An anonymous reader writes: European countries are currently implementing new data protection laws. Recently, despite leaving the European Union, the United Kingdom has expressed intent to implement the law called General Data Protection Regulation. As an extension, the UK wants to to ban re-identification (with a penalty of unlimited fines), the method of reversing anonymization, or pointing out the weakness of the used anonymisation process. One famous example was research re-identifying Netflix users from published datasets. By banning re-identification, UK follows the lead of Australia which is considering enacting similarly controversial law that can lead to making privacy research difficult or impossible. Privacy researchers express concerns about the effectiveness of the law that could even complicate security, a view shared by privacy advocates.

Yesterday, Disney announced its intent to pull its movies from Netflix and start its own streaming service. This upset many users across the web as the whole appeal of the streaming model becomes diluted when there are too many "Netflixes." TorrentFreak argues that "while Disney expects to profit from the strategy, more fragmentation is not ideal for the public" and that the move "keeps piracy relevant." From the report: Although Disney's decision may be good for Disney, a lot of Netflix users are not going to be happy. It likely means that they need another streaming platform subscription to get what they want, which isn't a very positive prospect. In piracy discussions, Hollywood insiders often stress that people have no reason to pirate, as pretty much all titles are available online legally. What they don't mention, however, is that users need access to a few dozen paid services, to access them all. In a way, this fragmentation is keeping the pirate ecosystems intact. While legal streaming services work just fine, having dozens of subscriptions is expensive, and not very practical. Especially not compared to pirate streaming sites, where everything can be accessed on the same site.

schwit1 shares a report from The Washington Post (Warning: may be paywalled; alternative source): The Walt Disney Co. secretly collects personal information on some of their youngest customers and shares that data illegally with advertisers without parental consent, according to a federal lawsuit filed late last week in California. The class-action suit targets Disney and three other software companies -- Upsight, Unity and Kochava -- alleging that the mobile apps they built together violate the law by gathering insights about app users across the Internet, including those under the age of 13, in ways that facilitate "commercial exploitation."

The plaintiffs argue that Disney and its partners violated COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law designed to protect the privacy of children on the Web. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Northern California, seeks an injunction barring the companies from collecting and disclosing the data without parental consent, as well as punitive damages and legal fees. The lawsuit alleges that Disney allowed the software companies to embed trackers in apps such as "Disney Princess Palace Pets" and "Where's My Water? 2." Once installed, tracking software can then "exfiltrate that information off the smart device for advertising and other commercial purposes," according to the suit. Disney should not be using those software development companies, said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "These are heavy-duty technologies, industrial-strength data and analytic companies whose role is to track and monetize individuals," Chester said. "These should not be in little children's apps." Disney responded to the lawsuit, saying: "Disney has a robust COPPA compliance program, and we maintain strict data collection and use policies for Disney apps created for children and families. The complaint is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of COPPA principles, and we look forward to defending this action in court."

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Ars Technica: Americans might not need a fast home Internet connection, the Federal Communications Commission suggests in a new document. Instead, mobile Internet via a smartphone might be all people need. The suggestion comes in the FCC's annual inquiry into broadband availability. Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband (or more formally, "advanced telecommunications capability") is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. If the FCC finds that broadband isn't being deployed quickly enough to everyone, it is required by law to "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market."

The FCC found during George W. Bush's presidency that fast Internet service was being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion. But during the Obama administration, the FCC determined repeatedly that broadband isn't reaching Americans fast enough, pointing in particular to lagging deployment in rural areas. These analyses did not consider mobile broadband to be a full replacement for a home (or "fixed") Internet connection via cable, fiber, or some other technology. Last year, the FCC updated its analysis with a conclusion that Americans need home and mobile access. Because home Internet connections and smartphones have different capabilities and limitations, Americans should have access to both instead of just one or the other, the FCC concluded under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler. The report goes on to add that with Republican Ajit Pai as chairman of the FCC, "the FCC seems poised to change that policy by declaring that mobile broadband with speeds of 10Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream is all one needs." Furthermore, "In doing so, the FCC could conclude that broadband is already being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, and thus the organization would take fewer steps to promote deployment and competition."

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Jason Needham, 45, of Arlington, Tennessee was sentenced last week to 18 months in prison and two years of supervised release for hacking his former company's FTP server and the email account of one of his former colleagues. Needham did all the hacking after he left his former employer, Allen & Hoshall (A&H), a design and engineering firm for which he worked until 2013. Needham left to create his own company named HNA Engineering together with a business partner. HNA is also a design and engineering firm. According to court documents obtained by Bleeping Computer, between May 2014 and March 2016, Needham hacked into the email account of one of his former co-workers. From this account, the FBI says Needham took sensitive business information, company fee structures, marketing plans, project proposals, and lists of credentials for A&H's FTP server. A&H rotated its FTP credentials every six months, but Needham acquired new logins from his former colleague's email account.

An anonymous reader writes: It was a big deal for many when Apple added a second camera to the back of the iPhone 7 Plus last year. In five years, that will be considered quaint. By then, smartphones could sport 13 cameras, allowing them to capture 360-degree, 3D video; create complex augmented reality images onscreen; and mimic with digital processing the optical zoom and aperture effects of an SLR. That's one of the far-out, but near-term, predictions in a new study by LDV Capital, a VC firm that invests in visual technologies such as computer vision. It polled experts at its own portfolio companies and beyond to predict that by 2022, the total number of cameras in the world will reach about 45 billion. Jaw-dropping as that figure is, it doesn't seem so crazy when you realize that today there are already about 14 trillion cameras in the world, according to data from research firms such as Gartner. Next to phones, other camera-hungry products will include robots (including autonomous cars), security cameras, and smart home products like the new Amazon Echo Show, according to LDV. UPDATE: Story has been updated to reflect the updates made to The Fast Company article. The outreach figures are 45 billion cameras by 2022, not trillion.

Allison Tierney, reporting for Vice: An international anonymous photo-sharing site where people post explicit photos without consent is playing host to the victimization of countless women. In the Canadian section of Anon-IB alone, there are currently over a hundred threads -- often organized by region, city, or calling out for nudes of a specific woman to be posted publicly. "Hamilton hoes," "Nanaimo Thread!," and "Markham wins" are some titles of Canadian threads. (Language used on the site equates the word "win" with sexually explicit photos of women.) Many major Canadian cities are represented on the site, and some threads even focus on women from specific schools. While it's a crime to share an "intimate image" of a person without their consent in Canada, sites that host this kind of activity don't necessarily fall under this. "[In terms of organizing content], is it criminal? No. Is it illegal? No," Toronto-based lawyer Jordan Donich, of Donich Law, told VICE. "It's a newer version of an older problem -- sites like these have been around for a long time." Anon-IB is not a new site; its current domain was registered to a "private person" in 2015 and ends in an ".ru." However, the site was initially up several years before 2015, going offline briefly in 2014.

Google fired engineer James Damore after he wrote a 10-page document about "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber." taustin writes from a report via Inc. about the potential legal trouble the company may face from firing the "anti-diversity" engineer: Whether Demore is right or wrong, whether one agrees with him or not, Google may have legal trouble for firing him. Employees are protected by federal law when they discuss working conditions with other employees (and this was an internal memo). His memo could be considered whistleblowing, which is also protected (and it is very clear that he was fired as retribution). And, in California, political opinions are protected in the work place as well. Just because one side is wrong doesn't mean the other side is right.