Saturday, June 30, 2018

Protesters block downtown streets during rally against Trump

begin quote from: Protesters block downtown streets during rally against Trump's ...

https://www.sacbee.com/latest-news/article214129234.html
11 hours ago - Saturday's nationwide "Families Belong Together" protest against the TrumpAdministration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy took over ...

Protesters block downtown streets during rally against Trump’s immigration policies

June 30, 2018 12:33 PM
Updated 3 hours 39 minutes ago

Report: Facebook Gave Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged as a ‘Threat’ by U.S. Intelligence Agencies

Facebook entered into a data-sharing agreement with Huawei, a Chinese firm flagged as a national security threat by U.S. intelligence agencies, the social network admitted on Tuesday. Facebook has data-sharing partnerships ... has close ties to the Chinese ...

Report: Facebook Gave Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged as a ‘Threat’ by U.S. Intelligence Agencies

Mark Zuckerberg
The Associated Press

Facebook entered into a data-sharing agreement with Huawei, a Chinese firm flagged as a national security threat by U.S. intelligence agencies, the social network admitted on Tuesday.

via the New York Times:
Facebook has data-sharing partnerships with at least four Chinese electronics companies, including a manufacturing giant that has a close relationship with China’s government, the social media company said on Tuesday.
The agreements, which date to at least 2010, gave private access to some user data to Huawei, a telecommunications equipment company that has been flagged by American intelligence officials as a national security threat, as well as to Lenovo, Oppo and TCL.
The four partnerships remain in effect, but Facebook officials said in an interview that the company would wind down the Huawei deal by the end of the week.
The data-sharing deals were part of Facebook’s broader outreach to smartphone manufacturers in 2007, the details of which were reported earlier this week. The revelation that Facebook had granted data access to “at least 60” phone manufacturers led to accusations that Mark Zuckerberg lied to Congress when he told lawmakers that users have “complete control” over who has access to their data.
Huawei, one of the manufacturers granted access, was founded by a former engineer in the People’s Liberation Army, and has close ties to the Chinese government. The CIA, NSA, and FBI and the Director of National Intelligence have warned American consumers not to use Huawei devices.
In Senate testimony earlier this year, FBI director Chris Wray expressed “deep concerns” about allowing companies “beholden to foreign governments that don’t share our values to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks.”
Wray warned that it would provide those governments with “capacity to maliciously modify or steal information. And it provides the capacity to conduct undetected espionage.”
Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio have introduced legislation that would bar the U.S. government from using Huawei devices.
“Huawei is effectively an arm of the Chinese government, and it’s more than capable of stealing information from U.S. officials by hacking its devices”, Sen. Cotton said.

Facebook reveals data-sharing partnerships, ties to Chinese firms in 700-page document dump

Facebook revealed to Congress late Friday that it shared user data with 52 hardware and software-making companies, including some Chinese firms. …
 
a group of people sitting at a table© Provided by The Hill
Facebook revealed to Congress late Friday that it shared user data with 52 hardware and software-making companies, including some Chinese firms.
The new acknowledgement came as a part of a more than 700-page document dump to the House Energy and Commerce Committee late Friday evening. The committee released the information publicly on Saturday.
Some companies on the list of 52 firms had previously been reported by The New York Times, including device-makers, telecommunications companies and software firms.
The list featured major tech companies like Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry and Samsung. Other firms featured on the list include Alibaba, Qualcomm and Pantech.
But the list also includes four Chinese firms that U.S. intelligence has flagged as national security threats - Huawei, Lenovo, Oppo and TCL.
Facebook said it shared data with the companies in an effort to improve its integrations and user experience across platforms and devices, noting that its partnerships were established before smartphones running on Apple's and Google's high-powered operating systems were as ubiquitous as they are now.
"People went online using a wide variety of text-only phones, feature phones, and early smartphones with varying capabilities," Facebook wrote. "In that environment, the demand for internet services like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube outpaced our industry's ability to build versions of our services that worked on every phone and operating system."
Facebook said it has ended 38 of its 52 partnerships and will shut down those remaining by July.
The tech company has been under scrutiny for its user data-sharing practices since the revelation earlier this year that Cambridge Analytica improperly harvested data from 87 million of its users.
Facebook said in documents that its initial omission of the partnerships resulted because it had shifted its focus to data shared between apps created on its developer platform - the product area which had been implicated by Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook's sharing of user data with developers appears to have been less controlled than its data sharing with comparatively well-known device-makers and software companies.
Still, lawmakers have voiced concern about the company's data sharing agreements with Chinese firms.
"The news that Facebook provided privileged access to Facebook's API to Chinese device makers like Huawei and TCL raises legitimate concerns, and I look forward to learning more about how Facebook ensured that information about their users was not sent to Chinese servers," Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said earlier this month.
Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal drew outcry from several lawmakers, ultimately culminating in CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivering a high-profile testimony in a lengthy Senate hearing.
The more than 700 pages of documents offer a follow-up to questions asked by lawmakers during and after the testimony.
"After initial review, I am concerned that Facebook's responses raise more questions than they answer," House Energy and Com