Google takes aim at privacy law after Facebook lobbying failed

Bloomberg

Alphabet Inc. is pushing efforts to roll back the most comprehensive biometric privacy law in the US, even as the company and its peers face heightened scrutiny after the unauthorised sharing of data at Facebook Inc.
While Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg were publicly apologising this month for failing to protect users’ information, Google’s lobbyists were drafting measures to de-fang an Illinois law recognised as the most rigorous consumer privacy statute in the country. Their ambition: to strip language from a decade-old policy that regulates the use of fingerprints, iris scans and facial recognition technology, and insert a loophole for companies embracing the use of biometrics.
Google is trying to exempt photos from the Illinois law at a time when it’s fighting a lawsuit in the state in which billions of dollars of damages may be at stake. The world’s largest search engine is facing claims that it violated the privacy of millions of users by gathering and storing biometric data without their consent.
Facebook has faced global backlash for failing to secure users’ information, triggered by revelations that a British firm with ties to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign harvested information from as many as 87 million Facebook users without their knowledge. That breach has put the tech behemoth and its Silicon Valley cohort at the center of a data privacy debate.
Facebook is trying to show it’s taking consumer privacy more seriously, but there’s an inexorable dilemma: The business models and future growth of both Google and the world’s largest social network are tied up with the very data they’re now being asked to lock up — information most users have volunteered in exchange for these companies’ free products and services.
Illinois state senator Bill Cunningham proposed an amendment to the Biometric Information Privacy Act in February then aimed at saving a local nursing home from overly burdensome litigation. Google and lobbyists from the Illinois Chamber of Commerce — of which Facebook is a member — intervened, and on April 4 they offered a new version with Cunningham to embed further caveats in the legislation, including language to exclude photos from regulatory scrutiny.
Facebook — which attempted to scale back the law in 2016 — said it didn’t play a role in the drafting or lobbying of the recent proposal. Still, critics contend the company would be an obvious beneficiary of a watered-down BIPA, along with Google, which declined to comment on its role in
revising the bill.
“The ball is in tech companies’ court now,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum. “Working to overturn a privacy law is certainly not the best approach.”

Facebook publishes content removal policies for first time
Bloomberg

For the first time, Facebook Inc is letting people know its specific rules for taking down content once it’s reported to the social network’s moderators.
The 27-page document governs the behaviour of more than 2 billion users, giving Facebook’s definitions of hate speech, violent threats, exploitation and more. It’s the closest the world has come to seeing an international code of conduct that was previously enacted behind closed doors. The release of the document follows frequent
criticism and confusion about the company’s policies.
The community standards read like the result of years of trial and error and are used to provide workers with enough specificity to make quick and consistent judgments.
Content from a hacked source isn’t acceptable “except in limited cases of newsworthi-
ness.” Facebook published the policies to help people understand where the company draws the line on nuanced issues, Monika Bickert, vice president of global policy management, said in a blog post.