior management team that stayed largely together for the duration of her time in charge. Over the years they have all moved on to major positions within New Zealand business.

For example, along with Moutter and Mark Ratcliffe, who ran Chorus for many years and is now acting CEO at NZTA we've got; Marko Bogoievski (now CEO at Infratil), Chris Quin (CEO at Foodstuffs North Island), Kevin Kenrick (CEO at TVNZ), Miki Szikszai (CEO at Snapper), Vic Crone (CEO at Callaghan Innovations), Glen Sowry (now CEO at Metlifecare and previously Housing NZ), Jason Paris (CEO at Vodafone New Zealand) and Adrian Littlewood (CEO at Auckland Airport). No doubt there are many others who will let me know I've left them off the list.

It's quite a remarkable alumni really.

Newsroom - Unequivocal ambition: the right woman for the job

Stuff - Simon Moutter cashes out from Spark on a high

Techblog - All change at Spark: CEO resigns

NZ Herald - Spark's Jolie Hodson on replacing Simon Moutter


Facebook: Thank you for smoking

Taking a page out of the tobacco industry's playbook, Mark Zuckerberg has called for Facebook to be regulated.

Why would he do that? After all, he's making lots of money and doesn't need the hassle, right?

Much like the tobacco industry, Zuckerberg knows full well that the US governmental machine doesn't move swiftly at the best of times and in its current state is unlikely to do anything meaningful for some time to come.

Also, if he's going to have to regulate the way Facebook behaves, surely it's better for him as CEO if all social media platforms are regulated together? That way he doesn't have to explain to his board why his market share and share price have fallen while Google/YouTube and the others have all gone the other way.

Better they all fall than just Facebook.

So it's a bold call and, just like when the tobacco industry did it, it's a short term move.

Ultimately, however, we will need to regulate the social media world on many fronts and the time to start thinking about how is now.

Facebook has failed to self-regulate and despite its lovely words of (checks notes) one week ago, it has failed to do anything concrete. No changes to the way it oversees its Facebook Live service at all. No changes to the way it manages hate content online. No removal of far right or white supremacy groups from its platform. Not a thing.

And this is the way Facebook operates. It hopes that by saying one thing and not acting it will simply be able to carry on not quite doing anything that impacts on its one true goal - to sell all the data we can give it.

The algorithm is everything for Facebook. That ability to decode your actions and decide what you need in terms of advertising and content based on your browser history is everything. It can sell your data, and the data of its other 1.5 billion users, and the data of those who don't use Facebook but who visit sites that do use Facebook (that is, all of them) is what makes the company so successful.

Anything that impacts on the algorithm is avoided at all costs. Forget about social justice, free speech, fair play, forget about community standards. The algorithm can only ever be adjusted to better serve advertising content and that's that. Facebook hates that it has to stop people seeing copyright material - it would love to let users access that. Cheaper for the company and easier to implement. But sadly the legal structures of Hollywood have meant social media giants have to filter and block and remove copyright material. Grr.

So it will take regulation and it will take global efforts to introduce regulation and minimum standards across the platforms and so while Zuckerberg hopes his calls will result in a regulatory process that bogs down for a decade or more, I believe we have a window of opportunity here in New Zealand to move with alacrity and speed and deliver an environment that works for us.

RNZ - Facebook tells Privacy Commissioner it hasn't changed its livestreaming at all

Huffington Post - Facebook Says White Nationalist Video Doesn't Break New Policy Against White Nationalism

Washington Post - Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let's start in these four areas.

RNZ - It's time to rethink hate speech laws

The Guardian - Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to fix the internet. Don't take him seriously

NZ Herald - YouTube executives ignored warnings, let toxic videos run rampant

RNZ - Don't be fooled, far right groups have not been silenced

Tech Insider - Facebook is asking some new users for their email passwords and appears to be harvesting their contacts without consent

Bloomberg - Millions of Facebook Records Found on Amazon Cloud Servers


Gumboot Friday

]]> Fri, 05 Apr 2019 13:46:54 +1300
EU passes copyright directives Industry News Legal The European Union has passed its controversial new Copyright Directive, including its two contentious Articles 11 and 13.

It's now up to the member states to ratify the decision, and they then have two years to introduce legislation to support the decision.

The two articles require search engines and news aggregators to pay to link to news websites (Article 11) while Article 13 increases the level of responsibility for material posted without copyright licences.

Large-scale copyright holders have welcomed the decision while a number of high profile tech companies and individuals have decried the decision as the death of the web, at least for EU member states.

The BBC quotes Robert Ashcroft, chief executive of PRS for Music, which collects royalties for music artists, describing the move as "a massive step forward" for consumers and creatives.

"It's about making sure that ordinary people can upload videos and music to platforms like YouTube without being held liable for copyright - that responsibility will henceforth be transferred to the platforms," he said.

In a written statement, Google has said the directive will "lead to legal uncertainty and will hurt Europe's creative and digital economies."

Whether the directives will make any practical difference to the way sites like Google News share news links remains to be seen and will largely depend on how each member state interprets the directives, and the way their laws are enacted.

Meanwhile there is a growing call for governments to regulate the way tech companies handle issues like hate speech, obscene content and live video streaming - however copyright issues, it seems, are more pressing.

]]> Wed, 27 Mar 2019 08:06:42 +1300
Facebook forced to explain itself some more Legal Security & Privacy In a surprise to probably no-one, it turns out that Facebook knew about Cambridge Analytica's use and abuse of personal data many months before the social media giant originally said.

Cambridge Analytica accessed an estimated 87 million user records without consent as part of a body of work it was conducting in the lead up to the US elections. Reporters at The Guardian in the UK exposed the breach in 2015 and Facebook confirmed it was accurate and revoked CA's access to its systems, but only after threatening legal action against the paper for reporting the findings.

Facebook has claimed it only learned of Cambridge Analytica's access (something CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said was unauthorised) when approached by journalists in December 2015, but documents suggest employees were discussing it in September of that year.

This is likely to inflame already tense relationships between Facebook and the UK's parliament which has been investigating the company and its relationship with Cambridge Analytica - an investigation which was thought closed last month with a damning report into Facebook's activities.

In its defence, Facebook says the September conversations were not about the data scraping that led to Cambridge Analytica's downfall but rather a totally separate data scraping project.

The news comes as Facebook was forced to reveal that it has stored user passwords for Facebook, Facebook Lite, and Instagram in plaintext without any attempt to protect the information. Although the company says no users were impacted by this astonishing lapse, those affected users will be contacted directly.

Meanwhile in New Zealand calls for social media giants such as Facebook to be regulated have increased and the government is likely to turn its attention to their reach and culpability following the Christchurch terror attacks.

]]> Mon, 25 Mar 2019 08:23:41 +1300
Brislen on Tech Innovation Legal ICT Trends Security & Privacy

[PLUS: Twitter remains oblivious to what its users actually want. The Web remains, but for how long?]]>
World class privacy legislation eludes our law makers




Unfortunately, our political servants have failed to do that.







Of course, by then it's just too late.


Parliament NZ - Privacy Bill

NY Times - Facebook's Data Deals Are Under Criminal Investigation

RNZ - Kathmandu security breach may have captured customer data


Twitter doesn't know what its users use it for













After all, does anyone here remember ICQ?














Only time will tell.

World Wide Web Foundation - 30 years can change everything




WWW turns 30

]]> Fri, 15 Mar 2019 11:00:00 +1300
DNA law under review Government Innovation Legal
The Law Commission spent 18 months reviewing the current law and practices and released a 367-page issues paper late last year, for which submissions close this month. The paper details just how powerful DNA technology is.]]>
New Zealand was among the first countries to pass laws governing the collection and use of DNA in criminal investigations. But, like pretty much all new technology, its application has evolved in leaps and bounds and regulatory oversight has not kept up with innovation.

The Law Commission spent 18 months reviewing the current law and practices and released a 367-page issues paper late last year, for which submissions close this month. The paper details just how powerful DNA technology is and why the State has a duty of care to protect the privacy of its citizens. The Commission is recommending that an entirely new Act be written that takes into account developments in science as well as human rights issues, Treaty of Waitangi ethical and tikanga issues, and privacy.

It also wants a public agency established to provide independent oversight over how the police and ESR use DNA in criminal investigations. While the Minister of Justice is responsible for the Criminal Investigations (Bodily Samples) Act, the reality is that it is the police and ESR (the Crown Research Institute that provides the forensic services) that administer it. They effectively have two databanks - the Crime Sample Databank (DNA profiles taken from samples lifted from crime scenes, for example blood on a victim's shirt etc), and a Known Person Databank (DNA profiles from samples from convicted criminals and others who have provided samples through consent).

As police use DNA to link people to crime scenes, it can be a powerful investigative tool. The technique has been used to help solve crimes such as the murder of Teresa Cormack - 14 years after the investigation into her death began. The breakthrough in the case was when scientists were able to find a usable DNA sample in 2001, and it was compared to 800 reference samples that were obtained from people who had been nominated as suspects during the investigation, leading to the identification - and subsequent conviction - of Jules Mikus.

High profile cases, and the influence of US TV dramas, have led people to believe that DNA profiling is used widely, whereas in reality the Commission estimates it is used in only 0.5 - 2% of all criminal investigations in New Zealand.

While the actual use of DNA might be relatively small, what it can tell about a person - and their family - is huge, as the Commission notes: "The sampling process… results in the State taking possession of (and therefore seizing) a biological sample that contains the entire genetic blueprint of the individual. This includes information about the person's health, ethnicity and family relationships".

So, what are the rules around gathering these samples? The Commission's paper looks into how consent is applied and how this may be adversely affected by the power imbalance between a police officer and a suspect. It discusses how Māori may be unfairly targeted in the process of DNA collection. It also points out that it is possible for police to obtain a DNA sample indirectly - that is by watching a person throw a drink bottle into a public rubbish bin and then collecting it later to obtain the saliva.

The Commission suggests new legislation needs to consider how DNA samples are obtained. It draws an analogy with searches of electronic devices in which the Supreme Court has held that because people are not always aware of the extent of the information contained on their device unique privacy interests are engaged, and special search and surveillance rules should apply. The counter to this argument is that the administrative burden this could place on police might potentially impede the investigation of an horrific crime.

Then there are practices such as DNA phenotyping, where scientists are able to extract information about a person's physical characteristics from a DNA sample left at a crime scene. This raises significant ethical and legal issues. The Law Commission argues that DNA phenotyping is not in keeping with the original public mandate for the CIBS Act and this should be something that Parliament needs to consider as part of the process of creating a new law.

Another decision for Parliament is whether New Zealand should opt for a universal DNA profile databank. Kuwait tried to establish one in 2015, but it was ruled unconstitutional in 2017, as it violated personal liberty. Portugal also tried to establish a universal DNA database, but public pressure meant the government had to limit it to criminal offenders.

If we don't enact a universal database (which is actually a very bad idea) then there should be rules in place governing whose DNA profiles are held by the State, and why, as the Commission notes: "When considering consistency, there is also a particular need to ensure that the statutory framework is consistent with the Treaty of Waitangi principles of equity and partnership. The collection and retention of DNA samples and profiles has a disproportionate impact on Māori… the data shows that Māori are already disproportionately represented on the DPD (DNA Profile Databank). This is particularly the case for rangatahi Māori."

The issues paper can be found here. Submissions close 31 March 2019.

]]> Thu, 14 Mar 2019 15:57:40 +1300
Brislen on Tech Industry News Government Legal Security & Privacy
Only I made the mistake of telling her as I heard it - via Jacob Margolis, a US-based science journalist who tweeted: "The last message they received was basically, 'My battery is low and it's getting dark.'" and that really was that. What an incredible story and an incredible piece of hardware.

[Plus: Fake news, privacy abuse and more]]]>
It's all over red rover

I made my eldest daughter cry this morning. I told her about the robot on Mars, Opportunity, and how it was finally out of juice.


What an incredible story and an incredible piece of hardware.

Designed for a 90-day mission, Opportunity has exceeded all expectations and has clocked up 15 years trundling around another world, providing us with more than just a snapshot into our nearest neighbour.

As well as the science and understanding we've gained, Opportunity has also taught a whole generation of school children that may be living in the gap between one glorious space age of exploration with humans and the next but we are still out there, learning and exploring. That emotional connection is important if we're to get the next generation of explorers to think seriously about where to from here.

So my hat is off to all those out there pushing the boundaries and building kit that goes the distance, and then some, and who are standing on the shoulders of giants, if only so they can haul up the next person in line to give them a better view.

(To help the kid over her emotional response I played the cold opening to the episode of The West Wing. It may not have helped)

Nasa - NASA's Opportunity Rover Mission on Mars Comes to End

CNN - After 15 years, the Mars Opportunity rover's mission has ended

Wikipedia - Opportunity (rover)

XKCD - Opportunity Rover




File Lance Armstrong's autobiography under "fiction"

Imagine if you will that a publishing company had put out a book outlining why the Holocaust never took place. Or that vaccines were evil and destructive to your health. Or the cellphones gave you cancer. Or that aircraft contrails were actually a secret government conspiracy to spray everyone with some kind of mind or mood control agent.

Such books would no doubt be published, but would be hard to come by, probably not at the front of the book shop and probably not even in the "factual" section but more likely the "crackpot" section.

Bookshop keepers and librarians would no doubt be able to source such books for you, but would advise that they were poorly written and had little scientific veracity to back up their claims.

Sadly, the internet does not have such distinctions and the chain of command appears to be:

1: Think up idea.

2: Publish.

3: Be damned.

All of which is fine if the material being produced is visibly not true, but when it's disguised as fact, when the "bookshop" and "library" shelve the information alongside journalism and say "hey, it's not our fault if you can't distinguish between the two" then the outcomes are often life threatening.

Vaccines save lives. Every year. Gone are the days when measles or smallpox ravaged the population. Defeating such terrible diseases is one of humanity's defining points, but today we're seeing a rise in cases of diseases long thought wiped out because of a fear of vaccinations lead, in no small part, by claims going unchallenged.

US researchers have come to the alarming conclusion that a lot of the misinformation about vaccine safety is shared online by bots controlled by the same accounts that share a lot of misinformation about the US election process, about race and class and various other topics designed to disengage readers from the facts.

This misinformation campaign is aided and abetted by our social media platforms and their seeming inability to spend more than a moment or two trying to solve the problem of automated sharing of propaganda and lies.

Yes, I'm sure it's hard work and possibly very difficult but hey, social media makes all the money in publishing these days so you could try spending some on getting it right. Otherwise we're about to see an entire generation brought up to disbelieve basic truths and unable to trust the information in front of them.

BBC - Russia trolls 'spreading vaccination misinformation' to create discord

Science Daily - Bots and Russian trolls influenced vaccine discussion on Twitter, research finds

British Medical Journal - Vaccine safety: Russian bots and trolls stoked online debate, research finds


Where to from here?

Speaking of social media, once again I'm forced to poke Facebook with a stick over its seeming inability to support users' privacy.

I'll be brief.

The Privacy Commissioner had challenged Facebook over its seeming nonchalance towards the Cambridge Analytica scandal and was rewarded with a change in Facebook's terms and conditions to reflect his concerns.

Since then, Facebook has enjoyed even more criticism for its abuse of app development programmes and the harvesting of data without proper consents.

Now the Commissioner says Facebook and others should be more heavily regulated as a result, and it's hard to argue with his reasoning.

But it's not just Facebook that seems happy to turn a blind eye to the privacy of its users.

Google and Apple are coming under fire for allowing the Saudi government to launch an app that allows men to track and manage the movements of women.

Absher, which is available for download from the Google Play store and Apple's app store, is an e-government portal that allows Saudi citizens to engage with government for various paperwork related activities - registering a birth, licensing a car, getting a passport and so on.

But the app also allows Saudi men to restrict the travel of women by disallowing them to leave the country, and by limiting the dates and places women are permitted to travel.

Human rights groups have called on both Apple and Google to drop the app, and Apple CEO Tim Cook says he was unaware of the app and would be investigating it further.

At the time of writing the app is still available in the New Zealand App Store in the "productivity" section.

So what are our regulators doing about this state of affairs? Given these politicians are supposed to work for the good of the country, how's that all shaping up around the world?

Australia, as we have discussed in the past, has implemented a law designed to break encryption and security at the most fundamental layer by refusing to consider the technology itself and instead simply declaring that software developers will be responsible for ensuring the government can listen in when it wants.

That's not going too well despite the law already being used by some enforcement agencies.

In the US state of New Jersey workers who are billing the government for their time will be required to have their keystrokes recorded and monitored to prove how much they're working on a project for the government and how much time is spent goofing off doing other things.

New Jersey isn't alone - several US states are considering similar legislation under the guise of keeping contractors honest when they bid for government work.

So much for work/life balance, eh?

And in the UK it's soon to be illegal to view terrorist propaganda, even if someone else sends it to you. Think "rick-rolling" but with a 15-year prison sentence hanging over your head.

The new Counter Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019 includes a tasty little offence of obtaining information "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism"  and all you have to do is look at it once to be in breach of the law. An amendment that said a user would have to repeatedly download material to be liable was scrapped at the last minute.

It's very difficult to see any sign of any positive outcomes for us as a society if our political representatives and law makers are this inept. If they're not siding with big business, they're failing to hold online billionaires to account for their activities or they're introducing legislation that will have major impact on people and industries that they clearly don't care terribly much about.

NZ Herald - Facebook 'doubling down' on privacy abuse: NZ watchdog

Stuff - Apple and Google under fire for Saudi app that lets men track women

ZDNet - Australian anti-corruption bodies should get encryption-busting powers: PJCIS

The Register - If you want a vision of the future, imagine not a boot stamping on a face, but keystroke logging on govt contractors' PCs

The Register - One click and you're out: UK makes it an offence to view terrorist propaganda even once

UK Parliament - Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019

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When is a hack not a hack? Industry News Legal Security & Privacy The South Canterbury Property Investors' Association collection of the private details of renters is one thing, sharing them with members is something else but exposing them to the internet for all the world to see is potentially a breach of the Privacy Act and is a timely wake up call to anyone who runs a website or maintains private information on a database.

The SCPIA put together a database of renters who may have had criminal convictions (or in some cases simply charges), may have had problems paying rent in the past and various other nefarious deeds. This list was then made available to members, presumably to assist in vetting potential renters, although since the story broke the site has been taken down.

According to Stuff one Timaru resident discovered the list online while searching for her own name and was shocked to discover a 15-year old conviction for a minor offence committed when she was a teenager was tagged to her name.

Laughably, the SCPIA president, Kerry Beveridge, claims the website was hacked and he would be investigating how that happened.

However, one self-professed geek Dylan Reeve refutes this claim, pointing out via Twitter that the database was openly available on the SCPIA website for anyone to see, and showed up easily on a Google search. The SCPIA's 'database' is a 600+ page spreadsheet posted to the organisation's website with no security evident, says Reeve.

"They made no effort at all to protect these details," he says in a tweet.

Much of the information in the database comes from the Timaru Herald's court records, according to SCPIA's website.

According to the Stuff story, the New Zealand Property Investors Federation chief executive Andrew King said the group had "taken legal advice and were within the law" but the Privacy Act does not allow data to be gathered for one purpose and then used for another. 

The Privacy Commissioner's office has expressed concern about the apparent lack of security around the list and urges anyone who feels their privacy has been breached to get in touch.

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Australian parliament hack attack Industry News Legal Security & Privacy Australian politicians are being forced to change their passwords following an attempt to hack the Australian federal parliament's IT system.

The attack, which has been said not to have succeeded, is thought to have come from a foreign state, rather than from an individual or organisation.

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Alastair MacGibbon, head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre, said the government's cyber experts "would work over coming days and weeks to make sure all the breaches had been detected and the hackers' presence removed" but gave no further details. Australia's current prime minister Scott Morrison says he won't be commenting on "the source or nature of this" in any detail.

The attack comes just three months out from the next Australian election but isn't the first time such attacks have taken place.

In 2015 and 2016 there were several attacks on the weather and statistics agencies, and in 2011 some Australian ministers had their email services compromised in an attack.

Meanwhile the Australian government is pressing ahead with its so-called encryption busting legislation, despite warnings that the government doesn't understand what it is doing and the impact it will have on privacy and security.

Despite some high profile opposition to the legislation, which requires service providers to enable government access to secured messages and communications on request, the Australian government is proceeding with its introduction, and the Department of Home Affairs says the law is already being used by police and national security agencies.

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Termination for convenience in ICT contracts: It isn’t always that convenient Legal ICT Trends When ICT projects fail (and it has been reported in the past that two thirds of projects in New Zealand are failing) the customer's first reaction is often to look at terminating for breach. However, in practice, claims of breach can be expensive and time consuming to prove; the 'smoking gun' is often elusive, and breach claims are frequently let down by issues such as undocumented arrangements or where the customer's post-execution conduct has effectively muddied the waters. 

In light of this, the customer may try to cut its losses and to seek to rely on a termination for convenience provision (where they have been included in the relevant contract). This may be a sensible and practical way to bring to an end a relationship that isn't working and stem any further project losses.  Subject to any provisions that survive termination (eg indemnities or data and confidentiality provisions), termination for convenience usually relieves the parties of their further contractual obligations upon expiry of the relevant notice period. Accrued rights or liabilities as at the date of termination would survive termination (unless the contract provides otherwise).

Yet, termination for convenience provisions are not a magic bullet; ICT contracts often include minimum terms, lengthy termination notice periods and early termination charges to recover any sunk costs. In addition, while termination for convenience and damages claims are not mutually exclusive, it is worth considering the risk that the customer may limit the damages it could potentially recover by terminating for convenience rather than terminating for breach. 

Specifically, termination for convenience may have the effect of limiting the customer's losses flowing from pre-termination breaches, depending on the particular facts.  For example, one potential loss if an ICT project contract is terminated may be procuring a new supplier. If the customer terminates for breach, it may be able to recover those losses as damages. In contrast, if the contract is terminated for convenience, the supplier could argue the procurement costs arose because of the terminating party's choice to terminate rather than as a direct result of any breach. The procurement costs, and potentially other losses, may therefore not be recoverable where a contract is terminated for convenience. 

Ideally, the contract will be clear about the consequences of termination for convenience, including the potential costs that can be recovered by the parties.  However, in practice, the customer's ability to secure favourable termination provisions is dependent on the customer's leverage and it can be difficult (and sometimes impossible) to get a supplier to agree to a list of costs/losses that may be recoverable by the customer on termination. 

An alternative approach would be to make it easier for the customer to terminate for breach. For example, rather than rely on the uncertain terminology of 'material breach' it may be helpful to include examples of what will constitute grounds for termination (such as repeated service level breaches or missed key milestones). 

If favourable termination provisions cannot be secured, then, before jumping to a decision to terminate for convenience, the customer should consider its appetite to later pursue any potential damages.


This post originally appeared in the Buddle Findlay newsletter, cross-posted with kind permission.

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Brislen on Tech Industry News Innovation Legal Security & Privacy
I'm sorry, I am looking for other stories but Facebook just keeps on shooting itself in the foot over and over...]]>
It's tough at the top

There's a cycle to successful companies in the tech sector that seems to repeat itself over and over.

In the beginning, you're a start-up. You're lean, you've got no idea what you're doing but something sparks and you're off and running. Suddenly you're in public, you're loud and people love you.

From there you sell product, there's huge demand, the hype cycle kicks in and people line up to throw money at you.

Then you list on the stock market, the media goes nuts, everyone wants a piece of you, you go from sleeping on the office couch to being a billionaire (literally in some cases) and you haven't broken a sweat yet.

But then, the worm turns.

Someone starts to suggest your products aren't as slick as you'd like. Mostly everyone is positive but there's some niggling going on. A competitor might release something similar or there's some noise about delays in shipping. In an irony-free moment, the media might declare you to be "over hyped" and your shares might climb, but at a slower rate.

Now you've got to deal with investors, you can't talk as much about your exciting concepts as you used to and your new board is telling you how to run the company. You, the oracle, the one who Saw The Way when everyone else had their backs turned, are schooled on corporate life.

Now you're at the head of a multi-national. You don't know all your staff, you haven't met anywhere near all of them and you feel yourself losing control of the direction of your company.

Pretty soon other companies are gaining more market share and you're not sought out quite as much so you used to be for comment. You have people to handle that sort of thing for you.

Something goes wrong and you're thrust into the spotlight but for all the wrong reasons and it gets a bit ugly.

And then the cycle is complete. You're the incumbent and the bright new thing is someone in a different business doing something else entirely. You've become successful, and just another company in the field of technology.

Pick any incumbent today and you'll find the challenger from a decade ago. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple. Go back far enough and Microsoft was the upstart taking market share off IBM and generally upsetting the world order.

Don't take it personally but it happens constantly and there's really nothing you can do about it except know it happens and ride the wave.

If you're lucky, you can come back on top as the next challenger. Locally, Spark has made a real fist of it with its separation from Chorus and rebranding. It's not the Telecom of old any longer.

Apple did it when Steve Jobs came back and introduced the iPod and then again when it went into phones and then again when it moved into tablets but these days the shine is well and truly off the company.

Despite Apple still selling a bajillion phones and tablets, sales were down 15% year on year in the all-important Christmas quarter and most of that was missed sales in the iPhone division and a decline in revenue from its Chinese market.

CEO Tim Cook admitted that perhaps price cuts were in order, and given the flagship iPhone XS Max device stars at more than $2,000 locally and can go all the way up to $2800 (which is more than Apple's popular MacBook Air) then yes, some reconsideration might be in order.

On top of all that, Apple also ran smack into the mother of all security bugs - one which allows callers to listen in to a recipient before they answer the FaceTime call - and one which brings into doubt Apple's number one claim to fame - that it knows what it's doing and users can just get on without having to manage their device.

Some advice, Tim: if you think it's tough at the top that's nothing compared with how tough it is in the middle. Suggest you invest some more money in R&D, rebuild confidence in your brand, design the next Next Big Thing and don't look back, because objects in the mirror may be closer than you think.

9to5Mac - New York State Attorney General says Group FaceTime bug is a 'serious threat', launching investigation into how long Apple knew

Gizmodo - What's The Latest On Apple's Catastrophic FaceTime Bug?

The Register - iPhone price cuts are coming, teases Apple CEO. *Bring-bring* Hello, Apple UK? It's El Reg. You free to chat?

The Register - Apple: Good news, everyone - sales are less bad than we thought. Not amazing but not bad. $84bn is $84bn, tho




Your call may be monitored for monetary purposes

And then there's Facebook.

Once again we're forced to look at Facebook's business model and conclude that it's based on lying and cheating and once again we have yet more proof to back up the claim that the company which destroyed the advertising market is a loose cannon, rolling around the decks, causing chaos and mayhem wherever it goes.

Today's despicable-behaviour story is that Facebook decided it wasn't learning quite as much as it would look about customer behaviour and so went after the youth market, by paying teenagers to give up all their personal data via a VPN.

Facebook Research gave Facebook root access to network traffic and allowed the social network to decrypt users' phone activity for data collection purposes.

Putting aside for a moment whether users who are paid US$20 a month for their data were fully informed of the breadth and depth of the app's intrusion, Facebook has agreed to pull the app from the iOS and Android stores, but was beaten to the punch by a furious Apple which yanked Facebook's developer credentials and banned the app itself.

Facebook had slipped the app out under an Apple Enterprise Certificate programme designed to give companies the ability to publish apps aimed only at their own staff. That Facebook abused this function to launch a public-facing app really got up Tim Cook's nose so that was that.

But before we keelhaul Facebook for yet another breach, Google has a similar problem with a very similar looking app it too has released. Screenwise is a monitoring tool (albeit aimed at adults) which made use of the same Apple process and which has likewise been pulled from the e-shelves, with the added benefit of Google apologising for the breach of trust.

So marks to Google for tidying up the mess properly, and for trying to manage the whole process a little more openly than Facebook, but it really does beg the question, what on earth do these companies think they're doing?

It's one thing to analyse customer data, to seek feedback on products and services, and to try to better understand what a customer is doing, but it's something else entirely to monetise that customer, turn them into a product and sell them as a commodity without their express and informed consent.

Facebook, Google, Twitter and others have promised to tidy up their act, to clean out the "fake news" merchants and to deal with neo-Nazi sympathisers and various other nefarious activities, but have they done anything substantial? The jury is still out.

I gave up my Facebook account last year because it became clear that despite lots of intense interest in the company's activities, and parliamentary-level hearings all around the world, the company wasn't about to stop operating the way it does and wasn't able to be reined in any time soon. The only choice we have as users is whether or not we take part in the game, and I made the call to get out.

Today, Facebook's share price is US$150.42 a share, up around 5% on this time last year.


TechCrunch - Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies on them

Mother Jones - Lawmakers Want Facebook to Stop Spying on Minors

TechCrunch - Apple bans Facebook's Research app that paid users for data

TechCrunch - Google will stop peddling a data collector through Apple's back door

The Register - Furious Apple revokes Facebook's enty app cert after Zuck's crew abused it to slurp private data

The Register - Europe taps Facebook, Google, Twitter on the shoulder. So about those promises to stamp out lies, bots, dodgy ads?

The Register - Facebook cuts off independent political ad reviewers, claims security concerns

Life Hacker - How To Check If Your Kid Is Using Facebook's 'Banned' Research App

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