WHATSAPP FACES EU CONSUMER COMPLAINT OVER PRIVACY UPDATE
Google France said in a statement it was “very disappointed” by the decision, and that the fine “doesn’t reflect the efforts put in place or the reality of the use of news content on our platform.” It said it is negotiating in good faith toward a solution, and that it’s on the verge of reaching an agreement with some publishers.
The dispute is part of a larger effort by authorities in the European Union and around the world to force Google and other tech companies to compensate publishers for content.
The French antitrust agency had issued temporary orders to Google in April 2020 to hold talks within three months with news publishers, and fined the company for breaching those orders.
“When the authority imposes injunctions on companies, they are required to apply them scrupulously, respecting their letter and their spirit. In the present case, this was unfortunately not the case,” the watchdog’s president, Isabelle de Silva, said in a statement.
“Google’s negotiations with publishers and press agencies cannot be regarded as having been conducted in good faith.”
The company was forced to negotiate with French publishers after a court last year upheld an order saying such agreements were required by a 2019 European Union copyright directive. France was the first of the bloc’s 27 nations to adopt the directive, which lays out a way for publishers and news companies to strike licensing deals with online platforms.
Google had initially balked at paying for news, saying news companies benefited from the millions of readers it sends to their websites. News companies, meanwhile, have been demanding for years that digital giants pay for news content they siphon from commercial media while taking the lion’s share of ad revenue.
The watchdog focused on a few specific violations of its orders by Google. It said the company pushed news publishers to negotiate deals for its News Showcase product, which lets publishers package stories with panels and features like timelines, while excluding income from general search results. Google also told French news agencies including AFP they couldn’t pursue payments if their content appeared on other news sites and came up in search results.
In Australia, Google and Facebook have signed licensing deals with news companies after the government passed a law this year requiring digital giants to help pay for journalism.
Google has been repeatedly targeted by French and European Union antitrust authorities for various business activities seen as abusing its market dominance, including a 220 million euro fine that the French competition watchdog issued the company last month for abusing its ‘dominant position’ in the online advertising business.
Facebook’s WhatsApp faces a complaint from European Union consumer groups who say the chat service has been unfairly pressuring users to accept a new privacy update in what it calls a breach of the bloc’s regulations.
The European Consumer Organisation, or BEUC, filed a complaint this week over the way WhatsApp has brought in changes to its terms of service and privacy policy, saying they aren’t transparent or easily understood by users.
Many WhatsApp users switched to other chat apps like Signal and Telegram because of privacy concerns when the update was rolled out earlier this year because of concerns the changes would give Facebook access to more information on users.
“WhatsApp has been bombarding users for months with aggressive and persistent popup messages to force them to accept its new terms of use and privacy policy,” BEUC Director General Monique Goyens said. “They’ve been telling users that their access to their app will be cut off if they do not accept the new terms. Yet consumers don’t know what they’re actually accepting.”
BEUC and consumer rights groups from eight member countries filed the complaint to the EU’s executive Commission and the bloc’s network of consumer authorities.
WhatsApp said the complaint is based on a misunderstanding of the update’s purpose and effect and would welcome the opportunity to explain it to the BEUC.
“Our recent update explains the options people have to message a business on WhatsApp and provides further transparency about how we collect and use data,”WhatsApp said in a prepared statement. “The update does not expand our ability to share data with Facebook, and does not impact the privacy of your messages with friends or family, wherever they are in the world.”
Cubans facing the country’s worst economic crisis in decades took to the streets over the weekend. In turn, authorities blocked social media sites in an apparent effort to stop the flow of information into, out of and within the beleaguered nation.
Restricting internet access has become a tried-and-true method of stifling dissent by authoritarian regimes around the world, alongside government-supported disinformation campaigns and propaganda.
On the extreme side, regimes like China and North Korea exert tight control over what regular citizens can access online. Elsewhere, service blockages are more limited, often cutting off common social platforms around elections and times of mass protests.
There was no formal organizer of protests; people found out about the rallying points over social media, mostly on Twitter and Facebook, the platforms most used by Cubans. The thousands of Cubans who took to the streets — protesters and pro-government activists alike — wielded smartphones to capture images and send them to relatives and friends or post them online.
Cuban authorities were blocking Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram, said Alp Toker, director of Netblocks, a London-based internet monitoring firm. “This does seem to be a response to social media-fueled protest,” he said. Twitter did not appear to be blocked, though Toker noted Cuba could cut it off if it wants to.
While the recent easing of access by Cuban authorities to the internet has increased social media activity, Toker said, the level of censorship has also risen. Not only does the cutoff block out external voices, he said, it also squelches “the internal voice of the population who have wanted to speak out.”
Internet access in Cuba has been expensive and relatively rare until recently. The country was “basically offline” until 2008, then gradually entered a digital revolution, said Ted Henken, a Latin America expert at Baruch College, City University of New York. The biggest
change, he noted, came in December 2018 when Cubans got access to mobile internet for the first time via data plans purchased from the state telecom monopoly. These days, more than half of all Cubans have internet access, Henken said.
Many Cubans now have real-time, anywhere-you-are access to the internet and the ability to share information among themselves, he added. Since early 2019, this access has facilitated regular, if smaller, events and protests on the island. In response, the government has periodically shut down access to social media, mostly to hide its repressive tactics from both citizens and foreigners, he said.
The Cuban government also restricts independent media in Cuba and “routinely blocks access within Cuba to many news websites and blogs,” according to Human Rights Watch.
Cuba is going through its worst economic crisis in decades, along with a resurgence of coronavirus cases, as it suffers the consequences of U.S. sanctions imposed by the Trump administration. The protests now, the largest in decades, are “absolutely and definitely fueled by increased access to internet and smartphones in Cuba,” said Sebastian Arcos, associate director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.
Social media posts from within and outside of Cuba are “not the root causes of the rebellion, but they are a factor in connecting the desperation, disaffection that exists in the island,” said Arturo López-Levy, an assistant political science professor at Holy Names University in California.
López-Levy, who grew up a few blocks from Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, said the country’s current leader has embraced the economic potential of digital technology far more than his predecessors, but may have calculated that a large segment of Cubans will accept a temporary internet shutdown if it helps restore order in the streets.
Elsewhere, government internet shutdowns after or ahead of protests have also become commonplace, whether for a few hours or extending for months. In Ethiopia, there was a three-week shutdown in July 2020 after civil unrest. The internet blackout in the Tigray region has stretched on for months. In Belarus, the internet went down for more than two days after an August 2020 election seen as rigged sparked mass protests. Mobile internet service repeatedly went down during weekend protests for months afterwards.
A decade ago during the Arab Spring, when social media was still in its early years and Egypt, Tunisia and other countries in the Middle East faced bloody uprisings that were broadcast on social media, headlines declared the movements “Twitter Revolutions” and experts debated about just how important a role social media played in the events. Ten years later, there is no question that social media and private chat platforms have become an essential organizing tool. Restricting them, in turn, is a routine move to suppress dissent. Internet service was disrupted in Cali, Colombia during May anti-government protests.
This year has also seen disruptions in Armenia, Uganda, Iran, Chad, Senegal and the Republic of Congo.
But authoritarian regimes aren’t the only ones getting into the act. India routinely shuts down the internet during times of unrest. Toker of NetBlocks said the imposition of internet restrictions in Cuba follows an emerging global pattern and not always in the countries you most expect them, such as a recent Nigerian cutoff of Twitter. On the plus side, he said, the world is much more aware of these incidents because it’s easier to monitor and report them remotely.
Last Sunday, all of Cuba went offline for less than 30 minutes, after which there were several hours of intermittent but large outages, said Doug Madory of Kentik, a network management company. He said large internet outages were very rare in Cuba until very recently.
“There was an outage in January just for mobile service following the ‘27N’ protests,” Madory said, referring to a movement of Cuban artists, journalists and other members of civil society who marched on the Ministry of Culture on Nov. 27, 2020, demanding freedom and democracy.
Henken said he doesn’t believe the government would shut off access for an extended period of time, even though that is its go-to tactic for dissidents and activists.
“The problem they have now is that it’s not a handful of activists or artists or independent journalists — it’s now a massive swath of the population all throughout the country,” he said. “So the genie is out of the bottle. They’re trying to put it back in.”