Movie and TV show endings can be a major let down, but what if you could control the storyline as it develops? Eko is an entertainment company that’s putting viewers in the director’s chair with interactive TV shows and videos. Tina Trinh reports.
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In 2018, technology firms such as Facebook and Google faced more scrutiny and negative press over their handling of data breaches and online speech. The issue may mean new rules and more regulations in the future.

The question of who can access personal user data through technology caused many people to rethink how much they trust these companies with their private information. At a recent hearing, House Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy grilled Google over accusations it uses algorithms to suppress conservative voices.

“Are America’s technology companies serving as instruments of freedom? Or instruments of control? Are they fulfilling the promise of the digital age? Are they advancing the cause of self-government? Or are they serving as instruments of manipulation used by powerful interests and foreign governments to rob the people of their power, agency, and dignity?,” he said.

At the hearing, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he runs the U.S. technology giant without political preference.

In October, Google acknowledged that several months earlier, it had discovered a data breach involving its Google Plus service, which the company said would be shut down.

Pantas Sutardja, chief executive of data storage company LatticeWork Inc., says such scandals are forcing the companies to take a closer look at how they manage and protect user content.

“2018 has been a challenging year for tech companies and consumers alike. Company CEOs being called to Congress for hearings and promising profusely to fix the problems of data breach but still cannot do it,” said Sutardja.

Also this year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced tough questions from U.S. lawmakers over a breach that allowed a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, to exploit the data of millions of Facebook users. Zuckerberg apologized to lawmakers, but some legislators say the giant social network cannot be trusted to regulate itself.

Separately, the attorney-general for Washington, Karl Racine, said the U.S. capital had sued Facebook over reports involving Cambridge Analytica’s use of data from the social media giant.

The year saw new revelations that foreign operatives were using social media to secretly spread divisive and often bogus messages in the United States and worldwide. Walt Mossberg, a former tech journalist, says consumers are frustrated.

“It doesn’t matter to whose benefit they were operating. What bothers people here is that a foreign country, using our social networks, digital products and services that we have come to feel comfortable in, a foreign government has come in and used that against us,” he said.

The Facebook data breach has prompted companies like Latticework to create new ways for users to protect their information and themselves, Sutardja says.

“Despite apologizing profusely about leaking customer data, they can’t do anything about it because their real master, their boss is Wall Street,” he said.

User data was just one area in which tech firms came under criticism.Under pressure, social media companies tightened restrictions on the kinds of speech they tolerate on their sites.

And workers pressed managers about their companies’ government contracts and treatment of female colleagues.

Mossberg says he wants federal law to limit U.S. internet firms’ collection and use of personal data.

“These are giant companies now. There really are four or five of them that control everything. And governments and citizens of countries around the world need the right to regulate them without closing down free speech. And that’s tricky,” he said.

Mossberg says he has given up Facebook.
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SpaceX continues making news in 2018. The company first broke its own record from 2017 when it passed 18 launches in year. On Sunday, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, SpaceX launched another record-setting rocket… this one for U.S. national security. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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Batteries have been around for hundreds of years, but don’t go thinking this technology is old hat (old fashioned). Batteries are the future. A team of California Scientists with support from the National Science Foundation are on the cutting edge of building a battery that lasts longer and holds more energy. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Some 1.3 billion people live with some form of vision impairment, according to the World Health Organization. A team of innovators at an Israeli technology company has developed a small device to help them. As Laura Sepulveda reports from Jerusalem, the device connects to regular glasses and helps people with visual limitations identify people and products, and read in more than 14 languages.
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Elon Musk’s SpaceX scrapped Saturday’s launch of a long-delayed navigation satellite for the U.S. military due to strong upper-level winds.

The next launch attempt will be on Sunday at 8:51 a.m. EST/13:51 UTC, according to Space X officials.

The launch would have been the rocket firm’s first national security space mission for the United States.
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Forests are often called the lungs of the planet because they produce so much oxygen. But they also store huge amounts of carbon. NASA scientists want to know exactly how much carbon, and so they have just launched a satellite that will finally give them an exact measurement. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The attorney general for Washington, D.C., said Wednesday that the nation’s capital had sued Facebook over reports involving Cambridge Analytica’s use of data from the social media giant.

“Facebook failed to protect the privacy of its users and deceived them about who had access to their data and how it was used,” Attorney General Karl Racine said in a statement. “Facebook put users at risk of manipulation by allowing companies like Cambridge Analytica and other third-party applications to collect personal data without users’ permission.”

The lawsuit came as Facebook faced new reports that it shared its users’ data without their permission.

Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign at one point, gained access to personal data from tens of millions of Facebook’s users. The D.C. attorney general said in the lawsuit that this exposed nearly half of the district’s residents’ data to manipulation for

political purposes during the 2016 campaign, and he alleged that Facebook’s “lax oversight and misleading privacy settings” had allowed the consulting firm to harvest the information.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Facebook defended its data sharing practices Wednesday after a report revealing that certain partners of the social network had access to a range of personal information about users and their friends.

The New York Times late Tuesday reported that some 150 companies — including powerful partners like Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix and Spotify — could access detailed information about Facebook users, including data about their friends.

The report marked yet another potential embarrassment for Facebook, which has been roiled by a series of scandals on data protection and privacy and has been scrutinized over the hijacking of user data in the 2016 US election campaign.

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook’s head of developer platforms and programs, said in a blog post early Wednesday that the Times report was about “integration partners” which enabled “social experiences — like seeing recommendations from their Facebook friends — on other popular apps and websites.”

Papamiltiadis added that “none of these partnerships or features gave companies access to information without people’s permission,” and maintained that the deals did not violate a 2012 privacy settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission.

According to documents seen by the Times, Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see names of Facebook users’ friends without consent and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read private messages.”

The report said Amazon was able to obtain user names and contact information through their friends, and Yahoo could view streams of friends’ posts.

While some of the deals date back as far as 2010, the Times said they remained active as late as 2017 and some were still in effect this year.

‘We’ve been public’

Papamiltiadis said however that “we’ve been public about these features and partnerships over the years because we wanted people to actually use them.”

“They were discussed, reviewed, and scrutinized by a wide variety of journalists and privacy advocates,” he said.

But he said most of the features are now gone.

“Still, we recognize that we’ve needed tighter management over how partners and developers can access information,” he added.

Netflix said in a statement the feature was used to make the streaming service “more social” by allowing users to make recommendations to friends, but that it stopped using it in 2015.

“At no time did we access people’s private messages on Facebook or ask for the ability to do so,” Netflix said in an emailed statement.

Spotify offered a similar response, indicating the music service “cannot read users’ private Facebook inbox messages across any of our current integrations.”

The Canadian bank RBC, also cited in the New York Times, said the deal with Facebook “was limited to the development of a service that enabled clients to facilitate payment transactions to their Facebook friends,” and that it was discontinued in 2015.

Facebook has already been called before lawmakers in the US and elsewhere to defend its data policies since news broke this year on the misuse of personal data in 2016 by Cambridge Analytica, a British consultancy working on Donald Trump’s campaign.

A report prepared for US lawmakers revealed this week showed detailed information on how Russian entities manipulated Facebook and other social networks to support the Trump effort.

Senator Brian Schatz said the latest revelations highlight a need for tougher controls on how tech companies handle user data.

“It has never been more clear,” Schatz tweeted. “We need a federal privacy law. They are never going to volunteer to do the right thing.”
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The European Union on Wednesday gave U.S. President Donald Trump two months to name an ombudsman to tackle EU citizens’ complaints under a data protection deal sealed by predecessor Barack Obama’s team.

Brussels has previously sought assurances the Trump administration is committed to the deal to protect Europeans’ personal data held in the United States by internet giants like Google and Facebook.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said an annual review found that Washington “continues to ensure an adequate level of protection for personal data” under the 2016 Privacy Shield.

But it said the United States should “nominate a permanent ombudsperson by February 28, 2019 to replace the one that is currently acting.”

If this does not happen, the commission warned it could take “appropriate measures” under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which was adopted in May.

The privacy shield came into force in August 2016 to replace a previous arrangement that the EU’s top court struck down over concerns about U.S. intelligence snooping.

“Today’s review shows that the Privacy Shield is generally a success,” said Andrus Ansip, the Commission vice president for the digital single market.

More than 3,850 companies have been certified, including giants Google, Microsoft and IBM, creating “operational ground” to improve how the deal works, he said.

During the first review more than a year ago, the Commission said more than 2,400 companies had been certified.

“We now expect our American partners to nominate the ombudsperson on a permanent basis, so we can make sure that our EU-US relations in data protection are fully trustworthy,” Ansip said in a statement.

After the first review, the Commission said the Trump administration had dispelled initial EU doubts about its commitment to the privacy deal despite its “America First” policy.

Officials say the Privacy Shield lays down tough rules to prevent U.S. intelligence agencies accessing European data. Companies face penalties if they do not meet EU standards of protection.

The European Court of Justice threw out the earlier Safe Harbour arrangement after Austrian activist Max Schrems sued Facebook in Ireland, citing U.S. snooping practices exposed by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
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In recent years, the tech industry has looked to China as a key partner to help build and sell cutting-edge devices and services.

But rising tensions between Washington and Beijing have Silicon Valley worried it will be caught in the middle of a growing trade war.

Over the summer, President Donald Trump slapped $250 million of tariffs on Chinese goods sold in the U.S. and claimed that China offers U.S. businesses an uneven playing field as Beijing seeks to make China into a tech super power.

The detention in Canada earlier this month of a Huawei executive for allegedly breaking U.S. sanctions on Iran has made tech executives feel even more vulnerable.

China, for its part, denies the U.S. claims and has taken steps to pursue a formal inquiry about the tariffs at the World Trade Organization.

A delicate line

For the tech industry, the increasing tensions come as it was already walking a delicate line. Tech executives complain about intellectual property theft in China and what they see as unfair conditions for doing business. But the two regions have strengthened their bonds through investment, trade and partnerships in areas such as artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous cars.

The tensions have left tech executives questioning what they can share about their work, said Stanley Kwong, adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco.

“All of these people are worried if they traveled back and forth, they might be arrested because of the IP, something they know and they talk about in both China, and in the USA,” he said.

Silicon Valley firms have complained the relationship “isn’t as reciprocal as it needs to be,” said Sean Randolph, senior director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

The relationship, from some tech firms’ point of view, is about “the extraction of technologies involuntarily from foreign companies to accelerate China’s technology leadership,” he said.

Critical technologies

Chinese money that has helped fuel the current tech boom in Silicon Valley may start drying up. One reason — a new U.S. law, the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA), beefed up oversight of foreign investment and acquisitions of critical technology that are deemed strategically important. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. has expanded powers to block foreign purchases of U.S. firms.

“Silicon Valley people have been optimistic for a long time,” said Xiaohua Yang, professor of international business at the University of San Francisco. “But now, they have begun to worry … about the lack of Chinese investment coming to support Silicon Valley technology development.”

Lawmakers are concerned that U.S. tech companies, as they pursue the Chinese market or seek Chinese investment, might hand over core technology to the Chinese government, a competitor and sometime adversary on the global stage. The tech industry waits, as what constitutes “critical technologies” under FIRRMA is still being developed.

For U.S. entrepreneurs, the changing climate may mean they will become more cautious, said Kwong, who advises startups.

“If you want to do business in China, if you’re doing consumer products, I say, that’s probably fine,” he said. “But let’s presume you’re doing AI. You better find out exactly what you’re doing. You can have AI in a coffee machine, and I don’t think that’s much to do with defense. If you’re doing facial recognition that may be something that’s going to have a major problem.”

Randolph said that the tech industry has long had an “open market, open platform” approach, with the idea that anyone can come and “we’re moving innovation forward globally.”

But if tensions between Washington and Beijing continue to escalate, experts say, the very openness of Silicon Valley may be a casualty — even if tech firms stand to benefit if China becomes more open for doing business.
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The U.S. has had its share of famous on-screen dogs, from Lassie to Benji. In China, the big-screen star is a lovable mutt named ‘Juice.’ But Juice is getting on in years, so what’s a movie company to do? Turn to cutting-edge biotech, of course. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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