Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Fixed? The FTC Orders Facebook to Stop Using Your 2FA Number for Ads

Since academics and investigative journalists first reported last year that Facebook was using people’s two-factor authentication numbers and “shadow” contact information for targeted advertising, Facebook has shown little public interest in fixing this critical problem. Subsequent demands that Facebook stop all non-essential uses of these phone numbers, and public revelations that Facebook’s phone number abuse was even worse than initially reported, failed to move the company to action.

Yesterday, rather than face a lawsuit from FTC, Facebook agreed to stop the most egregious of these practices.

The Victory

In one of just a few concrete wins in an overall disappointingsettlement, Facebook agreed not to use phone numbers provided for any security feature (like two-factor authentication, account recovery, and login alerts) for targeted advertising purposes.

Until this settlement, Facebook had been using contact information that users explicitly provided for security purposes for targeted advertising, contrary to those user’s expectations and Facebook representatives’ own previous statements. Revelation of this practice seriously damaged users’ trust in a foundational security practice and undermined all the companies and platforms that get two-factor authentication right.

The FTC’s order that Facebook stop using security phone numbers for targeted advertising is, hopefully, a first step toward rebuilding users’ trust in security features on Facebook in particular and on the web in general.

The Loose Ends

But the FTC didn’t go far enough here, and Facebook continues to be able to abuse your phone number in two troubling ways.

First, two-factor authentication numbers are still exposed to reverse-lookup searches. By default, anyone can use the phone number that a user provides for two-factor authentication to find that user’s profile. Problems with this search functionality have been public since at least 2017. Facebook even promised to disable it over a year ago in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but left open a loophole in the form of contact uploads. For people who need two-factor authentication to protect their account and stay safe, Facebook’s failure to fill this loophole forces them into an unnecessary choice between security and privacy. 

Second, the FTC’s settlement misses a whole additional category of phone numbers: “shadow” contact information, which refers to a phone number you never gave Facebook but which your friends uploaded with their contacts. In other words, even if you never directly handed a particular phone number over to Facebook, advertisers may nevertheless be able to associate it with your account based on your friends’ phone books.

This shadow contact information remains available to advertisers, and inaccessible and opaque to users. You can’t find your “shadow” contact information in the “contact and basic info” section of your profile; users in Europe can’t even get their hands on it despite explicit requirements under the GDPR that a company give users a “right to know” what information it has on them.

No Fix

Throughout this year, we have been demanding that a handful of companies fix some of their biggest privacy and security problems. For Facebook, we have taken aim at its tendency to use phone numbers for purposes contrary to what users understood or intended. While the FTC’s order may seem like a fix, it does not go far enough for us to consider it a complete victory. Until Facebook takes the initiative to address the reverse-lookup and shadow contact information problems described above, users can expect that its reckless misuse of their phone numbers will continue. And we’ll continue watching and putting pressure on them to fix it already.

Underwater glacial melting is occurring at higher rates than modeling predicts

Researchers have developed a new method to allow for the first direct measurement of the submarine melt rate of a tidewater glacier, and, in doing so, they concluded that current theoretical models may be underestimating glacial melt by up to two orders of magnitude.

Adblocking: How About Nah?

For more than a decade, consumer rights groups (including EFF) worked with technologists and companies to try to standardize Do Not Track, a flag that browsers could send to online companies signaling that their users did not want their browsing activity tracked. Despite long hours and backing from the FTC, foot-dragging from the browser vendors and outright hostility from the big online media companies mean that setting Do Not Track in your browser does virtually nothing to protect your privacy.

Do Not Track grew out of widespread public concern over invasive "behavioral advertising" that relied on tracking to target ads; despite a generation of promises from the ad industry that consumers would welcome more relevant advertising, the consistent result has been that users are freaked out by "relevant" ads because they understand that relevancy is synonymous with privacy invasion. Nothing is so creepy as ads for a product you looked into earlier following you from site to site, then from app to app, as you are tracked and retargeted by a desperate vendor's algorithm.

Internet users didn't take this situation lying down. They wanted to use the Web, but not be tracked, and so they started to install ad-blockers. A lot of ad-blockers, and more every year.

Ad-blockers don't just stop users from seeing ads and being tracked (and indeed, some ad-blockers actually track users!). They can also stop the publishers and marketers who rely on tracking and ad-clicks from earning money. Predictably, industry responded with ad-blocker-blockers, which prevented users from seeing their sites unless they turned off their ad-blocker.

You'll never guess what happened next.

Actually, it's obvious what happened next: users started to install ad-blocker-blocker-blockers.

The Biggest Boycott in History

The rise and rise of ad-blockers (and ad-blocker-blocker-blockers) is without parallel: 26% of Internet users are now blocking ads, and the figure is rising. It’s been called the biggest boycott in human history.

It's also something we've seen before, in the earliest days of the Web, when pop-up ads ruled the world (wide web), and users went to war against them.

In 1994, Hotwired (the defunct online adjunct to Wired magazine) displayed the first banner ad in Internet history. Forty-four percent of the people who saw that ad clicked on it. At the time, it felt like advertising had taken a great leap, attaining a conversion rate that bested print, TV, direct mail, or display advertising by orders of magnitude.

But it turned out that the click-rate on that Hotwired ad had more to do with novelty than any enduring persuasive properties of banner ads. Even as Web companies were raising millions based on the fabulous performance of early ads, the efficacy of those ads was falling off a cliff, with clickthrough rates plummeting to low single digits.

This created a desperate situation, where publishers needed to do something -- anything -- to goose their clickthrough rates.

Enter the Pop-Up Ad

That's when Ethan Zuckerman—then an employee at Tripod—invented the pop-up ad (he has since apologized). These ads spawned in new windows and were much harder to ignore—for a while. Human beings' response to stimulus tends to regress to the mean (the refrigerator hum gets quieter over time because you adapt to it, not because the decibel level decreases) and so pop-up ads evolved into ever-more virulent forms—pop-under ads, pop-ups with fake "close" boxes, pop-up ads that respawned, pop-up ads that ran away from your mouse when you tried to close them...

At the height of the pop-up wars, it seemed like there was no end in sight: the future of the Web would be one where humans adapted to pop-ups, then pop-ups found new, obnoxious ways to command humans' attention, which would wane, until pop-ups got even more obnoxious.

But that's not how it happened. Instead, browser vendors (beginning with Opera) started to ship on-by-default pop-up blockers. What's more, users—who hated pop-up ads—started to choose browsers that blocked pop-ups, marginalizing holdouts like Microsoft's Internet Explorer, until they, too, added pop-up blockers.

Chances are, those blockers are in your browser today. But here's a funny thing: if you turn them off, you won't see a million pop-up ads that have been lurking unseen for all these years.

Because once pop-up ads became invisible by default to an ever-larger swathe of Internet users, advertisers stopped demanding that publishers serve pop-up ads. The point of pop-ups was to get people's attention, but something that is never seen in the first place can't possibly do that.

How About Nah?

The Internet is full of take-it-or-leave-it offers: click-through and click-wrap agreements that you can either click "I agree" on or walk away from.

As the online world has grown more concentrated, with more and more power in fewer and fewer hands, it's become increasingly difficult for Web publishers to resist advertisers' insistence on obnoxious tracking ads.

But Internet users have never been willing to accept take-it-or-leave-it as the last word in technological self-determination. Adblockers are the new pop-up blockers, a way for users to do what publishers can't or won't do: demand a better deal from advertisers. When you visit a site, the deal on offer is, "Let us and everyone we do business with track you in every way possible or get lost" and users who install adblockers push back. An adblocker is a way of replying to advertisers and publishers with a loud-and-clear "How about nah?"

Adversarial Interoperability

Adversarial interoperability occurs when someone figures out how to plug a new product or service into an existing product or service, against the wishes of the company behind that existing product or service.

Adblocking is one of the most successful examples of adversarial interoperability in modern history, along with third-party printer ink. When you visit a website, the server sends your browser a bunch of material, including the code to fetch and render ads. Adblockers throw away the ad parts and show you the rest, while ad-blocker-blocker-blockers do the same, and then engage in an elaborate technological game of cat-and-mouse in a bid to fool the server into thinking that you are seeing the ads, while still suppressing them.

Browsers have always been playgrounds for adversarial interoperability, from the pop-up wars to the browser wars. Thanks to open standards and a mutual disarmament rule for software patents among browser vendors, it's very hard to use the law to punish toolsmiths who make adblocking technologies (not that that's stopped people from attempting it).

Adversarial interoperability is often a way for scrappy new upstarts to challenge the established players—like the company that got sued by IBM's printer division for making its own toner cartridges and grew so big it now owns that printer division (!).

But adversarial interoperability is also a way for the public to assert its rights and push back against unfair practices. Take-it-or-leave it deals are one thing when the market is competitive and you can shop around for someone with better terms of service, but in highly concentrated markets where everyone has the same rotten deal on offer, adversarial interoperability lets users make a counteroffer: "How about nah?"

But for How Long?

Concentration in the tech industry—including the “vertical integration” of browsers, advertising networks, and video content under one corporate umbrella—has compromised the Internet's openness. In 2017, the World Wide Web Consortium published its first-ever "standard" that could not be fully implemented without permission from the giant tech and media companies (who have since refused that permission to anyone who rocks the boat). In publishing that standard, the W3C explicitly rejected a proposal to protect adversarial interoperability by extracting legally binding nonaggression promises from the companies that make up the consortium.

The standard the W3C published—Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), for restricting playback of video—comes with many dangers for would-be adversarial interoperators, notably the risk of being sued under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans tampering with “access controls” on copyrighted works and holds out both criminal and civil liability for toolsmiths who traffic in programs that let you change the rules embodied by EME.

One driving force behind the adoption of EME was the ever-tighter integration between major browser vendors like Google, video distributors, and advertising networks. This created a lopsided power-dynamic that ultimately ended up in the standardization of a means of undoing the configurable Web—where the user is king. EME is the first crack in the wall that protected browsers from those who would thwart adversarial operability and take "how about nah?" off the table, leaving us with the kind of take-it-or-leave-it Web that the marketing industry has been striving for since the first pop-up ad.

Car Industry Goes Behind Trump’s Back, Cuts Mileage Deal

Oh my, what will Donald Trump do now? Four automakers from three continents have struck a deal with California to produce more fuel-efficient cars for their U.S. fleets in coming years, undercutting one of the Trump administration’s most aggressive climate policy rollbacks. The compromise between the California Air Resources Board and Ford, Honda, Volkswagen and […]

As Immigrants Become More Aware of Their Rights, ICE Steps Up Ruses and Surveillance

“ICE’s mission is to apprehend people that it believes shouldn’t be in our communities and it will go to great lengths to do that, particularly in the face of increased knowledge of rights.”

The post As Immigrants Become More Aware of Their Rights, ICE Steps Up Ruses and Surveillance appeared first on The Intercept.

America's packaged food supply is ultra-processed

Americans are overexposed to products that are high in energy, saturated fat, sugar and salt, according to a new study that reports the United States packaged food and beverage supply in 2018 was ultra-processed and generally unhealthy.

"Recently, tech companies have come to a troubling consensus: that they can change your computer, remotely (and often silently) without your knowledge or permission."

https://puri.sm/posts/consent-matters-when-tech-takes-remote-control-without-your-permission/

A Quarter of All State Supreme Courts Have Never Had a Justice of Color

State courts hear 95 percent of cases filed in the United States, setting sweeping legal precedents that influence generations. “The [courts] touch virtually every aspect of our lives,” says Alicia Bannon, managing director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. But unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the people whose hands those decisions rest […]

Congress and the Press Should Pick Up Where Special Counsel Robert Mueller Left Off

The anticlimactic end of the Trump-Russia investigation is partly due to decades of bitter political battles over what powers to grant special prosecutors.

The post Congress and the Press Should Pick Up Where Special Counsel Robert Mueller Left Off appeared first on The Intercept.

How a Sewer Socialist City May Push Democrats Left in 2020

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett announced March 11 that, for the first time in its history, the city will host the 2020 Democratic National Convention.

In some ways, the choice was obvious. Wisconsin is a swing state whose demographics—in terms of race, ethnicity, income, education and neighborhood composition—closely reflect those of the United States as a whole. And the memory of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 snub is still fresh in the minds of many Midwesterners: During Clinton’s presidential campaign, her team (led by Robby Mook) decided that Wisconsin was such a safe Democratic stronghold, Clinton wouldn’t need to visit. She lost Wisconsin by around 23,000 votes.

The Democratic Party has clearly learned from this 2016 mistake as it considers strategies to turn battlegrounds like Wisconsin blue. But one can also make the case that, in choosing Milwaukee, the party is honoring the city’s unique political history. Milwaukee is the only major U.S. city to have elected three socialist mayors: Emil Seidel, Daniel Hoan and Frank Zeidler. They held office for a collective 38 years (between 1910 and 1960) and helped earn Milwaukee a reputation for being, as Time magazine reported in 1936, “perhaps the best governed city in the U.S.”

Mark Jefferson, executive director of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, seized upon this history as an opportunity to redbait: “No city in America has stronger ties to socialism,” he said in a statement about the 2020 Democratic convention. “And with the rise of Bernie Sanders and the embrace of socialism by its newest leaders, the American Left has come full circle. It’s only fitting the Democrats would come to Milwaukee.”

Jefferson was being snarky, but he’s arguably correct. Nearly all the Democratic presidential candidates have included policies in their campaign platforms that harken back to the city’s legacy of “sewer socialist” mayors (a phrase coined in 1932 that refers to the superlative public works projects created by Milwaukee socialists). Milwaukeeans didn’t seem particularly bothered by the term, though. “Yes, we wanted sewers in the workers’ houses,” Mayor Emil Seidel wrote in his 1944 memoirs, “but we wanted much, oh, so very much more than sewers. We wanted our workers to have pure air; we wanted them to have sunshine; we wanted planned homes; we wanted living wages; we wanted recreation for young and old; we wanted vocational education; we wanted a chance for every human being to be strong and live a life of happiness.”

Tom Perez, chair of the Democratic National Committee, seemed to suggest that Milwaukee’s progressive politicians embodied the party’s best impulses, stating at the March 11 press conference, “Where you hold a convention is a very strong statement of your values … of who we are as a party, and who and what we’re fighting for.”

Perez, whose wife grew up in the Milwaukee suburbs, is likely well aware of the city’s socialist history. His own politics around socialism are less clear: A well-respected labor secretary under President Barack Obama, Perez beat out the Left’s preferred candidate for DNC chair, Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Keith Ellison, who was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the Progressive Democrats of America, Friends of the Earth Action, Unite Here and many other progressive organizations.

The Milwaukee chapter of the DSA, for its part, intends to leverage the city’s history to elevate democratic socialists—in particular, Bernie Sanders. They’re even thinking of leading a series of socialist history tours for politicians and delegates, with stops at local landmarks such as Turner Hall and the Riverwest Public House. In the meantime, residents continue to express interest in joining the chapter, which has seen its membership surge since the 2016 election. 

As more and more Democratic voters, especially millennials, identify as democratic socialists, it feels momentous that Milwaukee, with its proud “sewer socialist” past, will be hosting the Democratic convention. Candidates vying for the nomination will have to ask themselves: Will they embrace socialism, or run from it?

The socialist movement in Milwaukee has its beginnings in the mid-1800s, when German immigrants began moving to the city in droves. Many of them had been vocal supporters of the revolutions of 1848—a series of failed uprisings led by middle-class people who wanted to bring democracy to Europe’s remaining monarchies—and they brought their liberal ideas with them as they settled in Brew City. Yet those ideas may never have gained real traction if it weren’t for German-born Milwaukee socialists, such as the socialist newspaper editor Paul Grottkau, who helped spearhead a citywide strike in the spring of 1886. 

In 1886, Grottkau was among the founders of Milwaukee’s Eight-hour League, a group of workers dedicated to shorter workdays. That same year, Polish laborers began meeting at a local church to organize a general strike in protest of their 10-hour workdays. Together, they recruited thousands of people to join their cause.

On May 2, around 14,500 protesters marched through the streets of Milwaukee, chanting and waving banners. Tens of thousands of spectators turned out. According to a 1910 article in the Milwaukee Free Press, “Reports came in thick and fast that in all parts of the city uprisings were taking place and that large bodies of laboring men were marching toward the manufacturing plants intent on rioting and destruction.”

Afraid that the local police would not be able to control the crowds, Wisconsin Gov. Jeremiah Rusk dispatched the state militia to subdue them. By the time his troops reached the city, protesters had shut down every major factory in the metro area, save for the Bay View Rolling Mills, whose managers had insisted on keeping it open. On May 5, around 1,500 protesters—including many women and children who had joined the strikers—marched toward the factories, intent on convincing the workers there to shut them down.

When the marchers neared the militia, they stopped. But Major George P. Traeumer, anticipating violence from the protesters, ordered the soldiers to fire at will. At least five people were killed, including a 13-year-old, and many more injured. The bloody retaliation brought the 1886 strike to an abrupt end. In the months that followed, the public began to empathize more with the socialists who helped organize the strike. 

When Grottkau was convicted of inciting a riot and sentenced to a year in prison, he leveraged all the media attention he was receiving to announce a run for mayor of Milwaukee. He didn’t win, but he helped popularize working-class causes like public ownership of utilities and the elimination of graft in local government, leading the way for the successful electoral campaigns of other socialists.

In 1904, Emil Seidel became one of nine socialists to join Milwaukee’s city council as an alderman. In 1910, Seidel became the first socialist to win a mayoral race in a major U.S. city, with about 6,500 more votes than the next candidate. That same year, socialists carried 14 of the city’s 23 wards. 

Seidel became interested in progressive politics and Marxism while studying woodcarving in Berlin. From 1910-12, he established the first public works office in the city. Seidel also closed many of Milwaukee’s gambling parlors and brothels and created a public parks system. And he infuriated both Democrats and Republicans by cracking down on political corruption.

Dems and the GOP collaborated to beat out Seidel in 1912 by jointly endorsing a different candidate, but many other socialists managed to hold onto public office and continued to push for progressive reform. One of them was Daniel Hoan, who was elected Milwaukee’s city attorney in 1910. While holding that office, he pushed the country’s first worker’s compensation law through the state legislature and helped Seidel reduce corruption in the local government by making their processes streamlined and transparent. Hoan gained enough popular support to mount a successful mayoral campaign in 1916 and held the office for 24 years.

Hoan established a public bus system and the nation’s first public housing project and successfully steered Milwaukee toward public ownership of its stone quarry, streetlights, sewage disposal system and water purification system. Hoan created a program to make textbooks free for local students and another to administer free vaccines. He is still widely considered one of the most altruistic mayors in American history.

The most recent Milwaukee mayoral socialist, Frank Zeidler, held office from 1948 to 1960. His biggest achievement as mayor was incorporating many suburbs into the city, nearly doubling Milwaukee’s size and tax base (which forestalled the urban blight that had begun to plague cities that failed to incorporate their suburbs, like St. Louis, around the same time). Zeidler was also a staunch advocate for civil rights legislation and helped push for the establishment of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 

Near the end of his time in office, Zeidler released an “Inner Core Report,” a study describing Milwaukee’s inner-city conditions with a detailed plan to improve the city’s increasingly strained race relations. The suggestions, which could have helped prevent much of the redlining that would eventually transform Milwaukee into one of the most segregated cities in the United States, were largely ignored by his successor. 

The greater legacy of Milwaukee’s socialist politicians is still palpable today. Milwaukee’s public parks system is one of the most extensive in the country. Its public beaches (in the early 1900s, wealthy Milwaukeeans bought up most of the city’s lakefront property—socialists then poured sand and soil into the harbor in front of their land to create several public beaches) draw crowds every year. 

Milwaukee’s socialists also seem to have influenced later generations of progressive politicians, such as Robert La Follette, a left-wing Republican who became governor of Wisconsin and founded The Progressivemagazine.

Current members of Milwaukee DSA certainly see themselves as present-day sewer socialists. Member Brandon Payton-Carrillo, 35, says he draws inspiration from the pragmatic approach to local government adopted by Seidel, Hoan and Zeidler. Payton-Carrillo hopes his chapter can leverage the 2020 DNC convention to shine a spotlight on DSA campaigns like Get the Lead Out, a coalition formed to pressure Milwaukee politicians to remove lead from the city’s drinking water. “That bottom-up grassroots experience is the foundation of Milwaukee socialism,” he says.

When Bernie Sanders and the rest of the Democratic candidates arrive in Milwaukee in July 2020, the world will be waiting to see how they articulate their vision for a better future. If any of them point to Milwaukee’s sewer socialists, and the way they governed their city, the world will be listening.

Excellent work, Brother

This London Firm Helps the Wealthy Hide Assets – or Steal Them. Luckily We Have 15 Years of Their Client Communications.

by Barrett Brown

https://quitter.im/url/2791485

A glacier is dead. A monument will tell visitors whose fault it was
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/07/25/glacier-is-dead-now-monument-tells-future-visitors-whose-fault-it-was/ #climatechange #climatecrisis

#Anonymous    #FuckDonaldTrump    #FuckICE   #FuckThePolice    #ACAB


Watch as these Trump I.C.E Nazi SS Obergruppenführer FuckFace motherfuckers smash a car window to drag a father away from his family.

Better watch out, you racist, Nazi PIG motherfuckers, because people will eventually begin to fight back.

I'm so fucking over these low-life Nazi cunts!.


https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1154172660026355713

More than £1bn of #food wasted before reaching #supermarkets – study | #Environment | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/25/food-waste-farms-before-reaching-supermarkets-wrap-study

#Waste #UK

Gotta Hand It To Them

The market regulates itself!

EFF Extensions Recommended by Firefox

Earlier this month, Mozilla announced the release of Firefox 68, which includes a curated "list of recommended extensions that have been thoroughly reviewed for security, usability and usefulness." We are pleased to announce that both of our popular browser extensions, HTTPSEverywhere and PrivacyBadger, have been included as part of the program. Now, when you navigate to the built-in Firefox add-ons page (URL: about:addons), you'll see a new tab: "Recommendations," which includes HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger among a list of other recommended extensions. In addition, they will be highlighted in Add-ons for Firefox and in add-on searches.

What does this mean for users who already have our extensions installed? If you initially installed them from addons.mozilla.org or the recommendation list, it means that there will be a slight delay after we update the extensions while Mozilla reviews the new versions for security, utility, and user experience. If you installed the self-hosted extensions directly from eff.org without going through Mozilla, you'll get the updates right away after a routine automated check. Either way, you can rest assured that EFF has audited every piece of software we release for security and performance problems.

We're thrilled that Mozilla is highlighting privacy and security-focused extensions, and greatful that HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger are included in that list.

As Puerto Rico Erupts in Protests, “La Junta” Eyes More Power

While la junta and its supporters have painted the Puerto Rican government as financially irresponsible, the board itself is no paragon of fiscal restraint.

The post As Puerto Rico Erupts in Protests, “La Junta” Eyes More Power appeared first on The Intercept.

The FTC-Facebook Settlement Does Too Little to Protect Your Privacy

EFF is disappointed by the terms of the settlement agreement announced today between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Facebook. It is grossly inadequate to the task of protecting the privacy of technology users from Facebook’s surveillance-based system of social networking and targeted advertising.

This settlement arises from the FTC’s 2012 settlement order against Facebook, concerning the company’s deceptive statements about user privacy. Facebook violated the 2012 FTC order through its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which violated the privacy rights of millions of Facebook users.

Today’s FTC-Facebook settlement does not sufficiently protect user privacy. For example:

The agreement does not limit how Facebook collects, uses, and shares the personal information of its users. It is not enough for the agreement to require Facebook to conduct its own privacy review of new products; that just empowers Facebook to decide its own collection, use, and sharing practices.
The agreement does not provide public transparency regarding how Facebook collects, uses, and shares personal information, or how Facebook implements the FTC settlement. It is not enough for only Facebook and the government to have this information.
This agreement does nothing to address Facebook’s market power in social networks and internet advertising, and may risk cementing Facebook’s market power.

These deficiencies are not cured by the $5 billion fine against Facebook. For a company the size of Facebook, this is not an effective deterrent against future violations of user privacy.

If the FTC were serious about putting a dent in the privacy problems created by Facebook’s targeted advertising business model, it could have taken aim at two of Facebook’s biggest sources of information: data brokers and third-party tracking.

Some provisions of the settlement agreement are positive. For example, it requires Facebook to delete existing face recognition templates, and bars Facebook from creating new ones, absent the user’s informed opt-in consent. Also, the settlement bars Facebook from using phone numbers provided by users to enhance their security (i.e., for two-factor authentication) for advertising purposes. Unfortunately, the settlement does not address Facebook’s other egregious abuses of user phone numbers, including exposing two-factor authentication numbers to public reverse lookup, and vacuuming up “shadow” contact information that users never gave to Facebook in the first place.

Taken as a whole, this settlement is bad news for consumer privacy. But this is bigger than Facebook. Its surveillance-driven targeted ad business model is common across the web. To protect user’s privacy rights, we need solid consumer data privacy legislation.

Causes of multidecadal climate changes

A new reconstruction of global average surface temperature change over the past 2,000 years has identified the main causes for decade-scale climate changes. The new temperature reconstruction also largely agrees with climate model simulations of the same time period. This suggests that current climate models accurately represent the contributions of various influences on global climate change -- and are capable of correctly predicting future climate warming.