Facebook and FTC Negotiating Record Privacy Fine
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| Facebook and FTC Negotiating Record Privacy Fine | |
| Number | 752 |
| Broadcast Date | FEBRUARY 15, 2019 |
| Episode Length | 4:54 |
| Hosts | Rich Stroffolino |
Facebook and the FTC are in negotiations over a multi-billion dollar fine, JPMorgan Chase creates its own cryptocurrency, and Samsung opens its first full retail stores in the US.
Headlines
- Sources tell the Washington Post that Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission are in negotiations over a multi-billion dollar fine to settle an investigation into the company's privacy practices. The negotiations stem from the FTC's investigation into the improper access to Facebook user data by Cambridge Analytica back in March. Part of the FTC's investigation is whether Facebook violated a 2011 agreement with the FTC to improve its privacy practices, and included a provision to notify users before sharing data with third parties. The amount of the fine remains to be settled, but seems like it will dwarf the FTC's previous largest fine against a tech company, a $22.5 million fine against Google in 2012. Any negotiated fine will need to be approved by a federal judge.
- JP Morgan has created its own blockchain-based crypto-currency to help settle payments between clients of its wholesale payments business. JP Morgan hopes it can reduce risk and enable instant transfers. JPM Coins will each be worth one dollar and will only be available to the company's retail customers to be used with each other on JP Morgan's Quorum blockchain. Customers must be approved by regulators to use Quorum in order to avoid money laundering. All blockchain nodes on Quorum are operated by JP Morgan.
- Executives from HSBC told Reuters that it has reduced the costs of settling foreign exchange trades thanks to FX Everywhere, a blockchain-based system. The system handles between 3,500 and 5,000 trades a day, processing $250 billion in trades since February 2018. FX Everywhere coordinates payments across HSBC's Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific trading hubs, showing real time exposure across multiple balance sheets. The company hopes to offer the service to corporate customers with complex cross-border trades.
- Wired's Tom Simonite reports that OpenAI, founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman in order to give away new AI discoveries, has developed something they don't feel safe giving away. The system was designed to learn patterns of language and scores better on reading comprehension tests than any other automated system. But it's the ability of the system to generate text that feels real that has OpenAI concerned. A research paper was published but not the full model or training data. Google has also put constraints on sharing AI research over fear of misuse.
- Samsung announced plans to open its first retail locations in the US. Three Samsung Experience stores will open on February 20th in Los Angeles, New York, and Houston, offering phones, tablets, wearables, TVs and smart home devices for sale. Samsung has previously had pop-up retail locations, minishops in Best Buy locations, and showrooms, in the US. The stores will also offer customer support, including walk-in repairs for smartphones.
- Samsung announced the Galaxy Tab S5e, a 10.5 inch Android tablet. The S5e comes with a 2560 x 1600 Super AMOLED screen, a Snapdragon 670 processor, 64GB of internal storage with a microSD card slot, and 4GB of RAM. The tablet is 5.5mm thick and weighs in at 400 grams, while offering a 81.8% screen-to-body ratio. The Tab S5e ships with Android Pie and Bixby 2.0, although lacks S-pen support. It'll be available in Q2 2019 for $399.
- An update to Samsung's Galaxy Wearable app on Android appears to have leaked several upcoming products from the company. The front page of the app lists a 40mm Galaxy Watch Active smartwatch, the Galaxy Fit and Galaxy Fit e fitness trackers, and the wireless earbuds creatively named the Galaxy Buds. Presumably these will be announced at Samsung's Galaxy S10 event on February 20th.
- Nvidia reported it earned $0.80 per share in Q4 on revenue of $2.21 billion. Analysts had expected earnings per share of $0.75 on revenue of $2.20 billion. Though it just beat analysts revenue expectation, compared to last year, quartlerly revenue was down 24% and operating income decreased 73%, all while operating expenses increased 25%. In their press release, Nvidia blamed excessive post-cryto boom channel inventory and a pause in purchasing from public cloud providers for the decline in revenue.
- Canalys reports that 32 percent of smartphone shipments in Europe in 2018 were from Chinese manufacturers, mostly from Huawei. Samsung finished the year on top in Europe with 28.7% of the market, down 1% over 2017. Apple was second with 26% down 5.1%. Huawei stormed into third with 23.6% up 55.7%. Xiaomi rose 62% to take fourth at 6 percent of the market and HMD Global, AKA the seller of the Nokia brand had 2.4% for fifth.
Links
| Preceded by: "Amazon Scraps NYC HQ Plans" |
Facebook and FTC Negotiating Record Privacy Fine |
Followed by: "Week in Review for the Week of 2/11/19" |