Computer failure sounds bad, let’s call it
something else.
Delta
blames 'technology issue' for ground stop
Delta Air Lines said late Tuesday it had issued a
ground stop order due to a "technology issue" with some of
its computer tracking
systems.
… Delta's Twitter account was busy Tuesday
afternoon responding to angry customers of the airline who complained
of travel delays and being unable to log in to the company's website
and app.
Does not seem to force India to back off the creep
toward mandatory use of Aadhaar.
The World’s
Largest Biometric Database Is Legal, A Court Just Ruled
India’s Supreme Court has ruled that the
government’s controversial Aadhaar program — the world’s
largest biometric database — is constitutionally valid and does not
violate the privacy of the 1.2 billion people enrolled in it.
However, it imposed restrictions on key sections of the program.
A three-judge majority on a panel of five judges
struck down sections of a law that allowed private companies like
banks and mobile phone carriers in India to ask people for an Aadhaar
ID before providing services. The judges also ruled that India’s
government could not require people to ask for an Aadhaar ID for
peripheral issues like identifying students taking exams. However,
Indians will still be required to enrol into the program for paying
income tax and accessing government-provided welfare services.
The decade-old Aadhaar program was conceived as a
voluntary identity system for millions of Indians who didn’t have
any form of ID, and was positioned by the Indian government as a way
to stamp out corruption in the country’s welfare systems.
… But over time, India’s government and
private companies have made having an Aadhaar ID effectively
mandatory by requiring it for everything from getting
government subsidies to opening new bank accounts and getting
cellphone connections.
Coming soon? The hunt for Jeff Bezos?
Federal,
state law enforcement signaling new willingness to investigate tech
giants
A meeting of the country’s top federal and state
law enforcement officials on Tuesday could presage a series of
sweeping new investigations of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and
their tech industry peers, stemming from lingering frustrations that
these companies are too
big, fail to safeguard users’ private data and don’t
cooperate with legal demands.
The gathering at the Justice Department had been
designed to focus on social media platforms and the ways in which
they moderate content online, following
complaints from President Donald Trump and other top
Republicans that Silicon Valley companies deliberately seek to
silence conservative users and views online.
Attorney
General Jeff Sessions opened the meeting by raising questions of
possible ideological bias among the tech companies, and
sought to bring the conversation back to that topic at least twice
more, according to Karl Racine, attorney general for the District of
Columbia.
But the discussion proved far more wide-ranging,
as attorneys general from nine states — and officials from five
others — steered the conversation toward the privacy practices of
Silicon Valley. Those in the meeting did not zero in on specific
business tactics, but did cover issues ranging from how companies
collect user data to what they do with it once the information is in
their hands.
“We were unanimous. Our
focus is going to be on antitrust and privacy. That’s
where our laws are,” said Jim Hood, Mississippi’s attorney
general, in an interview.
(Related)
What to
expect when Apple, Amazon, and Google get grilled in Congress this
week
… Starting
at 10 a.m. Wednesday, the Senate
Commerce Committee plans to quiz representatives of six big tech
firms about privacy on
their services and in their apps. And the answers that committee
members get from Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Charter, Google and Twitter
executives may give
us a better sense of how these companies use our data and try not to
lose it.
Or, as we
saw earlier this month when
a House interrogation of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey turned into an
airing of GOP grievances, the
session could simply tell us how high each tech firm ranks on the
enemies lists of individual senators.
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