News of the Cyber World

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Jim Jordan Obtains Facebook Files Showing White House Pressure to Censor Americans

Never before seen emails from within Facebook obtained by the House Judiciary Committee led by chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) have shed further light on how the White House and Biden appointed government officials pressured the tech giant to infringe on the First Amendment rights of Americans.

Facebook initially resisted the Judiciary Committee’s subpoena of internal communications about White House pressure, leading the Committee to schedule a vote to hold Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress if his company did not turn over the documents.

...Facebook appears to have turned over the require documents, which reveal more of the Biden administration’s furious pressure campaign against the company to suppress discussion about important issues affecting Americans.
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In April 2021, a Facebook employee circulated an email for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, writing: “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the [Biden] White House” to remove posts.

In another April 2021 email, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global affairs, informed his team at Facebook that Andy Slavitt, a Senior Advisor to President Biden, was “outraged . . . that [Facebook] did not remove” a particular post.

When Clegg “countered that removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US,” Slavitt disregarded the warning and the First Amendment.

What happened next? Facebook panicked. In another April 2021 email, Brian Rice, Facebook’s VP of public policy, raised the concern that Slavitt’s challenge felt “very much like a crossroads for us with the [Biden] White House in these early days.”

But Facebook wanted to repair its relationship with the White House to avoid adverse action: “Given what is at stake here, it would also be a good idea if we could regroup and take stock of where we are in our relations with the [White House], and our internal methods too.”
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Facebook also changed its policies in direct response to pressure from Biden's Surgeon General, censoring members of the “disinformation dozen.”

Rep. Jordan also revealed that the White House demanded to know why Facebook had not censored a clip from Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. In response, Facebook was “ready to tell the White House that it had demoted a video posted by Tucker Carlson by 50% in response to the White House’s demands, even though the post didn’t violate any policies.”

Meta Fined $20 Million for Undisclosed User Data Collection

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (formerly Facebook) and its subsidiary has been slapped with $20 million (US$13.54 million) in fines after an Australian court found it secretly harvested data from users.

Onavo Protect, which was acquired by Meta in 2013, is a free virtual private network service that promised to keep user data “safe online” and give customers “peace of mind” when browsing the internet.

However, in 2020, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) filed a lawsuit against the company and Facebook Israel alleging that the app was secretly collecting “significant amounts” of data for commercial purposes from February 2016 to October 2017.

The consumer watchdog said Onavo Protect was tracking online activity and even recording the number of seconds spent on the app, alongside IP addresses.

Further, if users had a Facebook account, Meta would combine the data to learn “nearly everything” they were doing on their mobile device.

“Meta and Facebook Israel’s internal documents state that Onavo Protect was ‘a business intelligence tool’ for Meta, which provided Meta with ‘a sample of users who we are able to know nearly everything they are doing on their mobile device,'” wrote Federal Court Justice Wendy Abraham in her judgement on July 26.

Apple Faces $1 Billion UK Lawsuit by Apps Developers Over App Store Fees

Apple on Tuesday found itself the target of a 785-million-pound ($1 billion) class action lawsuit brought by more than 1,500 apps developers in the UK over its App Store fees.

Apple’s services business, which includes the App Store, has seen revenues grow at a rapid pace in the last few years and now hovers around $20 billion per quarter.

However, the commissions of 15 percent to 30 percent that the company charges some app makers for the use of an in-app payment system has been criticized by apps developers and targeted by antitrust regulators in several countries.

Apple has previously said that 85 percent of developers on the App Store do not pay any commission and that it helps European developers to access markets and customers in 175 countries around the world through the App Store.

The UK lawsuit at the Competition Appeal Tribunal is being brought by Sean Ennis, a professor at the Centre for Competition Policy at the University of East Anglia and a former economist at the OECD, on behalf of 1,566 app developers.

Details of 5,500 Google Accounts Handed Over to Australian Authorities

In one year, tech giant Google received over 6,300 requests from Australian authorities to disclose user data.

According to Google’s “Global Requests for User Information” report, the search giant allows government agencies around the world to submit requests for information for “civil, administrative, criminal, and national security purposes.”

“In this Global Requests report, we share information about the number and type of requests we receive from government agencies where permitted by applicable laws,” Google says.

In Australia, over the course of 2022, the tech giant received 6,335 requests for information regarding the activities of 7,183 accounts.

Google ended up agreeing to 5,525 requests from Australian authorities, likely including law enforcement and online safety agencies.
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Requests of this nature have increased yearly, notably since 2014, when there were just 1,711 requests for data.
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In 2014, U.S. authorities issued 22,520 requests for data, which increased to 111,608 by 2022.

On average, Google will acquiesce to around 75 to 85 percent of requests.

A similar situation is playing out with Meta (formerly Facebook) across the UK, United States, and Australia.

In 2014 in Australia, Meta received just 1,439 requests for user information, and yet by 2020, this number increased to 2,965, and by 2022 reached 4,287.

While U.S. authorities issued 29,700 requests in 2014 and 133,500 in 2022.

Apple Releases iPhone Security Fix as Expert Urges Users to Update Their Devices Now

Apple Inc. on Monday released updates to its iOS and MacOS operating systems that fix multiple security vulnerabilities and bugs.

The Cupertino, California-based firm said it released iOS and iPadOS 16.6 and MacOS 13.5 to fix a range of “actively exploited” security bugs, along with a number of other security fixes for problems that have been reported to Apple. As usual, Apple said it would not disclose or discuss the nature of the security flaws that are being fixed.
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The update provided several fixes for kernel vulnerabilities, including one that could allow a program to modify a kernel state and may have been actively exploited in the wild. According to Apple, the bug is now patched on all of its platforms.
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The updates also patched a vulnerability to WebKit, the engine that powers the Safari browser, that Apple also said could have been actively exploited.

Boris Larin, a security researcher with antivirus software maker Kaspersky, urged users on Monday to update their devices after the Apple fix was issued.

Elon Musk Reveals New ‘X’ Logo to Replace Twitter’s Blue Bird

The X started appearing at the top of the desktop version of Twitter on Monday, but the bird was still dominant across the smartphone app. At Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, meanwhile, workers were seen removing the iconic bird and logo Monday until police showed up and stopped them because they didn’t have the proper permits and didn’t tape off the sidewalk to keep pedestrians safe if anything fell.

As of early afternoon, the “er” at the end of Twitter remained visible.

Mr. Musk had asked fans for logo ideas and chose one, which he described as minimalist Art Deco, saying it “certainly will be refined.” He replaced his own Twitter icon with a white X on a black background and posted a picture of the design projected on Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.

“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Mr. Musk wrote on Twitter Sunday.

The X.com web domain now redirects users to Twitter.com, Mr. Musk said.
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Linda Yaccarino, the longtime NBC Universal executive Musk tapped to be Twitter CEO in May, posted the new logo and weighed in on the change, writing on Twitter that X would be “the future state of unlimited interactivity—centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking—creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”