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Cyber Daily: Walking the Privacy Tightrope
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Hello. Privacy is fast becoming an expensive and time-consuming legal problem for companies of all kinds. Protecting customer privacy is one way companies are seeking competitive advantage.
Facebook hasn’t complied fully with subpoenas and other requests for information about its privacy practices, according to the California attorney general in a lawsuit unveiled Wednesday. The tech company says it has provided thousands of pages of written responses and many more documents.
Also today: A New York medical center agrees to a $3 million settlement over patient privacy violations; Apple released details about how it handles privacy protections on its iPhones; and IBM and Bank of America released details about a cloud service that includes encryption and other security measures to guard banking data.
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Attorney General Xavier Becerra said California prosecutors haven’t received adequate responses from Facebook to subpoenas issued in June. PHOTO: BEN MARGOT/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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California seeks to force Facebook to comply with subpoenas. California is investigating Facebook’s privacy practices, the state’s attorney general revealed Wednesday in a lawsuit that accuses the Silicon Valley tech giant of failing to adequately comply with information requests, the WSJ reports. California prosecutors began probing Facebook in 2018, shortly after the company said data from as many as 87 million of its users may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct British political consulting firm.
Looking for email: California said in its legal filing that it doesn’t believe Facebook has searched the emails of either Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg or Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg in response to subpoenas. The office of Attorney General Xavier Becerra said that it issued a first round of subpoenas to Facebook on June 4, 2018, and waited more than a year for responses. A second round of information requests was issued this past June. In that case, the company didn’t answer 19 of 27 written questions, gave only partial responses on six others and didn’t provide any documents to six document requests.
Facebook says it has complied with requests: “To date, we have provided thousands of pages of written responses and hundreds of thousands of documents,” said Will Castleberry, Facebook’s vice president of state and local policy.
News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Facebook.
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$29 Million
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Amount an employee of Nikkei America Inc. wired to a fraudster’s account in September in response to an email message from someone posing as an executive of the Japanese media company. Nikkei said it is working with authorities in the U.S. and Hong Kong to investigate.
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Huawei’s Ren Zhengfei discussed how his company will navigate the trade war, concerns over whether its equipment could be used to spy for Beijing and his road trip across America. PHOTO: ANTHONY KWAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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Huawei founder says Chinese giant doesn’t need the U.S. The Chinese telecom giant hasn’t yet received any expressions of interest from U.S. companies to buy the intellectual property underpinning its 5G technology—a workaround floated earlier this year after years of being blocked in the U.S., the WSJ reports. In an interview, Chief Executive Ren Zhengfei Huawei’s 75-year-old founder, struck a defiant tone on the Trump administration’s recent moves against the company, while also praising the U.S.’s entrepreneurial spirit.
No biggie: “We can survive very well without the U.S.,” Mr. Ren said. “The China-U.S. trade talks are not something I’m concerned with.” Mr. Ren said he would welcome a visit from President Trump now or after he has left office. “We would certainly give him a warm welcome,” Mr. Ren said.
Context: In May the U.S. added Huawei to a Commerce Department “entity list,” preventing many American suppliers from doing business with the Shenzhen-based company. Huawei, which last year bought $11 billion of technology from American suppliers—including software from Alphabet and Microsoft, and chips from an array of manufacturers—has moved to find backup sources, while also working on its own chips and software.
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PHOTO: MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS
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Apple outlines iPhone privacy processes. The company issued papers for researchers and developers about how privacy is handled in its photo app, Safari web browser, location-based services and a sign-in process for third-party apps, Reuters reports. Apple’s machine-learning technology helps guard against the creation of fake accounts and other systems for preventing developers from bypassing safeguards.
IBM, Bank of America collaborate on cloud, security tools. The companies are building a public-cloud computing service for banks that includes automated security tools and top-level encryption, the WSJ’s CIO Journal reports. The service, unveiled Wednesday, is intended to protect banking data. “Even people at IBM with deep access to the cloud will not have access to the key” to unlock a bank’s encrypted data, said Arvind Krishna, IBM’s senior vice president for the cloud.
New York-based medical center settles privacy case. University of Rochester Medical Center said it will pay $3 million to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to settle a probe into violations of patient privacy, Becker’s Hospital Review reports. The medical center reported the theft of an unencrypted flash drive in 2013 and an unencrypted laptop four years later. Each contained sensitive personal data. An investigation by the Office for Civil Rights at HHS found inadequate security and risk management procedures.
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