Silicon Valley is Suddenly Pushing Privacy Laws. Don't Believe It.

Neema Singh Guliani points out that just because Silicon Valley companies are suddenly pushing for privacy laws after all of these years, that doesn’t mean they have our best interests in mind.

After years of claiming they could self-regulate, the tech industry is suddenly receptive to the idea of federal privacy legislation. But don’t let this post-Cambridge Analytica “mea culpa” fool you into believing these companies have consumers’ best interests in mind. Far from it.

This seeming willingness to subject themselves to federal regulation is, in fact, an effort to enlist the Trump administration and Congress in companies’ efforts to weaken state-level consumer privacy protections.

More Streaming Services Mean More Piracy

A Global Internet Phenomena report shows that piracy is increasing thanks to a deluge of streaming services. They all have compete with Netflix and it ends up being the exact same situation we had with television providers.

“More sources than ever are producing “exclusive” content available on a single streaming or broadcast service—think Game of Thrones for HBO, House of Cards for Netflix, The Handmaid’s Tale for Hulu, or Jack Ryanfor Amazon,” Sandvine’s Cam Cullen said in a blog post.

“To get access to all of these services, it gets very expensive for a consumer, so they subscribe to one or two and pirate the rest.” Cullen said.

The Facebook Hack Betrays Trust in Single Sign On Services

The recent Facebook hack means that we probably shouldn’t rely on single sign-on services like Facebook and Google anymore.

If they had taken more care with their implementation of Facebook’s Single Sign-On feature—which lets you use your Facebook account to access other sites and services, rather than creating a unique password for every site—the impact could have largely been limited to Facebook. Instead, hackers could potentially have accessed everything from people’s private messages on Tinder to their passport information on Expedia, all without leaving a trace.