The UK government has detailed "ambitious" plans to regulate the crypto industry, with proposals on stronger rules for trading platforms, crypto lending, new token issues and more. The goal, it says, is to protect consumers and businesses, while enabling "a new and exciting sector to safely flourish and grow," it wrote in a press release.
Last year saw the fall of FTX, Celsius and other crypto exchanges, along with wildly fluctuating prices for Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies. As a result, critics in the UK have been calling for new rules that protect consumers from the "crypto wild-west," as the opposition Labour party's Tulip Siddiq put it.
The UK government plans to strengthen rules around the operation of crypto trading firms like FTX, along with other financial intermediaries. The primary aim, it wrote, is to enhance consumer protection and the ability of exchanges to weather storms. As part of that, it's proposing what it calls a "crypto market abuse regime" that would create rules around money laundering and other illegal schemes. It also plans to strengthen laws around cryptocurrency lending.
At the same time, the treasury department is introducing a time-limited exemption that would allow designated crypto firms to issue new tokens. Companies registered with the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for anti-money laundering purposes would be allowed to issue coins while the new regulations are written.
In January 2022, the UK government promised a crackdown on misleading crypto ads, but that now seems quaint given the tumultuous year that followed. At the time, the government figured that around 2.3 million people in the country owned a cryptoasset.
Today's proposal "delivers on the original policy intention of the measure to promote innovation, enhance consumer protection and ensure that cryptoasset promotions can be held to equivalent standards as promotions of financial services products with similar risk profiles," the government said. The consultation will close on April 30th, 2023, at which point regulators will review feedback and formulate a response.
The European Union is eager to crack down on Big Tech's alleged privacy abuses, but the reliance on individual countries to enforce General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules has led to lengthy cases with punishments that are frequently modest. There will soon be pressure to act decisively, however. The European Commission will now require that EU nations share overviews of "large-scale" GDPR investigations every two months. This includes "key procedural steps" and actions taken — national regulators will have to show they're moving forward.
The tougher approach comes after the EU Ombudsman recommended closer monitoring of Big Tech cases that fall under the Irish Data Protection Commission, which regulates Meta and other industry giants. The rights group Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) made a complaint to the Ombudsman accusing Ireland's commission of being too slow and lenient against privacy violations. Just weeks ago, Europe's Data Protection Board forced Ireland to raise a data processing fine against Meta from €28 million to €390 million ($30.4 million to $423.3 million).
As Bloombergobserves, the European Commission is already issuing reports every two years on the overall status of GDPR enforcement. However, it hasn't conducted thorough, frequent reviews of individual countries' privacy regulators. This new requirement will theoretically hold all EU member states accountable if they delay investigations or don't apply the law when necessary. This could include legal repercussions at the European Court of Justice.
Critics might not be happy with the transparency. Ireland and other nations will share their progress on a "strictly confidential basis," according to the Commission. The public might not know if a regulator is mishandling a case unless the EU takes visible action in response. Nonetheless, this may encourage Meta, Amazon, Google and other tech heavyweights to take European privacy laws more seriously — they may see quicker investigations and stiffer fines.
The United States government has reportedly stopped issuing licenses that allow companies in the country to export to Huawei, according to The Financial Times. If you'll recall, the Trump administration added the company to the "entity list," making it ineligible from receiving exports from the US without a license. The US commerce department issued some companies like Qualcomm licenses to provide Huawei with American tech unrelated to 5G networks since then — Qualcomm, for instance, supplies Huawei with 4G chips for smartphones. But the government is reportedly looking to impose a total ban on the sale of American tech to the Chinese firm, and this expanded restriction is a step towards making that happen.
The US government adds companies to the entity list if it believes they are involved in or "pose a significant risk of being or becoming involved in, activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States." It has previously accused Huawei of having deep ties with the Chinese government and warned allies that the 5G equipment it makes could be used to spy on other countries and companies. Huawei has repeatedly denied the accusation.
It's not entirely clear why the US government is moving towards a total ban, if this report is indeed true, but the Biden administration seems to be taking a tougher stance on China compared to its predecessor. Last year, it introduced new rules that prohibit the export of powerful semiconductors that could be repurposed for military use, as well as chipmaking equipment, to China and Russia. One possible reason is that Huawei, The Times says, is backing projects that aim to build a semiconductor supply chain in its country that doesn't rely on imports. A former CIA official also told the publication that the government is probably looking to expand the existing export ban, because Huawei is a totally different company from when it was added to the entity list.
Huawei's focus back then was on 5G technology, but it has since changed gears to prioritize its enterprise and government businesses, including a cloud service, to survive the trade ban. Being added to the blacklist had a huge impact on Huawei's revenues in 2021, but company executive Eric Xu said the manufacturer was able to pull itself "out of crisis mode" in 2022 and expects to go back to "business as usual" this year. A total ban could very well put Huawei back into crisis mode, and it would likely affect the revenues of its US suppliers, as well. That said, the Chinese company might have some time to prepare, depending on when the export licenses that had already been issued will expire.
A commerce department spokesperson didn't confirm whether it has truly stopped issuing licenses to American firms, telling The Times that it "continually assess[es] its policies and regulations." A source told Reuters, however, that US officials are in the midst of crafting new policies that would prohibit shipments to Huawei below the 5G level. The new restrictions would reportedly cover products and components related to 4G, WiFi 6 and 7, AI, as well as cloud and high-performance computing.
Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok, will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on March 23rd. Chow will discuss the app's privacy and data security measures, its impact on kids and ties to China (parent company ByteDance is headquartered in the country). This will be Chew's first appearance in front of a congressional panel, the committee said. TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas faced similar questions from lawmakers in September.
"ByteDance-owned TikTok has knowingly allowed the ability for the Chinese Communist Party to access American user data," committee chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers said in a statement. "Americans deserve to know how these actions impact their privacy and data security, as well as what actions TikTok is taking to keep our kids safe from online and offline harms. We’ve made our concerns clear with TikTok. It is now time to continue the committee’s efforts to hold Big Tech accountable by bringing TikTok before the committee to provide complete and honest answers for people.”
Engadget has contacted TikTok for comment.
TikTok's security and relationship with Chinese authorities have drawn the attention of US officials over the last few years. However, as CNBC notes, discussions between the US and TikTok appear to have stalled, as officials remain concerned about the possibility of China forcing it to hand over user data.
The company has tried to placate concerns from regulators and elected officials by storing US user data on domestic Oracle servers and deleting such data from its own servers in the US and Singapore. Oracle has been reviewing TikTok's algorithms and content moderation models for signs of Chinese interference.
Last month, TikTok said it fired four employees (two each in China and the US) who accessed the data of several journalists. They were said to be looking for the sources of leaks to reporters.
News of Chew's appearance before the panel comes on Data Privacy Day. In a blog post, TikTok laid out some of its efforts to bolster user privacy, including a plan to set up a data center in Dublin this year to store UK and European Economic Area data.
More than two years after Meta extended former President Donald Trump’s “indefinite” suspension from Facebook, the company has opted to reinstate his account. In a statement, Meta saidTrump would be able to new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses.access his Facebook and Instagram accounts in the “coming weeks,” but that there would be "new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses.”
The decision comes after Trump’s campaign had reportedly pushed for the former president to be allowed back on Facebook ahead of the upcoming presidential primaries.
Trump was originally booted from Facebook in the aftermath of the attack on the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, after publicly praising the rioters. Meta’s handling of the initial suspension, which it quickly extended from a 24-hour ban to an “indefinite” suspension, was heavily criticized, including by its own Oversight Board. In its decision weighing in on Trump’s suspension, the board slammed Meta for not following its own rules and trying to “avoid its responsibilities.”
Meta then revisited the suspension, and said it would last for at least two years. However, the company confirmed that Trump would eventually be allowed back on Facebook. Nick Clegg, Meta’s top policy official, said at the time the former president would be “subject to new enhanced penalties” for future policy violations.
Senator Joe Manchin, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has introduced a new bill that squashes a small loophole around the Inflation Reduction Act's (IRA) $7,500 EV tax credit. The new credits are restricted to cars with final assembly in the US, as well as those with a certain amount of North American battery content (an amount that increases every year). But, the U.S. Treasury has delayed its final rules on battery guidance until March, which means EVs with foreign batteries can still receive the full $7,500 in credits until then. Manchin's legislation, dubbed the American Vehicle Security Act (AVSA), would push the battery requirement back to January 1st.
“It is unacceptable that the U.S. Treasury has failed to issue updated guidance for the 30D electric vehicle tax credits and continues to make the full $7,500 credits available without meeting all of the clear requirements included in the Inflation Reduction Act," Manchin wrote a statement. "The Treasury Department failed to meet the statutory deadline of December 31, 2022, to release guidance for the 30D credit and have created an opportunity to circumvent stringent supply chain requirements included in the IRA. The IRA is first-and-foremost an energy security bill, and the EV tax credits were designed to grow domestic manufacturing and reduce our reliance on foreign supply chains for the critical minerals needed to produce EV batteries."
If it's passed, the bill would be disappointing news for anyone who rushed out to buy an EV before March (something plenty of car publications were suggesting). As Autoblog notes, the AVSA doesn't touch on the other IRA loophole, which also allows for the full credit for leased cars built outside of the US. But given Manchin's early obstruction to the IRA, as well as his push against lax battery rules, it wouldn't be surprising to see another bill in the works.
Massachusetts politicians are still pushing for better working conditions for ridesharing drivers. New bills in the state House and Senate would not only pursue collective bargaining rights across companies, as with past measures, but would guarantee a minimum wage, paid sick leave and other benefits. Companies like Uber and Lyft would also have to cover some driver expenses and pour money into the government's unemployment insurance system.
The new legislation wouldn't decide whether drivers are employees or independent contractors. However, Senate bill co-sponsor Jason Lewis told the State House News Service his bill would establish requirements that apply regardless of a driver's status. Previous bills would have tasked workers with negotiating for benefits that are now included, Lewis says.
Massachusetts sued Uber and Lyft in 2020 for allegedly misclassifying drivers as contractors and denying protections granted under state labor law. The companies responded with a proposed ballot measure that would have offered benefits in return for requiring that drivers be treated as contractors. The state's Supreme Judicial Court rejected that proposal last June.
We've asked Uber and Lyft for comment. In a statement, the Service Employees International Union (a bill proponent) says the bill "rewrites the rules" and gives condition drivers have sought for over a decade. The Massachusetts Coalition for Independent Work, an industry-run organization that opposes the legislation, previously claimed that measures granting employee status don't reflect a "vast majority" of drivers that want to remain contractors. The coalition prefers bills that would bring the anti-employee ballot proposal to the legislature as well as create portable benefit accounts.
The state has been one of the major battlegrounds for ridesharing work conditions, but it's only one part of a larger fight. Uber and New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission have fought over pay raises, while a California law meant to reclassify many gig economy workers as employees has faced unsuccessful attempts to carve out exemptions for companies like Uber and Lyft.
In November, millions of Taylor Swift fans logged on to Ticketmaster hoping to scoop up tickets to arguably the most-anticipated tour of 2023. When the time came, the site crashed, rendering verified users unable to purchase admission to the singer's first slate of shows in five years. In the immediate aftermath, Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation explained that while 1.5 million people had signed up as legit customers, over 14 million hit the site when tickets went on sale — many of which were bots.
Live Nation president and CFO Joe Berchtold told the Senate Judiciary Comittee on Tuesday that the company "learned valuable lessons" from the Swift debacle. "In hindsight there are several things we could have done better – including staggering the sales over a longer period of time and doing a better job setting fan expectations for getting tickets," he said.
Berchtold told Senators that Ticketmaster experienced three times more bot traffic that day than it ever had before, and that a cyberattack on the company's verified fan password servers exacerbated the problem. He explained that despite investing over $1 billion in ticketing systems since the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger, mostly to combat fraud and scalping, the company has a massive bot problem that it can't get a handle on.
"We also need to recognize how industrial scalpers breaking the law using bots and cyberattacks to try to unfairly gain tickets contributes to an awful consumer experience," Berchtold said. What he called "industrialized scalping" led to the Taylor Swift fiasco, he explained, but the executive wants Congress to act to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.
Berchtold called for Congress to expand the scope of the BOTS Act to "increase enforcement." Signed into law in 2016, the legislation makes it illegal to bypass a website's security or tech features as a means of purchasing tickets. It also makes it illegal to resell tickets obtained via those methods. Specifically, Berchtold called for banning the use of fraudulent URLs and stopping the resale of tickets before their general on-sale date.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn during Tuesday's hearing
Tom Williams via Getty Images
The law leaves enforcement with the FTC and states, a topic Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn discussed with Berchtold in some of the most pointed questioning of the session. "You told me yesterday you block about 90 percent of the bot attacks that you get, and that's a failing grade," she said. "There ought to be people you can get some good advice from because our critical infrastructure in this country gets bot attacks every single day. They have figured it out, but you guys haven't?"
Blackburn admitted that the FTC has only taken action on the law once, and that the lack of widespread action was "unacceptable." She pledged to do something about the lack of enforcement through the dealings of the Senate Commerce Committee, where she is also a member.
"The FTC has the authority, but you have a responsibility to consumers," she continued. "I agree they are not exercising it, but how many times have you called the FTC and said 'we need your help?'"
Berchtold explained that Live Nation had only contacted the FTC once about suspected bot activity — in late 2019 and early 2020. He said that was the only time they had necessary information to work with the commission in order to get a prosecution. "These are not bots that are trying to break into our system, they are trying to impersonate people... putting true fans at a disadvantage," Berchtold told Blackburn when asked why Live Nation has such a hard time recognizing bots.
In regards to the BOTS Act, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal told Berchtold there are already legal options available to the company to go after scalpers using bots to procure tickets.
"You have unlimited power to go to court," Blumenthal said. "Your approach seems to be that everyone else is responsible here — not us."
Google doesn't plan to let political campaigns dodge Gmail's spam detection for much longer. The Washington Post has learned that Google plans to end the email filter bypass pilot program by the end of this month. In a dismissal motion filed at a federal court in the Eastern District of California, the company rejects the Republican National Committee (RNC) allegations of political bias that led to the test. Gmail's filtering methods "apply equally" to every sender whether or not there's a political connection, the company says.
The pilot was a response to RNC accusations in October that Google was censoring right-wing fundraising emails by marking them as spam. The committee pointed to a study that supposedly backed the claims, but Google maintained that messaging frequency, user responses and other non-political elements dictated filtering behavior. Even so, Google acknowledged the pressure and got permission from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to run the test. The experiment was already set to end in January, but it wasn't clear if Google would extend the program until now.
Over 100 Democrat and Republican committees joined the program after it was approved in August. However, the RNC wasn't one of them. Google points this out in its new filing, asserting that the Republicans want to accuse the firm of unfair treatment instead of participating in the solution.
In a statement to Engadget, Google spokesperson José Castañeda says a recent FEC decision "confirmed" it doesn't filter email for "political purposes." The representative also maintains that the RNC complaint is "without merit."
On top of the company's own objections, numerous advocacy groups and other critics urged the FEC to reject the looser approach to political emails. They were concerned this change would let political candidates from any party spam users with few repercussions. With this latest filing, the debate is moot — politicians will have to take a careful approach if they expect campaign messages to go directly to your inbox.
San Francisco has long sought to square its deeply-held progressive ideals with the region's need for tangible, technological progress. SFO international airport, which opened for business in 1959 and has undergone significant expansion and modernization in the years since, is a microcosm of that struggle. On one hand, the Bay Area likely wouldn't be the commercial, technical, and cultural hub that it is today if not for connectivity the airport provides. On the other hand, its installation and operation has had very real consequences for the local environment and the region's populace.
Dr. Eric Porter, Professor of History, History of Consciousness, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, examines how San Francisco International came to be and the challenges it will face in a climate changing 21st century in his latest work, A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport. Porter's connection to the topic is a personal one. "My grandfather worked as a skycap there beginning in the 1940s," Porter wrote in a recent UC Press blog. "Carrying white people’s luggage and the racial baggage that came with it was servile but good-paying work."
As Black skycaps protested changes to their working conditions during the spring and summer of 1970, a different group of activists, largely white and operating primarily as homeowners rather than as workers, were engaged in their own SFO-focused struggle. The issue was jet noise, a long-standing nuisance that had become more unbearable as the airport grew and as environmentalists and government agencies deemed it a form of pollution that could have detrimental effects on human well-being. That November, after months of unsuccessfully lobbying airport and government officials for changes to SFO flight operations, thirty-two property owners from South San Francisco, a then largely white working- and middle-class suburb located northwest of the airport, filed claims with the San Francisco Airport Commission seeking compensation for the disruptions caused by jets taking off over their neighborhoods. The commission denied the claims, so the following February the South San Franciscans filed a $320,000 lawsuit ($10,000 per plaintiff) against the City and County of San Francisco on the grounds that jet noise had “diminished and damaged” the “reasonable use and quiet enjoyment of their property.” Subsequently, ten individuals from the tonier suburbs of Woodside and Portola Valley, located southeast of the airport, filed their own lawsuit, requesting the same per-person damages caused by noise from aircraft on approach to SFO.
These lawsuits, ultimately settled by the Airport Commission’s promise to institute a $5 million noise mitigation program, were among the many antinoise actions undertaken by outraged SFO neighbors following the introduction of jet aircraft to the facility in 1959. Their communities had grown in symbiotic relationship with SFO in ways physical, social, political, and economic. Jet sounds helped to compose their soundscapes, or acoustic environments, offering their inhabitants references through which they conceptualized and lived their urban experiences. The sounds oriented local residents toward the sky, providing a generalized sense of being urban, while also defining their relationships to SFO through the horizontal positioning of homes, workplaces, recreation sites, schools, and other places they inhabited in relation to takeoff and landing vectors and the facility itself.
How people experienced this relationship to place via jet sounds — whether positive, negative, or ambivalent—was affected by people’s proximity to such sounds, the frequency and duration of them, their relative audibility in relation to other components of the soundscape, and the social and political meanings they were conditioned over time to hear in them. When Bay Area residents heard jet sounds as “noise,” it was often simply because they were loud and profoundly disruptive. But at other moments jet noise was a more subjective, socially determined “unwanted sound.” Such determination happened, in part, as anthropologist Marina Peterson’s work on LAX and its environs helps us understand, because of what these insistent sounds had come to symbolize as they catalyzed relationships among an expanding ensemble of individuals and community groups; government officials, agencies, and regulations; activists and their organizations; scientists and other researchers; the airport and its operations; and a broad set of social, political, and economic forces.
Some local residents were willing to tolerate the noise. It was an inconvenience to be put up with in exchange for the benefits of living, working, or doing business near the airport. Noise itself, and the impunity to make it, might have signified the financial and political interests of airlines, airport officials, and other powerful interests, but these entities offered something (jobs, construction contracts, airport employee spending, convenient travel, and so on) in return. For others, however, this loud component of the soundscape signified differently on the pros and cons of living near the airport as well as on the relationships in which they were immersed. Jet noise, in other words, could be heard as a manifestation of the forms of power that defined the regional colonial present, and it raised the question of how local residents would live out their attachments to them.
Anti–jet noise activism by individuals, homeowner associations, political figures, environmental groups, and others around SFO usually reflected their relative degrees of privilege and aspiration as mostly white beneficiaries of accumulated colonial power in the region. Yet their activism simultaneously articulated critiques, explicit and implicit, of the ways elements of the power—economic, legal, bureaucratic, and so on—that lay behind the noise had diminished human thriving in the region more generally. Airport and local government officials, labor unions, and others who opposed, deflected, or sought to incorporate strategically the goals of these activists also expressed or otherwise engaged multiple forms of social, economic, and bureaucratic power while seeking to advance or protect their own accumulated interests.
The activists had some successes. SFO and its surrounding communities eventually became less noisy because of changes in aircraft technology (especially engine technology) and also because the FAA, airport operators, civic leaders, and others eventually started to listen to anti-noise activists and made significant efforts to mitigate jet noise. But jets continued to generate noise at and near SFO, and some people are still complaining about the problem today. Still, the history of antinoise activism around SFO—the version in this chapter runs from the late 1950s into the 1980s — is still worth exploring because it makes audible some of the complex ways that challenging and reproducing power in the mid- and late twentieth-century regional colonial present occurred through the synergies, conflicts, and missed opportunities for cooperation among largely white homeowner, environmentalist, and worker movements when they collided with SFO as manifestation of broader economic transformations and modes of governmental infrastructure development and resource stewardship.
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Aircraft noise had been the subject of intermittent complaints in the Bay Area going back to the early days of aviation. Concern that loud air planes might depress real estate prices was among the factors that led to the shuttering of San Francisco’s early civilian airstrip in the Marina District. Noise was initially not a problem around Mills Field. Aircraft of the 1920s and 1930s were not terribly loud, and there was little residential development nearby. That began to change after World War II as commercial air operations at what became SFO increased, aircraft grew in size and sound-generating capability, and residential neighborhoods encroached upon the airport. As was the case elsewhere in the United States, growing local concern about airport noise dovetailed with fears of aircraft crashing into homes or businesses below, as happened near the Newark and Idlewild airports in late 1951 and early 1952. Two pre–jet age incidents of aircraft developing engine trouble after taking off over South San Francisco increased the level of anxiety about that community’s proximity to SFO in particular. Complaints, emanating primarily from five surrounding cities, grew exponentially with the arrival of jet aircraft in April 1959. Residents of San Bruno, Daly City, and, most vocally, South San Francisco were primarily affected by aircraft departing to the northwest from runway 28, oriented to allow aircraft to take off into the wind through the “gap” between San Bruno Mountain and the Santa Cruz Mountains. South San Franciscans formed neighborhood jet noise committees, but their complaints were often channeled through city councilman and later mayor Leo Ryan and City attorney John Noonan. The two officials began a dialogue with airport representatives, pilots, airlines, and federal officials about the coming jet noise problem in 1957, commissioned an engineer’s report on the matter, and stepped up their efforts after the jets arrived.
As complaints from South San Francisco increased, and as technological advancements permitted more takeoffs in crosswinds or slight tail winds, flights were shifted to the intersecting, perpendicular runway 1 in an effort to redistribute aircraft noise. This made things more difficult for residents of Millbrae and northeastern Burlingame and especially for those living in Bayside Manor, a Millbrae neighborhood established in 1943, across the Bayshore Freeway from the end of the runway. Bayside Manor residents were primarily affected by the “jet blast” (i.e., noise, vibration, and fumes) from aircraft as they began their takeoffs just seven hundred feet away from the edge of the development. Residents organized primarily through the Bayside Manor Improvement Association, formed in 1948, which had for several years been fighting the placement of industrial facilities on undeveloped land near their subdivision.
Local residents experienced a variety of dramatic and disruptive effects from jet engine-produced sound waves. According to a Millbrae woman, “We thought the old planes were bad enough. But jets are terrible. The house shakes, light bulbs burn out from the vibration, and we can’t hear TV programs when the planes are taking off.” People also complained about frightened and crying children, sleepless nights, distractions in schools, disrupted church and funeral services, interrupted in-person and telephone conversations, jumping phonograph needles, the inability to entertain outside, and actual physical damage to their property from sonic vibrations: cracked walls, stucco, chimneys, fire places, gas lines, and windows, as well as dishes breaking after falling from shelves. They worried about falling home values and about their physical and mental well-being. Some were exhausted. Others complained of headaches, earaches, temporary hearing loss, and other ailments. According to one petition, some South San Franciscans were “in a constant state of anxiety and have had to undergo medical treatment for nervous conditions said to have been induced by the noises created by the jet aircraft and the anxiety due to the passage of jet aircraft over their homes.”
