TWENTY THIRD DAY

Tired of Google following you? It is now easier to clear location data

New functionality automatically deletes history of places users have visited
It is now slightly easier to opt out of Google’s panopticon, with the introduction of new controls from the
search engine to automatically clear your data after a set period of time.
By default, Google saves a permanent history of everything a user has searched for, every website they
have visited, activity from any other app, site or device that uses Google services, and a record of their
physical movements gleaned from using Google Maps or an Android device.
Users have always been able to turn off – or “pause” – that tracking in a settings page, Activity Controls,
and, if they remember to, they can manually clear the saved information using the Delete Activity page. But
both those options have downsides: if tracking is turned off entirely, some Google products and services no
longer work, while deleting activity manually can be a chore, particularly for users with more than one
Google account.
In May, the company launched the ability to delete saved information automatically after a fixed period of
time (three or 18 months are the only options). The feature initially only covered “web and app activity”, but
now, Google has announced its expansion to location history.
Again, users have been able to delete location history manually through a fairly hidden setting on the
Google Maps timeline, where an unlabelled trashcan icon in the bottom right of the screen will clear history.
But this marks the first time a user can easily track their movements in the short term while regularly
cleaning their records.
The setting is not yet available on the web, but users of the iOS and Android Google apps will start to see
the setting as it “rolls out”, the company says. That should allow the best of both worlds, allowing users to
gain some of the benefits of location history, like looking up the name of that nice cafe they wandered into
last week, without the risk of building up a long-term record of their every movement.
Other activity records still need manual attention. The company allows users to manually delete recordings
of their voices made by the Google Assistant, and their search and viewing history on YouTube, but will not
yet automate those deletions, although users can again opt out of storing that information entirely.
And all of those settings only affect Google’s consumer-facing records and personalisation. The information
the company collects for adverts is a mandatory part of using Google services, although a separate setting
allows users to turn off ad personalisation.
“You should always be able to manage your data in a way that works best for you – and we’re committed to
giving you the best controls to make that happen,” Google said in a statement when it first announced the
new controls.
Uber settles with UK women who accused driver of sexual assault
Firm had contested allegations but has reached undisclosed out-of-court settlements
Uber has reached out-of-court settlements with two women who alleged they were sexually assaulted by
the same driver in what is believed to be the first case of its kind in the UK against the company.
The cases were taken by two women who had ordered vehicles using Uber’s app during nights out
in Leeds in December 2015, but told police they were sexually assaulted by the driver. They are both five-
figure settlements.
An investigation by Leeds city council subsequently found the driver, Naveed Iqbal, had used his brother’s
Uber driver login while he was away and assaulted two women on separate occasions.
Iqbal lost an appeal in 2017 to keep his own private-hire licence when a crown court heard no charges had
been brought, but a judge said he had carried out the attacks “on the balance of probabilities”.
Lawyers were instructed by the women, now in their 20s and 30s, and had argued in civil proceedings that
Uber was liable for the incidents as it had a duty of care to protect passengers, because its drivers were
employees.
Uber contested the claims, but has now agreed to undisclosed out-of-court settlements, Irwin Mitchell
announced on Thursday.
Emma Crowther, a legal expert on abuse who represented the women for the law firm, said the driver
would not have been free to go on and pick up the second woman a week later if Uber had properly
investigated the alleged first assault.
“Both women are still deeply affected by what happened to them,” she said.
The first woman, who was celebrating her birthday on the evening of the assault, said the driver had
groped her breasts twice.
She added: “My whole life has been turned upside down since that night. When it first happened, my initial
reaction was anger and disbelief, but I very quickly developed anxiety. I was aware that the driver knew
where I lived and this made me anxious about being at home.
“I suffered from poor concentration, a lack of enjoyment and poor motivation, and I had this feeling of being
dirty all the time.
“Everything that has happened has also had a huge impact on my career, as I no longer have the
confidence to work in a customer-facing role.”
The second woman, who had booked with Uber on 13 December 2015 following a night out with friends,
said: “That one night has had such a negative impact on my life, and to hear it had happened to another
woman a week earlier was horrible.
“This could have been prevented. I just hope we can now move on with our lives as best we can.”
Uber has been contacted for comment.
During a hearing about his private-hire licence, Iqbal reportedly denied using his brother’s Uber login and
sexually assaulting the two women. He was reported to have blamed a “technical fault” on the phone or the
Uber app.
A spokesman for West Yorkshire Police said that the force received two separate reports of women having
been sexually assaulted by a taxi driver in Leeds on December 6 and December 13, 2015.
“Investigations were conducted into both reports and a man was interviewed after voluntarily attending.”
“There were evidential difficulties, some in relation to the identity of the suspect, and both cases had to be
finalised on that basis.”

Facebook says it can't handle election misinformation crisis alone

Speaking at Aspen Ideas Festival, Mark Zuckerberg says private companies shouldn’t have ‘final
word’ on such decisions
Mark Zuckerberg has said Facebook cannot be expected to manage the crisis around election
misinformation campaigns on its own.
The Facebook CEO, speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Wednesday, said that while the company
was focused on questions of election security and interference before the 2020 US presidential election,
“those are really hard questions to answer”.
“I don’t think as a society we want private companies to be the final word on making these decisions,” he
added.
Facebook is scrambling to address concerns over misinformation spreading on the platform before voters
head to the polls. It is facing a potential $5bn (£4bn) fine from the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC),
which opened an investigation in response to the Cambridge Analytica revelations first reported by the
Guardian and Observer.

Zuckerberg discussed some of the many scandals facing Facebook during an event with the Harvard law
professor and Facebook consultant Cass Sunstein.
Hours before Zuckerberg spoke at the forum, the White House ramped up its criticism of the company for
alleged bias against Republicans and called for “robust conversations” about censorship on online
platforms at a summit on 11 July.
Zuckerberg said he encouraged governments to enact regulations to protect privacy and prevent foreign
influences in elections, citing his support for the Senate’s Honest Ads Act introduced by the senators Amy
Klobuchar and John McCain in 2017.
The measure, which would ban foreign nationals from purchasing broadcast, cable, or digital ads that
promote specific political candidates, is a “good floor for what should be passed”, he said.
“We would be better off if we had a robust democratic process setting rules on how we want to arbitrate the
processes to protect values that we hold dear, but in the absence of regulation we are going to do the best
we can to build up sophisticated systems to address these issues,” he said.
In September 2018, Facebook introduced new measures meant to curb foreign influence in elections,
including identifying and removing fake accounts and preventing accounts from outside the United States
from purchasing advertisements on the platform.
Despite repeatedly stating his support for legislating consumer and election security on Facebook,
Zuckerberg fired back at calls from politicians like Elizabeth Warren to break up the company, saying it was
investing billions of dollars into “systems that are more sophisticated than what governments have” to
address privacy and other social issues.
“It is not the case that if you broke up Facebook into a bunch of little pieces you wouldn’t have those issues
– you would still have them but you would be less equipped to deal with them,” he said.
Facebook is expected to grapple with increasing government scrutiny as elections approach, and it is
already facing backlash from international regulators and US Congress members over its Libra
cryptocurrency, expected to launch in 2020.
Schools to teach pupils about perils of fake news and catfishing
Education secretary says guidance will help guard children against online harms
Guidance on teaching online safety in schools to make children more resilient to catfishing, fake news and
other online harms has been announced by the education secretary.
The guidelines will combine teaching on relationships, citizenship and computing to help students
understand the technology behind targeted advertising, false profiles and other digital issues.
Damian Hinds, the education secretary, said: “It’s based on the premise that if you really understand the
technology, you’re less likely to get used by the technology. Then even when the technology changes, your
knowledge is somewhat future-proof.”
The guidance, which is non-statutory, will advise schools to teach students about how URLs are made and
what an IP address is, as well as how companies make targeted adverts through tracking behaviour and
how someone can create a fake profile, known as catfishing.
“At the most elemental level, it’s about understanding what people’s motivations are – why people behave
differently when they’re behind a computer screen and why companies want to get your data for
commercial advantage,” Hinds said.
The education secretary, speaking at an NSPCC conference about child online safety, said technology
companies should not wait for legislation to be implemented to take action to protect children online.
He stressed they should make it easier for parents to exercise control over what their children can see
online and that child-safe modes should be the default setting in many cases.
The culture secretary, Jeremy Wright, also expressed commitment to implementing
the online harms white paper and vowed to create a regulator that would impose sanctions on tech
companies failing to abide by a code of practice.
These sanctions would include fines, he said, but also place responsibility on company directors and
potentially lead to sites being blocked.
“We expect, we deserve and we will require that some of the cleverest companies in the world use their
ingenuity to protect us, as well as to sell to us,” he said.
He added that guidelines for websites and apps on how to safeguard children from inappropriate content
would be published in the autumn.
Jim Gamble, a former chief executive of the National Crime Agency’s child exploitation and online
protection division, said the government had been too quick to blame tech companies.
He said child vulnerability and mental health issues were the root causes that needed to be tackled, and
these problems had been exacerbated by Conservative austerity measures.
“It’s easy to point the finger of blame and I think we do it too frequently at industry, perhaps not frequently
enough at parents, but definitely we do not point the finger of blame where it belongs at government often
enough,” Gamble said.
He also criticised the Tory leadership favourite Boris Johnson for saying money spent on
investigating historical child sexual abuse allegations was “spaffed up a wall”.
Gamble added: “To use a word with a sexual connotation like that is appalling, and I want to say to him that
it’s time that he came out and gave the full explanation of himself, and delivered an apology to every
survivor who has felt hurt by that.”
EU to run war games to prepare for Russian and Chinese cyber-attacks
Ministers to be put in fictional scenarios after series of hacking incidents
The EU is to conduct war games to prepare for Russian and Chinese cyber-attacks, in response to a series
of incidents that alarmed European governments.
Pekka Haavisto, Finland’s foreign minister, said an increase in the prevalence of meddling required a
reaction from the 28 member states. During meetings in Helsinki in July and September, EU interior and
finance ministers will be asked to manage fictional scenarios.
Finland, which takes over the EU’s rotating presidency on 1 July, believes Russia was responsible
for blocking GPS signals last October when Finnish forces took part in Nato military exercises in Norway.
The Kremlin was also accused of trying to launch a cyber-attack on the headquarters of the international
chemical weapons watchdog in an operation that was ultimately foiled by Dutch military intelligence.
Hackers working for China’s ministry of state security were accused this week of breaking into the networks
of eight of the world’s biggest technology service providers in order to steal intellectual property.
Haavisto said: “We want the union and member states to strengthen their capacities to prevent and
respond. Military and civilian authorities can only do in times of crisis what they have been trained for.”
Last week the EU’s leaders committed at a summit in Brussels to “a coordinated response to hybrid and
cyber-threats” and asked the European commission and member states to “work on measures to enhance
the resilience and improve the security culture” of the bloc.
Leaders held their last two debates over the future leadership of EU institutions in restricted sessions with
mobile phone signals jammed to prevent information leaking.
Senior EU officials said the heads of state and government were likely to continue with such a policy given
the current security situation.
In 2017, EU defence ministers participated in the first ever cyber-wargaming session when they had to
respond to a simulated attack on one of the bloc’s military missions abroad.
In April, Finnish police announced they were investigating an apparent cyber-attack on a website that
publishes voting results during the country’s elections.
Finland has tabled cybersecurity as one of its priorities for the six-month period in which it will chair
ministers’ meetings and stimulating the bloc’s legislative programme.
An EU member state since 1995, it takes a pragmatic approach to Russia, with which it shares an 830-mile
(1,335km) border, and it is acutely aware of the risk its neighbour poses.
While the country is not a member of Nato, and has been loth to provoke hostility from the Kremlin by
changing that position, its troops have partnered with those of the western military alliance in both the
Balkans and Afghanistan.
Finland hosts the Nato-backed European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, with funding
from the US, UK, France and the Nordic states.
In a speech setting out some of the other challenges facing the bloc, Finland’s minister of European affairs,
Tytti Tuppurainen, said an “open question” remained over the “future relationship between United Kingdom
and the EU27, where the UK should define for herself both the answers and the basic rules of the game”.
Both the Russian and Chinese governments have consistently denied all accusations of involvement in
hacking.