Inauguration Has Happened, Google And Facebook Should End The Ban On Political Advertisements

from the it's-not-all-presidential-campaigns-and-nonsense dept

In light of the events at the Capitol, social media and other online companies have been reevaluating who they let speak on their platforms. The ban of President Trump from Twitter, Facebook, and various other platforms has sparked fierce debate over moderation and free speech. But Google’s recently reinstituted ban on political advertisements until at least inauguration day and the continued ban from Facebook are silencing voices that need to be heard the most – those speaking about state and local political issues.

Before last November’s election, both Google and Facebook restricted the ability of political advertisers to submit and run new ads. This policy was implemented to prevent situations like those in 2016, when Russian agents were able to purchase $100,000 in Facebook ads related to that year’s presidential election. Although these ads did nothing to affect the outcome of the election, they gave rise to the spurious narrative that Russia “hacked” the election.

But Facebook’s ban has continued far past election day under the stated purpose of preventing ads claiming the election results were rigged or that the election had been stolen. Google eventually returned to allowing ads and Facebook made an exception for the Georgia runoff. However, the companies’ most recent bans leave many smaller speakers without two of their most important platforms, despite the policies’ failure to prevent the spread of doubt over the 2020 election results.

Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ted Cruz, while certainly benefiting from social media, can reach an audience without these platforms. But many other speakers who want to speak to local audiences about important political issues have come to rely on them.

Before the advent of targeted online advertisements, communicating and organizing locally required going door-to-door or hanging flyers in your neighborhood. If you could find enough support, perhaps you could even set up a meeting in a public space. The old system was not only inefficient, but often costly in terms of time and money.

This is what makes advertising on Facebook and Google so valuable to those wanting to engage on important issues. Want to inform your neighbors about a city board meeting over a key issue for your community? Want to build a coalition of people to support or oppose an issue at your state capitol? Facebook and Google can do so more successfully, and at a fraction of the cost.

This is often the most important kind of political engagement - forming relationships with your fellow citizens to make your voices heard on issues that carry major personal impacts and are far too often under-reported and less understood.

And make no mistake, the last year has featured no shortage of critical state and local issues.

State legislatures are already in session dealing with important and contentious topics like education, budget cuts, and of course, the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine. Local governments are still dealing with shutdowns and business closures as the pandemic continues into 2021. And as organizing in person gets increasingly difficult, if not impossible, digital tools are becoming even more important.

Key state and local issues are also too often drowned out by politics at the national level. Given the turbulent times we are living through, who can blame people for being glued to the events unfolding in Washington? That’s why Facebook and Google ads are important tools to draw attention to state and local issues.

Inauguration is over and the stated purpose of banning these ads has passed. But more importantly our federalist system of government means that politics don’t only happen at the national level. Rather, the political issues that most greatly affect our lives are those closest to home. Facebook and Google should recognize this fact and end its political ad ban which puts national politics ahead of state and local issues.

The internet is at its best when it informs and connects local communities on the issues that impact them. Blanket political ad bans lessen the opportunity for this kind of much-needed engagement while also failing to improve the national discourse.

Eric Peterson lives in New Orleans where he is the Director of the Pelican Center for Technology and Innovation

Filed Under: messaging, political ads, politics, social media
Companies: facebook, google, twitter

BlackBerry Continues Its Shameful Descent Into Patent Trolling By Suing Twitter

from the those-who-can't-innovate,-litigate dept

BlackBerry (under its original name RIM) was always a bit of a patent troll. While it did have some early innovations in the mobile device space, and had popular actual products on the market for a while, it always had a habit of vindictively suing any company that seemed to be offering anything remotely similar to its products. Perhaps the company should have spent more time focused on its actual product rather than suing for patent infringement. Otherwise, its market share chart wouldn't have looked like this, courtesy of Statista:

However, now that its business of selling actual products has bottomed out, it's gone back to its earlier focus of suing totally random companies for doing fairly obvious things, and claiming that they violate Blackberry's patents. Last year, we covered its silly lawsuit against Facebook that only got them hit with an equally silly countersuit from Facebook.

And now BlackBerry has sued Twitter as well (incredibly, TechCrunch -- and nearly all other publications writing about this -- did not actually post the filing, but you can find it here). The lawsuit is completely silly, and should be embarrassing and shameful for Blackberry and its high priced lawyers (who know better). It claims that it invented "mobile messaging" and that Twitter, as a "latecomer" to the market, has "diverted" people away from Blackberry.

BlackBerry Pioneers Mobile Messaging - BlackBerry has been a leading innovator in the field of mobile communications for the past 30 years, having invested substantial sums into research and development of communications technologies. BlackBerry’s innovations led to the commercialization of some of the earliest models of smartphones in the United States, enabling its users to, among other things, send and receive e-mails securely and surf the internet anytime and anywhere. These same innovations prompted the rise of the smartphone as a necessary everyday accessory for businesspersons and ordinary consumers alike.

One example of BlackBerry’s innovations is the BlackBerry Messenger technology, which revolutionized instant messaging by providing users with secure, user-friendly, point-to-point instant messaging on their mobile devices. In many respects, through BlackBerry Messenger and other research and development, BlackBerry helped pioneer modern mobile messaging—secure, instant and user friendly on a mobile device. The appeal and success of BlackBerry Messenger led consumers to consider instant messaging functionality as an integral aspect of mobile communications, resulting today in billions of people worldwide engaging in instant messaging over their mobile devices.

Lots of folks developed mobile messaging, mostly by taking fairly obvious cues from existing computer messaging and email, which was created decades earlier, often borrowing from other types of messages, like the physical mail. There was no magic invention in taking messaging "mobile" that deserves any sort of patent. But then to suggest that Twitter "copied" Blackberry is laughable as well:

Defendant, on the other hand, is a relative latecomer to the mobile messaging world. Defendant created mobile messaging applications that co-opt BlackBerry’s innovations, using a number of the innovative user interface and functionality enhancing features that made BlackBerry’s products such a critical and commercial success in the first place.

Even more insane: claiming that Twitter's messaging features somehow drive users away from Blackberry -- a company whose business dried up for tons of reasons having absolutely nothing to do with Twitter.

Defendant’s use of BlackBerry’s inventions, and infringement of the Patents-in-Suit, has succeeded in diverting consumers away from BlackBerry’s products and services and toward those of Defendant. This has resulted in a substantial and undeserved windfall for Defendant as these users drive Defendant’s revenue. Defendant’s gain comes at BlackBerry’s expense, depriving BlackBerry of revenue to which it is entitled as a result of its inventions.

Oh come on, Blackberry. Don't make me laugh. Actually, clearly, Blackberry does want me to have a good chuckle, because check out these "innovations" it claims are oh so precious and unique to Blackberry:

User Interface Improvements For Mobile Devices—including (i) improvements in message notification techniques that streamline and optimize reception of new message notifications that prevent users from being inundated with numerous messaging notifications, (ii) resetting a new message indicator when a user accesses their inbox list of messaging conversations, which saves users from having to individually view each conversation in which there is a new message in order to reset their new message indicator;

(b) Messaging and Social Networking Improvements for Mobile Devices— including (i) improved techniques for determining whether a recipient has read messages in a conversation by inferring the status of one or more of the messages, thereby reducing data transmissions, power consumption and improving battery life in mobile devices, and (ii) improved techniques for making informational content, selected by one user, available to one or more other users via a data hub server that avoids users having to download and reupload content that they wish to share, thereby reducing unnecessary data transmissions, power consumption and improving battery life in mobile devices; and

(c) Mobile Advertising—improved techniques of delivering targeted advertising and content to mobile devices based on user demographics and interest, as well as the location of the user’s mobile device and time-based triggers.

If you don't want to read that wall of text, Blackberry's big inventions -- which it claims Twitter copied and is using to deprive it of tons of income -- are:

1. New message notifications
2. Resetting the new message indicator when someone checks their inbox
3. Message read status
4. Server hosting to make sharing messages easier without having to upload
5. Mobile advertising

Really? To argue that all of these are (1) patent worthy (2) non-obvious and (3) key revenue or even usage drivers is literally crazy. Someone go check in on the folks at Blackberry and their lawyers to make sure they're still in touch with reality. This is an obnoxious patent trolling experience, and Blackberry should be embarrassed. If you want to look at the actual patents in this suit they are:

• US Patent 8,676,929: "System and method for pushing information to a mobile device"
• US Patent 8,296,351: "System and method for pushing information to a mobile device"
• US Patent 9,349,120: "System and method for silencing notifications for a message thread"
• US Patent 9,021,059: "Data hub server"
• US Patent 8,286,089: "Representing new messages on a communication device"
• US Patent 8,572,182: "Handling notifications in instant messaging systems"

I hope that Twitter gets each and every one of these patents invalidated and people continue to shun and mock BlackBerry for being an obnoxious patent troll, spitefully suing others for innovating where it fell down on the job and flopped.

Filed Under: messaging, patent trolling, patents
Companies: blackberry, twitter

Researchers Say Chinese Government Now Censoring Images In One-To-One Chat

from the shot-spotters dept

It looks like China is continuing to set the gold standard for internet censorship. For a long time, the Great Firewall has been actively censoring content based on keywords. Activists and dissidents have worked around this filtering by placing text in images, but that doesn't appear to be working nearly as well as it used to.

Toronto's Citizen Lab noticed some unusual things happening in days surrounding the death of China's only Nobel Peace Prize winner (and longtime political prisoner), Liu Xiaobo.

On WeChat, we collected keywords that trigger message censorship related to Liu Xiaobo before and after his death. Before his death, messages were blocked that contained his name in combination with other words, for example those related to his medical treatment or requests to receive care abroad. However, after his death, we found that simply including his name was enough to trigger blocking of messages, in English and both simplified and traditional Chinese. In other words, WeChat issued a blanket ban on his name after his death, greatly expanding the scope of censorship.

We documented censorship of images related to Liu on WeChat after his death, and for the first time found images blocked in one-to-one chat. We also found images blocked in group chat and WeChat Moments (a feature that resembles Facebook’s Timeline where users can share updates, upload images, and short videos or articles with their friends), before and after his death.

China has tackled image censorship before, but it hasn't been able to achieve this in one-to-one chat until now. And it's being done stealthily to prevent senders or receivers from knowing their images have been blocked.

Similar to keyword-based filtering, censorship of images is only enabled for users with accounts registered to mainland China phone numbers. The filtering is also not transparent. No notice is given to a user if the picture they sent is blocked. Censorship of an image is concealed from the user who posted the censored image.

The censorship is only apparent to international users without registered Chinese phone numbers. And, like most blanket censorship efforts, it's far from perfect.

The exact mechanism that WeChat uses to determine which images to filter is unclear and in our testing sample we found unexpected results. Blocked images included screenshots of official government statements on Liu Xiaobo’s death, which we did not expect to be censored. We also found images that were not blocked that could be seen as sensitive, such as an image of book covers of “Charter 08” and a Biography of Liu Xiaobo, which are both banned in mainland China.

As Citizen Lab points out, this censorship effort is especially concerning, as it indicates the Chinese government is possibly in the business of internet-enabled retroactive amnesia. If it leaves the filtering in place long enough and censors enough websites and personal chats, the history of Liu Xiaobo will be slowly rewritten with narratives approved by the Chinese government.

Filed Under: censorship, chat, china, free speech, images, messaging, one on one

Senate Given The Go-Ahead To Use Encrypted Messaging App Signal

from the feinstein,-burr-will-continue-to-use-AOL-chatrooms dept

Certain senators have repeatedly pushed for encryption bans or encryption backdoors, sacrificing personal security for national security in a move that will definitively result in less of both. Former FBI Director James Comey's incessant beating of his "Going Dark" drum didn't help. Several legislators always managed to get sucked in by his narrative of thousands of unsearched phones presumably being tied to thousands of unsolved crimes and free-roaming criminals.

It will be interesting if the anti-encryption narratives advanced by Sens. Feinstein and Burr (in particular -- although others equally sympathetic) continue now that senators can officially begin using an encrypted messaging system for their own communications.

Without any fanfare, the Senate Sergeant at Arms recently told Senate staffers that Signal, widely considered by security researchers and experts to be the most secure encrypted messaging app, has been approved for use.

The news was revealed in a letter Tuesday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a staunch privacy and encryption advocate, who recognized the effort to allow the encrypted messaging app as one of many "important defensive cybersecurity" measures introduced in the chamber.

ZDNet has learned the policy change went into effect in March.

If this isn't the end of CryptoWar 2.0, then it's at least a significant ceasefire. Senators are going to find it very hard to argue against encrypted communications when they're allowed to use encrypted messaging apps. It's not that legislators are above hypocrisy. It's just that they usually allow a certain amount of time to pass before they commence openly-hypocritical activity.

This doesn't mean the rest of the government is allowed to use encrypted chat apps for official communications. Federal agencies fall under a different set of rules -- ones that provide for more comprehensive retention of communications under FOIA law. Congressional communications, however, generally can't be FOIA'ed. It usually takes a backdoor search at federal agencies to cut these loose. So, members of Congress using an encrypted chat app with self-destructing messages may seem like the perfect way to avoid transparency, but it's the law itself that provides most of the opacity.

If encryption's good for the Senate, it's good for the public. There's no other way to spin this. Even Trump's pro-law enforcement enthusiasm is unlikely to be enough to sell Congress on encryption backdoors. With this power in the palm of their hands, they're more apt to see the benefits of leaving encryption un-fucked with.

Filed Under: encryption, end to end encryption, messaging, senate, signal

Thai Government Demands Popular Chat App Reveal Any Time Any User Insults The King

from the encrypted-chats-are-important dept

I spent some time in Asia earlier this year, and while people in the US focus on Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Google Hangouts and a variety of other chat apps, the chat app of choice over there was Line. Basically everyone used it. A year ago, Line moved towards true end-to-end encryption. Earlier this year, the company made end-to-end encrypted chats the default, rather than as a user option (Thank you Snowden!).

Good timing. The company has apparently now refused to obey a Thai government demand that it alert the government to anyone insulting the Thai royal family on the messaging app. For years, we've written about Thailand's ridiculous lese majeste laws, which make it a crime to insult the king. As we've noted, the law is used as a way to censor and crack down on political opponents. And, of course, with the death of the Thai king last month, there's been a sudden uptick in Thai officials going after people for supposed lese majeste violations.

But Line is telling the government that it just can't help out here.

"We do not monitor or block user content. User content is also encrypted, and cannot be viewed by LINE," the statement sent to DPA said.

Of course, there's been some controversy in the past over this. Back in 2014, Thailand announced that it was instituting a broad surveillance program to snoop on basically all internet communications for the sake of seeking out and punishing lese majeste violators. A few months later, Thai government officials flat out claimed that this included monitoring Line messages, something that the company flat out denied (though, that may have also inspired the move to encryption). While Thai officials have, at times, even claimed the ability to read encrypted messages, it seemed like that was just idle boasting, rather than a legitimate revelation of surveillance capabilities.

There is one oddity about Line's response to the Thai government, though:

"We ask the authorities seeking to obtain user data to make official requests through diplomatic channels and have so advised the Thai authorities," LINE added.

So, uh, if the messages are all end-to-end encrypted and there's no way for Line to access them to share with any government, why is it asking the Thai government to use diplomatic channels to make an official request?

Filed Under: chat, encryption, insults, king, lese majeste, messaging, thailand
Companies: line

Privacy Groups File FTC Complaint Over Whatsapp Facebook Privacy 'Bait And Switch'

from the privacy-schmivacy dept

When popular messaging app Whatsapp was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion, the company responded to the obvious privacy implications with a blog post promising to "set the record straight" about the acquisition, while debunking all of the "inaccurate and careless information" being circulated online. In it, co-founder Jan Koum promised that the app, which has tried to build a reputation on respecting user privacy, would keep privacy at the heart of its operations under Facebook. Privacy was, Koum promised, simply "coded into our DNA":

"Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA, and we built WhatsApp around the goal of knowing as little about you as possible: You don't have to give us your name and we don't ask for your email address. We don’t know your birthday. We don’t know your home address. We don’t know where you work. We don’t know your likes, what you search for on the internet or collect your GPS location. None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we really have no plans to change that."

That was then, this is now.

Last week, the company announced in a new blog post that it would soon begin sharing Whatsapp user phone numbers and various analytics data with Facebook. While this is obviously about money, the company's blog post repeatedly insisted the move was about helping the end user avoid spam and make stronger, deeper connections with friends:

"But by coordinating more with Facebook, we'll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp. And by connecting your phone number with Facebook's systems, Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them. For example, you might see an ad from a company you already work with, rather than one from someone you've never heard of."

Gosh, thanks. The Electronic Privacy Information Center was quick to claim that Facebook and Whatsapp may have violated federal law with the move. The group notes it filed an FTC complaint back in 2014 (pdf) expressing concern that failure to obtain users' opt-in consent before modifying privacy practices was an "unfair and deceptive trade practice" violating Facebook’s FTC Consent Order (pdf). In a subsequent letter from the FTC to Whatsapp (pdf), the FTC warned the two companies that they must honor their privacy promises to WhatsApp users.

As expected, EPIC and the Center for Digital Democracy have filed a formal complaint with the FTC (pdf), accusing Facebook of violating Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act. In public statements, both organizations accuse Facebook and Whatsapp of a "bait and switch" on previous promises that user information would not be used for marketing across the Facebook social media empire:

"The FTC has an obligation to protect WhatsApp users. Their personal information should not be incorporated into Facebook’s sophisticated data driven marketing business,” said Katharina Kopp, Ph.D., and CDD’s Director of Policy. “Data that was collected under clear rules should not be used in violation of the privacy promises that WhatsApp made. That is a significant change that requires an opt-in, according to the terms the FTC set out. It’s not complicated. If WhatsApp wants to transfer user data to Facebook, it has to obtain the user’s affirmative consent."

Whatsapp users looking to opt out of data collection within the 30 day warning window simply have to uncheck the "share my account info" box before accepting WhatsApp's newly updated terms and conditions. Users who accidentally approved the new TOS still have several weeks to uncheck this same box by clicking on "settings," "account," then unchecking the same "share my account info" box. Granted the Whatsapp opt out instructions note that even after doing this you're still not entirely opted out of having this data shared with the "Facebook family of companies":

"The Facebook family of companies will still receive and use this information for other purposes such as improving infrastructure and delivery systems, understanding how our services or theirs are used, securing systems, and fighting spam, abuse, or infringement activities."

It seems unlikely that the EPIC and CDD complaints gain much traction. Fortunately, unlike sectors like telecom, users here aren't stuck waiting on regulators since they already have the choice of alternative, open source (and frankly already more secure) encrypted messaging options.

Filed Under: encryption, messaging, privacy
Companies: facebook, whatsapp

The Rise Of More Secure Alternatives To Everyone's Favorite Chat App, Slack

from the well-this-could-get-interesting dept

Like a ton of people and companies, we've been using Slack here. While we saw some folks claim it was revolutionary, we found it to be a nice, but somewhat marginal, upgrade to our previous use of Skype chat rooms. But, over time, it has certainly gotten comfortable, and there have been some nice feature add-ons and integrations that have made it a pretty cool service overall -- though if you really want to use it to its fullest extent and switch to the paid version, it can get pretty pricey, pretty quickly. I also am in a bunch of other group Slack chats, as it's basically become the platform of choice for group discussions.

However, in these days where hacked emails are in the headlines, I can see why some might get nervous about using a tool like Slack. Not that there have been any known breaches of Slack that I'm aware of, and I'm sure that the company takes security very seriously (it would undermine its entire business if it failed on that front...), it's been interesting to see other options start to pop up, which might be more appetizing for those who are extra security conscious.

Just as we've been encouraged to see greater use of encryption on mobile phones, email and on websites, it's good to see new entrants trying to take on Slack with a focus on security and privacy. The most recent, and perhaps most interesting, player in the space is SpiderOak, which recently launched its Semaphor Slack competitor on the market. I've been playing around with it -- and while it's early on, it certainly has potential. SpiderOak is the company you should already know of that provides an encrypted "zero knowledge" cloud backup solution. Since you keep the keys, even though it's hosted in the cloud, SpiderOak has no way to decrypt your files should anyone hack in, or should the government come calling. It's now taken that approach to Semaphor, which obviously takes its inspiration from Slack (and feels quite similar), but with the same zero knowledge encrypted setup. You get a key and that encrypts all of the data in your group messaging.

There are some limitations there -- of course -- because any team member might leak their key (though whoever gets in would just have access to whatever that team member can see). And, because of this setup, it's not as easy to do "integrations" with third-party apps and services, which is a key selling point of Slack. Semaphor is apparently trying to work its way around this limitation by creating bots that act as their own users within Semaphor (something Slack has also), but where the bots themselves become the key to integrations. It's a bit more clumsy, but if it helps keep things secure, that seems promising.

SpiderOak also, kindly, makes the Semaphor client source code available for anyone to audit, which is necessary if anyone's going to take their encryption seriously. Of course, Semaphor is, like Slack, working off a Freemium model, where additional features require per user fees, which can add up. One nice feature of Semaphor that Slack doesn't have: the ability for individuals to pay their own way. That is, there are lots of Slack groups that are general interest groups around certain topics, and not a company's own internal group. Those groups are never going to use a paid option, because there's no "company" to pay for all users. Semaphor offers an alternative, where each user can just pay their own way -- which might be appealing to some user groups.

The other alternatives that have been getting some attention lately are a couple of attempts to basically create a truly open source Slack clone that can be self-hosted. The two big players here are Mattermost and RocketChat. Both have built open source, self-hosted Slack clones (and both try to make money by offering paid hosting for those who want it). Mattermost is quite upfront that it's building a Slack alternative -- it's all over its website -- though it also points out that it's tried to improve on some things in Slack. RocketChat doesn't seem to mention Slack, and, frankly, feels a bit behind Mattermost in development (though it also announced that it's about to run a Kickstarter campaign to jumpstart more development.

Now, whether or not a self-hosted open source alternative is more secure than Slack... may depend. If you're doing the self-hosted version then you're basically relying on your own ability to keep the implementation secure. That might work. Or, whoever you have securing your installation might not be as good or as responsive as, say, the security team at Slack. But, using an open source solution that you host obviously does provide you with a lot more control and the ability to make any changes you think are necessary.

As someone who talks quite frequently about how competition drives innovation, it's great to see all of this happening. I don't think any of them will harm Slack's place in the market, which has become pretty standard in a lot of companies, but as more and more companies are realizing that they need to really think through security of their communications tools, it's a very good thing to see competition popping up. Hopefully, these competitors get stronger as well, and help drive more overall innovation -- including the focus on security and encryption -- across the entire market.

Filed Under: chat, cloud services, encryption, messaging, open source, security, work
Companies: mattermost, rocketchat, slack, spideroak