Open your Facebook feed. What do you see? [...] Facebook, in the years leading up to this election, hasn’t just become nearly ubiquitous among American internet users; it has centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way. [...]

And unlike traditional media organizations, which have spent years trying to figure out how to lure readers out of the Facebook ecosystem and onto their sites, these new publishers are happy to live inside the world that Facebook has created. Their pages are accommodated but not actively courted by the company and are not a major part of its public messaging about media. But they are, perhaps, the purest expression of Facebook’s design and of the incentives coded into its algorithm — a system that has already reshaped the web and has now inherited, for better or for worse, a great deal of America’s political discourse. [...]

For now, the network hums along, mostly beneath the surface. A post from a Liberty Alliance page might find its way in front of a left-leaning user who might disagree with it or find it offensive, and who might choose to engage with the friend who posted it directly. But otherwise, such news exists primarily within the feeds of the already converted, its authorship obscured, its provenance unclear, its veracity questionable. It’s an environment that’s at best indifferent and at worst hostile to traditional media brands; but for this new breed of page operator, it’s mostly upside. In front of largely hidden and utterly sympathetic audiences, incredible narratives can take shape, before emerging, mostly formed, into the national discourse. [...]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/magazine/inside-facebooks-totally-insa...

Companies like Facebook and Google can continue transferring data from the European Union to their servers in the US under a new deal between the two governments that privacy advocates still say isn’t good enough.

The Privacy Shield replaces the EU’s so-called Safe Harbor Decision, in place since 2000, which asserted that the US provided adequate privacy protections to meet EU standards, providing US-based tech companies legal cover for transferring data from Europe to their home servers. [...]

Privacy advocates say those protections are inadequate and want to see the Privacy Shield quashed. The ombudsperson will have limited power to fix problems and won’t be all that independent since that person will report to the Secretary of State, argues Privacy International. [...]

http://www.wired.com/2016/07/privacy-shield-will-let-us-tech-giants-grab...

A coalition of nearly 20 telcos including BT, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Hutchison, Nokia, Orange, Telefonica, Telenor, and Vodafone have drawn up what they call their "5G Manifesto"—outlining what they want from governments in order to deliver 5G coverage across Europe. [...]

However, there is a caveat: the telcos warn of the "danger" of strict regulation and want net neutrality rules to be watered down. Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers should treat all data the same, by not discriminating or applying different charges regardless of type of content or user. [...]

The telcos also want net neutrality laws to allow “innovative specialised services,” adding that “5G introduces the concept of network slicing to accommodate a wide variety of industry verticals’ business models on a common platform, at scale and with services guarantees.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/5g-vowed-by-telcos-demand-wea...

If a computer has a connection to the internet means no warrant is required for the US government to hack it, a Virginia court has ruled.
The judge angered privacy campaigners by reasoning that since no connected computer “is immune from invasion”, no user should ever expect their their activity to remain secret. [...]

Scarlet Kim, legal officer at Privacy International, told The Independent the verdict would have “astounding implications for the privacy and security of anyone who owns an electronic device”. [...]
“The justification that the rise in hacking destroys a reasonable expectation of privacy in these devices is illogical and absurd.” [...]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/computer-internet-hacke...