BREAKING: A new trove of CIA documents released by Wikileaks have revealed sophisticated hacking systems the CIA use to collect data from smartphones and smartTVs. Federal officials in the US are attempting to scrap rules set out by the Obama administration to impose stronger restrictions on internet providers who wish to sell customer information and data to advertisers. The rules in question say that customers have to explicitly opt-in to allow sharing of web browsing data, geolocation data, and health and financial information, however, FCC Chairman, Ajit Pai has argued that the rules limit competition and put internet providers at a disadvantage to other websites and services which can still freely use this data for advertising. The FCC are requesting more time to devise a new solution.

Across the pond, the UK’s chief privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office or ICO has announced that they are actively investigating claims that Cambridge Analytica, the data analytics company, helped to aid the Brexit Leave campaign by identifying key swing voters on Facebook, but did not declare this assistance to the electoral commission. The investigation comes amid growing media controversy around the role of big data (and notorious firms like Cambridge Analytica) in democratic processes across the UK and USA.

In other news…

Microsoft CTO, Norm Judah has shared his vision for the data sharing economy where innovation lies at the intersection and combination of datasets. Hear hear!

What’s legal isn’t always what’s ethical, especially when it comes to the sharing of personal information. As the fallout from the Centrelink/Andie Fox controversy continues, ethicist Dr Matthew Beard has suggested that the government ‘shot itself in the foot’ and undermined citizen trust by ‘correcting the record’ through the release of Andie Fox’s PI.

WORTH A READ

• Or this case a listen… Paul McCarney was interviewed by Stone & Chalk CEO, Alex Scandurra for their latest resident podcast
• MarketingTech explores the concept of hyper-localized marketing using big data
• Amin, one of our super-talented Software Architect’s shares a patch-solution to improve the speed of WebHcat HCatalog REST API

Until next week.