During a high-profile hearing that focused largely on antitrust issues, members of the House Judiciary Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law Subcommittee on July 29 also grilled four major tech company CEOs on a range of other policy issues including privacy and misinformation. […]

Over 30 technology companies, including Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Verizon, formed a coalition to promote policies for openness and interoperability in a key part of the architecture used by mobile devices, particularly for 5G use. […]

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is teaming up with the American Red Cross and Facebook to provide Portal video calling devices to veterans, caregivers, and families as social distancing guidance remains in place. […]

Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., asked Zoom Communications CEO Eric Yuan in an April 6 letter for a detailed accounting of the company’s security and privacy practices following numerous press reports of security complaints about the company’s teleconference services. […]

The Department of Justice (DoJ), along with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), announced today that Facebook has agreed to pay a $5 billion fine regarding data privacy claims. The fine is the largest civil penalty ever imposed by the FTC. […]

The Cybersecurity Tech Accord (CTA) announced May 9 that 16 new companies have signed on to the agreement, bringing the total to more than 106 signatories one year after its creation.  […]

Kevin Bankston is leaving New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) to become director of privacy policy at Facebook, where he will focus on “development privacy-protective tools” and help shape privacy policy for emerging technologies. […]

Citing “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” Facebook announced today that it has purged accounts from Iran, Russia, Macedonia, and Kosovo. […]

Facebook announced that it kept hundreds of millions of Facebook users’ passwords “stored in a readable format” within its internal data storage systems in a press release today. Facebook said it has already fixed the error. Although the passwords were not exposed to anyone external to Facebook, the company said its login systems were designed […]

As technology and public policy continue to meet at a crossroads in American society, Bruce Schneier, fellow and lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, proposed that the United States needs more public-interest technologists at the RSA Conference yesterday. […]

The Cybersecurity Tech Accord announced yesterday that it has added 11 new companies to its pledge, bringing its total to 90 signatories. AnchorFree, Domain Tools, Flowmon Networks, MarkMonitor, NTT, Paladion, Percipiet.ai, Silent Breach, Tanium, Telecom Italia, and Unisys all signed on and pledged to “defend customers everywhere from malicious attacks by cybercriminal enterprises and nation-states.” […]

Reps. Brenda Lawrence, D-Mich., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., today introduced a new resolution supporting “the development of guidelines for the ethical development of artificial intelligence (AI).” […]

In the face of increased public scrutiny and increased calls for Congressional oversight into the social media giant’s cybersecurity habits, Facebook has made quite a few new cybersecurity hires. […]

Rachel Holland has left her post in Rep. Will Hurd’s office after four years of service to the Texas Republican. […]

A New York Times report on Tuesday night revealed new details on Facebook’s partnerships with service providers, showing a high level of access to user data for other companies, spurred new calls for data privacy legislation. […]

A group of 31 civil rights and advocacy groups released a letter today urging Mark Zuckerberg to step down as Facebook’s CEO. […]

Yesterday two academics proposed creating an international organization modeled after the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), that would “provide assistance and relief to vulnerable citizens and enterprises affected by serious cyberattacks.” […]

Facebook said it informed users on Friday the company discovered attackers using a new technique to potentially take over user accounts–putting 50 million accounts at risk and forcing the company to take preventative action on 90 million accounts. […]

Tech giants including Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, Cisco, Dell, and VMware are calling on the United States and other governments to invest in defensive, rather than offensive, cyber technologies. […]

The chairman and ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee today voiced some interest in considering Federal government regulation of social media companies and their services, but offered no concrete steps on how to do so. […]

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Facebook, and Microsoft hosted a joint briefing on Friday, Aug. 24, for the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) and the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) regarding “actions being taken to combat malicious interference operations.” […]

The former chief security officer at Facebook urged in a column published today on the “Lawfare” blog that the U.S. consider creating an independent, “defense-only” cybersecurity agency to deal with defense of election systems and processes that may come under attack by adversaries. […]

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday convened a conference call with the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) and the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) regarding cybersecurity and ongoing threats to the 2018 midterm elections. […]

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said in a tweet late Tuesday that he supports a “full investigation” by Federal government authorities into Facebook over its dealings with political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica including the firm’s use of Facebook user data on millions of Americans to construct voter profiles.   […]

California lawmakers on Thursday passed the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, one of the toughest U.S. laws governing data privacy. The legislation specifically targets information companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and AT&T–many of whom are headquartered in California. […]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s marathon Congressional sessions in front of both the House and Senate have produced countless talking points and incendiary sound bites. […]

The U.S. military has long laid claim to having the best-equipped, best-trained fighting force in the world, and to spending more on defense than the next eight top-spending nations combined. But when the battleground is cyberspace, does that claim hold up? […]

Representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google told Congress on Oct. 31 that they’ve had to learn how to combat nontraditional cyberattacks, like the spread of disinformation, rather than focusing on malware attacks alone to protect consumers. […]

The Department of Commerce and the European Union held the first review of the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, where the parties discussed methods for keeping consumer data private. More than 2,400 organizations, including Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, have joined the Privacy Shield. […]

The vote last week by House and Senate Republicans to repeal privacy regulations governing Internet service providers’ use of customer data has forced some states to consider new laws and has ISPs scrambling to clarify their privacy policies. […]