Jan 20 (Reuters) – T-Mobile (TMUS.O), the No.3 U.S. wireless carrier by subscribers, said on Thursday it was investigating a data breach involving 37 million postpaid and prepaid accounts and that it could incur significant costs related to the incident.
The company, which has more than 110 million subscribers, said it identified malicious activity on Jan. 5 and contained it within a day, adding that no sensitive data such as financial information was compromised.
However, some basic customer data — such as name, billing address, email and phone number — was obtained, and it had begun notifying impacted customers, said T-Mobile.
“Our investigation is still ongoing, but the malicious activity appears to be fully contained at this time, and there is currently no evidence that the bad actor was able to breach or compromise our systems or our network,” the company said.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has opened an investigation into the data breach, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing an FCC spokesperson.
FCC and T-Mobile did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment on the reported investigation.
“While these cybersecurity breaches may not be systemic in nature, their frequency of occurrence at T-Mobile is an alarming outlier relative to telecom peers,” said Neil Mack, senior analyst for Moody’s Investors Service.
“It could negatively impact customer behavior, cause churn to spike and potentially attract the scrutiny of the FCC and other regulators.”
Last year, T-Mobile agreed to pay $350 million and spend an additional $150 million to upgrade data security to settle litigation over a cyberattack in 2021 that compromised information belonging to an estimated 76.6 million people.
The Bellevue, Washington-based company’s shares fell 2% in after-hours trade.
Reporting by Eva Mathews and Lavanya Ahire in Bengaluru; Editing by Sriraj Kalluvila, Maju Samuel, Rashmi Aich and Savio D’Souza
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NEW YORK/WILMINGTON, Del., Jan 11 (Reuters) – Crypto exchange FTX has recovered more than $5 billion in liquid assets but the extent of customer losses in the collapse of the company founded by Sam Bankman-Fried is still unknown, an attorney for the company told a U.S. bankruptcy court on Wednesday.
The company, which was valued a year ago at $32 billion, filed for bankruptcy protection in November and U.S. prosecutors accused Bankman-Fried of orchestrating an “epic” fraud that may have cost investors, customers and lenders billions of dollars.
“We have located over $5 billion of cash, liquid cryptocurrency and liquid investment securities,” Andy Dietderich, an attorney for FTX, told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey in Delaware at the start of Wednesday’s hearing.
Dietderich also said the company plans to sell nonstrategic investments that had a book value of $4.6 billion.
However, Dietderich said the legal team is still working to create accurate internal records and the actual customer shortfall remains unknown. The U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission has estimated missing customer funds at more than $8 billion.
Dietderich said the $5 billion recovered does not include assets seized by the Securities Commission of the Bahamas, where the company was headquartered and Bankman-Fried resided.
FTX’s attorney estimated the seized assets were worth as little as $170 million while Bahamian authorities put the figure as high as $3.5 billion. The seized assets are largely comprised of FTX’s proprietary and illiquid FTT token, which is highly volatile in price, Dietderich said.
ASSET SALES
FTX could raise additional funds in the coming months for the benefit of customers after Dorsey approved FTX’s request for procedures to explore sales of affiliates at Wednesday’s hearing.
The affiliates — LedgerX, Embed, FTX Japan and FTX Europe — are relatively independent from the broader FTX group, and each has its own segregated customer accounts and separate management teams, according to FTX court filings.
The crypto exchange has said it is not committed to selling any of the companies, but that it received dozens of unsolicited offers and plans to hold auctions beginning next month.
The U.S. Trustee, a government bankruptcy watchdog, opposed selling the affiliates before the extent of the alleged FTX fraud is fully investigated.
In part to preserve the value of its businesses, FTX also sought Dorsey’s approval to keep secret 9 million FTX customer names. The company has said that privacy is needed to prevent rivals from poaching users but also to prevent identity theft and to comply with privacy laws.
Dorsey allowed the names to remain under wraps for only three months, not six months as FTX wanted.
“The difficulty here is that I don’t know who’s a customer and who’s not,” Dorsey said. He set a hearing for Jan. 20 to discuss how FTX will distinguish between customers and said he wants FTX to return in three months to give more explanation on the risk of identity theft if customer names are made public.
Media companies and the U.S. Trustee had argued that U.S. bankruptcy law requires disclosure of creditor details to ensure transparency and fairness.
In addition to selling affiliates, a company lawyer on Wednesday said FTX will end its 19-year $135 million sponsorship deal with the NBA’s Miami Heat and a 7-year about $89 million deal with the League of Legends video game.
FTX’s founder, Bankman-Fried, 30, was indicted on two counts of wire fraud and six conspiracy counts last month in Manhattan federal court for allegedly stealing customer deposits to pay debts from his hedge fund, Alameda Research, and lying to equity investors about FTX’s financial condition. He has pleaded not guilty.
Bankman-Fried has acknowledged shortcomings in FTX’s risk management practices, but the one-time billionaire has said he does not believe he is criminally liable.
In addition to customer funds lost, the collapse of the company has also likely wiped out equity investors.
Some of those investors were disclosed in a Monday court filing, including American football star Tom Brady, Brady’s former wife supermodel Gisele Bündchen and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
Reporting by Dietrich Knauth in New York and Tom Hals in Wilmington, Del.; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Mark Porter, Matthew Lewis and Anna Driver
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Tom Hals
Thomson Reuters
Award-winning reporter with more than two decades of experience in international news, focusing on high-stakes legal battles over everything from government policy to corporate dealmaking.
WASHINGTON, Nov 14 (Reuters) – Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O) will pay $391.5 million to settle allegations by 40 states that the search and advertising giant illegally tracked users’ locations, the Michigan attorney general’s office said Monday.
The investigation and settlement, which was led by Oregon and Nebraska, is a sign of mounting legal headaches for the tech giant from state attorneys general who have aggressively targeted the firm’s user tracking practices in recent months.
In addition to the payment, Google must be more transparent with consumers about when location tracking is occurring and give users detailed information about location-tracking data on a special web page, the Iowa attorney general’s office said.
“When consumers make the decision to not share location data on their devices, they should be able to trust that a company will no longer track their every move,” Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said in a statement. “This settlement makes it clear that companies must be transparent in how they track customers and abide by state and federal privacy laws.”
Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said: “Consistent with improvements we’ve made in recent years, we have settled this investigation, which was based on outdated product policies that we changed years ago.”
Google said in a blog post on Monday that it would be “making updates in the coming months to provide even greater controls and transparency over location data.”
Those changes include making it easier to delete location data. New users will have auto-delete controls that allow them to order Google to delete certain information when it hits a certain age.
The state attorneys opened a probe in 2018 following a report that Google recorded location data even when users instruct it not to. The probe found that Google had misled consumers about location-tracking practices since at least 2014, in violation of state consumer protection laws.
Arizona filed a similar case against Google and settled it for $85 million in October 2022.
Texas, Indiana, Washington State and the District of Columbia sued Google in January over what they called deceptive location-tracking practices that invade users’ privacy.
Google had revenue of $111 billion from advertising in the first half of this year, more than any other seller of online ads. A consumer’s location is key to helping an advertiser cut through the digital clutter to make the ad more relevant and grab the consumer’s attention.
Writing by Diane Bartz and Alexandra Alper; Editing by Anna Driver and Aurora Ellis
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Diane Bartz
Thomson Reuters
Focused on U.S. antitrust as well as corporate regulation and legislation, with experience involving covering war in Bosnia, elections in Mexico and Nicaragua, as well as stories from Brazil, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Nigeria and Peru.
Oct 25 (Reuters) – “Is Twitter dying?” billionaire Elon Musk mused in April, five days before offering to buy the social media platform.
The reality, according to internal Twitter (TWTR.N) research seen by Reuters, goes far beyond the handful of examples of celebrities ghosting their own accounts. Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users – who are vital to the business – engaged, underscoring a challenge faced by the Tesla (TSLA.O) chief executive as he approaches a deadline to close his $44 billion deal to buy the company.
These “heavy tweeters” account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in “absolute decline” since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document titled “Where did the Tweeters Go?”
A “heavy tweeter” is defined as someone who logs in to Twitter six or seven days a week and tweets about three to four times a week, the document said.
The research also found a shift in interests over the past two years among Twitter’s most active English-speaking users that could make the platform less attractive to advertisers.
Cryptocurrency and “not safe for work” (NSFW) content, which includes nudity and pornography, are the highest-growing topics of interest among English-speaking heavy users, the report found.
At the same time, interest in news, sports and entertainment is waning among those users. Tweets on those topics, which have helped Twitter burnish an image as the world’s “digital town square,” as Musk once called it, are also the most desirable for advertisers.
Twitter declined to specify how many of its tweets are in English or how much money it makes from English speakers. But the demographic is important to Twitter’s business, some analysts say.
The platform earned more ad revenue from the United States alone than all other markets combined in its fourth quarter, according to its investor letter, and most ads in the United States are likely targeting English-speaking users, said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence.
Twitter’s study examined the number of heavy tweeters in English who displayed an interest in a topic, based on the accounts they followed, and how that number of users changed over the past two years.
Twitter was motivated to investigate “disturbing” trends among users that may have been masked by overall growth in daily active users and better understand the decline in the company’s most active users, the documents said. The study made no specific conclusions about why heavy users of the platform are declining.
Asked to comment on the internal documents’ findings, a Twitter spokesperson said on Monday: “We regularly conduct research on a wide variety of trends, which evolve based on what’s happening in the world. Our overall audience has continued to grow, reaching 238 million mDAU in Q2 2022,” the spokesperson said, using an acronym for monetizable daily active users.
‘NOT SAFE FOR WORK’ CONTENT
The number of heavy users interested in NSFW and cryptocurrency content grew, the research found.
Twitter is one of the few major social media platforms that permits nudity on its service, and the company has estimated that adult content constitutes 13% of Twitter, according to a separate internal slide presentation seen by Reuters. The presentation did not elaborate on how the figure was calculated.
Advertisers generally steer clear of controversy or nudity for fear of damaging their brands. Major advertisers including Dyson, PBS Kids and Forbes suspended advertising due to accounts that were soliciting child pornography on Twitter, Reuters reported in September.
In response to the September story, Twitter said it “has zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation” and was investing more resources into its work against such material.
Twitter’s most active English-speaking users were also increasingly interested in cryptocurrencies, reaching an all-time high in late 2021, the internal documents showed. But interest in the topic has declined since the crypto price crash in June, and the study noted cryptocurrencies may not be an area of growth in the future.
Current and former Twitter employees who spoke with Reuters said they feared Musk’s calls for less content moderation and his reported plans to gut the staff, which they said will exacerbate the deterioration of the quality of content.
‘DEVASTATING’ LOSSES
Topics that have traditionally made Twitter a popular platform for its millions of users are now in decline among the most active English-speaking users, the documents show.
Interest in world news, as well as liberal politics, showed spikes during major events such as the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. But the categories have since lost the highest number of heavy Twitter users and have shown no signs of recovery, the report said.
Twitter is also losing a “devastating” percentage of heavy users who are interested in fashion or celebrities such as the Kardashian family. These users are likely decamping to rival platforms like Meta Platform’s (META.O) Instagram and ByteDance’s TikTok, a Twitter researcher wrote.
The study also expressed surprise about the decline in interest for e-sports and online streaming personalities, which were previously growing quickly across Twitter. “The big communities are now in decline,” the report said.
“It seems as though there is a significant discrepancy between what I might imagine are our company values and our growth patterns,” one Twitter researcher wrote.
Reporting by Sheila Dang in Dallas
Editing by Kenneth Li and Matthew Lewis
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Consumer rights advocate bringing case for customers
Amazon says collective action is ‘without merit’
Case focuses on marketplace’s ‘Buy Box’ feature
LONDON, Oct 20 (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) is facing a lawsuit in Britain for damages of up to 900 million pounds ($1 billion) over allegations the online marketplace abused its dominant position by favouring its own products, lawyers said.
Consumer rights advocate Julie Hunter plans to bring the collective action on behalf of British consumers who have made purchases on Amazon since October 2016, lawyers representing her said.
The proposed case – which Amazon said was “without merit” – would be the latest mass action against a tech giant to be filed at London’s Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT).
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Law firm Hausfeld, which represents Hunter, said on Thursday that Amazon has breached competition law by using “a secretive and self-favouring algorithm” to promote its own products through the “Buy Box” feature on its website.
Hunter said in a statement: “Far from being a recommendation based on price or quality, the Buy Box favours products sold by Amazon itself, or by retailers who pay Amazon for handling their logistics. Other sellers, however good their offers might be, are effectively shut out.”
An Amazon spokesperson said in a statement: “This claim is without merit and we’re confident that will become clear through the legal process.”
The lawsuit is expected to be filed at the CAT by the end of this month and will have to be certified by the tribunal before it can proceed.
It is being brought on an “opt-out” basis, meaning that any potential claimants will be included in the claim unless they choose to opt out.
The case follows the announcement by Britain’s antitrust watchdog in July that it is investigating Amazon over suspected breaches of competition law, including how it selects which products are placed within the “Buy Box” feature.
Amazon has faced similar probes elsewhere, recently making an offer to the European Commission to avert possible hefty EU antitrust fines.
The platform has also declined to describe its product-search system to an Australian competition regulator which has heard complaints of large marketplace platforms giving preference to in-house wares.
The CAT authorised an estimated 920 milion-pound ($1.1 billion) damages claim against Google (GOOGL.O) in July and approved another case worth up to 1.7 billion pounds against Apple (AAPL.O) in May.
The tribunal is also due to decide in January whether to give the go-ahead to a claim valued at up to 2.2 billion pounds against Meta Platforms (META.O), the owner of Facebook and Instagram, over alleged anti-competitive behaviour.
Google and Apple deny the allegations against them, according to court filings, and Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
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Reporting by Sam Tobin; Editing by Andrew Heavens
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Sept 28 (Reuters) – Some major advertisers including Dyson, Mazda, Forbes and PBS Kids have suspended their marketing campaigns or removed their ads from parts of Twitter because their promotions appeared alongside tweets soliciting child pornography, the companies told Reuters.
DIRECTV and Thoughtworks also told Reuters late on Wednesday they have paused their advertising on Twitter.
Brands ranging from Walt Disney Co (DIS.N), NBCUniversal (CMCSA.O) and Coca-Cola Co (KO.N) to a children’s hospital were among more than 30 advertisers that appeared on the profile pages of Twitter accounts peddling links to the exploitative material, according to a Reuters review of accounts identified in new research about child sex abuse online from cybersecurity group Ghost Data.
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Some of tweets include key words related to “rape” and “teens,” and appeared alongside promoted tweets from corporate advertisers, the Reuters review found. In one example, a promoted tweet for shoe and accessories brand Cole Haan appeared next to a tweet in which a user said they were “trading teen/child” content.
“We’re horrified,” David Maddocks, brand president at Cole Haan, told Reuters after being notified that the company’s ads appeared alongside such tweets. “Either Twitter is going to fix this, or we’ll fix it by any means we can, which includes not buying Twitter ads.”
In another example, a user tweeted searching for content of “Yung girls ONLY, NO Boys,” which was immediately followed by a promoted tweet for Texas-based Scottish Rite Children’s Hospital. Scottish Rite did not return multiple requests for comment.
In a statement, Twitter spokesperson Celeste Carswell said the company “has zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation” and is investing more resources dedicated to child safety, including hiring for new positions to write policy and implement solutions.
She added that Twitter is working closely with its advertising clients and partners to investigate and take steps to prevent the situation from happening again.
Twitter’s challenges in identifying child abuse content were first reported in an investigation by tech news site The Verge in late August. The emerging pushback from advertisers that are critical to Twitter’s revenue stream is reported here by Reuters for the first time.
Like all social media platforms, Twitter bans depictions of child sexual exploitation, which are illegal in most countries. But it permits adult content generally and is home to a thriving exchange of pornographic imagery, which comprises about 13% of all content on Twitter, according to an internal company document seen by Reuters.
Twitter declined to comment on the volume of adult content on the platform.
Ghost Data identified the more than 500 accounts that openly shared or requested child sexual abuse material over a 20-day period this month. Twitter failed to remove more than 70% of the accounts during the study period, according to the group, which shared the findings exclusively with Reuters.
Reuters could not independently confirm the accuracy of Ghost Data’s finding in full, but reviewed dozens of accounts that remained online and were soliciting materials for “13+” and “young looking nudes.”
After Reuters shared a sample of 20 accounts with Twitter last Thursday, the company removed about 300 additional accounts from the network, but more than 100 others still remained on the site the following day, according to Ghost Data and a Reuters review.
Reuters then on Monday shared the full list of more than 500 accounts after it was furnished by Ghost Data, which Twitter reviewed and permanently suspended for violating its rules, said Twitter’s Carswell on Tuesday.
In an email to advertisers on Wednesday morning, ahead of the publication of this story, Twitter said it “discovered that ads were running within Profiles that were involved with publicly selling or soliciting child sexual abuse material.”
Andrea Stroppa, the founder of Ghost Data, said the study was an attempt to assess Twitter’s ability to remove the material. He said he personally funded the research after receiving a tip about the topic.
Twitter’s transparency reports on its website show it suspended more than 1 million accounts last year for child sexual exploitation.
It made about 87,000 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a government-funded non-profit that facilitates information sharing with law enforcement, according to that organization’s annual report.
“Twitter needs to fix this problem ASAP, and until they do, we are going to cease any further paid activity on Twitter,” said a spokesperson for Forbes.
“There is no place for this type of content online,” a spokesperson for carmaker Mazda USA said in a statement to Reuters, adding that in response, the company is now prohibiting its ads from appearing on Twitter profile pages.
A Disney spokesperson called the content “reprehensible” and said they are “doubling-down on our efforts to ensure that the digital platforms on which we advertise, and the media buyers we use, strengthen their efforts to prevent such errors from recurring.”
A spokesperson for Coca-Cola, which had a promoted tweet appear on an account tracked by the researchers, said it did not condone the material being associated with its brand and said “any breach of these standards is unacceptable and taken very seriously.”
NBCUniversal said it has asked Twitter to remove the ads associated with the inappropriate content.
CODE WORDS
Twitter is hardly alone in grappling with moderation failures related to child safety online. Child welfare advocates say the number of known child sexual abuse images has soared from thousands to tens of millions in recent years, as predators have used social networks including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram to groom victims and exchange explicit images.
For the accounts identified by Ghost Data, nearly all the traders of child sexual abuse material marketed the materials on Twitter, then instructed buyers to reach them on messaging services such as Discord and Telegram in order to complete payment and receive the files, which were stored on cloud storage services like New Zealand-based Mega and U.S.-based Dropbox, according to the group’s report.
A Discord spokesperson said the company had banned one server and one user for violating its rules against sharing links or content that sexualize children.
Mega said a link referenced in the Ghost Data report was created in early August and soon after deleted by the user, which it declined to identify. Mega said it permanently closed the user’s account two days later.
Dropbox and Telegram said they use a variety of tools to moderate content but did not provide additional detail on how they would respond to the report.
Still the reaction from advertisers poses a risk to Twitter’s business, which earns more than 90% of its revenue by selling digital advertising placements to brands seeking to market products to the service’s 237 million daily active users.
Twitter is also battling in court Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk, who is attempting to back out of a $44 billion deal to buy the social media company over complaints about the prevalence of spam accounts and its impact on the business.
A team of Twitter employees concluded in a report dated February 2021 that the company needed more investment to identify and remove child exploitation material at scale, noting the company had a backlog of cases to review for possible reporting to law enforcement.
“While the amount of (child sexual exploitation content) has grown exponentially, Twitter’s investment in technologies to detect and manage the growth has not,” according to the report, which was prepared by an internal team to provide an overview about the state of child exploitation material on Twitter and receive legal advice on the proposed strategies.
“Recent reports about Twitter provide an outdated, moment in time glance at just one aspect of our work in this space, and is not an accurate reflection of where we are today,” Carswell said.
The traffickers often use code words such as “cp” for child pornography and are “intentionally as vague as possible,” to avoid detection, according to the internal documents. The more that Twitter cracks down on certain keywords, the more that users are nudged to use obfuscated text, which “tend to be harder for (Twitter) to automate against,” the documents said.
Ghost Data’s Stroppa said that such tricks would complicate efforts to hunt down the materials, but noted that his small team of five researchers and no access to Twitter’s internal resources was able to find hundreds of accounts within 20 days.
Twitter did not respond to a request for further comment.
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Reporting by Sheila Dang in New York and Katie Paul in Palo Alto; Additional reporting by Dawn Chmielewski in Los Angeles; Editing by Kenneth Li and Edward Tobin
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WASHINGTON, Sept 21 (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department can resume reviewing classified records seized by the FBI from former President Donald Trump’s Florida home pending appeal, a federal appellate court ruled on Wednesday, giving a boost to the criminal investigation into whether the records were mishandled or compromised.
The Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals granted a request by federal prosecutors to block U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s stay barring them from using the classified documents in their probe until an independent arbiter, called a special master, vets the materials to weed out any that could be deemed privileged and withheld from investigators.
The appeals court also said it would agree to reverse a portion of the lower court’s order that required the government to hand over records with classification markings for the special master’s review.
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“We conclude that the United States would suffer irreparable harm from the district court’s restrictions on its access to this narrow—and potentially critical—set of materials, as well as the court’s requirement that the United States submit the classified records to the special master for review,” the three-judge panel wrote.
The decision is “limited in nature,” the panel wrote, as the Justice Department had asked only for a partial stay pending appeal, and that the panel was not able to decide on the merits of the case itself.
The three judges who made the decision were Robin Rosenbaum, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, and Britt Grant and Andrew Brasher, both of whom were appointed by Trump.
Trump’s lawyers could potentially ask the U.S. Supreme Court, whose 6-3 conservative majority includes three justices appointed by him, to intervene in the matter.
In filings on Tuesday, Trump’s lawyers urged the court to keep the stay in place and to allow them under the supervision of the special master, U.S Judge Raymond Dearie, to review all of the seized materials, including those marked classified.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not have an immediate comment. Attorneys for Trump could not be immediately reached for comment.
In an interview on Fox News Wednesday night, Trump repeated his claim without evidence that he declassified the documents and said he had the power to do it “even by thinking about it.”
The FBI conducted a court-approved search on Aug. 8 at Trump’s home at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, seizing more than 11,000 documents including about 100 marked as classified.
The search was part of a federal investigation into whether Trump illegally removed documents from the White House when he left office in January 2021 after his failed 2020 re-election bid and whether Trump tried to obstruct the probe.
Cannon, a Trump appointee herself, appointed Dearie to serve as special master in the case at Trump’s request, despite the Justice Department’s objections about a special master.
Cannon tasked Dearie with reviewing all of the materials, including classified ones, so that he can separate anything that could be subject to attorney-client privilege or executive privilege – a legal doctrine that shields some White House communications from disclosure.
However, Trump’s lawyers have not made such claims in any of their legal filings, and during a hearing before Dearie on Tuesday, they resisted his request to provide proof that Trump had declassified any records. read more
Although the appeals court stressed its ruling was narrow in scope, it nevertheless appeared to sharply rebuke Cannon’s ruling from top to bottom and many of Trump’s legal arguments.
“[Trump]has not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents,” the judges wrote. “Nor has he established that the current administration has waived that requirement for these documents.”
The Justice Department previously also raised strong objections to Cannon’s demand that Dearie review the seized records for documents possibly covered by executive privilege, noting that Trump is a former president and the records do not belong to him.
While it voiced disagreement, however, the Justice Department did not appeal that portion of Cannon’s order. It is not clear if prosecutors may separately seek to appeal other parts of Cannon’s ruling on the special master appointment.
“We decide only the traditional equitable considerations, including whether the United States has shown a substantial likelihood of prevailing on the merits, the harm each party might suffer from a stay, and where the public interest lies,” the appeals court said.
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Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch; additional reporting by Eric Beech, Mike Scarcella and Jacqueline Thomsen; Editing by Leslie Adler & Shri Navaratnam
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Sept 16 (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Friday upheld a Texas law that bars large social media companies from banning or censoring users based on “viewpoint,” a setback for technology industry groups that say the measure would turn platforms into bastions of dangerous content.
The largely 2-1 ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans, sets up the potential for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the law, which conservatives and right-wing commentators have said is necessary to prevent “Big Tech” from suppressing their views.
“Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say,” Judge Andrew Oldham, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote in the ruling.
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The Texas law was passed by the state’s Republican-led legislature and signed by its Republican governor.
The tech groups that challenged the law and were on the losing end of Friday’s ruling include NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which count Meta Platforms’ (META.O) Facebook, Twitter (TWTR.N) and Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) YouTube as members.
They have sought to preserve rights to regulate user content when they believe it may lead to violence, citing concerns that unregulated platforms will enable extremists such as Nazi supporters, terrorists and hostile foreign governments.
The association on Friday said it disagreed with forcing private companies to give equal treatment to all viewpoints. “‘God Bless America’ and ‘Death to America’ are both viewpoints, and it is unwise and unconstitutional for the state of Texas to compel a private business to treat those the same,” it said in a statement.
Some conservatives have labeled the social media companies’ practices abusive, pointing to Twitter’s permanent suspension of Trump from the platform shortly after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his supporters. Twitter had cited “the risk of further incitement of violence” as a reason.
The Texas law forbids social media companies with at least 50 million monthly active users from acting to “censor” users based on “viewpoint,” and allows either users or the Texas attorney general to sue to enforce the law.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Twitter hailed the ruling as “massive victory for the constitution and free speech.”
Because the 5th Circuit ruling conflicts with part of a ruling by the 11th Circuit, the aggrieved parties have a stronger case for petitioning the Supreme Court to hear the matter.
In May, the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, found that most of a similar Florida law violates the companies’ free speech rights and cannot be enforced. read more
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Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Leslie Adler
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Aug 23 (Reuters) – Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) misled federal regulators about its defenses against hackers and spam accounts, the social media company’s former security chief Peiter Zatko said in a whistleblower complaint.
In an 84-page complaint, Zatko, a famed hacker widely known as “Mudge,” alleged Twitter falsely claimed it had a solid security plan, according to documents relayed by congressional investigators. Twitter’s shares fell 7.3% to close at $39.86.
The document alleges Twitter prioritized user growth over reducing spam, with executives eligible to win individual bonuses of as much as $10 million tied to increases in daily users, and nothing explicitly for cutting spam.
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Twitter labeled the complaint a “false narrative.” The social media company has been battling Elon Musk in court after the world’s richest person attempted to pull out of a $44-billion deal to buy Twitter. Musk said it failed to provide details about the prevalence of bot and spam accounts.
Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) Chief Executive Musk had offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share, saying he believed it could be a global platform for free speech.
Twitter and Musk have sued each other, with Twitter asking a judge on the Delaware Court of Chancery to order Musk to close the deal. A trial is scheduled for Oct. 17.
Zatko filed the complaint last month with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice, as well as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The complaint was also sent to congressional committees.
“We are reviewing the redacted claims that have been published but what we have seen so far is a false narrative that is riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies,” Twitter Chief Executive Parag Agrawal told employees in a memo.
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Republican, Chuck Grassley, said the complaint raised serious national security concerns and privacy issues and needed to be investigated.
“Take a tech platform that collects massive amounts of user data, combine it with what appears to be an incredibly weak security infrastructure, and infuse it with foreign state actors with an agenda, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster,” he said.
The FTC declined to comment. A spokesperson for the Senate Intelligence Committee said it had received the complaint and was setting up a meeting to discuss the allegation.
A Twitter logo is seen outside the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, California, U.S., April 25, 2022. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
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Twitter’s real regulatory risk lies in whether the documentary evidence shows “knowing or reckless misleading” of investors or regulators, said Howard Fischer, a partner at Moses & Singer and a former SEC attorney.
‘GIVE A LITTLE WHISTLE’
Musk could not be reached for comment but reacted on Twitter with memes and emoji of a robot. Musk’s legal team has subpoenaed Zatko, CNN reported after the whistleblower disclosure was made public.
American hackers have admired Zatko since the 1990s, when he was credited with inventing a tool to crack passwords. He later used his hacking chops to become a sought-after security consultant and with other rebellious techies of the era, transitioned to top government and boardroom positions.
The whistleblower document says that after the Jan. 6 riots, the incoming Biden administration offered him “a day-one appointed position as Chief Information Security Officer for the United States,” which he turned down.
Cybersecurity leaders expressed widespread support for Zatko, and many deplored Twitter’s reaction to his revelations.
Robert Lee, founder of industrial cybersecurity company Dragos, said it was “one of the very rare times based on who it is I don’t even need to know a detail to form an opinion,” he said on Twitter. “If Mudge is making this type of claim, it deserves the investigation.”
In January, Twitter said Zatko was no longer its head of security, two years after his appointment to the role.
On Tuesday, a Twitter spokesperson said Zatko was fired for “ineffective leadership and poor performance,” adding his allegations appeared designed to capture attention and inflict harm on Twitter, its customers and its shareholders.
Debra Katz and Alexis Ronickher, attorneys for Zatko, said in a statement that throughout his tenure at Twitter, he repeatedly raised concerns about inadequate information security systems to the company’s executive committee, CEO and board. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on that statement.
(This story corrects closing price and removes extraneous percentage symbol in paragraph two)
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Reporting by Chavi Mehta, Ankur Banerjee and Tiyashi Datta in Bengaluru, Peter Henderson in Oakland and Raphael Satter in Washington; Additional reporting by Rick Cowan in Washington; Writing by Ankur Banerjee; Editing by Kenneth Li, Saumyadeb Chakrabarty, Sriraj Kalluvila and David Gregorio
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Aug 16 (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google is combining the eyes and arms of physical robots with the knowledge and conversation skills of virtual chatbots to help its employees fetch soda and chips from breakrooms with ease.
The mechanical waiters, shown in action to reporters last week, embody an artificial intelligence breakthrough that paves the way for multipurpose robots as easy to control as ones that perform single, structured tasks such as vacuuming or standing guard.
Google robots are not ready for sale. They perform only a few dozen simple actions, and the company has not yet embedded them with the “OK, Google” summoning feature familiar to consumers.
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While Google says it is pursuing development responsibly, adoption could ultimately stall over concerns such as robots becoming surveillance machines, or being equipped with chat technology that can give offensive responses, as Meta Platforms Inc (META.O) and others have experienced in recent years.
Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) are pursuing comparable research on robots.
Google research scientist Fei Xia accepts a Coca-Cola can from a robot during a demonstration of AI technology at a company micro-kitchen in Mountain View, California, U.S. August 11, 2022. REUTERS/Paresh Dave
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“It’s going to take a while before we can really have a firm grasp on the direct commercial impact,” said Vincent Vanhoucke, senior director for Google’s robotics research.
When asked to help clean a spill, Google’s robot recognizes that grabbing a sponge is a doable and more sensible response than apologizing for creating the mess.
The robots interpret naturally spoken commands, weigh possible actions against their capabilities and plan smaller steps to achieve the ask.
The chain is made possible by infusing the robots with language technology that draws understanding of the world from Wikipedia, social media and other webpages. Similar AI underlies chatbots or virtual assistants, but has not been applied to robots this expansively before, Google said.
It unveiled the effort in a research paper in April. Incorporating more sophisticated language AI since then boosted the robots’ success on commands to 74% from 61%, according a company blog post on Tuesday.
Fellow Alphabet subsidiary Everyday Robots designs the robots, which for now will stay confined to grabbing snacks for employees.
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Reporting by Paresh Dave; Editing by Kenneth Li and Richard Chang
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Paresh Dave
Thomson Reuters
San Francisco Bay Area-based tech reporter covering Google and the rest of Alphabet Inc. Joined Reuters in 2017 after four years at the Los Angeles Times focused on the local tech industry.