House Commerce Committee Republicans on Monday requested a classified State Department briefing on TikTok, days after President Donald Trump threatened to ban the Chinese social media platform from the U.S. Microsoft is continuing talks to buy TikTok, after CEO Satya Nadella discussed it with Trump, it said Sunday: “Microsoft fully appreciates the importance of addressing the President’s concerns." It's committed to acquiring TikTok "subject to" a complete review, it said. House Commerce Committee ranking member Greg Walden, Ore.; House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, La.; and House Consumer Protection Subcommittee ranking member Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Wash., raised concerns about the video app and alleged ties to a Chinese company doing secret face recognition and data harvesting. Walden and Rodgers cited previous complaints about TikTok on children’s privacy, corporate governance and COVID-19. Banning TikTok would threaten U.S. jobs and the livelihood of American content creators reliant on the app, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation Vice President Daniel Castro said: “In a week where many policymakers have called for more competition in the tech sector, undermining one of the fastest-growing social media platforms would be a step in the wrong direction.” ACT|The App Association said it's encouraged by ongoing negotiations for Microsoft to buy TikTok: “While this is an ongoing negotiation with no guaranteed outcome, we strongly urge policymakers to avoid a government intervention in banning TikTok that could result in an unprecedented geofencing of access to an online service used by 50 million Americans a day and create significant disruption to the app economy.” The State Department didn’t comment. The Microsoft blog suggests Trump “at least tentatively blessed the deal,” said Cowen analyst Paul Gallant. The deal could strengthen Facebook’s argument against antitrust scrutiny, and it might invite more attention on Microsoft from policymakers in Washington, he said.
Karl Herchenroeder
Karl Herchenroeder, Associate Editor, is a technology policy journalist for publications including Communications Daily. Born in Rockville, Maryland, he joined the Warren Communications News staff in 2018. He began his journalism career in 2012 at the Aspen Times in Aspen, Colorado, where he covered city government. After that, he covered the nuclear industry for ExchangeMonitor in Washington. You can follow Herchenroeder on Twitter: @karlherk
The House Antitrust Subcommittee’s hearing with Big Tech CEOs showed a glaring partisan divide, so it’s unlikely the Judiciary Committee will deliver a bipartisan report, antitrust attorneys told us. Public Knowledge is more hopeful: Policy Counsel Alex Petros said both parties delivered well-researched claims against the industry at the hearing (see 2007290063). Attorneys said the evidence focused more on harm to competitors, rather than consumers, which doesn’t make a strong case.
House Antitrust Subcommittee Democrats presented evidence Wednesday of anticompetitive behavior by Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, during a hearing with their CEOs. Republicans hammered executives with claims of anti-conservative bias. All four executives appeared virtually.
Face recognition algorithm accuracy declines substantially with masked faces, the National Institute of Standards and Technology reported Monday. For the most accurate algorithms tested, authentication failure rates increased from 0.3% for unmasked individuals to 5% when scanning digitally masked faces, NIST said.
The Senate Homeland Security Committee advanced two bills by voice vote Wednesday targeting tech threats from China. One seeks to address Chinese theft of American research and intellectual property, and the other would ban federal employees from using the social media app TikTok on government-issued devices.
Amazon began additional checks for certifying Alexa’s voice-control capabilities, or skills, a spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday. In a presentation before the FTC that day, Clemson University Graduate Research Assistant Christin Wilson described Alexa’s certification process as “improper and disorganized." The agency held PrivacyCon, a conference with researchers meant to help identify consumer risks and better target enforcement efforts, Consumer Protection Bureau Director Andrew Smith said.
Twitter’s human-enabled hack is another example of why the White House needs a national cyber director and the Cyberspace Solarium Commission’s (CSC) recommendations should be implemented (see 2007150065), said House Cybersecurity Subcommittee members during a hearing Friday. “It doesn’t take much imagination to see what chaos one could sow with such access on election day if a bad actor was pushing out disinformation,” said Rep. James Langevin, D-R.I., of the Twitter hack.
Multifactor authentication should be a default for companies accessing and transferring customer data, the FTC was told. The agency proposed process-based requirements in April to add to its safeguards rule on how financial institutions keep customer information secure. Monday’s workshop was to gather information for the proposed rulemaking.
Standardizing data shared on software components is vital for identifying cyber vulnerabilities and will have an impact across industries, stakeholders told NTIA during a virtual meeting on the multistakeholder process on software component transparency Thursday. NTIA’s goal is to standardize software component data sharing so entities and users can better understand networks, which will help identify risks and affected components. NTIA plans to issue guidance for a software bill of materials. SBOMs list software components. “The NTIA SBOM initiative is driven by stakeholders, and they are ultimately responsible for setting timetables, defining deliverables and reaching consensus,” a spokesperson emailed. NTIA Director-Cybersecurity Initiatives Allan Friedman highlighted the importance of guidance. He cited a recent Snyk survey, in which 60 percent of respondents say lack a “good view into the full dependency trees of their software.” This means it’s difficult to identify newly discovered vulnerabilities, Friedman said. Survey participants included officials in software development, security and infrastructure/operations. Progress on the initiative has been “subtle” but “impactful,” said FDA Cyber Policy Adviser Jessica Wilkerson. Lack of clarity can make it difficult to map “component to vulnerability data, license data, or other data,” wrote working group co-chairs Michelle Jump, MedSec's global regulatory adviser-medical device cybersecurity, and Art Manion, a senior member of the vulnerability analysis team at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute. It makes it difficult for entities potentially hit in a cyberattack to determine if they are affected and where the affected software is used, Jump said.
Facebook’s handling of President Donald Trump’s recent post about looting (see 2006100027) is dividing the Senate along party lines, leading Republicans to examine amendments to Section 230, as expected (see 2005290058). Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas; Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.; and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said in interviews they are exploring proposals for altering the tech industry’s liability shield.