Tag: Privacy

DHS Facial Recognition facial recognition social media monitoring

EPIC, Coalition Urge DHS to End Broad, Unwarranted Surveillance Programs

In a letter to the Secretary of Homeland Security, EPIC and a Coalition of privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties organizations demanded the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) end some of the agency’s more pervasive surveillance programs. The coalition called for DHS to end its practice of purchasing sensitive data (e.g. cellphone location and utility information) from third-party vendors and cease the collection of social media identifiers. The coalition also urged DHS to implement a moratorium on the use of face recognition for immigration enforcement. In previous comments to DHS, EPIC opposed DHS collecting social media identifiers and called for DHS to suspend the use of facial recognition.

Continue reading

children consumer Facebook FTC teens

Senators Announce Probe into Facebook’s Alleged Coverup of its Negative Influence on Children and Teens

Today, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn announced an investigation into Facebook’s knowledge and coverup of the harmful effects of Facebook’s Instagram on children and teenagers. The announcement follows a Wall Street Journal investigation which revealed that Facebook’s researchers found that Instagram is harmful to a “sizeable percentage” of its young users, most notably teenage girls. Internally, Facebook knew that Instagram’s effects on young people included increased anxiety and depression, body image issues, and thoughts of suicide. Publicly, CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress that Facebook’s research suggested that the use of its social media apps had positive mental health benefits to users. The Wall Street Journal uncovered several documents that “show that Facebook has made minimal efforts to address these issues and plays them down in public.” In response to Senators Blumenthal and Blackburn’s August 2020 request for Facebook to release its internal research on the matter, Facebook sent a six-page letter that did not include the company’s studies. EPIC has fought for transparency and accountability for Facebook’s privacy abuses for over a decade, from filing the original FTC Complaint in 2009 that led to the FTC’s 2012 Consent Order with the company, to moving to intervene in and filing an amicus brief challenging the FTC’s 2019 settlement with Facebook.

Continue reading

SSN consumer

EPIC, Coalition to Senators: Reject Plan Requiring SSN Collection by Peer-to-Peer Payment Services

EPIC and a coalition of privacy and consumer rights group today sent a letter to Senators Ron Wyden and Mike Crapo of the Senate Finance Committee regarding a proposal under consideration in the budget reconciliation bill to expand the mandatory reporting regime for private financial information in the United States. The proposal would require peer-to-peer payment apps and other similar services such as Square Cash and Venmo to collect Taxpayer Identification Numbers (“TINs”) for virtually all payee accounts in order to comply with new reporting obligations. Because most individuals do not hold a separate TIN from their Social Security Number, unlike businesses, this means that these private entities will be collecting SSNs of millions of Americans. The groups urged the Senators to reject the Treasury Department’s proposal and instead explore ways to improve tax compliance that do not put Americans’ SSNs at risk. “At minimum, the expanded reporting requirement should be scaled back to apply only to business accounts or individual accounts with a high de minimus threshold, adjusted for inflation over time,” the groups said. “Peer to Peer payment apps and other similar services that currently do not collect TINs should not be required to do so under the new reporting requirements.”

Continue reading

DPA FTC consumer policy

House Committee Approves $1B to Create New Privacy Bureau at FTC

The House Energy and Commerce Committee today approved a $1 billion appropriation for the Federal Trade Commission to create and operate a new bureau focused on privacy, data security, identity theft, data abuses, and related matters. EPIC strongly supports the appropriation, but urges Congress to follow up this budget measure with comprehensive privacy legislation and create an independent data protection agency. “This increased funding for enforcement is a step in the right direction, but the increasing pervasiveness of technology in our lives and our economy necessitates an update to our privacy laws and a dedicated agency,” said Caitriona Fitzgerald, EPIC’s Deputy Director. “While the FTC helps to safeguard consumers and promote competition, it is not a data protection agency. Congress must follow up this budget measure with comprehensive baseline privacy legislation and the creation of an independent data protection agency. And the FTC should use these funds to promptly initiate a privacy rulemaking and go after unfair data practices and biased AI systems.” EPIC has long advocated for the creation of a U.S. Data Protection Agency.

Continue reading

Federal Trade Commission

Privacy & Civil Rights Expert Alvaro Bedoya Nominated to Federal Trade Commission

President Biden has nominated Alvaro Bedoya, founding director of the Georgetown Center on Privacy & Technology, to serve as member of the Federal Trade Commission. Bedoya will succeed Commissioner Rohit Chopra when confirmed by the Senate. As a legal scholar and advocate, Bedoya has exposed the harms and biases of facial recognition technology and argued for legislation that would prevent predatory and discriminatory targeting of online ads. Bedoya is the author of Privacy as a Civil Right, in which he details how “the burdens of government surveillance have fallen overwhelmingly on the shoulders of immigrants, heretics, people of color, the poor, and anyone else considered ‘other'” and argues that privacy must be understood as a “shield that allows the unpopular and persecuted to survive and thrive.” Bedoya previously served as Chief Counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. “Alvaro brings more than a decade of experience in privacy and surveillance issues, including a special focus on the impact that invasive technologies have on communities of color, to an FTC that needs to quickly and dramatically ramp up its responses to these emerging threats,” said Alan Butler, EPIC’s Executive Director. “There is no doubt that his expertise on these issues will put the Commission in a much better position to investigate data abuses and to craft new rules to bring these invasive business practices under control.”

Continue reading

EPIC Urges UK Surveillance Commissioner to Foreground Privacy, Ban Facial Recognition in Updates to Surveillance Camera Code

EPIC has submitted comments to the Biometrics and Surveillance Commissioner of the United Kingdom on proposed updates to the Surveillance Camera Code of Practice. The currents updates proposed focus on aligning the Code with developments in surveillance law and recent court decisions. EPIC’s comment contains several recommends to more directly address surveillance risks to privacy and international human rights, including banning facial recognition technology, emotion recognition, and biometric categorization systems, setting clear assessment and consultation requirements criteria for databases used for matching technology and consultations, and strengthening protections against improper use of facial and biometric recognition systems. EPIC contributes substantially to ongoing efforts in protections against surveillance, including a campaign to ban facial recognition technology and filing suit against agencies misusing surveillance technology, as in a recent suit against the Postal Service .

Continue reading

EPIC Amicus Filing Lindenbaum

Sixth Circuit Says Callers Liable for Illegal Robocalls Made in 2015-2020

The Sixth Circuit has rejected a robocall defendant’s bid to use the Supreme Court’s decision last year in Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants to create immunity for illegal robocalls made between 2015 and 2020. In Barr, the Supreme Court found that an exception added in 2015 to the decades-old robocall restriction was unconstitutional and must be severed from the law. The defendant in the case before the Sixth Circuit, Lindenbaum v. Realgy, LLC, argued that the decision in Barr made the broad robocall ban unenforceable for the period between the unconstitutional exception’s enactment and the Supreme Court’s decision to sever, from 2015-2020. The district court agreed and threw the lawsuit out. The Sixth Circuit’s decision reverses the district court and allows the robocall suit to continue. EPIC and the National Consumer Law Center filed an amicus brief in the case arguing that granting robocallers immunity “would reward those who made tens of billions of unwanted robocalls and deprive consumers of any remedy for the incessant invasion of their privacy.” EPIC regularly files amicus briefs supporting consumers in illegal robocall cases.

Continue reading

Jeff Deist: You recently completed a series of articles for the Mises Institute, which we will publish in book form, on how money works today. Why is it important for average people to understand the mechanics of the plumbing of central and commercial banks?

Bob Murphy: There’s two main reasons. First, it’s intrinsically interesting. That’s why I went into economics. Just like the average person should know the basics about physics and chemistry and Darwin’s theory of evolution, likewise, the average person needs to know: How does money work, how do banks work? Just the raw basics of it because it’s an important part of modern society, even premodern society, in terms of money. But beyond that, because central banks certainly since 2008 and even more so in the wake of the pandemic in 2020 have done lots of things that I believe are setting the world up for a series of major financial crises, and the average person needs to know about this.

JD: Considering the monetary and fiscal machinations engaged in by governments since the pandemic, it’s as though we lost any sense of what money is. It seems unlimited. People on Twitter tell us money is just information, or energy in a system.

BM: I do know what you’re saying. On the one hand, I can’t bristle too much when outsiders, people like Eric Weinstein, come forward and they say the economists have just botched it. I get why they’re saying it, because the economists have done such a poor job. It’s hard for me to say hey, stay in your lane, leave money to the economists. But, on the other hand, you’re right. We shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the older-school economists and the ones in the Austrian tradition don’t know anything and that there’s no point in reading them. There are lots of fallacies that intelligent people who are not conversant with the economics literature might fall prey to, just like if you go into philosophy, there are lots of detours, and you would do well to take a basic course in philosophy to avoid fallacies that plagued people centuries ago. Likewise with money, there are lots of ways you can go down the wrong path, and some of these bright people who are spouting off on Twitter are just going over stuff that was demolished by Mises in 1912. They’re just repeating those fallacies and it’s because they never heard of it before.

JD: To be fair, the average Joe or Jane might well say money is just this made-up thing government tells us to use.

BM: Exactly, and it’s interesting because there is this sense in which money is a social convention, but it’s not merely a social convention. Just like spoken language is a social convention in a sense but that doesn’t mean words can just mean whatever you want. Money is a complex topic and it is easy to think of money incorrectly and certainly to then endorse government policies…

Continue reading

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

(Psst: The FTC wants me to remind you that this website contains affiliate links. That means if you make a purchase from a link you click on, I might receive a small commission. This does not increase the price you’ll pay for that item nor does it decrease the awesomeness of the item. ~ Daisy)

by Jeff Thompson

For those who may not know, (and those who do) here is a primer on The Great Reset.

Buckle your seat belts for this one because it’s more chilling than any horror movie you’ve ever seen. You’ve heard your “crazy” friend at work bring it up in conversation. Perhaps you heard it briefly mentioned on TV the other day. And now you’re left wondering, “Just what on earth is The Great Reset?”

Meet the World Economic Forum (WEF)

You’ve heard of the WEF before. They’ve been in the news quite a bit for the past year or so. The reason? The Great Reset initiative. It is there that a man by the name of Klaus Schwabb runs the show. Schwabb founded the WEF and is one of the most powerful men in the world.

Each year the World Economic Forum hosts an event at a ski resort in the mountains of Switzerland where “the self-proclaimed global elite” meet to discuss global problems they can all work together to “fix.”

Generally, WEF invites 1500 people from roughly 70 countries to attend. All the attendees play major roles in various sectors of society, with a large portion of those invited being major players in the worlds of politics and business. 

In 2020, Schwabb released a book titled COVID-19: The Great Reset, in which he lays out his plans for what he believes needs to happen next.  

Now, let’s talk about Agendas

First, you need to understand one thing: the World Economic Forum and the United Nations march together hand in hand. In short, they’re two sides of the same coin.

The United Nations previously announced two separate agendas eerily similar to The Great Reset that contain many of the same components. These two UN agendas, Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030, include plans for what needs to happen on earth by 2021 and 2030 (there’s also an Agenda 2050, by the way).

Agenda 2030 has publicly stated goals of promoting racial and gender equality, eradicating global poverty, and abolishing violence, hate, and war from the globe. It also states it will reduce natural resource use in every country and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in every industrialized country. 

And how do you suppose Agenda 2030 would accomplish those goals?

Suppose you’re a lumberjack. A global organization has just stated you’re no longer permitted to cut down trees to “reduce natural resource use.” You’re now out of a job and can’t afford to feed your newborn daughter.

Or, let’s say you’re a farmer. A global organization…

Continue reading

consumer Facebook WhatsApp

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission Fines WhatsApp €225 million

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) fined Facebook’s WhatsApp €225 million ($266 million) for privacy violations following a GDPR investigation that began in 2018. In the decision, the data privacy regulator explained that WhatsApp breached the GDPR’s rules about data transparency, including when it processed user information between WhatsApp and other Facebook companies. While the €225 million fine is a record for the DPC and the second largest fine ever issued under the GDPR, privacy advocate and EPIC Advisor Max Schrems noted “[t]he DPC also proposed an initial € 50 million fine and was forced by the other European data protection authorities to move towards € 225 million, which is still only 0.08% of the turnover of the Facebook Group. The GDPR foresees fines of up to 4% of the turnover.” EPIC has long urged the Federal Trade Commission to block or unwind Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. In 2014, EPIC and the Center for Digital Democracy warned the FTC that Facebook incorporates user data from companies it acquires, and that WhatsApp users objected to the acquisition. Despite these problems, the FTC allowed the merger to go forward.

Continue reading