In this report, the Federal Trade Commission discusses the results of an in-depth study of nine data brokers. These data brokers collect personal information about consumers from a wide range of sources and provide it for a variety of purposes, including verifying an individual's identity, marketing products, and detecting fraud. Because these companies generally never interact with consumers, consumers are often unaware of their existence, much less the variety of practices in which they engage. By reporting on the data collection and use practices of these nine data brokers, which represent a cross-section of the industry, this report attempts to shed light on the data broker industry and its practices. For decades, policymakers have expressed concerns about the lack of transparency of companies that buy and sell consumer data without direct consumer interaction. Indeed, the lack of transparency among companies providing consumer data for credit and other eligibility determinations led to the adoption of the Fair Credit Reporting Act ("FCRA"), a statute the Commission has enforced since its enactment in 1970. The FCRA covers the provision of consumer data by consumer reporting agencies where it is used or expected to be used for decisions about credit, employment, insurance, housing, and similar eligibility determinations; it generally does not cover the sale of consumer data for marketing and other purposes. While the Commission has vigorously enforced the FCRA, 1 since the late 1990s it has also been active in examining the practices of data brokers that fall outside the FCRA.

Criminal activities in cyberspace are increasingly facilitated by burgeoning black markets. This report characterizes these markets and how they have grown into their current state to provide insight into how their existence can harm the information security environment. Understanding these markets lays the groundwork for exploring options to minimize their potentially harmful influence.

Every enterprise application creates data, whether it’s log messages, metrics, user activity, outgoing messages, or something else. And how to move all of this data becomes nearly as important as the data itself. If you’re an application architect, developer, or production engineer new to Apache Kafka, this practical guide shows you how to use this open source streaming platform to handle real-time data feeds. Engineers from Confluent and LinkedIn who are responsible for developing Kafka explain how to deploy production Kafka clusters, write reliable event-driven microservices, and build scalable stream-processing applications with this platform. Through detailed examples, you’ll learn Kafka’s design principles, reliability guarantees, key APIs, and architecture details, including the replication protocol, the controller, and the storage layer. Understand publish-subscribe messaging and how it fits in the big data ecosystem. Explore Kafka producers and consumers for writing and reading messages Understand Kafka patterns and use-case requirements to ensure reliable data delivery Get best practices for building data pipelines and applications with Kafka Manage Kafka in production, and learn to perform monitoring, tuning, and maintenance tasks Learn the most critical metrics among Kafka’s operational measurements Explore how Kafka’s stream delivery capabilities make it a perfect source for stream processing systems

This open access monograph argues established democratic norms for freedom of expression should be implemented on the internet. Moderating policies of tech companies as Facebook, Twitter and Google have resulted in posts being removed on an industrial scale. While this moderation is often encouraged by governments - on the pretext that terrorism, bullying, pornography, "hate speech" and "fake news" will slowly disappear from the internet - it enables tech companies to censure our society. It is the social media companies who define what is blacklisted in their community standards. And given the dominance of social media in our information society, we run the risk of outsourcing the definition of our principles for discussion in the public domain to private companies. Instead of leaving it to social media companies only to take action, the authors argue democratic institutions should take an active role in moderating criminal content on the internet. To make this possible, tech companies should be analyzed whether they are approaching a monopoly. Antitrust legislation should be applied to bring those monopolies within democratic governmental oversight. Despite being in different stages in their lives, Anne Mette is in the startup phase of her research career, while Frederik is one of the most prolific philosophers in Denmark, the authors found each other in their concern about Free Speech on the internet. The book was originally published in Danish as Dit opslag er blevet fjernet - techgiganter & ytringsfrihed. Praise for 'Your Post has been Removed' "From my perspective both as a politician and as private book collector, this is the most important non-fiction book of the 21st Century. It should be disseminated to all European citizens. The learnings of this book and the use we make of them today are crucial for every man, woman and child on earth. Now and in the future." Jens Rohde, member of the European Parliament for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe "This timely book compellingly presents an impressive array of information and analysis about the urgent threats the tech giants pose to the robust freedom of speech and access to information that are essential for individual liberty and democratic self-government. It constructively explores potential strategies for restoring individual control over information flows to and about us. Policymakers worldwide should take heed!" Nadine Strossen, Professor, New York Law School. Author, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship.

“Bruce Schneier’s amazing book is the best overview of privacy and security ever written.”—Clay Shirky Your cell phone provider tracks your location and knows who’s with you. Your online and in-store purchasing patterns are recorded, and reveal if you're unemployed, sick, or pregnant. Your e-mails and texts expose your intimate and casual friends. Google knows what you’re thinking because it saves your private searches. Facebook can determine your sexual orientation without you ever mentioning it. The powers that surveil us do more than simply store this information. Corporations use surveillance to manipulate not only the news articles and advertisements we each see, but also the prices we’re offered. Governments use surveillance to discriminate, censor, chill free speech, and put people in danger worldwide. And both sides share this information with each other or, even worse, lose it to cybercriminals in huge data breaches. Much of this is voluntary: we cooperate with corporate surveillance because it promises us convenience, and we submit to government surveillance because it promises us protection. The result is a mass surveillance society of our own making. But have we given up more than we’ve gained? In Data and Goliath, security expert Bruce Schneier offers another path, one that values both security and privacy. He brings his bestseller up-to-date with a new preface covering the latest developments, and then shows us exactly what we can do to reform government surveillance programs, shake up surveillance-based business models, and protect our individual privacy. You'll never look at your phone, your computer, your credit cards, or even your car in the same way again.

Businesses are rushing to collect personal data to fuel surging demand. Data enthusiasts claim personal information that's obtained from the commercial internet, including mobile platforms, social networks, cloud computing, and connected devices, will unlock path-breaking innovation, including advanced data security. By contrast, regulators and activists contend that corporate data practices too often disempower consumers by creating privacy harms and related problems. As the Internet of Things matures and facial recognition, predictive analytics, big data, and wearable tracking grow in power, scale, and scope, a controversial ecosystem will exacerbate the acrimony over commercial data capture and analysis. The only productive way forward is to get a grip on the key problems right now and change the conversation. That's exactly what Jules Polonetsky, Omer Tene, and Evan Selinger do. They bring together diverse views from leading academics, business leaders, and policymakers to discuss the opportunities and challenges of the new data economy.