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The Morning Risk Report: Facebook to Antitrust Regulators: Data Is Complicated
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Facebook’s Nick Clegg said antitrust officials should be careful not to treat data like other commodities that could be monopolized. PHOTO: TOBIAS SCHWARZ/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
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Good morning. Facebook has a message for regulators and policy makers concerned about the company’s harvesting of user information: don’t treat data as a simple resource like oil.
Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs and communications, said Monday that antitrust officials should be careful not to treat data like other commodities that could be monopolized, but rather as something more complex that can be shared and kept at the same time.
“We think it is legitimate to ask profound questions about how data is held,” Mr. Clegg said at a briefing with journalists on Monday. But he added that officials defining what he called the orthodoxy of competition policy should “reconfigure old concepts” and “relinquish themselves of the idea that [using data] is the same as using finite resources in finite, one-off ways.”
[Continued below...]
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Mr. Clegg’s statement comes as tech companies including Facebook and Alphabet Inc.’s Google face growing antitrust scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic for their control and use of user data. In the U.S., both the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission are probing the companies.
The European Commission, the European Union’s antitrust enforcer, is also in the early stages of probes into how both Google and Facebook gather and monetize data about their users for advertising purposes, according to a commission spokeswoman.
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Regulatory Compliance in a Disrupted World
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Join The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 10 in London for a discussion about regulatory risk and geopolitics with Anna Bradshaw, a partner on the business crime team at Peters & Peters Solicitors; Neil Donovan, a senior associate at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer; and Sophie Heading, global geopolitics lead at KPMG International. To register, click here.
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From Risk & Compliance Journal
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Citizens Financial Group said it has spent several years developing internal controls to ensure it has a handle on AI-related risks. PHOTO: SCOTT EISEN/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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A blind spot for risk managers in financial services is itself becoming a risk: Few say they have the know-how to properly analyze the potential downsides of artificial intelligence.
AI has been used for years to make trading decisions, but financial services companies more recently have begun exploring potential uses in consumer lending, transaction monitoring and other areas. That has created a new challenge for risk managers, requiring them to understand how algorithms work and identify potential pitfalls with how the technology is applied, executives said.
Risk managers are grappling with a fear of the unknown. AI hasn’t been adopted at a large scale and the unintended consequences aren’t fully documented, according to Steve Culp, senior managing director for finance and risk at management consulting firm Accenture. “Before there were ships,” he said, “we never had shipwrecks.”
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Former Alstom Executive Asks Judge to Reverse Conviction
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Former Alstom executive Lawrence Hoskins has asked a federal judge in New Haven, Conn., to overrule jurors who found him guilty last month of helping orchestrate an Indonesian bribery scheme.
The acquittal request is the beginning of what could be a long appeals process for the retired executive, a former senior vice president of the French transportation company who was charged in 2013 with violating the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Mr. Hoskins also has asked the judge to consider granting him a new trial.
If the judge overseeing the case chooses to deny his request, Mr. Hoskins could appeal his case to an appellate court in New York. A lawyer for Mr. Hoskins declined to comment.
Mr. Hoskins, a U.K. national who worked at Alstom’s Paris headquarters, argued in a court filing Friday that insufficient evidence was presented at trial to prove he acted as an agent of a former company subsidiary in Windsor, Conn. He also argued that there was insufficient evidence to prove he knew that bribery payments allegedly made to Indonesian officials would come from the U.S.—a requirement under U.S. money-laundering law.
—Dylan Tokar
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The Brooklyn detention center where Lebanese shipbuilding executive Jean Boustani was being held. PHOTO: KATHY WILLENS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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A federal jury in Brooklyn found a Lebanese shipbuilding executive not guilty of fraud and money-laundering charges related to $2 billion of debt deals in Mozambique, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
Jean Boustani, a salesman for shipbuilder Privinvest Group, was found not guilty on charges of wire fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering related to the debt raised to pay for contracts between Privinvest and Mozambique.
The verdict could hinder the Justice Department’s efforts to police alleged corruption in emerging-markets finance. It also delivered a victory for Privinvest and its owner, Lebanese businessman Iskandar Safa.
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Australia is creating a new intelligence task force to tackle the threat of foreign interference, as authorities grow more concerned that Beijing is meddling in domestic affairs. The task force, to be led by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO, will pool classified information from the country’s intelligence agencies including those involved in defense, cyber and financial crimes as well as the FBI-style Australian Federal Police.
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China suspended visits by U.S. military ships and aircraft to Hong Kong and placed sanctions on some U.S. nongovernment organizations, in an act of retaliation against President Trump’s signing of a bill intended to show support for Hong Kong’s antigovernment protesters. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, who announced the new measures Monday, warned that Beijing could take further steps if necessary, calling the U.S.’s passage and signing of the bill a “serious violation of international law and basic norms.”
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Garrett Motion is suing its former parent, Honeywell International, alleging that it was forced into a burdensome agreement related to asbestos liabilities. Garrett is Honeywell’s former transportation-systems division, making turbochargers and compressors for cars and trucks, and became a separate public company in October 2018.
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President Trump and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron at the Group of 7 summit on Aug. 26 in Biarritz, France. PHOTO: KIETZMANN,BJÃRN/ZUMA PRESS
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French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said the European Union would strike back against the U.S. if President Trump follows through on a plan to impose tariffs on French imports, in what could develop into a trans-Atlantic tit-for-tat on trade.
On Monday, the Trump administration proposed tariffs of up to 100% against $2.4 billion of French imports—ranging from cheese and wine to handbags and porcelain—saying the nation’s new digital-services tax unfairly targets U.S. tech companies such as Apple and Google.
Mr. Le Maire said the U.S. tariff threats were unacceptable. Speaking on French radio Tuesday, he said if America went ahead, “The European Union would be ready to retaliate.”
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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been accused of destroying the environment, endangering human rights and offending women and gay people. But for companies here trying to raise money, he is something else: a rainmaker.
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Increasing competition for water is playing out across the Eastern U.S., a region more commonly associated with floods and hurricanes and one that was mostly a stranger, until recently, to the type of bitter interstate water dispute long seen in the West.
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Cars destroyed by wildfire in California. PHOTO: JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
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PG&E failed to adequately inspect and maintain its transmission lines for years before a faulty line started the deadliest fire in California history, a state investigation has found. In a 700-page report detailing the problems that led the Caribou-Palermo transmission line to malfunction on Nov. 8, 2018, sparking the Camp Fire, investigators with the California Public Utilities Commission said they found systemic problems with how the company oversaw the safety of its oldest lines.
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A South Korean plan to create a shipbuilding behemoth controlling roughly 20% of the global market is raising competition concerns in Singapore, one of many parties that have to approve the process. Seoul announced the merger of debt-ridden Hyundai Heavy Industries Co. and Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering Co. in January, but the tie-up needs regulatory approvals from Japan, Singapore, China, Kazakhstan and the European Union to be sealed. Regulators in several of those countries are looking at potential issues that could affect their own shipbuilders at a time when orders for new ships are at their lowest level in nearly a decade.
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U.S.-based multinationals will be less exposed to certain U.S. taxes after the Treasury Department issued new rules implementing two major pieces of the 2017 tax law. The regulations, unveiled on Monday, will help ease the burden of two separate minimum taxes that were designed to put a floor under corporate tax collections. Senior Treasury officials said rules largely finalize regulations proposed late last year, while also addressing U.S. multinational firms’ concerns.
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Procter & Gamble has recorded the biggest goodwill impairment so far this year. PHOTO: JOHN MINCHILLO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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The total value of goodwill impairments by U.S. public companies—on the rise for the past three years—could decline in 2019 due to companies’ rising stock market values. Major goodwill impairments for U.S. public companies reported in 2019, which doesn’t account for the fourth quarter or smaller impairments, exceeded $33 billion, according to Duff & Phelps LLC, a New York-based valuation firm.
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Spanish oil-and-gas and chemicals company Repsol SA is aiming to cut emissions to net-zero by 2050 and said it would take a multibillion euro impairment charge against its oil and gas assets. The company said late Monday that its management analyzed the company’s role “in the fight against climate change,” which triggered the strategic shift. Repsol said it expects to book an after-tax impairment charge of about €4.8 billion ($5.3 billion) in some assets in 2019, mainly affecting exploration and production assets in the U.S. and Canada.
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China says its regulation for new mobile-phone services is aimed at minimizing telephone fraud. PHOTO: WU HONG/SHUTTERSTOCK
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Chinese citizens registering for new mobile-phone services will now have to scan their faces to verify their identities, a move that will further increase the government’s scrutiny of its people.
The requirement, which came into effect Sunday, is aimed at minimizing telephone fraud and preventing the reselling and illegal transfer of mobile phone cards, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in a notice in September. In the past, Chinese citizens applying for a new mobile phone number had to personally present an identity card.
Concerns have grown as facial recognition becomes more and more prevalent in China, with authorities applying artificial intelligence to sift through reams of data collected in a bid to boost the economy and centralize oversight of the population.
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The Federal Bureau of Investigation warned that certain Russian-made software, including the viral hit FaceApp, pose a potential counterintelligence threat and could put Americans’ private data at risk. The FBI expressed the concerns in a letter sent to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, N.Y.) that was released on Monday.
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