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"There are three big challenges in the Internet space that all countries must face in the near future. China's approach to the challenges will impact not only Chinese Internet users, but potentially all Internet users. What interface follows the smart hone, whether it be AR-enabled glasses, foldable screens, or wearable projectors, will not only be influenced by China's substantial Internet-using population, but also by their manufacturing. Privacy, as it relates to online information collecting and sale, has consequences for broader community standards, and there is no one-size fits all approach to this issue. China must engage their own ethicists, community, government and technologists to develop a solution that works for China. Finally, globalization. Most of China's internet success has been within China, but as China begins to consider how it might attract users from outside its borders, it will need to consider dialing back the protections that have held foreign Internet companies at bay."

"Chinese consumers are increasingly standing up to Internet giants for their digital privacy in an unprecedented way. China is in the early stages of setting up a data protection regulatory system. The Cyber Security Law, effective Jun 1, 2017, included for the first time a set of data protection provisions in the form of national-level legislation. The 2018 e-Commerce Law incorporated data privacy protections for consumers such as the "right to be forgotten", similar to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation."

"The Singapore government says the wearable device it is developing for COVID-19 contact tracing will not have GPS, internet, or cellular connectivity, so data it collects can only be extracted when it is physically handed over to a health official. These details are being offered up as the government looks to ease concerns about data privacy and drive the adoption of digital tools that can help speed up contact tracing. "

GREAT website with lots of debate re Privacy issues...

"If you were born around the turn of the 21st century, you've probably had to endure someone calling you a "digital native" at least once. At first, this kind of sounds like a good thing to be-raised without the taint of the offline world, and so imbued with a kind of mystic sixth sense about how the Internet should be."

"According to a report by Sophos, malware and spam are on the rise on social networks such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. In the last year, 57% of users report they have been spammed via social networking sites, an increase of 70.6% compared to last year. Furthermore, 36% of users claim they've been sent malware via social networking sites, which is a rise of 69.8% from last year. On the other hand, CEOs of companies are concerned that their employees' usage of social networks is posing a security risk for their company. Sophos has surveyed more than 500 organizations, discovering that 72% of them think social networks are a danger for their companys, with 60% of them tagging Facebook as the biggest security risk, followed by MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, says that Facebook is the biggest threat because it's the biggest social network out there, but he also places some of the blame on Facebook's own privacy rules. "When Facebook rolled-out its new recommended privacy settings late last year, it was a backwards step, encouraging many users to share their information with everybody on the internet," he says. Interestingly enough (and contrasted to some of the reports we've seen lately), Cluley thinks that simply barring access to Facebook is not the solution. "Social networks can be an essential part of the business mix today," he says, "and the answer is not to bar staff from participating in them but to apply some 'social security' instead.""

"They join attempts by lawmakers to regulate the internet for kids. States have proposed and even passed laws that restrict what children can access online, up to banning certain services entirely. On the federal level, several recently introduced bipartisan bills run the gamut from giving children more privacy protections to forbidding them from using social media at all. Some efforts also try to control the content that children can be exposed to. Critics of such legislation point to privacy issues with age verification mechanisms and fears that forced content moderation will inevitably lead to censorship, preventing kids from seeing material that's helpful along with what's considered harmful."

"Some have argued for much greater policing of content online, and companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have talked about hiring thousands to staff up their moderation teams.8 8. April Glaser, Want a Terrible Job? Facebook and Google May Be Hiring,Slate (Jan. 18, 2018), https://slate.com/technology/2018/01/facebook-and-google-are-building-an-army-of-content-moderators-for-2018.html (explaining that major platforms have hired or have announced plans to hire thousands, in some cases more than ten thousand, new content moderators).On the other side of the coin, companies are increasingly investing in more and more sophisticated technology help, such as artificial intelligence, to try to spot contentious content earlier in the process.9 9. Tom Simonite, AI Has Started Cleaning Up Facebook, But Can It Finish?,Wired (Dec. 18, 2018), https://www.wired.com/story/ai-has-started-cleaning-facebook-can-it-finish/.Others have argued that we should change Section 230 of the CDA, which gives platforms a free hand in determining how they moderate (or how they don't moderate).10 10. Gohmert Press Release, supra note 7 ("Social media companies enjoy special legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, protections not shared by other media. Instead of acting like the neutral platforms they claim to be in order obtain their immunity, these companies have turned Section 230 into a license to potentially defraud and defame with impunity… Since there still appears to be no sincere effort to stop this disconcerting behavior, it is time for social media companies to be liable for any biased and unethical impropriety of their employees as any other media company. If these companies want to continue to act like a biased medium and publish their own agendas to the detriment of others, they need to be held accountable."); Eric Johnson, Silicon Valley's Self-Regulating Days "Probably Should Be" Over, Nancy Pelosi Says, Vox (Apr. 11, 2019), https:/

"After a decade or so of the general sentiment being in favor of the internet and social media as a way to enable more speech and improve the marketplace of ideas, in the last few years the view has shifted dramatically-now it seems that almost no one is happy. Some feel that these platforms have become cesspools of trolling, bigotry, and hatred.1 1. Zachary Laub, Hate Speech on Social Media: Global Comparisons, Council on Foreign Rel. (Jun. 7, 2019), https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-global-comparisons.Meanwhile, others feel that these platforms have become too aggressive in policing language and are systematically silencing or censoring certain viewpoints.2 2. Tony Romm, Republicans Accused Facebook, Google and Twitter of Bias. Democrats Called the Hearing 'Dumb.', Wash. Post (Jul. 17, 2018), https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/07/17/republicans-accused-facebook-google-twitter-bias-democrats-called-hearing-dumb/?utm_term=.895b34499816.And that's not even touching on the question of privacy and what these platforms are doing (or not doing) with all of the data they collect."

Thought you were not scared about your privacy on Facebook then read this!

"The internet is primarily funded by the collection, analysis, and trade of data-the data economy. Much of that data is personal data-data about you. The trading of personal data as a business model is increasingly being exported to all institutions in society-the surveillance society, or surveillance capitalism."

"Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg called for new global regulations governing the internet, recommending overarching rules on hateful and violent content, election integrity, privacy and data portability."

"* 1.8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone * Optic Nerve program collected Yahoo webcam images in bulk * Yahoo: 'A whole new level of violation of our users' privacy'"

"The message seems to be that if you really want to keep something private, treat it as a secret, and in the age of algorithmic analysis and big data, perhaps best to follow Winston Smith's bitter lesson from Nineteen Eighty-Four: "If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.""

""The fact is that an interconnected ecosystem of companies and data brokers, of purveyors of fake news and peddlers of division, of trackers and hucksters just looking to make a quick buck, is more present in our lives than it has ever been," he said. "Technology does not need vast troves of personal data, stitched together across dozens of websites and apps, in order to succeed.""

"Security researcher Troy Hunt reports that the snuggly spies, from Spiral Toys, Security researcher Troy Hunt reports that the snuggly spies, from Spiral Toys, "represents the nexus" of the problem with internet-connected appliances and toys: children being recorded, data being leaked, and the technical possibility of surreptitious access to children through networked toys. "The best way to understand what these guys do is to simply watch the video [advertisement for the toy].""

"Three months passed. Then, on Wednesday, anonymous government officials reportedly confirmed that a local company called Systems Engineering of Egypt (SEE or See Egypt) had won the bid to develop the system, which would allegedly allow the Egyptian government to sniff and analyze Internet and social media activity, as well as intercept Skype, WhatsApp and Viber conversations. "

"One of the most widely used tools for monitoring and restricting pupils' internet use in UK schools has a serious security flaw which could leave hundreds of thousands of children's personal information exposed to hackers, a researcher has warned."

"So, yes: the internet of things presents many new possibilities, and it would be foolish to dismiss those possibilities out of hand. But we would also be wise to approach the entire domain with scepticism, and in particular to resist the attempts of companies to gather ever more data about our lives - no matter how much ease, convenience and self-mastery we are told they are offering us."

"In the fall of 2020, gig workers in Venezuela posted a series of images to online forums where they gathered to talk shop. The photos were mundane, if sometimes intimate, household scenes captured from low angles-including some you really wouldn't want shared on the Internet. In one particularly revealing shot, a young woman in a lavender T-shirt sits on the toilet, her shorts pulled down to mid-thigh. The images were not taken by a person, but by development versions of iRobot's Roomba J7 series robot vacuum. They were then sent to Scale AI, a startup that contracts workers around the world to label audio, photo, and video data used to train artificial intelligence."

"Shodan is a search engine for the Internet of Things, scanning the public Internet for devices communicating on ports and over protocols that are commonly used by IoT devices. By feeding it the right parameters -- Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP, port 554) -- you can find innumerable publicly shared webcams, ranging from CCTVs that oversee marijuana grow-ops and many, many baby-monitors. "