We use cookies to give you the best online experience. By using our website you agree to our use of cookies in accordance with our cookie policy. Learn more here.Close Me
United States: Social Links: FTC Fights Fraudulent Online Product Reviews; Twitter Takes Another Swipe At Trolls; Influencers Affect Everything From Cybersecurity To Career Choices
The high-end skincare brand Sunday Riley has settled lawsuits
filed by the Federal Trade Commission claiming that the brand's
founder encouraged employees of her eponymous company to set up
accounts "under different identities" on the cosmetics
retail site Sephora.com and leave positive reviews for Sunday
Riley's products. The FTC filed the complaints after the agency
conducted an investigation that was prompted by a whistle
blower's post on REDDIT last year. Read about the settlement's
lenient terms, which two of the FTC's five commissioners
don't believe are severe enough to deter other companies from
attempting to post fraudulent reviews online.
Last month four senators—three Democrats and one
Republican—introduced a bipartisan bill to
require communications platforms to provide their users with a
means of exporting the data that their users have accumulated on
the platforms, such as friends lists. The rationale behind the
legislation: making it easier for smaller platforms to compete with
the likes of social media giants like Facebook and YouTube.
Legislation like this is intended to benefit consumers and would
require "operability standards to be
revised" as interfaces evolve, writes Forbes columnist
Robert Seamans. The real challenge, he argues, would be determining
the types of data covered by the legislation.
Twitter announced it will
extend to all of its users around the world the "Hide
Replies" feature that it first tested in Canada in July and
then rolled out in the United States and
Japan in September. The feature allows users to
"hide" any replies to their tweets. However, other
Twitter users may view and respond to hidden replies by clicking a
grey icon that appears on the tweets. Twitter's blog reports that
the platform's test runs of the Hide Replies feature revealed
that "27% of people who had their Tweets hidden said they
would reconsider how they interact with others in the future,"
and Twitter posters who hid replies "may want to take further
action after [they] hide a reply, so now [Twitter will] check to
see if you want to also block the replier." This isn't the
first
action that Twitter has taken to control trolls, and the platform's blog promises
that it won't be the last.
Influencer culture has infiltrated the world of cybersecurity,
with the Twitter accounts of several popular experts in that
increasingly prominent field running ads for Lenovo's "ThinkShield" line of
products and services. VizSense, an influencer marker, reached out
to the influencers, who included journalists, a former intelligence
operative, and experts in areas like artificial intelligence, each
with more than 10,000 Twitter followers apiece. Find out why the campaign sparked
controversy in the cybersecurity community.
Speaking of influencers, guess what Bloomberg reports is now the
number one career aspiration of the "overwhelming
majority" of young Americans? Sigh.
Because of the generality of this update, the information
provided herein may not be applicable in all situations and should
not be acted upon without specific legal advice based on particular
situations.
The third quarter of 2019 continued the public pushback on the unrestricted use of AI technologies, particularly, for the U.S., with regard to technologies used to create "deepfake"
Starting in March 2020, companies that maintain or process New York residents' personal information will need to comply with New York's stringent new data security requirements.
Gain access to Mondaq global archive of over 375,000 articles covering 200 countries with a personalised News Alert and automatic login on this device.