Netizen Report: Facebookistan Edition

Image via Flickr user opensourceway (CC BY-SA 2.0)

This report was researched, written, and edited by Chan Myae Khine, Weiping Li, Renata Avila, Sarah Myers, and  Rebecca MacKinnon.

Facebook has faced another wave of scrutiny from Europe for changes to its privacy policies. Recently, the company proposed an amendment to its privacy policies requiring users to agree to share their data with other Facebook-owned applications, such as Instagram, with a possibility of expansion for use in ad targeting outside of Facebook. This proposal prompted Irish data protection regulators in the European Union to seek urgent clarification on the policy change.

Another challenge to Facebook comes from Scandinavian countries: the Consumer Ombudsmen of Norway, Sweden and Denmark sent a letter to the European Commission expressing concern that Facebook’s “sponsored stories” advertising program, which shows advertisements in users’ Facebook news feeds without users’ prior consent, may violate the European Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications.

Facebook has also proposed a change in its “site governance process.” Instead of letting users vote on proposed policy changes, as the site has done in the past, the new system will let users comment on recommended changes and submit questions on its privacy policies. Facebook explained that the voting mechanism “resulted in a system that incentivized the quantity of comments over their quality.”

Privacy

Hong Kong’s privacy watchdog issued a warning over the potential risks of using smartphones and related applications after commissioning a survey showing more than half of respondents did not know what personal information stored in their smartphones could be accessed by the apps they download.

Google has to pay US$22.5 million in a privacy settlement with the Federal Trade Commission for breaching 190 million users’ privacy settings on their Safari browsers by planting cookies improperly.

Censorship

Reporters Without Borders has launched a new website, We Fight Censorship, which will serve as a global repository for online articles, photos, and videos that have been censored or which caused the content creator to be jailed.

Kyrgyz independent news website Ferghana News is seeking to overturn a ban on the website based on a 2011 parliament resolution. Critics believe the ban was in retaliation to the news website’s coverage of ethnic violence which took place in southern Kyrgyzstan in 2010.

Alistair McAlpine, a British politician who was falsely accused by the BBC of child sexual abuse, is pressing for compensation from those who tweeted about the BBC story at that time. According to the Economist, about 1,000 Twitter users implicated McAlpine, and 9,000 or so retweeted the messages. At least 20 high-profile tweeters are being targeted by the lawsuit, while those who have fewer than 500 Twitter followers are being asked for an online apology and charity donation.

Thuggery

Eduardo Carvalho, the owner and editor of the Brazilian website Ultima Hora News was shot to death by two men on his way home. Carvalho had repeatedly received death threats after he published articles criticizing politicians and police.

The offices of Malaysiakini, Malaysia’s largest independent news site, were raided by police seeking information about a contributor who wrote an article asking why ethnic Malays had to be Muslims. The raid is part of a continuing trend of harassment of news sites by Malaysian police, including police threats, DDOS attacks, and requests for statements on website funding.

A Vietnamese court upheld a 6-year jail sentence that had been imposed on the dissident blogger Dinh Dang Dinh for criticizing the government on the Internet. According to a report by Radio Free Asia, the Vietnamese police beat the blogger and herded him into a truck following the hearing.

South Korean Twitter user Park Jung-geun has received a 10-month suspended jail term for retweeting North Korean propaganda posts from his Twitter account. Park was charged with violating South Korea’s National Security Law and propagandizing for the North Korean government. Park has asserted that his actions were intended as parody.

National Policy

Pakistani authorities temporarily suspended mobile phone services in major cities, including parts of the capital Islamabad, the southern port city of Karachi, and in Quetta in the south-east, to avoid the use of mobile devices to set off bombs during key Shia Muslim commemorations.

The Hamburg Tax office in Germany decided to retroactively revoke the non-profit organization status of Wau Holland Foundation, the main financial supporter for Wikileaks in Germany, claiming that the organization “did not satisfy the condition for the direct pursuit of tax-advantaged purposes.” The decision specifically applies to 2010, the year when Wikileaks published a series of classified documents.

A new campaign has launched [pr] to save the Marco Civil, a bill that would define the rights of the Brazilian Internet. A vote on the bill has been postponed several times already and could be postponed indefinitely.

Copyright

The Australian High Court rejected an appeal from Optus TV Now over a ruling that had determined the broadcast recording product, which would allow Optus customers to save recorded TV broadcasts to Optus’ cloud, infringes on copyright. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and eBay have called for Australian copyright law to be more technology neutral in response to the ruling.

Sovereigns of Cyberspace

Kazakhstan’s public prosecution office urged Google, Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal to take down pages that include content from opposition media, defining them as “directed at inflaming social hatred”.

Internet Governance

Google developed a Take Action website asking its users to sign a petition against upcoming United Nations International Telecommunication Union proposals that “could increase censorship and threaten innovation”.

ICANN will hold a meeting with representatives of around 50 countries to discuss requests for new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) names, including .bbc by the BBC, .google, .docs and .lol by Google, and other, more controversial terms including .church and .islam. As Google and Amazon requested broader terms such as .book, .search and .app, many governments voiced their concerns at pre-discussions for ICANN's Government Advisory Committee (GAC) meeting.

The European Parliament has approved a Joint Resolution which expresses its support to maintain the transparent and participatory Internet governance model, and urges EU member states to vote for proposals to “maintain the current scope of the [treaty] and the current mandate of the ITU…” at the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) which will be held in December in Dubai.

Cybersecurity

Pro-Palestinian hackers claiming to be Pakistani have targeted Israeli websites and social media, shutting down Groupon’s Israeli site, and hacking in to Israeli Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom’s Twitter and Facebook accounts to send out pro-Palestinian messages.

In Pakistan, a group of hackers under the name “eboz” defaced 284 websites with .pk domains including google.com.pk, microsoft.pk and apple.pk by changing DNS entries mangaged by MarkMoniter and leaving a message in Turkish with an English phrase “Pakistan Downed”.

Netizen Activism

Many activists in India including Marx Anthonisamy, a 63-year-old former professor and author, have demanded the revision of the “arbitrary and unconstitutional” Section 66A of the Information Technology Act. Mr. Marx has filed a lawsuit for its repeal.

Bytes for All (B4A), a Pakistani human rights organization launched a “Take Back The Tech!” 16 day campaign to encourage women to tell, listen and map their stories about cyber bullying.

Cool Things

Sana Saleem, a Pakistani activist and blogger, and a contributor to Global Voices Online, has been named by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers 2012 for her efforts fighting against the Pakistani government’s online censorship.

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