CfA's October 9, 2020 Newsletter

Our Latest Work:

• Google's Continued Failure to Stop Exploitative Ads Around Voting Information: On Monday, the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), in partnership with Common Cause, released a report revealing Google's continued failure to remove exploitative ads served to users searching for voting information. TTP first highlighted the prevalence of predatory and misleading ads served alongside voting-related search results in a June report. These ads appear to violate Google’s advertising policies and run counter to Google’s pronouncements about protecting election integrity. (Press Release, Report)

What We're Reading:

• Google is Giving Data to Police Based on Search Keywords, Court Docs Show: "Court documents showed that Google provided the IP addresses of people who searched for the arson victim's address, which investigators tied to a phone number belonging to Williams. Police then used the phone number records to pinpoint the location of Williams' device near the arson, according to court documents. The original warrant sent to Google is still sealed, but the report provides another example of a growing trend of data requests to the search engine giant in which investigators demand data on a large group of users rather than a specific request on a single suspect." (CNET, October 8)
• Amy Coney Barrett failed to disclose talks on Roe v. Wade hosted by anti-abortion groups on Senate paperwork: "It is not known what was said in the two events, though both centered on abortion court cases. In a separate instance, CNN's KFile found a publicized talk that Barrett gave to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade -- a seminar Barrett disclosed in her Senate paperwork -- was removed by the university from YouTube in 2014. A school spokesman told CNN the video is now lost." (CNN, October 9)
• US Senate Subpoenas Heads of Google, Facebook and Twitter: "Republicans and Democrats on the committee voted unanimously to summon the chief executives. However, each side is likely to have different priorities - with some Republican members speaking about the alleged censorship of conservative views online, while Democrats focus on competition and misinformation. 'There has never been such an aggregation of power in the history of humankind as big tech enjoys today, with money and monopoly, power and the hubris that comes with the unchecked use of power,' Republican Senator Ted Cruz said following the vote." (BBC, October 1)

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