Your Phone is Listening to You and Google is a Monopoly (Issue 38, 2024)
Also unsurprisingly, GM is Selling Driver Data and Texas is Buying Spyware
We’re delivering you the hottest internet news that affects all of us. Scroll down to read our full reporting below and if you love what we’re doing, please consider contributing $5 per month so that we can continue providing you with this vital, unique reporting.
Talk Liberation is committed to providing equal access for individuals with disabilities. To view an accessible version of this article, click here.
In this edition:
GM tricks Texans into Selling Driver Data
US Court Finds Google Guilty of Anticompetitive Practices
Uber’s GDPR Violation Earns €290M Fine
CEO Butchers Own Bank for $47M
Facebook Partner Admits Smartphone Mic Used for Listening
RealPage Accused of Price Fixing Rental Housing
Texas Spends $5.3M on Spyware
FTX Owes Victims $12.7B
GM tricks Texans into Selling Driver Data
Earlier this August the state of Texas filed a lawsuit against General Motors Company (GM), accusing the automaker of abusing customers’ data and trust over multiple years. Texas is seeking damages of $10,000 for every GM vehicle sold in the state since 2015 and an additional $250,000 if the purchaser was over the age of 65 - Go git ‘em Grandpa!
The alleged deceptive practices were caused by a “confusing and highly misleading” consent process where GM implied that handing over driving data would improve customer safety. According to the suit however, this process, “was no more than a deceptively designed sales flow” that culminated in giving GM full permission to sell driver data to third parties.
And sell that data they did — primarily to insurance companies who, as we reported on in June, have used driver data to adjust people’s insurance premiums. While it is unclear at this time if premiums were raised for Texan drivers, the fact that GM never explicitly stated that selling driver data was possible will likely put them in violation of Texas’s consumer protection laws.
US Court Finds Google Guilty of Anticompetitive Practices
Google has been found by a United States Federal Court to be guilty of violating anti-trust laws. Specifically, the tech giant was, “engaging in anticompetitive practices to maintain its dominant position in the markets for general search and general search text advertising”. The next phase of this case will occur in December when a hearing to determine the remedies required of Google to address their anticompetitive practices will be held.
Globally Google is also under pressure with over 100 anti-trust investigations either active or pending. It is likely the recent US ruling will influence these investigations as it showcased how Google directed users to Google’s vertical offerings and advertisers to Google’s advertising options at the expense of competitors, and how Google pushed for default status of their search engine across platforms, including Apple’s iPhone.
While this recent court case certainly puts pressure on Google to change their operating strategy in the realm of smartphones, Christian Bergqvist, a Senior Fellow at the George Washington Competition and Innovation Lab, is concerned that Google’s true motivations behind these anticompetitive actions are aimed at securing their monopoly on the next generation of devices. This, he argues, could cause the judgment against the search giant to not have the intended effect as Google is already securing exclusivity deals involving smartwatches, cars, and other devices connected to the internet.
Uber’s GDPR Violation Earns €290M Fine
In 2021 a series of complaints from over 170 French Uber drivers kicked off an investigation into the global ride-sharing company that resulted in one of the largest GDPR fines to date. With Uber’s EU headquarters located in the Netherlands, Dutch data regulators were tasked with holding Uber responsible for improperly processing drivers’ personal data by transferring it out of the EU into the United States.
The reasoning behind such a large fine for simply sending data overseas stems from concerns that U.S. intelligence agency surveillance programs violate the privacy and data protection rights of EU people. When data is improperly transferred into the U.S. it is likely accessible by these surveillance programs, creating “a serious violation” according to Dutch regulator Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP).
A response from Uber regarding the ruling was emailed to TechCrunch and stated, “This flawed decision and extraordinary fine are completely unjustified. Uber’s cross-border data transfer process was compliant with GDPR during a 3-year period of immense uncertainty between the EU and US. We will appeal and remain confident that common sense will prevail.”
CEO Butchers Own Bank for $47M
Shan Hanes, a 53 year old man from Kansas, has received 24 years in prison after embezzling $47 million from the bank where he was CEO. The embezzlement occurred after he sent money from his church, a local investing club and his daughter’s college fund to scammers running a fraudulent scheme known as “pig butchering”.
In this case, unknown person(s) contacted Hanes and promised massive profits if he invested in a poorly-implemented cryptocurrency exchange. Ignoring warning signs that included his neighbour explicitly telling him he was involved in a scam and to “walk away”, Hanes doubled down and directed bank employees to wire millions of dollars to the fraudsters.
Subsequently, “Hanes’ fraudulent actions caused HTSB (Heartland Tri-State Bank) to fail and the bank investors to lose $9 million” according to the US Attorneys Office. The reason losses were not higher was due to Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation absorbing the remainder of the embezzled funds.
Facebook Partner Admits Smartphone Mic used for Listening
Listing Facebook, Google and Amazon as clients, Cox Media Group (CMG) recently caused controversy when a pitch deck for prospective customers was made public. Included in the deck was a service called “Active Listening” that CMG boasted would, "capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations".
All three major tech companies were quick to distance themselves from CMG after the pitch deck was publicised, with Amazon and Meta claiming they do not participate in the “Active Listening” program and Google simply removing CMG from their Partner Program website.
Fuelling further outrage was a blog post from CMG dated November 2023 that responded to the question of whether this program was illegal, saying, “It is legal for phones and devices to listen to you. When a new app download or update prompts consumers with a multi-page term of use agreement, somewhere in the fine print, Active Listening is often included."
RealPage Accused of Price Fixing Rental Housing
The US government and eight state attorneys general are suing software maker RealPage for enabling landlords to collectively set housing rental prices. The suit accuses RealPage of using data voluntarily uploaded by landlords to provide “recommendations” for pricing property rentals and then monitoring landlords for compliance with RealPage’s pricing algorithm.
Attorney General Merrick Garland alleged that "a large number of landlords effectively agree to outsource their pricing decisions to RealPage by using an 'auto accept' setting, which effectively permits RealPage to determine the price a renter will pay."
In a statement responding to the allegations, RealPage said that, “its software benefits both housing providers and residents," and "makes price recommendations in all directions—up, down, or no change—to align with property-specific objectives of the housing providers using the software." This is in direct contrast with the US Attorneys Office who is claiming RealPage "reviews and weighs in on landlords' other policies, including trying to—and often succeeding in—ending renter-friendly concessions (like a free month's rent or waived fees) to attract or retain renters".
Texas Spends $5.3M on Spyware
In June of this year the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) inked a multi-million dollar deal with tech firm Penlink that will give them the ability to geofence specific areas. While it was recently determined by a US Federal Court that geofencing warrants violate the Fourth Amendment (we reported on it here), by working directly with Penlink the DPS can effectively ignore this ruling as there are no search warrants necessary for directly spying on people’s smartphones.
The specific software Penlink is offering is named Tangles, which is an “artificial intelligence-powered web platform that scrapes information from the open, deep, and dark web”. The geofencing capability comes from an optional add-on for Tangles called WebLoc and it is this program that is concerning to privacy advocates.
Justifying their use of the software, the DPS is claiming that, “Intelligence and Counterterrorism division personnel need the tool to identify and disrupt potential domestic terrorism and other mass casualty threats”.
Brian Harrison, a Texas state represensative, is concerned about the contract and wants to ensure the DPS's use of WebLoc is constituitonal. He stated, “I want to make sure that we don’t have Fourth Amendment violations going on here, whether it’s intentional or not… Government should be protecting our civil liberties, not violating them.”
FTX Owes Victims $12.7B
Bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX must repay victims to the tune of nearly $13B after a court case by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) was closed this August. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX and mastermind behind one of the largest financial frauds ever, caused customer losses well into the billions when the exchange collapsed almost two years ago.
The repayment is the largest ever secured by the CFTC, highlighting the massive amount of damage FTX caused when it misappropriated customer funds. Bankman-Fried’s fraud was unfortunately able to occur due to the cryptocurrency industry’s lack of, “the basic regulatory tools, like governance, customer protections, and surveillance that exist to identify misconduct and ultimately prevent collapse” that other traditional markets have, according to CFTC Chairman Rostin Behnam.
Additionally, the court has ordered a permanent ban for Bankman-Fried and other guilty parties from, “trading on any registered entity and from holding or entering into any transactions involving commodity interests or digital commodities, including bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), or tether (USDT)”.
That concludes this edition of Your Worldwide INTERNET REPORT!
Remember to SUBSCRIBE and spread the word about this unique news service.
This issue of Your Worldwide INTERNET REPORT was produced by the Talk Liberation Digital Media Team.
Talk Liberation - Your Worldwide INTERNET REPORT was brought to you by Panquake.com. We Don’t Hope, We Build!
© Talk Liberation Limited. The original content of this article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Please attribute copies of this work to “Talk Liberation” or talkliberation.com. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact licensing@talkliberation.com