Some privacy advocates question mobile apps agreement

A proposed code of conduct for mobile app developers intended to make them explain how user data is collected and used does not have a clear enforcement mechanism,  one privacy advocate said.

The code was negotiated this week by several trade groups and the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). While many participants in the NTIA's mobile privacy negotiations voiced support Thursday for the transparency code of conduct, Consumer Watchdog criticized the document and the NTIA process.

Just two participants voted to fully endorse the code, while 20 supported it, 17 voted for further consideration and one objected. Participants voicing support had no obligation to adopt the code, the NTIA said.

"This is absurd Orwellian doublespeak," John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's Privacy Project director, said in an email.  "A company can put out a press release saying it supports the transparency code, boosting its public image and then do absolutely nothing."

Several consumer and privacy groups voted to support the code, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Consumers Union, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The code defines a short notice to provide consumers with information about the data collection and sharing practices of the mobile apps they use. The short notices tell consumers if the apps are collecting biometrics, browser history, contacts, financial information, health information, location, and other information.

NTIA Administrator Lawrence Strickling, called Thursday's vote a "seminal milestone in the efforts to enhance consumer privacy on mobile devices. "

Several software trade groups also praised the transparency code. The short notice will quickly and easily inform consumers about the personal information apps collect, said Jon Potter, president of the Application Developers Alliance.

"App developers know that consumer trust is critical to our industry's continuing success," Potter said in a statement. The agreement that "the model notices are ready for introduction and consumer testing is a win for both consumers and app developers."

But Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, criticized the NTIA's negotiation process. Chester, who abstained from the vote, had asked the NTIA to review existing mobile and app practices to determine the extent and range of data collection, but the agency didn't do that, he said.

"The NTIA process is seriously flawed," he said in an email. "It's as if a surgeon was allowed to operate without first examining the patient. [The agency] refused to make the industry discuss all the ways mobile apps use data and target users."

The code approved Thursday "is just words on a very small screen," Chester added.

Jerry Bruckheimer's Disney Future in Question As Moguls Defend His 'Lone Ranger'

Amid continuing reverberations from the mega-failure of The Lone Ranger, it appears clear that the movie has damaged producer Jerry Bruckheimer's long and often highly successful relationship with Disney and will lead at minimum to a renegotiation of his rich deal for a fifth Pirates of the Caribbean, if not his eventual exit from the studio.

But in a testament to Bruckheimer's long and extraordinary career -- which has included hits from Flashdance to Beverly Hills Cop to the National Treasure series, not to mention television shows such as The Amazing Race and the CSI series -- some of the industry’s leading figures, including CBS CEO Les Moonves and director Michael Bay, are coming to the producer’s defense.

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At the heart of the discussion is the question of how much responsibility a producer bears when a film like Lone Ranger -- which cost more than $250 million to make and opened to a grim $48.9 million domestic over the long holiday weekend -- goes over budget and all but out of control. Disney sources say Bruckheimer had committed to hold the line on director Gore Verbinski’s spending despite the filmmaker’s reputation for profligacy. But other industry observers say the studio should never have expected Bruckheimer to rein in the director, who had collaborated with him and star Johnny Depp on four Pirates of the Caribbean movies that grossed a combined $3.7 billion at the box office.

“Film directors are very headstrong, and it’s hard,” says Bay, who made two Bad Boys movies and Pearl Harbor with Bruckheimer. “Trust me, as a producer, there are things [you] just can’t control. A director will take it and you’ve kind of got to let ‘em go. It’s their movie.”

One of Bruckheimer's reps concurs.

“I don’t know that Jerry Bruckheimer ever promised, per se, to 'control’ Gore Verbinski,” says David O’Connor of CAA. “I don’t know how anybody could promise to control a movie. … Part of the whole visual pitch [of Lone Ranger] was the scope and vistas and incredible beauty of the West. There’s a lot -- when you’re using real locations like that -- that is out of control.”

Bruckheimer and Verbinski declined to comment, as did Disney.

A number of top industry executives who praised Bruckheimer to The Hollywood Reporter were responding in part to recent slams elsewhere, such as one in the New York Times on July 7, which read: “Mr. Bruckheimer’s track record of late has been dismal, with duds including Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” The former film grossed $335 million worldwide, while the latter pulled in $215 million. Given their sizable budgets, both films were disappointments.

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Moonves, just departing for the Allen & Co. gathering in Sun Valley, says Bruckheimer “has clearly been one of the most successful producers in the history of television.” Referring to Bruckheimer-produced hits from The Amazing Race to the CSI franchise, he adds, “A few years back he had seven shows on our air. He’s one of my go-to guys. He always will be.” Moonves notes that Bruckheimer is producing Hostages for CBS, one of the network’s big bets for the fall. “Some of the shows he produced were expensive ones but there was never an issue creatively or financially,” Moonves says.

“Jerry Bruckheimer is the Rock of Gibraltar of Hollywood,” says DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, who has known Bruckheimer for more than 30 years. “To suggest that one movie, no matter how big a miss it might be, in any way undermines his value or his career is insane. This is a guy who bats .850 in a world where .350 makes you an all-star.” Universal's Ron Meyer, too, praises Bruckheimer’s track record, adding, “They took a big swing and they missed. I don’t know any one of us that hasn’t.”

In an important way, the outsized failure of Lone Ranger is having minimal impact as Wall Street analysts have shrugged off the loss despite predictions that a write-off of up to $190 million is coming. Nonetheless, Disney executives are deeply unhappy with the loss and the embarrassment. Sources say the studio battled with Verbinski over length and content and the director lost his final-cut privileges early on due to budget overages. But in practical terms, Disney was not in a position to take control of the picture, potentially alienating a star as important as Depp.

Disney film studio chief Alan Horn, who joined the studio when the film was already underway, is known for his distaste for graphic violence and potentially offensive language -- an inclination perfectly suited to Disney’s culture. Anticipating that the studio would seek cuts, an insider says Verbinski put some dark and violent material in the film -- such as a scene depicting a character eating a human heart -- fully expecting to cut them back to placate executives. Though the heart-devouring scene was trimmed, Disney pushed further.

The studio had contractual power to effect some changes through language in the filmmaker’s contract giving the studio the right to eliminate material inconsistent with the company’s image. As the film moved closer to release, however, Verbinski is said to have threatened to walk off the project if additional changes were made.

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Nonetheless, a source involved in the project says Verbinski was more collaborative than usual. From the start, this person says, the director assured the studio that he wanted to control the budget to rebut his reputation for spending. But with challenges such as poor weather -- as well as Verbinski’s insistence on realizing his vision -- he obviously failed.

In the aftermath, Verbinski seems likely to suffer the most fallout of all the key players. But still, it appears that Bruckheimer faces a budget renegotiation on the planned Pirates of the Caribbean 5. There is still no approved script for the film, tentatively set for 2015, though Depp and Bruckheimer are set to return for directors Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg.

Bruckheimer’s deal at Disney expires in spring 2014. It seems probable that the producer will test the waters at other studios, especially with Disney’s pipeline packed with tentpole movies from Marvel, Lucasfilm and other suppliers. Meanwhile, Bruckheimer is working on Pirates and a found-footage genre film, Beware the Night, for Screen Gems; the latter film is set for release in January 2015. Another potential project is a second Bad Boys sequel at Sony Pictures. Bruckheimer also has a reality series, Marshall Law, in production for TNT.

In an interview with THR just before Lone Ranger opened, Horn declined to comment on Bruckheimer's future at the studio, adding, “He’s a very talented fellow, but every picture needs to justify its green light in this marketplace on its merits. We’ll pick 'em one at a time."

Are HBCUs in Trouble? An Evergreen Question

President Obama spoke last month at commencement ceremonies at Morehouse College in Atlanta, which brought fresh attention — and scrutiny — to historically black colleges.

Earlier this month, St. Paul's College, a tiny, 125-year old liberal arts college in southern Virginia, quietly announced that it was throwing in the towel and would be closing its doors at the end of June.
The 600-student college had been struggling for years to find funding and to remain in good standing with the accrediting body that governed it. But St. Paul's president said that its plan to merge with another unnamed historically black college or university (HBCU) had suddenly and unexpectedly imploded, leaving the school's board of trustees with few options.
The news of St. Paul's closing came around the same time that a board member at Howard University, another historically black institution, wrote a much-discussed public letter warning about the school's dire financial straits. The school was hemorrhaging money, the trustee said. Its student body was shrinking. "Howard will not be here in three years if we don't make some crucial decisions now," she wrote.
These events come amidst a flurry of questions about the educational opportunities available to black students. Just this week, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in a major case on affirmative action in higher education, asking a lower court to reconsider the legality of the University of Texas's admissions policies.
For decades, folks have been asking: is affirmative action still necessary? And they ask the same questions of HBCUs: have black colleges outlived their usefulness?
St. Paul's and Howard are very different. While St. Paul's impending closure was greeted by people saying they'd never heard of the school, Howard is probably the most prominent HBCU in the country and it boasts an army of famous alumni (and alumni, famous and otherwise, who are very, very vocal about their alma mater). If Howard was in trouble, people wondered, were any black colleges safe?
Marybeth Gasman, a professor who studies education policy at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying HBCUs for years. She said that these questions about the viability and usefulness of HBCUS are as old as the idea of HBCUs themselves. She pointed to a recent Washington Post article with the headline "Is Howard University at a Crossroads?" as an example. "Every few years, HBCUs are a crossroads," she said. (We spoke on the phone, but the eye-roll was heavily implied. Headlines from 1993 and 2002 illustrate her point.) "The first thing that happens is that when a school gets into financial trouble, people say 'Oh, no, HBCUs are going down the drain.'"
Gasman said she looked at 300 articles about black colleges published between 2000 to 2003, and found that the articles tended to be negative.
There are
negative signals for HBCUs, to be sure. But the picture is more complicated than those signals alone would indicate. And in some areas, HBCUs are making serious advances.
Financial Challenges
The aforementioned trustee's letter garnered lots of unwanted attention to Howard, which has watched its enrollment slide in recent years. Even in better economic times, the students that HBCUs serve are often the first in their families to attend college and they have less wherewithal to pay for college. But new, stricter rules on awarding loans have put HBCUs and their students in a tighter bind.
That's hit Howard, which also spends a significant part of its revenue on its teaching hospital, especially hard. Twenty-one percent fewer students are receiving federal loans at Howard — which shakes out to about $7.5 million in real dollars. And since HBCUs have relatively small endowments, they can't be as generous with scholarships.
HBCUs have long struggled to find stable avenues of support. "HBCUs have always been in a situation where a lot of them have had to struggle. a lot of that had to do was inequitable fundings," Gasman said. "I like to be very blatant about it and say that it's a product of American racism."
After Brown v. Board of Education, deep-pocketed white philanthropists like John D. Rockefeller cut off their financial support for black colleges because they felt the institutions would be unnecessary in the putatively integrated world. But predominantly white colleges were slow to integrate, and black colleges suddenly had fewer resources to tap.
Today, HBCUs like Howard sit in proximity to a huge pool of unexplored funding — alumni giving. Black colleges have had an especially rough time getting their alums to open their wallets for socioeconomic reasons such as relative wealth, Gasman said. But she said the reason many people give for not supporting their alma maters is that even alums who love their schools don't necessarily trust them with their money. Why? Walter Kimbrough, the president of Dillard University in New Orleans, chalked it up to a "Bermuda Triangle" of unpleasant if not counterproductive experiences at their schools registrar's office, the business office and financial aid offices that leave graduates feeling that their universities are poorly run.
The red tape and logistical headaches of handling administrative issues are well-worn tropes of the HBCU experience. At Howard, the "A building" is notorious. President Obama even joked about it at Morehouse's commencement in May. "I know that some of you had to wait in long lines to get into today's ceremony," he said. "And I would apologize, but it did not have anything to do with security. Those graduates just wanted you to know what it's like to register for classes here."
"Overall, HBCUs have to work on their administrative mechanisms that frustrate their alumni, but you have to be customer service-focused," Gasman said, while adding that cash-strapped institutions have a harder time ameliorating these problems. But that administrative jankiness also means that many HBCUs simply aren't particularly good at following through on their fundraising aims. "[HBCUs] have got to invest in fundraising so people can go out and raise the funds they need."
But many are trying, and some are succeeding. Howard's alumni giving rate was a paltry 4 percent in 2008; they've tripled it to 16 percent in 2012. Spelman College in Atlanta and Claflin University in Atlanta both having alumni giving ratios in the mid-forties and climbing, and are racing to become the first HBCUs to hit the 50-percent mark — a number that would rival some Ivies.
A Tough Marketplace For Colleges
St. Paul's will be the latest HBCU to shut down, but the last several decades have seen several others cease operations. Prentiss Institute and Bishop College both closed in 1988. Mary Holmes College shut down in 2004. Morris Brown College in Atlanta has been on life support for years, and recently rejected an offer from the city to eliminate its crushing debt, and faces a longshot bid for survival.
But while small HBCUs are struggling to stay afloat (see the aforementioned obstacles to fundraising), they're also being buffeted by the same financial challenges that are buffeting mainstream institutions. "Students these days want everything," Gasman said — like state-of-the-art facilities and lifestyle amenities — "and a lot of small liberal colleges don't have a large endowment, [so] they can't compete."
"If you're a small liberal arts college, you have to have something you're really good at it," she said. "I don't think it has a lot to do with black colleges, per se."
Last year, for example, Chester College, a small, predominantly white liberal arts school in Massachusetts, decided to cease operations after fundraising efforts to close its budget gap fell short. Ohio's Antioch College had to suspend operations for several years.
And just as St. Paul's is shuttering, another institutions is joining the HBCUs. American Baptist College in Nashville, Tenn., with a student body around 150, became the 106th school with that designation earlier this month. The federal government designates any institution founded before 1964 "whose principal mission was, and is, the education of Black Americans" as an HBCU, making those institutions eligible to receive federal funding. Some institutions that saw their student bodies become primarily black after
1964, like Chicago State University, aren't eligible. (Conversely, Bluefield State College in West Virginia, which earned the HBCU designation in the 1960s still retains that designation even though its student body has been about 80 percent white for decades.)
Graduation Rates
If you look at the numbers, they can be kind of jarring: aside from more well-known schools like Spelman and Howard, most HBCUs have six-year graduation rates below 50 percent. According to the Journals of Blacks in Higher Education, 24 black colleges saw only a third of their graduates earn a bachelor's degree.
But Gasman said that so much of this is a function of demographics. [What HBCUs] have at their core is a dedication to low-income students," she said. "That makes it harder to have higher graduation rates" — HBCUs students face financial pressures outside of college and so they have narrower margins of error. "If you're doing that kind of work, you're dealing with low-income students, you're tuition-driven, your alumni are not making enormous salaries and you're dealing with racism, it's a difficult situation."
But as low as those graduation rates may be, the numbers at many HBCUS are still higher than the national average for black graduations. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education recently took a look at 41 institutions, and found that more than half those HBCUS saw their graduation numbers tick up over the last 15 years, and 10 of those schools saw increases in the double-digits.
And in the aggregate, HBCUs, small and underfunded as they may be, are still doing a lot of higher lifting for blacks in higher education: one in five African-American college graduates earned their degrees at HBCUS; black colleges graduated nearly all black students (90 percent) who earned bachelor's degrees in STEM fields between 2006 and 2010; black colleges produce half percent of all black public school teachers, half of all future lawyers and eight in 10 black judges.
The popular conversations around HBCUs tend to get flattened into debates over whether they should exist, and those conversations have remained frozen in time for the last half-century. But the fact that we keep returning to these conversations illustrate just how hardy these institutions have been and how attractive they remain for black folks looking to gain a foothold in the middle class.
"I always like to say that HBCUs are just as diverse as the rest of institutions of higher education," Gasman said. They have different individual histories, pull from different applicant pools in different regions, and have distinct strengths and challenges. "The thing they have at their core is a dedication to low income students. It's a noble, noble goal that a lot of [mainstream] institutions don't want to have anything to do with."

 

Critics question whether NSA data collection is effective

The recently revealed mass collection of phone records and other communications by the U.S. National Security Agency may not be effective in preventing terrorism, according to some critics.

 

The data collection programs, as revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, is giving government agencies information overload, critics said during the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference in Washington, D.C.

 

“In knowing a lot about a lot of different people [the data collection] is great for that,” said Mike German, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent whose policy counsel for national security at the American Civil Liberties Union. “In actually finding the very few bad actors that are out there, not so good.”

 

The mass collection of data from innocent people “won’t tell you how guilty people act,” German added. The problem with catching terrorism suspects has never been the inability to collect information, but to analyze the “oceans” of information collected, he said.

 

Mass data collection is “like trying to look for needles by building bigger haystacks,” added Wendy Grossman, a freelance technology writer who helped organize the conference.

 

But Timothy Edgar, a former civil liberties watchdog in the Obama White House and at the Office of Director of National Intelligence, partly defended the NSA collection programs, noting that U.S. intelligence officials attribute the surveillance programs with preventing more than 50 terrorist actions. Some critics have disputed those assertions.

 

Edgar criticized President Barack Obama’s administration for keeping the NSA programs secret. He also said it was “ridiculous” for Obama to suggest that U.S. residents shouldn’t be concerned about privacy because the NSA is collecting phone metadata and not the content of phone calls. Information about who people call and when they call is sensitive, he said.

 

But Edgar, now a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, also said that Congress, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and internal auditors provide some oversight of the data collection programs, with more checks on data collection in place in the U.S. than in many other countries. Analysts can query the phone records database only if they see a connection to terrorism, he said.

 

The U.S. has some safeguards that are “meaningful and substantive, although I’m sure many in this room ... and maybe even me, if I think about it long enough, might think they’re not good enough,” Edgar said.

 

While German noted that the NSA has reported multiple instances of unauthorized access by employees to the antiterrorism databases, Edgar defended the self-reporting. “It’s an indication of a compliance system that’s actually meaningful and working,” he said. “If you had a compliance system that said there was no violation, there were never any mistakes, there was never any improper targeting that took place ... that would an indication of a compliance regime that was completely meaningless.”

 

The mass data collection combined with better data analysis tools translates into an “arms race” where intelligence officials try to find new connections with the data they collect, said Ashkan Soltani, a technology and privacy consultant. New data analysis tools lead intelligence officials to believe they can find more links to terrorism if they just have “enough data,” but that belief is “too much sci fi,” he said.

 

“This is the difficult part, if you’re saying that if we have enough data we’ll be able to predict the future,” the ACLU’s German said.

 

Many U.S. intelligence officials are suspect of tech vendor claims about predictive analysis, Edgar countered. However, link analysis—the tracking of suspects through communications with other known criminals or terrorists—is a “very powerful tool,” he said. It may be possible to use sophisticated cryptographic techniques to do that kind of analysis without the bulk collection of phone records, he said.

 

“The [internal] compliance regime is not the best answer for privacy,” Edgar said. “The best answer is not to take the data in the first place, then you don’t have to worry about compliance.”

 

The ACLU has concerns about link analysis, because it creates a massive list of suspicious people that overwhelms investigators, German said. “What link analysis creates is suspicion upon the people that suspicious people are linked to,” he said. “That growing cloud of suspicion can never been cleared.”